ABSTRACT
Thailand's politics and its development are best viewed not so much as pieces on a giant chessboard, but as a scattered jigsaw puzzle, with the pieces needing to be put together. This fracturing is not necessarily a weakness. As a polity, the Thai state's effectiveness in managing change and handling threats has long been evident. The economy and society have been open and liberal, although the state continues to retain its activist and centralised character, and its civil and military bureaucracy has remained a closed system. The Chakri Reformation under King Chulalongkorn in the nineteenth century resulted in the modernisation of the bureaucracy and especially the military, making the latter the dominant organisation in a predominantly unorganised agricultural society. The peasantry were largely unaffected by political changes at the top, although they suffered from largescale wars with the Burmese from time to time.
