ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 mainly centres on the theoretical framework of this book. It begins by discussing how Thailand’s flexible foreign policy is similar to International Relations’ literature on small-state behaviours and discounts these approaches due to their shortcomings in making sense of the case of Thailand during the Second World War. This chapter builds on Ayşe Zarakol’s approach to ontological security and proposes that historical experiences, especially when the non-Western states confronted the standard of civilisation, affect how the national leaders should position themselves in international society dominated by the Western powers. The chapter also argues that such encounters with the Western mode of living and the necessity to imitate the West to receive recognition in order to gain admittance into the club of the civilised have been traumatising for the non-Western states, which were not only limited to the former empires such as Turkey, Japan, and Russia, but also to a small nation such as Thailand. This chapter asserts that such traumatic experiences have been institutionally embedded within the state’s national identity and would influence subsequent foreign policy outcomes, which could be highly proactive. The states with such collective traumas could be more sensitive to status anxiety than the states without the aforementioned experiences.
