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DURING THE RECENT World Cup, Thailand's hugely enthusiastic football supporters were ambushed in the intervals by a television advertisement showing Thai-speaking foreigners explaining classic aspects of Thai culture to Thais.

In perhaps the most memorable segment a farang - a Westerner - is shown teaching a young Thai man how to smile. Not just any smile but a 'Yim Siam', a Thai smile that comes from the heart.

In other scenes Westerners explained the subtleties of Thai cooking, dancing, 'correct behaviour' and so on.

It ended with a black screen and the words 'Aren't you ashamed?' before closing with the name of their sponsor, Krung Thai Bank.

The advertisement, repeated many times in the following weeks, was rather shocking - foreigners who happened to catch some Thai language television wondered what exactly it was trying to say.

Not a few detected a whiff of racism in the air. Was this state-owned bank jumping on an anti-foreigner bandwagon trundled out following last year's election victory by what some observers have described as the blatantly chauvinist Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party?

Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has long claimed that he would not make the 'same mistake' of kowtowing before foreigners, and the International Monetary Fund in particular, as the previous Democrat-led government

Much of Mr Thaksin's fire has been directed at opponents who 'lack the courage' to make the 'correct' decisions. The notion that Thais are best capable of looking out for their own interests has received some intellectual cover in the widely held belief that the IMF miscalculated in pressing Bangkok, and the region, to opt for austerity measures after the 1997 crash.

Most international economists now accept that an IMF 'cure' concocted originally for heavily indebted Latin American governments caused unnecessary pain in Thailand, where the debt was almost entirely piled up in private hands.

In the early months of last year the premier threw some punches in the direction of 'foreigners who do not know how Thailand works'. To some observers it looked for a time as if he was about to follow in the footsteps of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who protected a business high ground preserved for Malays - his cronies to cynics - to the extend of imposing capital controls after 1997.

Yet as last year unfolded it became clear that 2000's reasonably buoyant economic performance was not going to be repeated and Mr Thaksin's anti-foreign rhetoric quickly ebbed away.

So far this year no one has beaten the drum for foreign investment louder than the premier: he travels perhaps more than any other Thai leader in living memory and uses his foreign trips to 'sell' Thailand as an investment destination.

'The people around him know what the game is. His cronies know that this economy absolutely depends on the fuel of foreign investment,' said Ammar Siamwalla, a senior economist at the Thailand Development and Research Institute.

So was that memorable - if slightly unnerving Krung Thai advertisement - an aberration? It seems not.

Sumit Champrasit, an adviser to the bank's board of directors and the originator of the advertising campaign, said it was deliberately designed to shake up Thais, who research had shown regarded the bank as stodgy, conservative and boring, .

'But we wanted to do more than that - we wanted to remind Thais in a very forceful way that they have skills and a culture that foreigners think has value. That if you forget what it means to be a Thai, and to know the secrets of Thai culture, you are losing something very precious,' Mr Sumit said.

The advertisement plays to the idea that Thailand has to think up ways of exploiting its strengths.

This is of course exactly what the premier now claims is the point of his 'populist' programme of offering loans to farmers, helping small and medium-sized businesses and asking every small district to dream up at least one saleable idea.

The problem is that so far there appears to be very little return from 'Thaksinomics' and this injection of money has merely fuelled a consumer boom. Bar girls and farmers now sport mobile phones. Home purchases are up sharply, and asset prices generally are showing flickerings of life.

To a cynic like Nation  columnist Chang Noi this rhetoric boils down to a simple plan to help the wealthy. 'Policies are actually designed to help the rich by appearing to help the poor. Instead of trickle-down these are gush up,' he said.

What is missing from this picture - and indeed in Krung Thai's scenes of foreigners teaching Thais age-old Thai skills - is any sense of a country reborn, repositioned or just bubbling with ideas.



Ad puts bank at the centre of debate on nationalism