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I know it was only yesterday when I wrote that there will be no public discussion about the merger issue. However taking into account all the pros and cons it became clear that a merger with Thailand is not really an option because the cons heavily outweigh the pros. That's why I'm announcing now that we won't merge with Thailand. We are still ready to help our Thai friends in other ways though.

Below is a list of arguments against, some of them might be familiar from the discussions about the Singapore merger, others are specific to this case:
- The costs: military operations for carrying out the merger could cost up to 500 gold. And then there would be the costs of buying Malaysian licences into Thai companies and the buying out of the THB.
- Fragility: the new union would still have very few citizens and low military power. Thailand could be put back on the map by a resistance war rather easily.
- Foreign policy: Thailand is a member of PEACE while Malaysia is neutral and keen on her neutrality. This could cause quite some problems even if PEACE approved of the merger.
- Citizenship: if we merged before it is introduced, there would be a huge risk of a PTO attempt with many foreigners choosing the Malaysian citizenship. Essentially we'd put ourselves in the face of severe risks. On the other hand if we merged after citizenship is introduced, then Thai citizens would become second class citizens in the union until they can all be given citizenship, which would take quite a lot of time given our small population and thus very few citizenships that the congress can hand out each month.
- Public support: this is a tricky one, it's hard to say how supported the idea of the merger is in both Malaysia and Thailand.

In my opinion it is clear that the cons unfortunately heavily outweigh the pros and we'd risk a lot for little gain with a merger so we have to turn down the offer. Also as far as I know the Thai leadership agreed to a one week "ceasefire" with the Romanian TOers so we have a chance to see how the situation develops and react later on based on this. The events in Thailand will be closely monitored and we are ready to help the local community in any way if possible.

Despite the above please feel free to discuss the Thai situation on our national forum.

Best regards,
Nagyzee

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PS:
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Please join us there, too!🙂

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