ABSTRACT
Cambodians have since World War II endured an array of short-lived regimes unmatched by any Asian country in number and intensity.1 The most recent attempt to start anew, with the second post-war Kingdom of Cambodia, was carried out with massive United Nations intervention in the early 1990s as Cambodia became the only Asian party-state to shed its communist mantle following similar reversals in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Comparable political reconstruction challenges were faced following the overthrow of the millenarian Khmer Rouge regime by the Vietnamese army in early 1979 (People’s Republic of Kampuchea); the fall of the pro-American republican regime in 1975 (Democratic Kampuchea); a coup d’état followed by the deposition of the monarchy in 1970 (Khmer Republic); an authoritarian monarchy (first post-war Kingdom of Cambodia – revised version) two years after gaining independence from indirect French rule in 1953; and an interregnum of French-sponsored parliamentarism after 1945 (first post-war Kingdom of Cambodia). One could go further and mention the tumultuous changes during World War II that affected all of Southeast Asia; the strains of Cambodia’s accommodation with colonial France, preceded in turn by the interregnum of King Ang Duang’s rule in 1847-60, when Cambodia regained its sovereignty after centuries of unstable rule marked by internecine struggles linked to territorial encroachments by neighbouring Siam and Vietnam. Political stability has not been a hallmark of Cambodian history, modern or pre-modern, but the post-World War II attempts to establish a modern, or post-traditional, polity, as its victims especially in the 1970s bear witness, have been especially tragic.
