ABSTRACT
Although the Vietnamese had struggled for centuries with the Laotians and the Khmer for living space in the Indochina peninsula, the imposition of French rule over the entire area in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought a new sense of common purpose. The young communist leaders of the 1930s became convinced that independence could only be achieved by a unified struggle. Out of this conviction was born the Communist Party of Indochina; and while in 1951 separate parties were formed in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, each was originally dedicated to a peninsulawide revolutionary strategy and to the maintenance of a “special relationship”—under Vietnamese leadership.
