ABSTRACT
Decolonisation – and with it the final spread of the Westphalia-Versailles system to Asia – coincided with the emergence of Cold War and was both promoted and impeded and certainly complicated by it. Burma, like India, had secured its independence before the Cold War was ‘militarised’ by the Korean War, and so had Indonesia. Indochina – the late nineteenth-century French combination of Vietnam (Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China), Laos and Cambodia – had not, and indeed it became the scene of a Cold War-influenced struggle, though it was not a mere ‘proxy’ war. Other Southeast Asian countries – Malaya, Singapore, the Borneo territories – were to gain independence without such a struggle. But the terms on which they were decolonised were inflected by ‘Cold War’ considerations. The Philippines had secured independence for the second time in 1946 before the Cold War began. But post-war strategic considerations inflected the terms on which the US granted it, and the subsequent domestic history of the country was much affected by the ambiguity of its relationship with the US during the Cold War. The Korean War influenced the struggle in Indo-China. Comparisons and contrasts and apprehensions were evident: outside intervention by ‘volunteers’, UN action, avoidance of nuclear options, armistice, partition, zones, were common issues. Indeed the Geneva Conference on Indo-China of 1954 was also a conference on Korea, and its failure to deal with the latter contributed to its relative success with the former. But it also reflected the experience of the Cold War in other parts of the world. That included possible precedents, such as the Communist takeover in Prague in 1948, trends such as the emergence of coexistence, and improvisations or developments of traditional practices, such as unification and partition, exemplified by the divided occupation of Germany and Austria. Neutrality and neutralisation were also in mind, though the terms were not formally employed in the 1954 Geneva agreements. One of the successor states, Laos, was, however, to be neutralised at a second Geneva conference in 1961-2. The agreement was more elaborate than any precedent might have suggested. But that was not a sign of the durability of the arrangement. Laos did not have a strong government, and its frontiers, on the edge of a conflicted zone, were readily penetrable. Nor did outside parties – the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) based in Hanoi and the Americans
supporting the rival Republic of Vietnam in Saigon – abide by their undertakings. Maintaining the arrangement was impossible. But perhaps it limited conflict for a period, and for the British, if not the Americans, that was a gain.
