ABSTRACT
On 31 December 1977 Radio Phnom Penh denounced as an aggressor what it termed the so-called Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV). It alleged the SRV had expansionist designs on Kampuchean territory, and plans to incorporate Kampuchea into a Vietnamese controlled Indochina Federation. Kampuchea's historical territorial losses to Vietnam — and widespread popular awareness of them — contributed to the emergence of a particular diplomatic strategy regarding the frontier issue in the Sihanouk era. The most important of them stem from the contrasting socioeconomic and political settings that faced Kampuchean and Vietnamese communists in making their revolutions and from differences in the historical eras during which these two groups entered the more and more nationally divided ranks of a disintegrating world communist movement. Nationalist radicalism is reflected in an intensification of Sihanouk's closing off of the country to a point where almost all foreign elements are excluded.
