ABSTRACT
The decolonisation of Vietnam was much more contested than that of other parts of French Indo-China when, even before the outbreak of the Korean War, but especially after that, the Cold War caught up with it. At the 1954 Geneva conference the independence and territorial unity of Laos and Cambodia were accepted, though it endorsed a special position in two provinces of the former and did not consider the frontiers of the latter. Their neutrality was also endorsed, though the word was not used, and the provisions did not amount to neutralisation. Vietnam – where the main fighting between the French and the Communist-led Viet Minh had been taking place – was subject to a kind of partition, though not of the same kind as that of post-war Germany or Austria, nor indeed like that created by the conclusion of the armistice in Korea, upon which it had been vainly hoped Geneva would build a durable peace. Set against that ‘partition’, the sense of unity among the Vietnamese over a long period of history that had seen their settlement and their rule extend south from Hanoi, Southeast Asia’s oldest capital, since they had regained from China the control of their own affairs in the tenth century CE. That extension – at the cost of the Cham and later the Khmer kingdoms – had brought them the means to sustain that independence, but also made holding a single state together difficult, given its elongation and its exposure to the maritime world. Vietnam was indeed divided under two different regimes for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reunified in its expanded form only in 1802 under Gia-long, the founder of the Nguyen dynasty. Little over half a century later, the French secured Saigon, the southern city of what Europeans had called Cochin China. The attempt to maintain the Vietnamese empire’s unity had contributed to the clash with the European imperialists, since it was based in part on a Confucianist ideology that rejected commercial enterprise and missionary activity. Vietnam’s expansion had given it another challenge: it was exposed to the west as well as the east. It had an interest in the political stance of the remnant Lao states and the Cambodian kingdom and was thus in a sense a rival to the Thai state that had been built up since the fourteenth century. France’s intervention in the three states – together with its intervention in Siam, limited by Thai opposition and that of the British established in Burma and Malaya – changed their character and their interrelationship. The Lao states
were preserved, and indeed ultimately unified into a kingdom, though many Lao remained in Isan under Thai authority. Cambodia, too, was preserved, though exposed to Vietnamese immigration. Vietnam was, however, divided into three pays, Tonkin and Annam, both protectorates, and Cochin China, a colony. When the ‘national’ idea took hold, it was particularly strong, given not only the oppressive nature of French rule but also the ‘memory’ of a sense of and a struggle for political unity. Pre-war French opposition even to autonomy tended to put nationalist leadership into the hands of extremists, terrorists, but above all communists. It was the leader of the communists, Ho Chi Minh, who proclaimed the independence of Vietnam as the DRV in September 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese occupiers. The DRV conceived of the future as that of an independent unified state. Whether it would be more communist or nationalist was disputed at least to a degree among its leaders, but also among opponents and other outsiders. There was as with Soviets and Chinese themselves no clear answer or no clear distinction. The struggle between the DRV and the returning French turned to armed conflict from late 1946. At first seeking to renew their hold on the country, the latter had sought to create a republic of Cochin China, and then resorted, alongside their military efforts, to a political attempt to capture the nationalism of the Vietnamese to counter their communism by setting up a State of Vietnam with, as Head, not Emperor, the representative of the old Nguyen dynasty. But they were slow to make over control of the old colony or to give Bao Dai the powers that would enable him to present himself as an effective ruler of all Vietnam. They thus ensured the development of a civil war. Seeking US support, they presented their struggle as a Cold War one, and indeed the advance of the Chinese Communists seemed likely to boost the DRV’s cause, despite the centuries of distrust between the rulers of China and its one-time dependency. After the Korean War broke out, that support was forthcoming. Initially, the British welcomed it, though in no position to amplify it. But they became increasingly concerned at the extent and nature of the US commitment, and the risk of another conflict with the PRC, recognised by them but not by the US. The failure of the French to ‘win’ the war encouraged them to pursue a compromise, though their American allies were unwilling to do so, since it would mean a ‘loss’ to communism to add to the ‘loss’ of China and the stalemate in Korea. They wanted the French to fight on, though their political will to do so was exhausted, as the reaction to the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 made clear. Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, took a leading role at the conference that ensued, with Molotov as Co-Chairman.
