Choosing Sides in the Global Cold War: Switzerland,Neutrality, and the Divided States of Korea and Vietnam

This article examines neutral Switzerland's recognition policy towards the divided states of Korea and Vietnam. Drawing comparisons with other neutrals, notably Austria and Sweden, allows us to assess the credibility of neutrality in the Global Cold War. All three neutrals explicitly or implicitly aimed to reinforce their neutrality through the principle of universality, which entailed the recognition of all regimes, no matter their political couleur. Yet this principle was not applied consistently, but rather pragmatically. Until the beginning of the 1970s, Switzerland, as well as Austria and Sweden, favoured the Western-oriented over the Communist halves of Korea and Vietnam. Thereby, this article argues, they undermined the credibility of neutrality. They were, however, willing to take that risk, because they feared that the recognition of North Korea and North Vietnam could irritate the United States, and provoke East German claims for recognition, which was undesirable due to the Hallstein doctrine and West Germany's economic weight. It was only with the rise of the Third World as a political force, and the softening of the US position that the neutrals, which saw themselves in competition with each other for status and influence, eventually recognised North Korea and North Vietnam.     

Public Policy and the Idea of the Vietnamese State: The Cultural Political Economy of Domestic Water Supply

Using Rural Water Supply (RWS) policy practices as a case study, this article shows that the disjunction between implementation as formally conceived and informally practised is not a question of ineffective policy cycle dynamics, but rather an inherent feature of Vietnam’s Cultural Political Economy. Drawing on critical realist approaches to social and state theory, we argue that formal and informal RWS policy practices, as a set of two interconnected spheres, serve as key, separate but connected, mechanisms for reproducing the distribution of material resources (primarily through the informal sphere) and the hegemony of ideas (primarily through the formal sphere) in Vietnamese society. We conclude that the formal, administrative practices of RWS policy are primarily to be understood in their function of reproducing the idea of the state and state legitimacy. RWS administrative practices function to sustain the core social and political order in Vietnam as institutionalised in “the state”, rather than being primarily oriented to improving rural water supply. The findings raise questions for donor-supported programs that focus on formal administrative institutions and practices for improving the performance of the water sector.     

Furthering Mekong ontologies: On China and local uncertainties

In response to Hirsch's “The Shifting Regional Geopolitics of Mekong Dams”, this commentary focuses on two local imaginings of the Mekong River in Cambodia and Vietnam. First, we highlight the role of China in reimagining ownership over mainland Southeast Asia's portion of the river. Second, we consider some of the ways in which the river creates uncertainty over citizenship among Cambodians and Vietnamese living on the river in Vietnam. Our goal in adding these two dimensions to Hirsch's conceptualization is to encourage narratives of the river from the perspective of those living there.     

A zone of exception: gendered violences of family ‘Happiness’ in Vietnam

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a number of ‘power-geometries’ including violence preventive legislation, an official family discourse, and the patrilineally organized family facilitate the conditions that allow for male-to-female violence in the domestic sphere. The article highlights how Intimate Partner Violence transmutes the ‘happy family’ into a ‘zone of exception’ wherein which the laws prohibiting violence are suspended, the juridico-political status and rights of a woman blurred, and a state of chronic precariousness and crisis generated. Such tendencies are fortified by the ambiguous strategies of the Women’s Union. In maneuvering between violence preventive legislation and family ideals, the Union is criticizing patriarchal family hierarchies while also encouraging women to nurture family happiness by complying with an abusive partner.     

Australia’s war in Vietnam: debate without end

Australia’s commitment in Vietnam can be interpreted as a small ally drawing its superpower partner into war for its own ends. Two studies by eminent Australian authors throw light on the role of human agency, and in so doing bring Australian historiography of the war closer to the trend in the United States. Peter Edwards’s history just about describes Vietnam as ‘Menzies War’. However, he finds no new sources on Menzies’s mindset, and diminishes the roles of his foreign ministers, Garfield Barwick and Paul Hasluck. The late Geoffrey Bolton’s intimate biography of Hasluck shows him as an active minister and also that his private papers are thin on Vietnam, the part of his distinguished career on which he never wrote. The Cabinet meeting of 17 December 1964 reveals much more about Australian decision-making on going to war than can be gleaned from Edwards’s cursory treatment and Bolton’s second-hand account. Barwick’s different approach, and even Hasluck’s last-minute caution, show Australia had a choice. Barwick, if he had remained Foreign Minister, might have kept Australia out of the Vietnam war, so freeing it to continue to play a leading regional political role.     

Irregular Auxiliaries after 1945

ABSTRACT

Collaboration with native auxiliaries in wars in the peripheries of the international system is an age-old practice, the relevance of which is likely to increase in the twenty-first century. Yet, the parameters of such collaboration are understudied. This article aims to contribute to the nascent yet fragmentary scholarship on the use of native auxiliaries. It identifies three intellectual templates of the collaboration between Western regular forces and native auxiliaries: the eighteenth-century model of auxiliary ‘partisans’ as tactical complements to regular armed forces; the nineteenth-century transformation of the ‘partisan’ into the irregular guerrilla fighter and the concomitant rise of the ‘martial races’ discourse; and, finally, the post-1945 model of the loyalist auxiliary as a symbol of the political legitimacy of the counter-insurgent side in wars of decolonisation and post-colonial insurgencies. The article focuses on the rise of loyalism after 1945 in particular, a phenomenon that it seeks to understand within the broader context of irregular warfare and the moral reappraisal of irregular fighters after the Second World War.     

Lester B. Pearson’s Temple University Speech Revisited: The Origins and Evolution of the Proposal for a Bombing Pause

Lester B. Pearson’s speech at Temple University in April 1965 suggesting a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam enraged United States President Lyndon B. Johnson, who in private the next day at Camp David strongly rebuked the Canadian prime minister. While their stormy encounter has become the stuff of legend, just how the controversial proposal for a bombing pause appeared in Pearson’s speech in the first place has received far less attention. Making use of new archival material, including the private diary of Canadian Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Marcel Cadieux, among other original sources, this article revisits previous accounts of the Temple speech, offering new details on the origins of the proposal for a bombing pause and examining the hitherto unknown but crucial drafting changes that were made prior to its becoming public. In doing so, this article sheds new light on one of the most significant events in the history of Canadian–American relations.     

The class route to nationhood: China,Vietnam, Norway,Cyprus – and France*

ABSTRACT. This essay explores the proposition that China and Vietnam represent a fourth class route to modern nationhood, in addition to the ethnic (German), civic (French) and plural (American) routes. Nation‐states emerging along the class route are characterised by an exclusive membership based on social class rather than just ethnicity, living under the same laws or participation in liberation from foreign rule. The essay compares China's and Vietnam's class‐based nationalism with the more inclusive labour movement nationalisms of Norway and Cyprus. Then it explains how the class route differs from the French civic route. In the conclusion, the author concedes that the Chinese and Vietnamese class route is perhaps a detour rather than a route of its own, since it leads to inevitable tension between the divisive history of how the nation was formed and the need of its later leaders to include and represent the same social classes that were originally excluded. These leaders and their national storytellers are forced to undertake a redefinition of the national self as ethnic, civic and/or plural in an attempt to recreate national legitimacy, often in competition with more radically nationalist opposition groups.     

Salt production in pre-Funan Vietnam: archaeomagnetic reorientation of briquetage fragments

Bronze to Iron Age briquetage found in the northern Mekong Delta has an appearance similar to analogous material from Europe and Asia; however, the orientation in which the briquetage was employed during the production of salt is still under debate. As a consequence of the heating and subsequent cooling of the briquetage during the evaporative recovery of salt, the magnetic mineral particles within the ceramic formed a stable thermoremanent magnetization in alignment with the Earth's magnetic field. It thus becomes possible to find the orientation in which the ceramics were last fired by aligning their recorded archaeomagnetic signal with estimates of the Earth's ancient field direction in Vietnam. The archaeomagnetic directions obtained from 22 samples taken from five different briquetage artefacts are somewhat scattered, but they reveal a consistent orientation and thus the mode in which the briquetage was employed can be reconstructed.     

Historical Development of Asian Anchors,as Evidenced by Two Wooden Anchors Found in Northern Vietnam

This article presents the result of research on two large wooden anchors recently identified in Hanoi, Vietnam. Some features of the anchors show similarities with anchors originating from East Asian regions, but the research demonstrates that they are probably from ships locally constructed in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the attempt to clarify the origin of these anchors, it was discovered that there has been little discussion on the historical development of anchors in East and Southeast Asia. Therefore, this article will also assess the significance of the two anchors in the regional evolvement of anchors. © 2010 The Authors