Two Giant Steps in the Scholarship on the First Indochina War

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Notes

^1. The book is discussed in an H-Diplo round table 14 (1), 2012: www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-1.pdf (accessed 28 February 2013).

^2. Note also the puzzling references to “total war,” with “total” sometimes defined as combat that blurred the line between civilian and soldier, while elsewhere the term refers to the DRV's success in establishing a chain of command down to village level and to a horizontal axis that integrated governmental branches at each echelon (a construction that nudges “total” toward “totalitarian”). The term état de guerre is also difficult. Goscha seems to be building on Tilly 1992, which dwells on the importance of preparing for war among leaders who built the administrative structures that came to typify the nation-states of the early modern period. But Tilly also shows how states formed by war took many forms and diverged over time. It would be interesting to hear Goscha on the distinctive features of the DRV in comparison to other emerging states at war in the middle of the twentieth century, as well as his thoughts on the legacy of the DRV as represented in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam formed in 1976. For a recent study, see Gainsborough 2010.

^3. Goscha suggests that the party stationed trusted cadres at “district level, and sometimes even in the villages” (442).

^4. Tilly (1992, 101–2) grants that such situations are “asymmetrical.” But he also believes that “the core of what we now call ‘citizenship’ consists of multiple bargains hammered out by rulers and ruled in the course of their struggles over the means of state action, especially the making of war.”

^5. Goscha expresses a doubt about Sino-Soviet mobilization techniques when he writes that “a sort of epiphanal grace ought to be produced” by cadre training sessions, “a conversion of all into the grand family of the party and its ideology, an absorption of the ‘mass line.’ At least that was the goal sought by the exercise” (442). Another hesitant note emerges when land reform is awkwardly brought into the analysis toward the end of the book. That inducement was not offered until the last weeks of the war and cannot explain why PAVN soldiers were willing to fight in the major battles occurring before then.

^6. The text is beautifully presented, with many impactful photographs: a technician with a paint brush working on a U.S.–supplied C-119 transport plane in order to change “the white star of the U.S. Air Force into the French tricolor” (232); French paratroopers in November 1953 watching from a distance as comrades descend into Dien Bien Phu (386); fly-on-the-wall snapshots of important people in unguarded moments (Eisenhower convulsed by his own joke, while Dulles and various French leaders more or less gamely nod and smile [344]).

^7. For a recent statement, see Costigliola 2012, the centerpiece in H-Diplo Round table 14 (8), 2012: www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XIV-8.pdf (accessed 28 February 2013).

^8. On the “prism,” see Bradley 2000, 70, 74–75; on trusteeship for twenty, thirty, or fifty years, 78; on the president changing his mind, 102.

^9. And certainly not to clear the way for Japanese trading networks in Southeast Asia, a U.S. objective dating back to the late 1940s, as spelled out by Michael Schaller and Andrew Rotter (cited on 744, fn 9). Logevall's oeuvre amounts to a sustained critique of U.S. interventions, but this is one of the few moments where he borrows from revisionist scholarship that calls attention to economic factors shaping U.S. policies.

^10. Anderson 1991.

^11. As noted, Goscha agrees on this point. See also Asselin 2011.

^12. For “compliant client,” see Catton 2002, 9. See also, Miller forthcoming.