From Saigon to Baghdad: Nation-building and the Specter of History

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Notes

Nation-building is being defined here as an externally driven, or facilitated, attempt to form or consolidate a stable, and sometimes democratic, government over an internationally recognized national territory against the backdrop of the establishment and consolidation of the United Nations and the universalization of a system of sovereign nation-states. Nation-building can encompass formal military occupation, counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, national reconstruction, foreign aid and the use of stabilization forces. During much of the Cold War the externally driven, or facilitated, nation-building efforts were primarily US- or Soviet-sponsored operations with limited actual UN involvement. This is a geo-political definition. The term is, of course, also used more broadly to refer to the efforts by national elites to create a territorial state and mobilize the population around a shared sense of national identity.

Richard A. Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 3rd edn, 2000).

William M. Leogrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks sought to control the different non-Russian nationalities, and contain nationalisms within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by promoting accepted forms of national identity and nationhood without offering substantive autonomy or independence. Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Nation-building also emerged as an important concern of North American political science in the context of the Cold War and the rise of modernization theory. See Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation-Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and Mark T. Berger, ‘Decolonization, Modernization and Nation-Building: Political Development Theory and the Appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, 1945–1975’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34/3 (October 2003).

Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy 1945–1980 (New York: Pantheon Press, 1988).

Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Ankie Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave, 2001; first published 1997), p.177.

A central element of the US-led globalization project is its focus on the promotion of liberal economic policies and the reconfiguration of state-mediated national development efforts into neo-liberal states. Also central to the globalization project are the technological changes of the past few decades, which have under-girded the instantaneous character of a growing range of financial, economic, social, political and cultural transactions. The globalization project, as conceptualized here, is centered on the US, but it is also being pursued at a wide range of sites by increasingly unaccountable transnationalized and overlapping elites. The globalization project is linked, in particular, to the growing concentration of control over the global economy by a relatively small number of large oligopolistic transnational corporations that have emerged from merger-driven and technology-facilitated changes to the global political economy of the last few decades. However, despite the increasingly oligopolistic character of global business operations the US-led globalization project is legitimated by, and promoted in the name of, a free-enterprise and free-trade vision of the global economy. See Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective, 3rd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2004); Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization (London: Routledge, 2004).

Alex J. Bellamy, Paul Williams and Stuart Griffin, Understanding Peacekeeping (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), pp.188–268.

Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Press, 2001).

Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and Modern Historical Experience, 2nd edn (New York: New Press, 1994; first published 1985), pp.111–25, 208–30, 654–7.

This was in contrast, for example, to the emergence of a single nation-state out of the sprawling but centralized Netherlands Indies. The reasons for this difference are many, but one central factor is that Vietnam had been an important pre-colonial polity (although not a nation-state) that the French had only conquered and absorbed into Indochina more or less intact in the second half of the nineteenth century allowing it to remain a meaningful vector for the emergent anti-colonial Vietnamese nationalism of the twentieth century. The remaining territories of Laos and Cambodia were left to pursue their own paths to independence. While Java was the central social and economic prop of the Netherlands Indies it did not form a reference point for the nationalist struggle because it had been absorbed into the Dutch colonial polity much earlier than was the case for the Vietnamese empire. Furthermore, the Javanese elite had by and large been much more successfully incorporated by the early twentieth century into an increasingly centralized colonial bureaucracy and when the nationalist movement emerged it mapped itself onto the Dutch empire as a whole. David E.F. Henley, ‘Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism: Indonesia and Indochina’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37/2 (1995), pp.286–9, 319–20.

Huynh Kim Khanh, Vietnamese Communism 1925–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).

Nan Wiegersma and Joseph E. Medley, US Economic Development Policies Towards the Pacific Rim: Successes and Failures of US Aid (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp.17, 20, 71–9.

Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

For a good study of the dynamics of this process, which emphasizes local actors, see E. Karsh and I. Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). For a revisionist study that attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of the rulers of the Ottoman Empire see Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

One of the best overviews of Iraq's modern history is Charles A. Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).