National Reconstruction of Colonial Territory in Southeast Asia

This presentation examines diplomatic relations between Indonesia and the two Vietnams from 1955-65, when political elites toggled between commitments to free themselves from colonial rule on the one hand and imperatives to fill out territories defined by colonial rule on the other.

All three countries sent delegates to the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung and embraced its principles of self-determination, anticolonialism, and equality among nations. Yet subsequent diplomatic, political, and military maneuvers demonstrate that Vietnamese and Indonesian elites used the same Bandung principles to legitimize the conquest of territory created by former colonial overlords.

Putting the principle of “respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” to work, Presidents Sukarno of Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh of northern Vietnam (DRV) made common cause in their respective pursuits of western New Guinea, left out of the 1949 settlement with the Netherlands, and southern Vietnam (RVN), administered separately since the 1954 Geneva Agreements. Called “national reunification” in archived documents, their projects endeavored to create national territories that, in fact, had never existed before. Caught in between, RVN leaders worried about the expansionist ambitions of both and, consequently, drew closer to the US in a heating Cold War contest. Taken together, the irredentist pursuit of territory in Southeast Asia suggests how Bandung principles exceeded anti-colonial solidarity and became, instead, tools of postcolonial recolonization.

Speaker & chair biographies

Dr. Christian C. Lentz is Associate Professor of Geography and Environment and Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Contested Territory: Điện Biên Phủ and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), winner of the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize for outstanding first book in Southeast Asian studies. His articles have appeared in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Political Geography, Modern Asian Studies, American Historical Review, and other journals. He has held fellowships with Fulbright in Vietnam, the Asia Research Insitute at the National University of Singapore, and the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. His current research examines territory, nationalism, and decolonization in Indonesia and the two Vietnams.

Dr. Qingfei Yin is Associate Professor of International History (China and the World) and SEAC Associate at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building projects in Asia.

*Banner photo by Road Ahead on Unsplash

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