Dennis J. Duncanson

South Vietnam: Detente and Reconciliation

OIUTH VIETNAMESE people have cause to feel that they are under greater pressure from the communist world now that detente is the order of the day than they ever were at the height of the cold war in the 1950s. Agitation to persuade the intellectual public of countries with open societies of the inherent wickedness of those Vietnamese who resist the communists actually increased after President Nixons undertaking to withdraw American combat forces from Indochina; coordinated on principles similar to those some of us recall as the hallmark of the League against Imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s, the antiSaigon campaligns continue today after American withdrawal is complete, no whit abated in either frequency or virulence. The broadcasts of Radios Moscow and Peking preclude the possibility that the campaigns are started otherwise than with the blessings of Kremlin and Great Within. Detente is often reckoned to have begun with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and has since moved down to control of conventional weapons; yet it evidently proved impossible for Dr. Kissinger to negotiate, on a more modest plane still, a limitation on the supply of conventional weapons to the two belligerents in Indochina-either impossible because Peking and Moscow declined, or futile because he knew in advance that they would not honour eventual undertakings, and, thanks to land frontiers and closed societies, could get away with extensive breaches of any. It is true that a limitation of a kind is written into the January ceasefire; but the relevant clause merely bans the introduction into South Vietnam of fresh munitions, beyond what is needed for replacement-it says nothing about introducing them into North Vietnam, Laos or Cambodia, whose frontiers with South Vietnam are all entrusted by another clause in the ceasefire, irreversibly, to the charge of the communist forces. Members of the International Control Commission endeavouring, in fulfilment of duties under a third clause, to gain some idea what movement was taking place across those frontiers have paid for their foolhardiness with their lives, unmourned by any outcry. One is reminded of Chinese condemnations of Britain for bad faith in the 1830s in declining to ban the export of opium from Bengal; that measures to prevent importation alone were bound to be ineffectual

Book reviews: The titles reviewed are listed below with names of authors, editors and reviewers

Whose News: politics, press and the Third World. Rosemary Righter, London: Andre Deutsch. 1978.272 pp. £5.50. Politics and Markets: the worlds political‐economic systems. Charles E Lindblom, New York: Basic Books. 1978. 403 pp. £8.95. Human Rights in a One Party State: international seminar on human rights, their protection and the rule of law in a one party state. Convened by the International Commission of Jurists, London: Search Press in conjunction with the International Commission of Jurists, Geneva. 1978. 133 pp. Human Rights and Development: report of a seminar on human rights and their promotion in the Caribbean. Organised by the International Commission of Jurists and the Organisation of Commonwealth Caribbean Bar Associations, Bridgetown, Barbados: Cedar Press. 1978. 342 pp. Torture, The Grand Conspiracy. Malise Ruthven, London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson. 1978. 190 pp. £10.00. Economic Planning and Social Justice in Developing Countries. Ozay Mehmet, London: Croom Helm. 1978. 282pp. £8.95. For a ...

Malayasia as a Nation-State

An implicit assumption underlay the termination of colonial rule in Southeast Asia that the peoples who were thereby given their independence could reasonably indeed with certainty -be expected to stand on their own feet, the colonial interlude having been no more than a temporary disturbance of their historical condition and natural development as nation-states. It has yet to be demonstrated that that expectation was wrong. It has also yet to be demonstrated that it was right. India set the pace in the process of decolonization, and the unquestionable lightness of the expectation in her case -both a priori and in the event -was the foundation for a doctrine quickly extended to Southeast Asia. It was not unfitting that India should become the exemplar for Further India: she had been the source of most of its political ideas in the remote past; French Indochina had been constituted in many details on the model of British India, while Malaya had begun its colonial life as a dependency rather of India than of Britain; and Mr. Nehru was now adopting the posture both of patron and of advocate to speed the process of Southeast Asian emancipation ably and enthusiastically seconded, of course, by Mr. Malcolm Macdonald, the senior Briton and most prestigious European in the region, from his borrowed Mount Meru in Johore. Indeed, in the world political climate of the time, there was really no option for anybody over decolonization: the example of India could be followed, but it could not not be followed. There was no question that the metropolitan powers would relinquish their dominion only to whom, when, and under what constitutional arrangements. The question whether the Southeast Asian peoples could stand on their own feet did not arise as such -only how the successor states could best maintain internal unity, how they could be made economically and administratively viable, and how their independence, once they had it, was to be defended. On this practical level, the example of India was not much help, for, in giving up her Adams rib for the creation of Pakistan, she had compromised her own internal unity from the outset, however reluctantly, while her very size as second biggest nation in the world, even when cut down by the loss of Pakistan, begged all the Southeast Asian questions of economics, administration, and defence. That the independence which would follow the termination of colonial rule would necessarily find its constitutional shape in nationstates had not been quite so clear in prospect before the event as it now appears to us in retrospect after the event: independence and nationalism did not become synonyms in common usage till after World War II. As late as 1941, Mr. Nehru was able to envisage an independent