1st Edition

The End of the First Indochina War A Global History

By James Waite Copyright 2012
    310 Pages 3 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The French withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954 was the product of global pressures and triggered significant global consequences. By treating the war as an international issue, this book places Indochina at the center of the Cold War in the mid-1950s. Arguing that the Indochina War cannot be understood as a topic of Franco-US relations, but ought to be treated as international history, this volume brings in Vietnamese and other global agents, including New Zealand, Australia, and especially Britain, as well as China and the Soviet Union. Importantly, the book also argues that the successful French withdrawal from Vietnam – a political defeat for the Eisenhower administration – helped to avert outright warfare between the major powers, although with very mixed results for the inhabitants of Vietnam who faced partition and further bloodshed.

    The End of the First Indochina War explores the complexities of intra-alliance competition over global strategy – especially between the United States and British Commonwealth – arguing that these rivalries are as important to understanding the Cold War as east-west confrontation. This is the first truly global interpretation of the French defeat in 1954, based on the author’s research in five western countries and the latest scholarship from historians of Vietnam, China, and Russia. Readers will find much that is new both in terms of archival revelations and original interpretations.

    @contents:Introduction  Part I: Escalation and Negotiation, March 1953 – May 1954  1. "More Important than Korea": Background to Negotiation  2. Defeat in Vietnam? The Battle for Dien Bien Phu  3. The Vietnamese Confront the Cold War  4. Before Geneva: The Foundations of Western Disunity  5. In Search of a "Lesser Evil:" Partition as an Idea  6. United Action Averted  Part II: The Geneva Conference on Indochina, May – July 1954 7. The Geneva Conference: The Bidault Phase  8. Gouverner, c’est choisir  9. The Geneva Conference: The Mendès-France Phase  Part III: The Global Legacy, July 1954 – July 1956  10. Making Partition Permanent  11. Global Implications  Epilogue: "Our offspring"  Sources  Index

    Biography

    James Waite is a New Zealand diplomat, currently with the International Security and Disarmament Division in the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Waite was posted to the New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta, 2008-2011. Prior to joining the foreign service, he lectured in history at Ohio University, where he received his PhD in 2005. His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History and the Global Economy Journal.

    "…Waite’s book…represent[s] a credible and laudable attempt at a much-needed international history of a crucial episode in both the Cold War and the postwar history of Southeast Asia. Particularly impressive is the amount of new French material Waite presents, as well as the effort he makes to place revelations from Communist archives and sources alongside the more familiar Western perspectives in order to gain a far more complete picture of how a settlement at Geneva was finally forged…"-Matthew Jones, London School of Economics and Political Science