Communist Workers’ Party

The effect of this type of imperial interaction was to create expectations in the nationalisms they produced which would be very difficult to fulfil. The colonial boundaries were of course sacralised as the correct boundaries for anti-imperial nationalism. But in Burma, Burman ethnie nationalism became fatally entangled with state nationalism after independence, with a constant state of unwinnable war against minority ethnie nationalisms. Vietnam was very fortunate that the anti-imperial nationalism of the Indo-Chinese communist party was unable to take control of the whole colony in 1945, and eventually renamed itself the Vietnamese Workers Party in 1951. The French were able to steer Laos and Cambodia to a fragile independence in 1954 (Goscha 1999). The wars of Indo-China up until 1980 were nevertheless bedevilled by Vietnamese attempts to lead the anti-imperial nationalisms of Laos and Cambodia in the Indo-Chinese Revolution of which they had dreamed since 1930, and problems remain between these variants of nationalism. 

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