Abstract

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN EXPECTED that in the post-Mao era socialist states would have deemphasized ideological differences in the interests of internationalism. Yet meaningful differences in the basic line of revolutionary transformation, particularly in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR), the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), and Democratic Kampuchea have brought into sharp focus the contradictions obtaining between the strict adherence of socialist nations to proletarian internationalism and the conflicting demands of narrow bourgeois nationalism. While media attention has been focussed upon the leading protagonists and victims of the conflict between erstwhile revolutionary allies, less interest has been shown in Laos, an example that allows certain interpretations to be examined in a way that provides valuable insights into the wider dynamics of regional politics. The case of Laos, moreover, serves to illustrate the attempt of one Southeast Asian state and sovereign member of the nonaligned movement to reconcile the conflicting poles of its national security priorities on the one hand, and the dictates of alliances and more powerful socialist nations on the other. Emphasis given here to the ideological imperatives governing the interstate and interparty relations of socialist states is not to depreciate the widely observed relevance of historical, cultural, ethnic, and geostrategic considerations, which are in thie final analysis largely inseparable, but to seek a coherent set of answers to otherwise inexplicable political behavior that analysis of party publications, documents, monitored radio broadcast transcripts, etc., makes possible.

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