Long Time Passing: The Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans to 1946

Abstract

Abstract What constitutes a long time? That is a central question of the vietnam war. For the vietnamese the fight represented the latest phase of a centuries-long, even millennial, effort to define themselves and cast out invaders. Vietnamese nationalists and revolutionaries who fought the French and Americans seemed infinitely patient, serenely confident that eventually outsiders would have to go. But for first the French, and then the Americans and their Vietnamese allies, war seemed to go on forever. The French and the Americans grew increasingly frustrated and impatient when the war did not end on their terms. The French, before the climactic battle of Dienbienphu in 1954 and the Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, heard a clock ticking ever more loudly with every battle, every report of a death in combat, every change in the government of Vietnam, and every anguished cry of opposition at home. No wonder two of the most popular American accounts of events in Vietnam after 1945 are called America’s Longest War and The Endless War. The war in Vietnam helped shape the contours of world politics after the era of European domination. For four hundred years, from the sixteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, the history of international relations was the story of what European states did—with one another and with other peoples and with states in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. But the European epoch ended in the twentieth century. The First World War eroded European power and the Second nearly destroyed it. World War II set the future course of world politics. The end of European pre-eminence foretold the demise of European empires in Asia and Africa. Before 1940 challenges to colonialism in Asia and Africa were mostly theoretical; after the war they became real. Although another fifteen turbulent years of anticolonial agitation were to pass, direct European rule was doomed.