Soldiering through Empire. Simeon Man
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COLONIAL INTIMACIES BETWEEN GENEVA AND BANDUNG
The French mistakenly thought it would be easy to crush the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, but they had underestimated the strength and determination of their colonized subjects. In the spring of 1954, the Viet Minh dealt a stunning blow to French forces in the siege of Dien Bien Phu. The battle marked the end of the war, and news of the French defeat traveled quickly across the globe, soon inspiring revolutionaries in Algiers to call forth their own revolt against the French. The black American activist Paul Robeson, fighting white supremacy from the seat of U.S. empire, was moved to pen an essay hailing Ho Chi Minh as the “Toussaint L’Overture of Indochina.” The Viet Minh’s victory signified the beginning of the end of empire. However, the revolutionary meaning of the Viet Minh’s victory evaporated rapidly.7
In the hopes of gaining advantage during negotiations, the Viet Minh had timed their victory perfectly to coincide with the Geneva Conference. The very day of victory, state leaders of the five major world powers (the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the United States, France, and Great Britain) gathered at Geneva, prepared to settle the terms of the Indochina War. The Euro-American allies were most concerned with how French colonialism’s end would redistribute global relations of power, instead of determining what an independent Vietnam should look like. In the end, the participants agreed to partition Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, regrouping French forces to the south and the Viet Minh to the north, and to ban further military buildup and military alliances on both sides. The accords stipulated the reunification of the country by general elections in 1956. All world powers signed the agreement except the United States, because U.S. plans to subvert the Geneva Accords and to maneuver greater influence in Vietnam were already under way.8
During the Geneva Conference and even long before, U.S. leaders worried about the political implications of their ongoing association with France over Indochinese matters. In a policy statement, one State Department official, Charlton Ogburn, warned plainly that supporting the French was no longer tenable. He believed that backing France militarily would ensure “the loss of all Vietnam and all of Indochina” to the communists, and “cause a serious decline of American prestige in the Far East, widespread resentment and despair among the Asians over our short-sighted and bitter-end support of the French.” Ogburn advised that the United States should seek a “common approach” with other Asian nations, which would pay dividends: “We [would] have put ourselves in the best possible light in non-Communist Asia, have given the Asians valuable experience in bearing responsibility and have prepared the basis for effective cooperation between the free Asian countries and ourselves in preventing the further expansion of Communism.” Simply put: a stand for Asian unity was a stand against communism and colonialism.9
In an attempt to distance the United States from the French and from Euro-imperialism generally, U.S. officials found support in the Philippines to attest to America’s exceptionalism. As early as 1946, Philippine Resident Commissioner Carlos P. Romulo had hailed the U.S. independence legislation for the Philippines as “the beginning of the end for imperialism,” saying that it “encouraged the dream of ultimate freedom among colonial peoples.” Romulo embraced his part as a postcolonial middling elite, glowing about American democracy just as often as he presumed to interpret the desires of the “Asian masses” for U.S. leaders. In 1950, as the Truman Administration began to aid the French in the Indochina War, Romulo told Secretary of State Acheson, “In the eyes of the great mass of the people of Indochina and Asia, the French army … is a hostile army, an enemy of Viet Nam independence.” The U.S. decision to support France in turn had resulted in “the virtual isolation of American policy from the sentiment of Asian countries.” He made it clear that the challenge for the United States was to unburden itself “of the suspicion of pro-imperialism.” He said, “I personally am convinced that this suspicion is unjustified, but how could it be otherwise in the untutored minds of Asia’s discontented masses?”10
Shortly after the Geneva Conference, the U.S. pursuit of forging a collective “Asian front” to signal its commitment to anti-imperialism and anticommunism materialized at the founding meeting of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in Manila, which occurred from September 5 to 8, 1954. Representatives from the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States gathered at the Manila Conference to proclaim their anticommunist solidarity and collective resolve to safeguard Southeast Asia. They were keen on protecting Vietnam and its bordering states of Laos and Cambodia against the encroachments of Communist China and the Soviet Union. The conference resulted in the Manila Pact and articulated a broad, multinational responsibility to defend the region. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles emphasized that the Pact “is not directed against any people or any government,” but “is directed against an evil, the evil of aggression.” Lest the peoples of Southeast Asia suspect that the Manila Pact was a blueprint for some kind of neocolonial form of regional governance, the conference concluded with the signing of the Pacific Charter, which proclaimed the rights of peoples to self-determination, self-government, and independence.11
In contrast to the Geneva Accords, the Manila Pact provided justification for U.S. military intervention in Indochina in the name of countering communism. The Manila Pact also accomplished much more. Although the conference included delegates of “white” colonial powers with longstanding interests in the region, its ideological force derived from the idea that Asians were determining their political destiny in a democratic and postcolonial setting. The core of the agreement embodied an Asian regionalism that reflected the U.S. commitment to anticolonial self-determination.
The conference also signaled an emerging role in regional affairs for Philippine leaders. The Philippine Vice President and Secretary of Foreign Affairs Carlos P. Garcia affirmed that the formation of SEATO signified “the first big step” in facilitating closer ties between the Philippines and its neighboring countries, which previously had been foreclosed by “centuries of colonialism.”12 According to Garcia, “The measure of usefulness of the Asian participants to this conference will depend largely on the measure that we may win the confidence, the faith and the friendship of our neighbors and brothers of Southeast Asia.”13 The language of “friendship” and kinship that infused the conference proceedings solidified an imagined geography of “Southeast Asia,” one that subsumed ethnic, linguistic, religious, and other forms of difference to project the image of a united region.14 Philippine state leaders mobilized the language of kinship increasingly in the weeks and months after the Geneva Conference, particularly as they sought to formalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
The Junior Chamber of Commerce played an important part in this story. A civic organization founded during the U.S. Progressive Era, the Junior Chamber, or Jaycees, had transformed into a worldwide phenomenon with chapters in over fifty countries by the 1950s, represented by the international body Junior Chamber International (JCI). Organized around the tenets of “free enterprise” and “humanitarianism” that “transcends the sovereignty of nations,” JCI served as a quintessential organization to facilitate what one scholar called a “global imaginary of integration.”15 As the Philippine Congress engaged in unresolved debates over the question of extending diplomatic recognition to Vietnam, JCI was already mobilizing the Philippine public to action. In July 1954, the Manila chapter of the Jaycees voted to extend its support by providing medical aid and volunteers to help Vietnamese refugees who were migrating south of the seventeenth parallel. The Geneva Accords and its mandate of a three-hundred-day period of unrestricted travel across the two zones had resulted in a massive movement of refugees. Nearly nine hundred thousand people, mostly Catholic civilians from the northern region of Tonkin, took advantage of the opportunity to escape the Viet Minh and to seek better life chances in the south. In the summer of 1954, the Jaycees brought the first group of Filipino friends to South Vietnam to care for these refugees.
A year later, at the University of the Philippines convocation in July 1955, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs Raul Manglapus reaffirmed the stakes of recognizing the sovereignty of South Vietnam, and evoked the Filipinos already there. First, he alluded to the specter of communism: “Our policy of strengthening our freedom impels us to do all we can to strengthen freedom