Vietnam's Lost Revolution: Ngô ?ình Di?m's Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955–1963 (Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations)

Geoffrey C. Stewart
Cambridge University Press, 3/24/2017
EAN 9781107097889, ISBN10: 1107097886

Hardcover, 278 pages, 23.6 x 16 x 2.1 cm
Language: English

Vietnam's Lost Revolution employs newly-released archival material from Vietnam to examine the rise and fall of the Special Commissariat for Civic Action in the First Republic of Vietnam, and in so doing reassesses the origins of the Vietnam War. A cornerstone of Ngô Đình Diệm's presidency, Civic Action was intended to transform Vietnam into a thriving, modern, independent, noncommunist Southeast Asian nation. Geoffrey Stewart juxtaposes Diem's revolutionary plan with the conflicting and competing visions of Vietnam's postcolonial future held by other indigenous groups. He shows how the government failed to gain legitimacy within the peasantry, ceding the advantage to the communist-led opposition and paving the way for the American military intervention in the mid-1960s. This book provides a richer and more nuanced analysis of the origins of the Vietnam War in which internal struggles over national identity, self-determination, and even modernity itself are central.

1. A temporary expedient
the origins of civic action in Vietnam
2. Nationalism and welfare improvement in the Republic of Vietnam
3. Revolution, community development, and the construction of Diệm's Vietnam
4. 'Bettering the people's conditions of existence'
civic action and community development, 1957–9
5. Civic action and insurgency
6. The strategic Hamlet program and civic action in retreat
Conclusion
Vietnam's lost revolution.