The longest wars Indochina 1945 to 1975

The Longest Wars: Indochina 1945-75 Author(s): Stein Tønnesson Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 9-29 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/423583 Accessed: 03/01/2010 16:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sageltd. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Peace Research. http://www.jstor.org

ISSN 0022-3433 Journal of Peace Research, vol. 22, no. 1, 1985 The Longest Wars: Indochina 1945-75* STEIN TONNESSON International Peace Research Institute, Oslo In 1981-82, as a graduate student of history, Stein Te0nnesson was lucky enough to be admitted to the Indochina files of the French archives, where secret cables and reports had been conserved since the outbreak of the first Indochinese war in late 1946. In the first part of this article he presents a new version of the process that led to the Franco-Vietnamese war, based on this previously unpublished material. New light is thrown on French actions and motives and also on the Indochina policy of the United States at that time. The French sources show how the high commissioner in Saigon, with backing from the French premier and foreign minister Georges Bidault, deliberately provoked war. This was done at the same time as Bidault's government was replaced by a Socialist government under the veteran Leon Blum. Once taking office, Blum sent a peace proposal to Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh and ordered the French troops to negotiate a cease-fire. His order was ignored by the French army, however, and in the face of vigorous nationalist sentiments in France, Blum had to give in. In the second part of the article Stein T0nnesson compares the first and second Indochinese wars and finds notable parallels in the ways they escalated and in the reasons why they lasted so long. 1. Introduction Indochina o