Making space in Laos constructing a national identity in a `forgotten country》.pdf

Political Geography, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 809–831, 1998 Pergamon  1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved Printed in Great Britain 0962-6298/98 $19.00 + 0.00 PII: S0962-6298(98)00028-6 Making space in Laos: constructing a national identity in a ‘forgotten’ country Department of Human and Economic Geography, Gothenburg University, S-411 80 Go¨teborg, Sweden Department of Geography, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK The paper interrogates changing notions of ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘nationality’ with reference to one of the world’s least-known countries— the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. The analysis is used to reflect on the roles of culture and history in understanding nations and nationalities. The discussion begins with an investigation of how Laos, as a territory, was carved from the canvas of mainland Southeast Asia by the French from the late 19th century overturning, in the process, indigenous notions of space and nationhood. Broadly speaking, the primacy of control over people was supplanted by control over space. For the French, Laos became little more than an annex to Vietnam; and for the Americans a ‘a wart on the back of Vietnam’. Laos was finally unified in 1975, since when the