Cambodia’s relationship with the West began in earnest with early European attempts at exploration and informal imperialism in the 1500s. It has continued unabated (with the United Nations peacekeeping operations of the 1990s and the Khmer Rouge trials of the 2000s) up unto the present. Despite a number of sophisticated academic accounts, which reference Cambodia’s difficult relationship with the West, historians of Cambodia’s recent past have been understandably content to focus upon the rise and fall of the barbaric Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s as part of the wider American War in Vietnam. Consequently, little attention has been given to the evolution of Cambodia’s longer and often troubled transnational interplay. This current collection considers Cambodia’s problematic relationship with the West, not solely within the traditional context of the Vietnam War or the Khmer Rouge genocide , but as part of a wider story of Western imperialism, transnational history and globalisation from 1500 to 2000 and up to the present day.
Nevertheless, to shroud the themes represented in this volume with a title such as Cambodia and the West could be construed by some as challenging. This is because the meanings of the words ‘Cambodia’ and the ‘West’ are not easy to define. On the one hand, this work is part of a larger narrative of globalisation, where constructs of regional western and eastern civilisation clashed, intersected and combined during the last 500 years and created a global modernity.1 On the other hand, the very mention of the word ‘Cambodia’ in the early twenty-first century evokes modern western notions of state formation. But the very hypothesis of Cambodia as a national entity is fraught with problems of its own (from both western and eastern worldview perspectives)—namely: does the concept of a Cambodian national identity and statehood hinge upon traditional notions of kingship and territory, or other societal and cultural constructs?2
Hence, although this collection sits squarely within the study of globalisation and competing ‘national’ identities, it attempts to define neither ‘Cambodia’ nor the ‘West’, but instead allows each author to explore a chronological timeframe and relevant themes as they deem fit. This enables the study to analyse Cambodia’s interaction with the West from the early periods of European expansion, to formal French colonialism, British peace enforcement after World War Two, independence and modernisation during the early Cold War , the United States dominance in the region after the French imperial denouement, the United Nations peace process of the 1990s, and the Khmer Rouge trials that are still proceeding as this is written.
In many respects, Cambodia’s historical relationships with the West are intertwined within a complex set of bonds with its regional and local partners. A habitual theme in this regard is how Cambodia used western assistance to counteract dominance by its more powerful Siamese and Vietnamese neighbours. This recurring theme thereby challenges the simplistic and often circumspect notion of Cambodia as merely a victim of regional circumstances, and reinforces Cambodia’s role as an occasionally astute local (yet transnational) player.
Thus, in the second chapter of the study, Kenneth Hall analyses this complex rapport through the lens of the first Cambodian interactions with the West (the Portuguese , the Spanish and the Dutch ) c.1500–1800. Cambodia’s ensuing financial growth from these early exchanges certainly transformed not just the nature of the Cambodian elite but also the kingdom’s commercial position in the region. Crucially, Hall’s analysis of the Asian deerskin trade alongside other mercantile change demonstrates the existence of increased Asian revenues which were subsequently required for enlarged national bureaucracies and international power-plays (for example in trade, diplomacy, and military conquest).
Following Hall’s study of early imperial flirtations between Cambodia and the West, John Tully and Trude Jacobsen consider the international dynamics concerning western influences during the French colonial epoch. Tully focusses upon how the French believed that Cambodia could act as a buffer towards British activities in Siam , while encouraging French commercial dreams of improving access to China. Jacobsen’s early to mid-twentieth century chapter examines French approaches to education and emancipation as well as the visual, performing and intellectual arts.
British influence in Cambodia is highlighted in T.O. Smith’s chapter. This looks at British peace enforcement actions on the ground immediately following the conclusion of the Second World War. Smith also analyses British diplomacy between Thailand and Cambodia from 1945 to the restoration of the lost western provinces of Cambodia in late 1946.
Jacobsen and Kenton Clymer both tackle Cambodia’s Cold War connections: but from internal and external perspectives. Jacobsen’s decolonisation chapter (set against a French attempt of imperial rebirth and Cold War failure, before France’s retreat from its Asian empire with the Geneva Conference of 1954) outlines Cambodia’s independence, modernisation, corruption and increasing criticism from the West between 1945 and 1975; whilst Clymer’s chapter explores themes pertinent to American diplomacy from 1958 onwards—the problems of Cambodia’s Cold War neutrality, the advantage to the United States of the Lon Nol republic , the disastrous Pol Pot regime, which was followed by the diplomatic benefits for America of a Third Indo-China War and eventually a negotiated peace.
Finally, in contrast to the historians noted above, Kevin Doyle and Fergal Quinn conclude the study, from a communications studies perspective, by examining the United Nations peace process of the 1990s, human rights monitoring, refugee protection, international development aid, and the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal of more recent times. In addition, Doyle and Quinn aptly close the current volume by briefly looking to Cambodia’s future. In doing so, they consider what the outlook may entail for Cambodia’s increasingly complex, fraught, and entangled relationships with both the United Nations and the West.
In many respects, therefore, the current volume touches upon the need for further study concerning Cambodia’s difficult relationships with the West and its wider international history.
To this end, it is evident that comparative borderlands studies of pre-colonial and colonial Cambodia with other geographical areas of European expansion in the nineteenth century are missing from the current historiography. In this matter, comparisons between Cambodia and Kashmir might be fruitful. The similarities between both kingdoms on the verge of European new imperialism are striking. Both reflect indigenous societal identities shaped by violence, which were often naively challenged by the European elites. Yet, this violence was systematically and historically woven into the local, regional and international fabrics of each kingdom—and it may have survived the illusions of each European ‘civilising’ mission. Nonetheless, in spite of the inherent parallels, many restrictions hamper a comparative Cambodian-Kashmiri academic enterprise. These prohibitions do not exist from a Cambodian Studies perspective (David Chandler , Penny Edwards , Milton Osborne and John Tully having already forged useful analyses of violence, kingship, patronage and the Cambodian borderlands societal identities before and during the early French colonial period),3 but rather, further comparison is currently hindered by the haphazard logistics (and somewhat controversial debates) presently associated within contemporary Kashmiri Studies.4
Similarly, with the volume of secondary literature now being produced concerning the advance of the Cold War within Southeast Asia, plus the growth of recent archival access to previously closed and critical primary sources, a reappraisal of Cambodia’s position in the western sphere of influence during the Cold War epoch clearly awaits future assessment and vitalisation.5 In addition, the imminent completion of the recent Khmer Rouge trials will further provide future scholars with yet another rich seam of dynamic comprehension concerning Cambodia’s international and economic interplay within wider regional and global geopolitics.6 And finally, the current evolution of international concerns along the Mekong River will no doubt provide said future scholars with more historical, political and contemporary transnational complexities to dissect, inform and debate.7
In the meantime, the current volume must suffice as a link to further studies. In doing so, Cambodia and the West attempts to provide a bridge to future scholarship by bringing together an interdisciplinary team of established and emergent scholars working in the disciplines of history, political science, and communication studies. This has enabled the individual authors to contribute towards a historical-whole larger than our own specialist time periods and areas of research. Therefore, this book uniquely offers a reappraisal of Cambodia’s troubled relationship with the West in order to understand more broadly Cambodia’s troubled interaction with the West and the consequences for the Cambodian people.
Footnotes
1
A wider discussion of the long and complex evolution of globalisation as an academic discipline can be found in T.O. Smith, ‘Europe, Americanization and Globalization’, (review article), European History Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2 (April 2007): 301–9. For an excellent introduction to globalisation see J. Osterhammel and N.P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).
2
P. Edwards , Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 1–12.
3
For example: D. Chandler , ‘Normative Poems (Chbap) and the Pre-Colonial Cambodian Society’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 15,...