As France begins to confront the new challenges of the post-Cold War era, the time has come to examine how French security policy has evolved since Charles de Gaulle set it on an independent course ...in the 1960s. Philip Gordon shows that the Gaullist model, contrary to widely held beliefs, has lived on--but that its inherent inconsistencies have grown more acute with increasing European unification, the diminishing American military role in Europe, and related strains on French military budgets. The question today is whether the Gaullist legacy will enable a strong and confident France to play a full role in Europe's new security arrangements or whether France, because of its will to independence, is destined to play an isolated, national role.
Gordon analyzes military doctrines, strategies, and budgets from the 1960s to the 1990s, and also the evolution of French policy from the early debates about NATO and the European Community to the Persian Gulf War. He reveals how and why Gaullist ideas have for so long influenced French security policy and examines possible new directions for France in an increasingly united but potentially unstable Europe.
Dommen's book promises to be the definitive political history of
Indochina during the Franco-American era. -- William M. Leary, E. Merton
Coulter Professor of History, University of Georgia This
...magisterial study by Arthur J. Dommen sets the Indochina wars 'French and American'
in perspective as no book that has come before. He summarizes the history of the
peninsula from the Vietnamese War of Independence from China in 930-39 through the
first French military actions in 1858, when the struggle of the peoples of Indochina
with Western powers began. Dommen details the crucial episodes in
the colonization of Indochina by the French and the indigenous reaction to it. The
struggle for national sovereignty reached an acute state at the end of World War II,
when independent governments rapidly assumed power in Vietnam and Cambodia. When the
French returned, the struggle became one of open warfare, with Nationalists and
Communists gripped in a contest for ascendancy in Vietnam, while the rulers of
Cambodia and Laos sought to obtain independence by
negotiation. The withdrawal of the French after their defeat at
Dien Bien Phu brought the Indochinese face-to-face, whether as friends or as
enemies, with the Americans. In spite of an armistice in 1954, the war between Hanoi
and Saigon resumed as each enlisted the help of foreign allies, which led to the
renewed loss of sovereignty as a result of alliances and an increasingly heavy loss
of lives. Meticulous and detailed, Dommen's telling of this complicated story is
always judicious. Nevertheless, many people will find his analysis of the Diem coup
a disturbing account of American plotting and murder. This is an
essential book for anyone who wants to understand Vietnam and the people who fought
against the United States and won.
This book is an account of two dimension of state and nation building in France and Spain since the seventeenth century--the invention of a national boundary line and the making of Frenchmen and ...Spaniards. It is also a history of Catalan rural society in the Cerdanya, a valley in the eastern Pyrenees divided between Spain and France in 1659. This study shuttles between two levels, between the center and the periphery. It connects the "macroscopic" political and diplomatic history of France and Spain, from the Old Regime monarchies to the national territorial states of the later nineteenth century; and the "molecular" history--the historical ethnography--of Catalan village communities, rural nobles, and peasants in the borderland. On the frontier, these two histories come together, and they can be told as one. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990. This book is an account of two dimension of state and nation building in France and Spain since the seventeenth century--the invention of a national boundary line and the making of Frenchmen and Spaniards. It is also a history of Catalan rural society in.
