Britain and the neutralisation of Laos

摘要

Nicholas Tarling has spent a lifetime working on the subject that defines this book: British strategic foreign policy, with particular reference to international relations in Southeast Asia. It shows. Tarling brings to this study both a substantial body of work analysing the international history of Southeast Asia, from a regional perspective, and a series of detailed studies examining British strategic foreign policy regarding Southeast Asia. This book draws and benefits from that work, in a study Tarling sees as addressing two gaps: to try to understand how British policy-makers managed the decline of Britain's role in the region as responsibly as possible; to focus more closely on an important issue not yet covered by his broader studies. The topic is well chosen in both respects. The dilemma of how to manage the construction of a post-colonial state in the landlocked kingdom of Laos was an international problem from the start, the state itself being a product of the landmark Geneva conference and agreements of 1954. Those agreements framed the problem: how great powers, and smaller regional states, could together manage the collision between decolonisation and Cold War in Southeast Asia.