Posted June 6, 2008 

Laos has often—but very unkindly—been described as an artificially created country lacking all of the historical, ethnic and political criteria for nationhood. Its creation, Søren Ivarsson of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies argues, “can be traced back to the colonial encounter at the end of the 19th century, when France carved out Laos as an unprecedented territorial entity in conformity with Franco-Siamese treaties.” In 1893 France sent gunboats up the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok and forced then King of Siam, King Chulalongkorn, to relinquish all claims to the territories east of the Mekong, which until then to various degrees had been paying allegiance to him. This new entity was populated not only by people speaking a language closely related to Thai, but various hill tribes as well.

Nevertheless, today Laos is a reality, and a nation whose sovereignty and independence no other country would question. There is also a strong appreciation among its inhabitants of being Lao in terms of culture, history and even language. In a sense, this is not unusual. Many countries have been created as a result of colonial conflicts and historical accidents. Among them is unquestionably Asia’s youngest nation, East Timor, with a territory of 14, 874 square kilometers and a population of only about 800,000 people—who belong to various clans and speak more than a dozen different languages. All that they share is a Portuguese colonial past as well as years of resistance against Indonesia, which occupied the territory from 1975 to 1999.

But then Indonesia is also a colonial creation, made up of the vastly ethnically and linguistically different territories of the former Dutch East Indies. And so is today’s Burma, which includes within its present boundaries numerous nationalities and tribes, which were brought together by the British into one political entity—and has been struggling to remain as such ever since the British left in 1948.

Seen in that broader context, Mr. Ivarsson’s study of the Lao example gives fascinating insight into how nations can be created—and even succeed as such. Having separated their new colonial acquisition from Siamese political influence, the French had to give it a separate identity. This was especially important because there were— and still are—many more people speaking Lao in what now is Thailand than in Laos. In Thailand, it is considered a Thai dialect and is spoken in the northeast. In Laos, it has developed into a separate language with its own alphabet and literature.

The French, Mr. Ivarsson argues, “brought the Lan Xang kingdom out of the mist of time and made the history of Lan Xang synonymous with the history of the Lao in the Mekong valley.” The legendary 14th century King Fa Ngum was hailed as the monarch who brought unity to the country while other King Anou of Vientiane, who reigned in the early 19th century, not only reigned “over a prosperous Vientiane, but … also embodied the desire to free his country from the yoke of Siamese domination.” Annals were unearthed and rewritten, Mr. Iversson continues, so that “the Lao were not only given a past, but they also possessed a written tradition symbolizing a flourishing civilization of the past. The written history was an important mark of civilization vis-à-vis the Siamese.”

When pan-Thai nationalism ran high in the 1930s and 1940s, the need to strengthen a separate Lao identity became even more urgent. Charles Rochet, the then French director of public education in Laos, was instrumental in creating the territory’s first newspaper in the Lao language, Lao Nhay, in 1941. It carries cartoons ridiculing pan-Thaiism and articles about Lao history and culture.

But, in the end, it all backfired. As the very idea of what it meant to be Lao grew, so did the desire to become an independent nation, or, as Mr. Ivarsson writes, the “French-sponsored Lao cultural nationalism was transformed into a political and anticolonial nationalism.” Various independence movements gained momentum, and, in 1953, the French had to transfer power to a new Lao government in Vientiane. The king, however, resided in Luang Prabang. He was actually only one of several kings, but the French had promoted him as a “national” king of Laos in another attempt to unify the ethnically and politically diverse territory.

The main shortcoming of Mr. Ivarsson’s otherwise excellent study of how a “Lao space” was created between Siam and Indochina is that his study ends in 1945. Laos embarked on an even more interesting nation-building endeavor after independence. The people of the lowlands, who speak a language related to Thai, were designated as “Lao Loum”, or “Lao of the valleys—while the Mon-Khmer speaking minorities were called “Lao Theung,” or “Lao of the mountain slopes,” and the highlanders, most of whom speak Tibeto-Burman languages, became “Lao Soung,” or “Lao of the mountain tops.”

Ethnicity or language is no longer important to be Lao; now, everyone inside the present boundaries of an “erstwhile colonial state which did not correspond to any political entity already in existence,” to use Mr. Ivarsson’s characterization of the country, have become Lao. And Laos appears to have succeeded where other, similar colonial creations have not. Burma is still plagued by ethnic strife and civil war while East Timor is in danger of becoming a failed state. So perhaps the Lao example is worth some closer scrutiny—and Mr. Ivarsson’s book on the subject is a brilliant study of how a once undefined “space” eventually became a nation.

Bertil Lintner is a journalist based in Thailand.