Among the newly independent nation-states of Southeast Asia, the fate of
nationalism, I will argue, hinged less on management of internal ethnic diversity than on problems of reintegrating former colonial economies and state
structures within the world capitalist economy and the Cold War global political order on the basis of national independence. Here it is useful to recall the
tortured maneuvers and tragic fates of figures like Burma’s U Nu, Cambodia’s
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and Indonesia’s Soekarno as they struggled to carve
out a modicum of economic autonomy and political neutrality in the 1950s and
1960s in the context of continuing economic linkages to old colonial metropoles and intensifying American intervention in the region. Between the “neocolonial” option of continuing openness to Western capital and facilities for