fraternal communities across the border would be a much more risky policy than for any of the external homelands in Europe.
There was also anxiety, however, on the side of the larger states. Because na- tional self-determination was such a powerful force in international affairs, most of the larger states were acutely aware of the risk that their minorities might be interested in separatism (that is, the establishment of a new border state), or irredentism (that is, ‘reunification’with the ethnically defined state).19 These fears were sharpest in China, partly because the Mongols had a previous history of imperial rule over China. This historical memory remained a driving force both in Mongol ideas of independence in the twentieth century and in pan- Mongol movements in Inner Mongolia. China feared its international enemies might encourage separatism in order to weaken China.20 Such fears were also strong in Indonesia, where the ruling elite had similarly come to regard the en- couragement of separatism as one of the main tools which hostile powers might use to undermine the country. These fears were weaker but far from absent in Thailand. In 1896, France had agreed with Britain that the Khorat plateau on the west bank of the Mekong River would be considered a French sphere of in- fluence.21 If the French had turned this claim into colonial reality, they would have controlled virtually all the Lao-speaking regions. This claim reappeared on the political agenda in 1945 in an essay by the Lao nationalist prince Phet- sarath which proposed that the borders of the Lao state should run far to the west along the Chao Phraya-Mekong watershed.22 Thailand was also appre- hensive that ethnic dissatisfaction in the northeast might win support for the Communist Party of Thailand, which used Chinese backing to function effec- tively across a large part of the country, especially the northeast, from 1965 to 1980.23 As a result, in all three cases the external homelands had good reason to fear that toying with the loyalties of fraternal communities might open a Pan- dora’s box of dangerous consequences for themselves.