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Laos's Peripheral Centrality in Southeast Asia

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Laos's Peripheral Centrality in Southeast Asia European Journal European Journal of of East Asian Studies 17 (2018) 228–262 East Asian Studies brill.com/ejea Laos’s Peripheral Centrality in Southeast Asia Mobility, Labour and Regional Integration James Alan Brown School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London [email protected] Abstract Laos’s position at the centre of the Southeast Asian mainland has entailed peripheral- ity to regional loci of power. Its geography of peripheral centrality has however resulted in Laos becoming a realm of contestation between powerful neighbours. The analysis traces the construction of Laos within a regional space from pre-colonial times to con- temporary special economic zones. Laos has been produced through mobility, foreign actors’ attempts to reorient space to their sphere of influence, and transnational class relations incorporating Lao workers and peasants, Lao elites and foreign powers. These elements manifest within current special economic zone projects. Keywords Laos – regional integration – mobility – labour – special economic zones 1 Introduction In the past two decades, the Lao government has emphasised turning Laos from a ‘land-locked’ to a ‘land-linked’ country. Laos is located at the centre of main- land Southeast Asia and has been historically isolated from maritime trade routes. The vision encapsulated by the ‘land-linked’ phrase is thus of trans- forming Laos’s relative geographic isolation into a centre of connectivity for the region. Laos will act as the central integrative territory which brings together other countries in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), facilitating commerce between them.1 The ‘land-locked’ part of the phrase implies tropes of ‘Laos 1 Vatthana Pholsena and Ruth Banomyong, Laos From Buffer State to Crossroads (Chiang Mai: Mekong Press, 2006), 2–3. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/15700615-01702005Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 07:38:55AM via free access laos’s peripheral centrality in southeast asia 229 as a forgotten, lost, half-formed and remote land’,2 one which has historically experienced ‘political, territorial and military stagnation’.3 The move to a ‘land- linked’ country can therefore be read as signifying a desire to emerge from the traditional and autarkic into the bustling modernity of Southeast Asian cap- italism. The straightforward linearity of this discursive manoeuvre obscures however the long and diverse history of Laos’s integration with the region. Rather than viewing Laos as largely apart from the main sweep of continental Southeast Asian history, it appears to make more sense to highlight the multiple forms of integration Laos has experienced, and their continuities and ruptures. Identifying the long trajectory of Laos within the region will then provide a van- tage point for understanding the current round of regional integration. The aim here is threefold. The first is to disrupt a straightforward notion of peripheries and centres in Laos’s external relations and integration into the global capitalist system. Laos has been cast as the ‘edge of the world’4 or a ‘colo- nial backwater’.5 This however downplays the importance it has had as a con- stitutive part of historical regional dynamics and neighbouring polities. This is not to flip its peripherality to an all-important determining role, and ascribe a significance that would be difficult to maintain. It is rather to highlight that Lao territories have often been an object of contest through the history of capitalist development, spatial integration and colonial expansion in Southeast Asia. A focus on Laos’s role thus sheds light on the historical geography of capitalist trajectories in the region. The second aim is to establish that efforts to orient Laos to a sphere of influence or particular spatial formation, such as colonial Indochina, have involved Lao actors pursuing their own aims and goals when engaging with external powers. This complicates any easy narrative of impo- sition of external power or dependency. The third aim relates closely to the second, to emphasise the agency of a particular category of Lao actor: the sub- altern. Unlike the majority of Lao historiography, which tends to emphasise the historical agency of elite Lao, this paper highlights the relevance of worker and peasant agency to Laos’s shifting orientations within the region. This subaltern agency is situated in relation to both Lao and foreign elite actors. Two impor- tant and interrelated themes are thus opened up: class relations and mobility. 2 Jonathan Rigg, Living with Transition in Laos: Market Integration in Southeast Asia (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 46. 3 Pholsena and Banomyong, Laos From Buffer State to Crossroads, 2. 4 Jonathan Rigg, ‘Land-locked Laos: development dilemmas at the edge of the world’, Geopoli- tics and International Boundaries 2, 1 (1997), 153–174. 5 Geoffrey C. Gunn, Rebellion in Laos: Peasant and Politics in a Colonial Backwater (Boulder; Oxford: Westview Press, 1990). European Journal of East Asian Studies 17 (2018)Downloaded 228–262 from Brill.com10/01/2021 07:38:55AM via free access 230 brown The aim here is to establish ‘an analytical optic that thinks core–periphery rela- tions and class relations as coeval and intermeshed forces in capitalist develop- ment’.6 Laos’s various forms of integration have been processed through class relations both internal to the territory and stretching beyond it, and these class relations in turn have often hinged upon the spatial mobility of the subaltern. Capture and flight of labour power has been a persistent theme. This is evi- dent not only for ethnic Lao-Tai,7 but also for ethnic minorities, Vietnamese, and latterly Chinese migrants who have crisscrossed Lao space. This historical perspective helps us better understand two key points of contemporary rele- vance: struggles over mobility of the subaltern partly determine the forms of integration and the winners and losers therein; and analysis of development in Laos must be undertaken by situating it firmly within its regional connections in order to be adequate in explanation. 2 Peripheries, Centres and the Labour in Between Analysis in terms of centres, or cores, and peripheries has been an abiding perspective on capitalist development, but is rightly viewed as problematic. While taking into account that vast economic and political inequalities exist between territories, a binary model is too blunt for the analysis of complex connections. Frank famously asserted a core–periphery model for the structure of the global economy, established in the colonial era.8 Frank thus rejects the linear model of modernisation theory, which sees only internal limitations on a country’s capacity for development, to posit instead a stunted developmen- tal pathway for the unfortunate peripheral countries, structurally determined by global trading relations with the core. He analyses the ‘development of under-development’ as enacted through a satellite model which reaches deep into peripheral countries, sucking surplus value to the metropolitan cores. The value of Frank’s contribution lies in directing attention to the global inequali- ties of power which impact societal development. Nevertheless, Brenner was to 6 Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ‘Passages from Marxism to postcolonialism: a comment on Vivek Chib- ber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital’, Critical Sociology 43, 4–5 (2017), 559–571, p. 560. 7 ‘Lao-Tai’ refers to the majority ethnic group in Laos, who are part of the broader Tai ethno- linguistic group, which also includes the Thai of Thailand. 8 Andre Gunder Frank, ‘The development of underdevelopment’, Monthly Review 18, 4 (1966), 17–31; see also Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974). European Journal of East Asian StudiesDownloaded 17from (2018) Brill.com10/01/2021 228–262 07:38:55AM via free access laos’s peripheral centrality in southeast asia 231 emphatically critique Frank’s perspective for eliding the centrality of class rela- tions in production.9 More sophisticated versions of structural core–periphery analysis however aimed to understand ‘the dialectic of internal and exter- nal factors and social relations which conditioned development’.10 Contem- porary global development is still interpreted by some authors in terms of the core–periphery structures, with endogenous technological development in core countries essentially unconnected with broader international conditions and diffusing out from the core.11 Anievas and Nisancioglu have taken issue with such internalist thinking on the grounds that international conditions have shaped developmental trajec- tories of what have been deemed to be ‘core’ countries, a perspective which provides a useful approach for the present argument. Anievas and Nisancioglu mobilise Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development to empha- sise ‘the geopolitically interconnected and sociologically co-constitutive nature of [capitalism’s] emergence’.12 Unevenness refers to the differentiated level and conditions of development both within and between countries, and the attendant spatial differences, entailing that structural competitive pressures between societies create ‘the whip of external necessity’ which influences development. ‘Social development is thus ineluctably multilinear, polycen- tric and co-constitutive by virtue of its interconnectedness.’13 Combination
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