Independence

Abstract

The nineteen-fifties saw greater political changes in South-East Asia than any other previous decade in its history. When they dawned, the Philippines, Burma and Indonesia had just achieved independence. The states forming French Indo-China followed in 1945, when the kingdoms of Cambodia and Laos became independent in fact, and not merely in name, and Vietnam was divided at the 17th parallel of latitude into two independent states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, and South Vietnam, initially under the one-time emperor of Annam, Bao Dai. In 1957 the Federation of Malaya achieved independence in the British Commonwealth by agreement with Britain, and in June 1959 Singapore, which had been excluded from the Federation, was granted internal self-government. Thus, whereas Thailand up to the Japanese invasion had been the only independent state, with the rest of South-East Asia under four Western imperial powers, now save for the British parts of Borneo, Portuguese Timor and Dutch Western New Guinea the imperial régimes had disappeared, and their places had been taken by independent states.