Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Abstract

Throughout history, Lao politics have been dominated by the country’s natural and social ecology. Situated in the hinterlands of China and Vietnam, the mountainous regions, plateaux and valley passages of Laos formed a continental divide between the traditional Indianised and Sinicised sections of the South-east Asian region.¹ The divide was by no means neat, especially as populations expanded. Some of the many dozen national groups in Laos, notably those in the highlands, are closely related to the national minorities in the northern regions of Vietnam, while many of the lowland and upland groups belong to or are related to ethnic nationalities in Thailand.² The frontiers of the modern state were finally fixed in the nineteenth century by the French and British colonialists who decided to use the Lao corridor as a buffer area separating their spheres of influence; the French shifted and divided some of the local civilisations in the process.³ Between this ethnic division and diversity and the rugged terrain, a unitary national consciousness and the emergence of a modern society and economy in Laos remain visions attaching to the future rather than realities of contemporary political life. Even an official communist history depicts the country from an external perspective as an ‘enclave in the Indochinese peninsula’.⁴