Vietnam War
Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam – review
In Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam, Christina Schwenkel unpacks how the city of Vinh was reconstructed with the aid of East Germany in the aftermath of its bombing by the US between 1964 and 1973. Schwenkel skilfully combines historical analysis and ethnography to explore Vinh’s urban evolution, highlighting the challenges created through socialist planning and the enduring societal impact of Cold War urbanisation, writes Xue Xuan. This post was originally published on the LSE Southeast Asia Blog.
In her book Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam, Christina Schwenkel tells of the neglected story of the Vietnamese city Vinh’s socialist reconstruction during the Cold War. This city was badly decimated by US air strikes between 1964 and 1973. To rescue Vinh from its ruins, East Germany provided substantial material and technological assistance that was designed to transform it into Vietnam’s model socialist city. However, this transformation was not without its challenges, as Vinh’s rapid ascendance was followed by a quick fall into “unplanned obsolescence”.
Schwenkel skilfully weaves historical records with ethnographic research to dissect the architectural forms and planning practices of postwar Vinh, while also capturing its residents’ lived experiences within this changing urban landscape.
Schwenkel skilfully weaves historical records with ethnographic research to dissect the architectural forms and planning practices of postwar Vinh, while also capturing its residents’ lived experiences within this changing urban landscape. This historical ethnography of Vinh’s postwar reconstruction offers an in-depth exploration of state-led socialist modernisation, its vision, implementation and subsequent impact. During the Cold War, information about these urban experiments among socialist countries was largely inaccessible and unknown to the external world. To expose these facts contributes to a better understanding of socialist modernisation. It also resonates with the “multiplicity of experienced modernities”, thereby shifting the focus away from the dominant narrative of capitalist spatial production.
Schwenkel contends that socialist planning was both a “utopian science” and a “fantastical art of projection”, often venturing into realms of impracticality.
Interestingly, the book does not dedicate a specific section to explain what socialist urbanism is. Instead, its unique characteristics are gradually revealed across several chapters through detailed documentation of historical events and objects. Schwenkel contends that socialist planning was both a “utopian science” and a “fantastical art of projection”, often venturing into realms of impracticality. She examines two visual devices in the service of modernist planning: figurative drawing and abstract blueprints, delving deep into how these visual renderings of rationalised spaces sought to represent a universal socialist future. However, when materialised in buildings and infrastructures, the rational planning was far from fulfilling its promise: it neither increased labour productivity nor moulded enlightened proletarians. The author employs the case of Quang Trung Housing Estate to concretise how practical problems like poor material conditions and conflicting spatial practices inhibited the rapid construction of mass housing and how residents’ uncivil behaviours serves to contest quotidian forms of urban governance, epitomising the dialectical relationship between civilization and backwardness. The ethnographic approach of this study offers the author an opportunity to deliver a nuanced understanding of the lived experiences associated with socialist urbanisation. This perspective underlines the agency of citizens, challenging prevailing views that often portray citizens as passive participants. Schwenkel traces manifold ways that residents in Quang Trung made the decayed buildings adapt to their changing needs and urban lifestyles. Such acts, as demonstrated in the book, were not arbitrary but planned, which serves as individualised ways to pursue the unfinished utopia.
When recounting the destruction of Vinh during the war with the US, Schwenkel pays particular attention to the contrasting visual techniques employed by the US and Vietnam in reporting and recording urban warfare.
A particularly fascinating aspect of Schwenkel’s analysis is the focus on affect. She skilfully draws together socialist planning and its afterlife in mass housing through the thread of affect, generating many thought-provoking ideas. When recounting the destruction of Vinh during the war with the US, Schwenkel pays particular attention to the contrasting visual techniques employed by the US and Vietnam in reporting and recording urban warfare. In contrast with the aerial photographs by the US military, those photos taken by Vietnamese photographers employ close-up shots in recording the architectural remains of everyday urban life. The intimate portraits of the destroyed buildings powerfully convey the sense of trauma perceived by the people. This sense of trauma further strengthened international solidarity between East Germany and Vietnam, as detailed in the chapter “Solidarity”. It also set the stage for East Germany’s involvement in Vinh’s postwar reconstruction, which is thoroughly explored in the chapter “Spirited Internationalism”. This international solidarity, as demonstrated in the book, was both political and affective, appearing on the surface as a form of brotherhood between East Germany and Vietnam, but at its core, it was characterised by an asymmetrical relationship. The middle part of the book elaborates how this international solidarity gave birth to socialist planning and architectural forms in Vinh.
The author delves into the complexities of international solidarity as affective practice, highlighting the challenge of cultural differences, misaligned expectations, and the difficult balance between altruism and self-interest. The last part of the book features voices from the people of Vinh, who inhabited and used modernist architecture. Their affective attachments to the modernist architecture of the city are reflected in the various modifications they made to their residences, which subverts the narrow understanding of seeing modernist architecture as the product of rationality. To examine this state-sponsored, nationalist project through the thread of affect is very intriguing. It also piques my curiosity: how does affect relate specifically to socialist urbanisation as opposed to capitalist urbanisation? While the author briefly addresses this aspect in certain chapters, a detailed exploration is not provided.
The book not only sheds light on a lesser-known chapter of Cold War history but also propels readers to think about the lasting impact of architectural and urban planning decisions in shaping societal narratives and experiences.
The book’s strength lies in its methodological approach. Schwenkel’s transnational perspective, underpinned by extensive use of both German archives and Vietnamese sources, allows for a nuanced understanding of this complex historical interplay. By engaging with key informants in Vinh and delving into local archives, Schwenkel brings to the fore voices that have long been marginalised in historical discourse.
Building Socialism is a compelling read for scholars and enthusiasts of socialist urban planning and architecture, Asian urbanisation, and postcolonial studies. The book offers a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the socialist modernisation in the postwar city of Vinh. It not only sheds light on a lesser-known chapter of Cold War history but also propels readers to think about the lasting impact of architectural and urban planning decisions in shaping societal narratives and experiences.
This book review is published by the LSE Southeast Asia blog and LSE Review of Books blog as part of a collaborative series focusing on timely and important social science books from and about Southeast Asia.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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The Little Prince Haunts New York
When I moved to New York, I set out to discover how my new adopted home had influenced that sense of tristesse in The Little Prince, which Saint-Exupéry wrote during his 1941–1943 stay in the city....
Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community – review
In Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, Katherine Millar analyses “support the troops” discourses in the US and UK during the early years of the global war on terror (2001-2010). Millar’s is a nuanced and powerful study of shifting civilian-military relations – and more broadly, of political community and belonging – in liberal democracies, writes Amy Gaeta.
Read an interview with Katherine Millar about the book published on LSE Review of Books in March 2023.
Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Katherine Millar. Oxford University Press. 2022.
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Katherine Millar’s Support the Troops identifies the emergence of calls to “support the troops” in the US and UK and asks what this discourse not only represents about political community and gender relations, but how this call mobilises public support for wars they may also oppose.
Millar contextualises “support the troops” within the normative construction of civilian-military relations in liberal democracies, and in doing so, challenges what she calls “the good story of liberalism” by tracing how liberalism has feigned moral superiority and structure by distancing itself from the military violence upon which it relies for maintenance (xx).
Millar contextualises ‘support the troops’ within the normative construction of civilian-military relations in liberal democracies, and in doing so, challenges what she calls ‘the good story of liberalism’
Across eight chapters, Millar assembles an impressive and varied archive of calls to support the troops, including speeches, media reports, government press releases, bumper stickers, adverts, and more. The book is guided by the feminist methodological impulse to confront uncertainty and partiality in our objects of study. In other words, it is refreshing that Millar admits this impressively researched book is guided by a series of unanswered questions that emerged in her personal experience of living in Canada during the Iraq War. These questions include, “can you oppose a war while still living in community” (x) and “why do we think we have to [support the troops]?” (xi). Also impressive is Millar’s choice to not focus on individuals’ reasons for why they do or do not support the troops. By focusing on the larger patterns in discourse, Support the Troops offers a more applicable and comparative work that enables readers to appreciate the slight, yet telling difference in US and UK civil-military relations and their formation.
Millar refuses easy equations and assumptions, namely the notion that “support the troops” is yet another site of militarism.
In this exploration, Millar refuses easy equations and assumptions, namely the notion that “support the troops” is yet another site of militarism. Rather than providing an answer, Millar instead demonstrates that militarism is simply not a productive analytical framing. Using the analytic of “discursive martiality,” she treats the military as a “discourse of gendered obligation and socially generative violence” and aims to follow how it moves and what it forecloses (35).
The idea that serving and thereby being willing to go to war and possibly die or become disabled for one’s country, is a key quality of what it meant to be a ‘good citizen,’ a deeply masculinised and racialised ideal.
Central to her investigation of support the troops discourse is the liberal military contract, a binding element of modern-day liberal democracies. Namely, the contract is the idea that serving and thereby being willing to go to war and possibly die or become disabled for one’s country, is a key quality of what it meant to be a “good citizen,” a deeply masculinised and racialised ideal. In earlier 20th-century wars, namely the World Wars, attacks on the domestic front, such as the aerial bombing of civilian areas in the UK, cultivated a shared sense of vulnerability among publics with the military and therefore obligation to sacrifice something in service of the war, Millar argues. As such, by World War Two, the expectation that everyone should do one’s part for the war – no matter the war – became domesticated, “experientially, affectively, and ideologically within the US and UK” (52). Structurally then, this further sedimented the feminisation of the domestic front – providing charity and care labour and making sacrifices at home – and the masculinisation of the war front – being willing to die to protect their nation and the feminised home front.
Particularly illuminating about Millar’s project is her tracing of how different wars produced different discursive formations of military personnel and therefore civilian-military relations. A memorable example is the refrain of “our boys” during the Vietnam War which framed soldiers as innocent, emphasising their youth and pre-empting how the experience of war would rush them into “manhood” (55). The innocent angle also firmly contrasts the horrors of the Vietnam War enacted by US soldiers.
The pluralised and more passive formation of the “troops” still requires the support of the public, posing important questions about what the troops need support for, and what support the military and government are failing to provide them that the public must supplement.
Once again, today, civilian-military relations are in flux for civilians living in liberal democracies. War is something that happens “over there,” and no longer do eager citizens enlist in hoards and go to war overseas, nor are they drafted, although military recruitment campaigns are still going strong. In tandem, many military service jobs appear as rather mundane, and this may impact the social importance and status of soldiers and soldiering to classed, racialised, and gendered ideas of civilised and ultimately “good” citizenship. Millar argues that these changes contribute to a shift in the gendered structure of the liberal military contract’s relationship to normalising violence. Whereas in past wars, where killing and dying for the state were key to masculinised normative citizenship, now “violence is presented as incidental to war, something that ‘happens’ to the vulnerable, structurally feminized troops” (102). The pluralised and more passive formation of the “troops” still requires the support of the public, posing important questions about what the troops need support for, and what support the military and government are failing to provide them that the public must supplement.
Millar’s text is extremely pertinent in a political era of cyberwar, drone warfare, and other forms of warfare that do not require the same degree of physical and geographical mobilising of troops.
Millar’s text is extremely pertinent in a political era of cyberwar, drone warfare, and other forms of warfare that do not require the same degree of physical and geographical mobilising of troops. As an academic working across questions of disability, gender, and contemporary US militarisation, I found Millar’s project to offer generative questions about how political community emerges differently when the ready-to-die cisgender-heterosexual-male idea of a solider and the violence inflicted by war is moved out of the view of the domestic front, especially when that figure is not even physically present in geographically defined spaces of conflict and war.
The book did leave me wanting a more robust analysis of the relationship between “good citizenship,” Whiteness, and masculinity, all of which are deeply shaped by the violence that underpins the “good” story of liberalism and civilian-military relations – although Millar certainly does not ignore or deny those connections. Yet, this may also be read as an opportunity for scholars to examine how changes in military service expectations and roles affect the ways that racial structures shift in accordance.
Millar’s investigation of the discursive patterns around “support the troops” begs questions about what happens when a minority or a wider segment of the public refuses to give such support.
Support the Troops is a powerful text that invites readers to think carefully about the present-day formation of political community and belonging in liberal democracies. Millar’s investigation of the discursive patterns around “support the troops” begs questions about what happens when a minority or a wider segment of the public refuses to give such support. As large waves of state-critical activism and civil protests continue to sweep across the US and UK, among other parts of the world, Support the Troops is a crucial touchpoint for understanding the “good story of liberalism” and the types of social contracts it relies upon for cohesion between the state, the military, and citizens.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
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