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With Disunion, historian Nu-Anh Tran has written a commendable intellectual and political history of South Vietnam that covers a period spanning the embryonic moments of anti-colonial revolutionary movements in the 1920s to the end of the first Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in 1963. The book examines the origins and evolution of non-Communist political parties on their own terms and situates them in the broader genealogy of modern Vietnamese nationalism. At the heart of this endeavor, Tran develops a conceptual framework termed “anti-communist nationalism”(2) and makes several crucial scholarly contributions.

First, Disunion joins the chorus of a “new Vietnam” scholarship to foreground the political diversity of South Vietnam, a focus previously obscured by a persistent Communist teleology manifest in the works of scholars who were absorbed in the etiology of Communist victories or untrained in the …