THE creation of modern nation-states in Europe was a protracted and bloody business. In the Middle Ages, the continent was divided into roughly a thousand political entities—duchies, free cities, kingdoms, republics, and the like. By 1789, there remained only 350 and by 1900 a mere 25.1 Countless conflicts such as the War of the Roses, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Wars of German Unification had to be fought before the map of Europe could assume its modern shape. The whole process took hundreds of years. In South Vietnam, the nation-building experience began in earnest in mid-1954, and its
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