From Authoritarian to Democratic Constitutionalism in Vietnam
Principal Investigator: Tuong Vu, University of Oregon
Modern Vietnam has experienced significant constitutional development. From 1945 to 1980, Vietnam had five different constitutions, or more accurately, one draft and four actual constitutions.
The first one was drafted in 1946 by a multi-party assembly but was never ratified; it remains a draft until today. After 1954, Vietnam was divided into two sovereign countries, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the North under a communist government and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the South under an anticommunist government. In the North, a new constitution was adopted in 1960, whereas in the South one was promulgated in 1956 under the government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Both were totally different from the 1946 draft.
After Diem was overthrown in a coup d’etat in 1963, his successors in the South experimented with several temporary charters until a new constitution was promulgated in 1967. This 1967 Constitution reused some elements of the 1956 Constitution but was radically modified. In the North, the 1960 constitution was not changed until the civil war between North and South ended with a communist victory in 1975. A new constitution was adopted in 1980 for a reunified Vietnam that was a modified version of the 1960 Constitution. This constitution has been amended many times, and the most recent time was 2013.
Constitutions perform many functions in modern states. As a recent study of liberal constitutions defines, “a constitution establishes a system of government, defines the powers and functions of its institutions, provides substantive limits on its operation, and regulates relations between institutions and the people.” In authoritarian regimes, however, constitutions perform more sinister roles. As argued by Gabriel Negetto, constitutions in authoritarian regimes are adopted “to demand obedience in the name of the law, to win recognition from the international community, and to regulate access to power within the authoritarian elite.”
Among the Vietnamese constitutions in the period under investigation, the 1946 and 1967 constitutions are widely accepted as relatively democratic and liberal, whereas the 1956 constitution was mixed between democratic and authoritarian elements, and the 1960 and 1980 constitutions were decisively authoritarian. Post-1980 constitutions have gradually adopted once-taboo concepts such as human rights, but remain no less authoritarian than the 1980 constitution. When the Communist Party called for inputs from the Vietnamese people about a draft of an amended constitution in 2013, a movement by many Vietnamese intellectuals and former officials proposed a democratic constitution, but they were simply ignored by the Party.
To the extent that constitutions reflect not only the elites’ values and visions but also the degree of power they enjoy in society and the unity among them, constitutions are valuable for gaining a perspective into the politics of rule in postcolonial Vietnam. Constitutional debates conveyed internal tensions within the ruling elites and reflected to some extent the distribution of power among them. In addition, constitutional borrowing revealed the foreign sources of the elites’ ideas and aspirations, whether being French, American, or Soviet. Like their counterparts in most other countries since the French and American revolutions, Vietnamese constitutional drafters did not start from scratch but were consciously consulting and borrowing from constitutions of other countries.
Most interestingly, the 1946 (draft) Constitution and the 1967 Constitution were produced under conditions of intense struggles between rival elite factions and (for the 1967 constitution) between the elites and society. The two periods that gave rise to these two liberal constitutions, namely 1945-1946 and 1963-1967, are generally discussed by historians as periods of extreme violence and chaos, but the constitutions adopted in 1946 and 1967 told a different story. In comparison with the other three constitutions that were far less liberal, they pointed to the missed opportunities for a democratic and liberal Vietnam.
This research project aims to contribute to the study of modern Vietnamese constitutional development with the hope for a democratic constitutional order in the future that meets the needs of the country in the modern world.
References:
- Douglas Greenberg et al., eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy: Transitions in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
- Denis Galligan and Mila Versteeg, “Theoretical Perspectives on the Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions,” in Galligan and Versteeg, eds. Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- Tom Ginsburg, and Alberto Simpser, eds. Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- David G. Marr, Vietnam: State, War, and Revolution (1945-1946) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
- Lâm Vĩnh-Thế, The History of South Vietnam: The Quest for Legitimacy and Stability, 1963-1967 (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021).
- J. A. C. Grant, “The Viet Nam Constitution of 1956.” American Political Science Review, 52: 2, 437-462.
- Nu-Anh Tran, Disunion: Anticommunist Nationalism and the Making of the Republic of Vietnam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2022).
- Milton Sacks, “Restructuring Government in South Vietnam,” Asian Survey 7: 8 (August 1967), 515-526.
- Cynthia Kay Fredrick, “The South Vietnamese Constitution of April 1, 1967: The Institutionalization of Politics in the Second Republic,” PhD dissertation, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1969.
- Thiem Hai Bui, “Constitutionalizing Single Party Leadership in Vietnam: Dilemmas of Reform.” Asian Journal of Comparative Law 11: 2 (2016): 219-34.
- Son Bui and Pip Nicholson. “Activism and Popular Constitutionalism in Contemporary Vietnam,” Law & Social Inquiry 42: 3 (2017): 677-710.
