is Vietnam a 'Land Without a King

8/22/2019 'is Vietnam a 'Land Without a King'

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Prof Adam Fforde

Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, VictoriaUniversity; Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

[email protected]

Melbourne 2013

'Is Vietnam a 'land without a King'? Understanding politicsand governance issues in Vietnam since de-Stalinisation

and the emergence of a market economy'
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Introduction self-reflection

Fforde/Melbourne 20132

This presentation offers thoughts about the origins of the dire politicalsituation in Vietnam. It draws on recent presentations in Stockholm,Copenhagen and Leiden in June, and a recent trip to Vietnam. It alsodraws on observation, often participatory, over a number of years.

I have not mainly made my career as a professional academic, but asomewhat feral scholar who has made his living as a consultant. Thishas given me greater freedom that many others to chose what I publish.

I am a widely-cited academic writer on Vietnam (thanks in the main toFrom Plan to Market(1996) which came out of the Sida-financed reportVietnam an economy in transition (both co-authored with Stefan deVylder). To this are added books on traditional cooperatives, of the northbefore 1975 (both in the 1980s), and State Owned Enterprises (2007)

In ca. 2002-3 I was worried about ungovernability in Vietnam, andpublished two articles inAsian Surveyabout this.

From the mid noughties, consultancy work amongst other thingspushed led me to the conclusion that Vietnam had become a Landwithout a King, facing a major crisis of the political system. So most ofmy recent and forthcoming academic articles on Vietnam are aboutpolitics.


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The middle income trap


In caricature, what we hear is that, for a growing economy, fromper capita GDP levels of around $1000 a year (roughly, whereVietnam is now), a range of things change. Basically, furthergrowth requires a shift from perspiration to inspiration fromuse of unskilled labour to more sophisticated methods. For thelay person, what starts to emerge is a more normal economy,from a previous style of growth that relied upon cheap labourcoming off the farm

This, people argue, requires modernisation of state actions, toprovide the context for this qualitative change in growth: publichealth, public education, urban infrastructure etc this comesdown to a decent environment for growth. And this in turn is saidto require good policy (for economists good public goods

production).And this is not happening. The issue remains -make policy matter this should have been sorted out inthe 1990s. It was not. This is quite clear from consultancies.

So the analytical focus should be upon basic issues of politics


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Overview


This presentation has 5 parts 1. A discussion of these recent consultancies and what I took

them to implytreat this as data 2. A discussion of the notion of domestic sovereignty in the

sense I draw from Hinsleys book of that name treat this asframework

3. A discussion of 3 patterns of growth: socialistconstruction, commercialisation as transition from planmarket and capitalist growth treat this as historical context

4. A comparative discussion of what the CPSU did interminating Soviet-style rule under Gorbachev with the VCPtreat this as a comparative insight

5. Concluding remarks about local responses to the situation,focussing upon A. Local Kings Da Nang and B. Localmandarins Quang tri and Ha Giang treat this as a way oflooking at paths forward


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Some ideas


The political crisis is understood by many Vietnamese asnegative and chaotic, in the sense that there is an absenceof social order and signs of disorder - people do not getalong with each other (khng ai chu ai)

A fine phrase used, which is pure demotic Vietnameserather than high Sino-Vietnamese, is c m mt la tench (a type of fish) of the same clutch, more usuallyused to refer to families facing internal tensions. AnEnglish equivalent might be same-same no difference.Nobody has their place.

The situation is thus as recognizable to Vietnamese as a

typhoon or epidemic unusual, but not alien. So what theywill do may about it may not be entirely new. I come backto this in Part 5.

But there is something familiar to the political situation


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Some ideas


A Land without a King? (Dat khong co Vua) Where the phrase came from Cambodia and

Vietnam compared What it might meanchuquyen (doinoi vs. doi

ngoai) usually translated as sovereignty Note views that Vietnamese political culture is

possibly as much monarchical as mandarinal (seeWoodside, Vietnamand the Chinese Model), or,more interestingly, both

Where does authority come from? How doesauthority link to power?


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1. So is There a King? Participatory

Observation experiences in the past few years


I have long argued that the VCP has not at crucialperiods been a driver of change, but tended to swimwith the tide; this meant that whilst there was limitedpolicy capacity (how to devise it, how to implement it)this policy was, when deemed successful, often

reactive In recent years I argue the point that policy capacity

has largely vanisheddomestic sovereignty haslargely eroded.

4 examples -

1. Policy Capacity and the Ministry of Finance; 2. TheLaw on Cadres and Civil Servants; 3. Education,socialisation, and Ho Chi Minh City; 4. Local governmentand Chia se


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So is there a King? Participatory Observationexperiences in the past few years


Pol icy analys is capaci ty and the Ministry o f

Finance

Mid noughties

Budget for policy analysis only there where there

was a policy to be drafted therefore no pre-emptive research

Cains remark this is all about power and nothaving it


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The Law on Cadres and Civi l Servants Passed by the National AssemblyAddressed a core issue of state power the imagined

boundary between agency and implementation(between political staff and public servants in Westernstates). Not just Western - Sun Yat-Sen was very clear about the

importance of implementation capacity (nang) in his ThreePrinciples of the People

On the ground, interviews showed that there was noclarity and so this was seen as a systemic big issue

Da Nang seen as anomalous a little monarchy (Dai diaquan quyen), where the population gave authority to thelocal King who then used it to exert authority over theapparat one could think one sawproblematisation.Was this a model? No, as the man is strange (la).


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Educat ion , social isat ion , and Ho Chi Minh City Population deeply suspicious of socialisation

High levels of corruption

All stakeholders keen on empowering school councils

Rejected by the political leadership reasons? Loss of corrupt

$splus civil society? Or cant do it? Chia se

Worked below the grass roots, at village level.

Empowerment seen as a positive sum power game as acadre, you give power but gain authority and so the system

works better in simple development terms - $ for $ (trao quyennhan uy). Obviously a better politics tooa model?

Looking for a national policy, but I dont think this hashappened, for obvious reasons but see my Part 5


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Conclusions?


If reasonable people are unhappy with a situation, yetnothing can yet be done about it, and the issues arebig, and if they think they are a nation, then there is

the question of national agency.

An answer (there are others) to the situations wefound is that there is no chu quyen, and thus one can

indeed say (and be understood by Vietnamese) thatthis is a Land without a King (Dat khong co Vua). This

may be problematised and so we need someanalytical framework that discusses how sovereigntycan form logically, from a situation where it does notexist. Thus, Hinsley. =>


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2. Hinsley and the issue ofsovereignty


Hinsley an English historian, originally in security analysis, saidto have negotiated secret-sharing with the US after WWII still inhis 20s. No slouch.

Men do not wield or submit to sovereignty. They wield or submitto authority or power. [Hinsley 1986:1]

Ifwe wish to explain why men have thought of power in terms of

sovereignty we have but to explain why they have assumed thatthere was a final and absolute authority in their society andwhy they have not always done so [1]

Compare Gainsbough 2010the Vietnamese state is littlemore than a disparate group of actors with a weak notion of thepublic good {but} when this collectivity of institutions and

actors feels its core interests threatened, it is able to mobilizefairly robustly in order to clamp down on people or activitiesdeemed to threaten the whole show [182]

But is it? Policy is usually better than police.


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Hinsley and the issue of sovereignty


This may help explain why in Vietnam we see security clampdown rather than policy, and suggests that no more ispossible. The King may rule but he cannot govern, - yetcompetitive and stable open market economies demandgovernment (of subjects).

Distinguishing rule and govern in Vietnamese got far clearer in

the noughties. Not helped by donors accepting translation ofgovernance as state management . Thong trivs. dieu hanh?

Hinsley is telling us is that political tensions and emergingdiscussions of sovereignty are indicators -

The concept has been formulated when conditions have beenemphasizing the interdependence between the political society

and the more precise phenomenon of its government. . It hasbeen the source of greatest preoccupation and contention whenconditions have been producing rapid changes in the scope ofgovernment or in the nature of society or in both. [2]


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3. A review of 3 patterns of growth


# 1 Socialist construction up to the late 1970s Recall Mary McCauley USSR post-Stalin had

designed-in conservatism, with limited discretionarypower at peak structural representation (co cau)

A modelquote Mlynar answers for everything Soviet law schools turn out legal specialists,

people who know what regulations the authorities havelaid down for given cases In effect, Soviet law schoolsproduced qualified bureaucrats.

In the five years it took me to become a legalspecialist,, that is, a qualified, Soviet-style bureaucrat,{the experience provided me} with a concrete idea ofhow Soviet bureaucracy administers society.


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Socialist construction


Everything was relatively well thought-out and, above all,regulated in great detail. Many of the questions I brought with meto Moscow about how, practically speaking, this or that problemin everyday life would be dealt with under socialism, how thework process, and other processes, would be regulated (thingsthat neither Lenin nor Stalin ever write concretely about) seemed to receive answers here [18-19]

This is a model, with no place in it for policy as a driver ofchange by acting, based upon sovereignty, upon an autonomousnon-state. Change is driven by and within the model itself.

No ideological sense of policy and so of an autonomouseconomy - Chinhsach translates as policy, but does no domore than concretise socialist construction, for the Party line

chu truong articulates what the model is under local conditions. No authority above all as the Party is to only a certain extent

self-limiting, mainly as it is as Post-Stalinist (structuralrepresentation of insider interests) to avoid Stalins and Maos


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3 patterns of growth


# 2 Transition (from when? Late 1970s to early 1990s?)and the partial emergence of policy swimming with thetide The 1980s saw the economy commercialise. Data emerged to

gauge this.

The economy had naturally far more relative autonomy andthis was increasingly grasped in intellectual terms (Phan vanTiem as an economist, actually a macroeconomist).

Thus policy becomes more apparent and observable. SOEs,trade, cooperatives but two crucial points:

First, it is reactive. The VIth Congress of 1986 is adaptive tochange, pushed by the state business interest

Second, there is still personal authority in the system (butcompare Laos where change could be pushed through earlierand with more power than in Vietnam)


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Transition? - Conclusions


The transition of the 1980s had a strongly economicflavour, but policy did not matter much

As for political change, the de-Stalinisation of the verylate 1980s was driven by Party Gen-Secretary

Nguyen van Linh and was not Gorbachevian thequestion of the extent of political rethinking within theVCP at this time remains crucial but marginal (so far)and we know too little about it. Probably because

most people were far more conservative and not(yet?) frightened by the idea that the formal politicalinstitutions of the SRV might not work with a marketeconomy And then what?


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3 patterns of growth


# 3 Capitalism and market economy since the early1990s From the early 1990s Vietnam grew fast with what was clearly

an emerging capitalism.

SOEs retained political influence

Donor agencies asked many questions about policy. Manypolicies were written, lauded as reform, but then became deadletters: support to SMEs, vocational training, public education,anti-corruption, public health, urban planning

Macroeconomic stability secured (fear of hyperinflation afterthe chaos of the late 1980s?) up until 2007. Instability resulted

from inability to use state power to sterilise capital inflows asSOEs opposed policy. Macroeconomic rents then furtherincreased the value of politicians to business interests, used tocurb use of state power in coherent policy terms.


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Capitalism and market economy


Domestic sovereignty then flows away. The VCPsinstitutional powers cannot control senior politiciansthe Politburo is revealed not to have the authority todiscipline senior politicians. The King is seen to beneutered.

There is thus a historical break around the midnoughties as the political compromises of the early1990s, reliant upon temporary conditions (mainlysurely the political authority of men like Vo van Kietand Do Muoi?) that no longer hold

This then starts be suggestive about the emergingnature of Vietnamese Capitalism and its politics. Butthat is another research project (VC Blue DragonFrom Market to Capitalism etc)


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3 patterns of growth conclusions?


Conclusions? Policy is clearly needed, and policy that matters; the

middle income trap discourse, for Vietnam, rapidlyleads to realisation that issues such as the reform ofpublic health, urban planning, education etc are not

being solved because policy does not matter withoutauthority over the apparat, it does not implement.

Hinsley is then useful the political crisis can beproblematised as a crisis of sovereignty a boot strapproblem How to create suitable powers when they do

not already exist? More seriously, this points to a political crisis:

Use the security forces if you cannot do policy

But dont use the security forces against the corrupt


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4. A comparative discussion of what the CPSU did interminating Soviet-style rule under Gorbachev with theVCP


Much of this argument hinges upon how power andchange in Soviet-style situations actually happen. Thisprompts useful thinking about Vietnam.

Mary McCauley argued long ago that Soviet regimes areinherently highly conservative they do not convey uponthose who occupy peak positions much discretionary

power (Is this the right term?). They are set up toimplement a model, and, within limits, that is what they do.No more.

This raises the question do such regimes conferauthority for fundamental change? Technically, a political

community that acts politically in terms of its belief in itsown sovereignty can decide to do anything it wants, and itconfers the authority to try to do so. Whether it can or not,after the decision, is another matter.


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A comparative discussion of what the CPSU did interminating Soviet-style rule under Gorbachev with theVCP


Consider Gorbachev, 2002, writing about the situationfrom 1985: the slogan adopted at the beginning by the entire

party (both as a social organism and as a mechanism ofpower), namely, that the initiating and driving force ofperestroika was and must be the Communists and theirpower, was in practice carried out inconsistently,although millions of Communists, despite themechanism of power, were in favour of the new policy.They often did not know how to carry it out and besideswithout the party structure, the apparatus and thenomenklatura, they were, strictly speaking, powerless.The party itself as a mechanism of power, and a largepart of the nomenklatura, became a barrier, anobstruction on the road of reform. [104 stress added]


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I take this to mean that the Gorbachev group were ina King Lear position to shift to a democratic politicswith an open economy they would have to give uptheir powers (but which?), and to do that, what powerwould they use, and then what?

The basic view is that Soviet power was inconsistentwith market economy and an open society.

The Gorbachev groups analysis would have led tothem predicting that the VCPs attempt to use Soviet

institutions to rule over a globalising and increasinglyopen society with a market economy would lead to acrisis of political authority, and they would have beencorrect.


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This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the CPSU was asuccess, in that it managed to solve a serious political problemhow to create the preconditions for a political system suited to amarket economy in a relatively open society - and the VCP afailure

A Russian intervention at an early 1990s conference, in

Vietnamese, asked ra sao? (then what?) if the Vietnamese didnot accept the political stance the Gorbachev group had taken.Nobody paid much attention, so far as I can see

What is interesting is how neatly, if we take Hinsleys stance,things have played outa Land without a King an extinctionor severe erosion of domestic sovereignty, leading to discussionwithin the Vietnamese political community of relations betweenrulers and ruled between state and people around the issueof national agency-


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Which of course provokes thought, for Vietnamese,about the Chinese and how to deal with theirpressure, for which there are many narratives

So, we wait and watch; personally, I watch inparticular ideas and language. Even if one shouldwatch what they do, not listen to what they say

It was Disraeli, the 19th Century British Prime Minister,who wrote (in a novel):

Few ideas are correct ones, and which they are

none can tell, but with words we govern men [33]

Ca me mot lua


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5. local responses to the situation, focussing upon A.Local Kings Da Nang and B. Local mandarins Quang tri and Ha Giang


A. Local Kings Da nang What does he do?

1. Hop voi dan/ hinh thanh van de

2. Lap nhom chuyen trach

3. Chiu trach nhiem ca nhan

How can we construe this? A triangle monarchical

Sun Yat-Sen Three principles of the people

Dan chu

Dan quyen

Dan sinh All require a nang a capacity, separate from political will

and sources of authority

Focusses upon interest in chu quyen


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Local mandarins?


Work at the village level, beyond the system, in Quang tri andHa giang Basically, the local Party decides, and learns, to work in ways that

earn it confidence and prestige that is, authorityfrom the localpopulation. This allows it to create a local political order, in asomewhat mandarinal sense yen dan, no hot points (diemnong) comparable to those that arose during and after the 1997

events in Thai Binh in north Vietnam. It does this by deferring to popular opinion as expressed in

village-level meetings, and it does this by telling Partyorganisations at village level to do so. This then gets taught inprovincial party schools.

The process does not seem to rely heavily upon particular

personalities (here it differs from Da Nang). It seems to be boundup with creation of a local rationality, which is internalised. Herethis rationality is expressed initially in aid project documents butthen this is read across into teaching materials and guidancedecrees of the local Party/state.


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Local mandarins?


It is rational in that it self-justifies by reference togreater efficiency of resource delivery, with littleovert political discussion. But the reference to yendan or the absence of hot spots can easily be

linked to mandarinal traditions.


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Two models?


These two approaches can both be analysed in termsof the domestic sovereignty problem and its solution,but in very different ways.

The mandarinal solutions implication for national levelpolitics is the need for a Party resolution on local level

planning and democracy. This combines with a needfor some political force to multiply it out into otherareas, and this seems lacking

The local King solution does not seem so limited.Nationally, it requires some Yeltsin equivalent. Thisalso seems lacking.

But, put the two together, and one can imagine suchprovinces supporting a Yelstin


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Reflections?


Western analysts tend to think that the VCP was and remained aneffective articulator of national agency, driving change through policy.This naturally encouraged donors to focus upon policy advice as the keyto doing development, ratherthan a political engagement, whateverthat might have been

Most political analyses of Vietnam buy the idea of the VCP as anational agent, driving change (thus they focus upon 1986 and the VIth

Congress, rather than on processes going back to the early 60s Look at KerkvlietHow peasants changed policy

Note the INGO push to advocacy in Vietnam during the late 1990srather than (compare with Cambodia) spending much on building upVietnamese NGOs. Formal structures were defined as the suitabledonor partners [McCall 1998]

Thus the seminal nature of Gainsboroughs 2007 article it is nothingto do with policy

So, if Vietnam started to appear as a Land without a King? A big ask a very big change in basic beliefs


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Wider implications?


Results? Dis-interest in the sovereignty issue

Lack of interest in spontaneously formed informalfarmers groups and similar indications of emergentcivil societyfocus instead upon policy and how toform CS

Schizophrenic thinking: one Ambassadorsaid goodthings are happening here, an aid Counsellorfocussed upon policy-change in their dialogue with

the Vietnamese, and thought this made sense, butthen reflecting, on what their spouse told themabout life outside, saw that policy was usually adead letter, contradicting the main line.


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Summary and conclusions


There has a been a major increase in political tensions inVietnam since the early noughties.

I argue that this is to do with political failure to address thepolitical requirements of a capitalist and open society, which hasresulted in a crisis of authority in the sense that there is nodomestic sovereignty. Policy therefore does not matter and

rule uses other mechanisms One can see very little significant rethinking in Vietnam that

address the basic issue of what sorts of politics suit the country;this would seem necessary we can see important pointers invarious areas

This points for me to interesting aspects of just how Vietnamese

view political activity, their state, and so on. I think oneconclusion is that they have been far less creative and proactivethan they were often given credit for.


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References not to my own work


Berman, H.J., 1983, Law and revolution: the formation of the Western legal tradition,Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press

Berman, H.J., 2000, The Western legal tradition in a Millennial perspective: past and future,Louisiana Law Review, 60:3 739-763

Cowen, Michael and Robert Shenton, 1996, Doctrines of Development, London: Routledge.

Gainsborough, M., 2010, Vietnam: Rethinking the State, London: Zed Books

Gainsborough, M., 2007, From patronage to outcomes: Vietnams Communist Partycongresses reconsidered, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2(1): 3-26

Gorbachev, Mikhail and Zdenek Mlynar, 2002, Conversations with Gorbachev Onperestroika, the Prague Spring and the crossroads of socialism, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press

Hinsley, FJ, 1986 second edition, Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

McCall, Elizabeth, 1998, Partnership with Government: A realistic strategy for povertyfocused NGOs, mimeo, July.

Mlynar, Zdenek, 1980, Night frost in Prague the end of humane socialism, trans. PaulWilson, London: C. Hurst & Co

Woodside, Alexander, 1971, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study ofNguyen and Ching Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, CambridgeMass.: Harvard University Press


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Recent and forthcoming work by me


Post Cold War Vietnam: stay low, learn, adapt and try to have fun butwhat about the Party?, forthcoming, early 2014, Contemporary Politics

Understanding development economics: its challenge to DevelopmentStudies. Forthcoming, Routledge 2013

Vietnams Political Crisis Blocks Needed Reforms, 02 Jul 2013, WorldPolitics Review (and translated in to Vietnamese up on their site theBBC Vietnamese service)

The politics of civil society organization in Cambodia and Vietnam,European Journal of East Asian Studies, 12.1, 2013, June

Vietnam in 2013 the end of the party,Asian Survey, Vol. 53,Number 1, 2013 pp. 101108

Vietnam in 2011: questions of domestic sovereignty,Asian Survey, Vol52 # 1 2012 pp. 176-185

Contemporary Vietnam: political opportunities, conservative formalpolitics and patterns of radical change,Asian Politics and Policy,2011Vol 3 No 2, 165-184

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is Vietnam a 'Land Without a King