'Is Vietnam A 'Land Without A King'

'Is Vietnam a 'land without a King'?
Understanding politics and governance issues in Vietnam since de-Stalinisation and the emergence of a market economy'
Prof Adam Fforde Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University; Asia Institute, University of Melbourne adam@aduki.com.au Melbourne 2013
Introduction self-reflection
This presentation offers thoughts about the origins of the dire political
situation in Vietnam. It draws on recent presentations in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Leiden in June, and a recent trip to Vietnam. It also draws on observation, often participatory, over a number of years. I have not mainly made my career as a professional academic, but a somewhat feral scholar who has made his living as a consultant. This has 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 to From Plan to Market (1996) which came out of the Sida-financed report Vietnam an economy in transition (both co-authored with Stefan de Vylder). To this are added books on traditional cooperatives, of the north before 1975 (both in the 1980s), and State Owned Enterprises (2007) In ca. 2002-3 I was worried about ungovernability in Vietnam, and published two articles in Asian Survey about this. From the mid noughties, consultancy work amongst other things pushed led me to the conclusion that Vietnam had become a Land without a King, facing a major crisis of the political system. So most of my recent and forthcoming academic articles on Vietnam are about politics.
Fforde/Melbourne 2013
The middle income trap

In caricature, what we hear is that, for a growing economy, from
per capita GDP levels of around $1000 a year (roughly, where Vietnam is now), a range of things change. Basically, further growth requires a shift from perspiration to inspiration from use of unskilled labour to more sophisticated methods. For the lay person, what starts to emerge is a more normal economy, from a previous style of growth that relied upon cheap labour coming off the farm This, people argue, requires modernisation of state actions, to provide the context for this qualitative change in growth: public health, public education, urban infrastructure etc this comes down to a decent environment for growth. And this in turn is said to 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 in the 1990s. It was not. This is quite clear from consultancies. So the analytical focus should be upon basic issues of politics
3 Fforde/Melbourne 2013
Overview
This presentation has 5 parts
1. A discussion of these recent consultancies and what I took
them to imply treat 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 as framework 3. A discussion of 3 patterns of growth: socialist construction, commercialisation as transition from plan market and capitalist growth treat this as historical context 4. A comparative discussion of what the CPSU did in terminating Soviet-style rule under Gorbachev with the VCP treat this as a comparative insight 5. Concluding remarks about local responses to the situation, focussing upon A. Local Kings Da Nang and B. Local mandarins Quang tri and Ha Giang treat this as a way of looking at paths forward
Some ideas
The political crisis is understood by many Vietnamese as
negative and chaotic, in the sense that there is an absence of social order and signs of disorder - people do not get along with each other (khng ai chu ai) A fine phrase used, which is pure demotic Vietnamese rather than high Sino-Vietnamese, is c m mt la tench (a type of fish) of the same clutch, more usually used to refer to families facing internal tensions. An English 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 they will do may about it may not be entirely new. I come back to this in Part 5. But there is something familiar to the political situation
Some ideas
A Land without a King? (Dat khong co Vua)
Where the phrase came from Cambodia and
Vietnam compared What it might mean chu quyen (doi noi vs. doi ngoai) usually translated as sovereignty
Note views that Vietnamese political culture is
possibly as much monarchical as mandarinal (see Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model), or, more interestingly, both Where does authority come from? How does authority link to power?
1. So is There a King? Participatory Observation experiences in the past few years

I have long argued that the VCP has not at crucial
periods been a driver of change, but tended to swim with the tide; this meant that whilst there was limited policy 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 vanished domestic sovereignty has largely eroded. 4 examples 1. Policy Capacity and the Ministry of Finance; 2. The
Law on Cadres and Civil Servants; 3. Education, socialisation, and Ho Chi Minh City; 4. Local government and Chia se
So is there a King? Participatory Observation experiences in the past few years

Policy analysis capacity and the Ministry of
Finance
Mid noughties Budget for policy analysis only there where there
was a policy to be drafted therefore no preemptive research Cains remark this is all about power and not having it

The Law on Cadres and Civil Servants
Passed by the National Assembly Addressed a core issue of state power the imagined
boundary between agency and implementation (between political staff and public servants in Western states).
Not just Western - Sun Yat-Sen was very clear about the
importance of implementation capacity (nang) in his Three Principles of the People

On the ground, interviews showed that there was no
clarity and so this was seen as a systemic big issue Da Nang seen as anomalous a little monarchy (Dai dia quan quyen), where the population gave authority to the local King who then used it to exert authority over the apparat one could think one saw problematisation. Was this a model? No, as the man is strange (la).

Education, socialisation, 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
$s plus 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 a
cadre, you give power but gain authority and so the system works better in simple development terms - $ for $ (trao quyen nhan uy). Obviously a better politics too a model? Looking for a national policy, but I dont think this has happened, for obvious reasons but see my Part 5
Conclusions?
If reasonable people are unhappy with a situation, yet
nothing can yet be done about it, and the issues are big, and if they think they are a nation, then there is the question of national agency. An answer (there are others) to the situations we found is that there is no chu quyen, and thus one can indeed say (and be understood by Vietnamese) that this is a Land without a King (Dat khong co Vua). This may be problematised and so we need some analytical framework that discusses how sovereignty can form logically, from a situation where it does not exist. Thus, Hinsley. =>
2. Hinsley and the issue of sovereignty

Hinsley an English historian, originally in security analysis, said
to have negotiated secret-sharing with the US after WWII still in his 20s. No slouch. Men do not wield or submit to sovereignty. They wield or submit to authority or power. [Hinsley 1986:1] If we wish to explain why men have thought of power in terms of sovereignty we have but to explain why they have assumed that there was a final and absolute authority in their society and why they have not always done so [1] Compare Gainsbough 2010 the Vietnamese state is little more than a disparate group of actors with a weak notion of the public good {but} when this collectivity of institutions and actors feels its core interests threatened, it is able to mobilize fairly robustly in order to clamp down on people or activities deemed to threaten the whole show [182] But is it? Policy is usually better than police.
12
Hinsley and the issue of sovereignty

This may help explain why in Vietnam we see security clamp
down rather than policy, and suggests that no more is possible. The King may rule but he cannot govern, - yet competitive and stable open market economies demand government (of subjects). Distinguishing rule and govern in Vietnamese got far clearer in the noughties. Not helped by donors accepting translation of governance as state management . Thong tri vs. dieu hanh? Hinsley is telling us is that political tensions and emerging discussions of sovereignty are indicators The concept has been formulated when conditions have been emphasizing the interdependence between the political society and the more precise phenomenon of its government. . It has been the source of greatest preoccupation and contention when conditions have been producing rapid changes in the scope of government or in the nature of society or in both. [2]
13
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 discretionary power at peak structural representation (co cau) A model quote Mlynar answers for everything
Soviet law schools turn out legal specialists,
people who know what regulations the authorities have laid down for given cases In effect, Soviet law schools produced qualified bureaucrats. In the five years it took me to become a legal specialist,, that is, a qualified, Soviet-style bureaucrat, {the experience provided me} with a concrete idea of how Soviet bureaucracy administers society.
Socialist construction
Everything was relatively well thought-out and, above all,
regulated in great detail. Many of the questions I brought with me to Moscow about how, practically speaking, this or that problem in everyday life would be dealt with under socialism, how the work process, and other processes, would be regulated (things that 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 of
change by acting, based upon sovereignty, upon an autonomous non-state. Change is driven by and within the model itself. No ideological sense of policy and so of an autonomous economy - Chinh sach translates as policy, but does no do more 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 (structural representation of insider interests) to avoid Stalins and Maos
3 patterns of growth
# 2 Transition (from when? Late 1970s to early 1990s?)
and the partial emergence of policy swimming with the tide

The 1980s saw the economy commercialise. Data emerged to
gauge this. The economy had naturally far more relative autonomy and this was increasingly grasped in intellectual terms (Phan van Tiem 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 to change, pushed by the state business interest Second, there is still personal authority in the system (but compare Laos where change could be pushed through earlier and with more power than in Vietnam)
16
Transition? - Conclusions
The transition of the 1980s had a strongly economic
flavour, but policy did not matter much As for political change, the de-Stalinisation of the very late 1980s was driven by Party Gen-Secretary Nguyen van Linh and was not Gorbachevian the question of the extent of political rethinking within the VCP 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 political institutions of the SRV might not work with a market economy And then what?
3 patterns of growth
# 3 Capitalism and market economy since the early
1990s
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. Many policies were written, lauded as reform, but then became dead letters: support to SMEs, vocational training, public education, anti-corruption, public health, urban planning Macroeconomic stability secured (fear of hyperinflation after the chaos of the late 1980s?) up until 2007. Instability resulted from inability to use state power to sterilise capital inflows as SOEs opposed policy. Macroeconomic rents then further increased the value of politicians to business interests, used to curb use of state power in coherent policy terms.
Capitalism and market economy

Domestic sovereignty then flows away. The VCPs
institutional powers cannot control senior politicians the Politburo is revealed not to have the authority to discipline senior politicians. The King is seen to be neutered. There is thus a historical break around the mid noughties as the political compromises of the early 1990s, reliant upon temporary conditions (mainly surely the political authority of men like Vo van Kiet and Do Muoi?) that no longer hold This then starts be suggestive about the emerging nature of Vietnamese Capitalism and its politics. But that is another research project (VC Blue Dragon From Market to Capitalism etc)
3 patterns of growth conclusions?

Conclusions?
Policy is clearly needed, and policy that matters; the
middle income trap discourse, for Vietnam, rapidly leads to realisation that issues such as the reform of public health, urban planning, education etc are not being solved because policy does not matter without authority over the apparat, it does not implement. Hinsley is then useful the political crisis can be problematised as a crisis of sovereignty a boot strap problem 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
4. A comparative discussion of what the CPSU did in terminating Soviet-style rule under Gorbachev with the VCP
Much of this argument hinges upon how power and
change in Soviet-style situations actually happen. This prompts useful thinking about Vietnam. Mary McCauley argued long ago that Soviet regimes are inherently highly conservative they do not convey upon those who occupy peak positions much discretionary power (Is this the right term?). They are set up to implement a model, and, within limits, that is what they do. No more. This raises the question do such regimes confer authority for fundamental change? Technically, a political community that acts politically in terms of its belief in its own sovereignty can decide to do anything it wants, and it confers the authority to try to do so. Whether it can or not, after the decision, is another matter.
21
A comparative discussion of what the CPSU did in terminating Soviet-style rule under Gorbachev with the VCP
Consider Gorbachev, 2002, writing about the situation
from 1985:
the slogan adopted at the beginning by the entire
party (both as a social organism and as a mechanism of power), namely, that the initiating and driving force of perestroika was and must be the Communists and their power, was in practice carried out inconsistently, although millions of Communists, despite the mechanism of power, were in favour of the new policy. They often did not know how to carry it out and besides without the party structure, the apparatus and the nomenklatura, they were, strictly speaking, powerless. The party itself as a mechanism of power, and a large part of the nomenklatura, became a barrier, an obstruction on the road of reform. [104 stress added]
22
I take this to mean that the Gorbachev group were in
a King Lear position to shift to a democratic politics with an open economy they would have to give up their powers (but which?), and to do that, what power would they use, and then what? The basic view is that Soviet power was inconsistent with market economy and an open society. The Gorbachev groups analysis would have led to them predicting that the VCPs attempt to use Soviet institutions to rule over a globalising and increasingly open society with a market economy would lead to a crisis of political authority, and they would have been correct.
This leads to the counter-intuitive position that the CPSU was a
success, in that it managed to solve a serious political problem how to create the preconditions for a political system suited to a market economy in a relatively open society - and the VCP a failure A Russian intervention at an early 1990s conference, in Vietnamese, asked ra sao? (then what?) if the Vietnamese did not 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 out a Land without a King an extinction or severe erosion of domestic sovereignty, leading to discussion within the Vietnamese political community of relations between rulers and ruled between state and people around the issue of national agency-
24
Which of course provokes thought, for Vietnamese,
about the Chinese and how to deal with their pressure, for which there are many narratives So, we wait and watch; personally, I watch in particular ideas and language. Even if one should watch 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
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
Local mandarins?
Work at the village level, beyond the system, in Quang tri and
Ha giang
Basically, the local Party decides, and learns, to work in ways that
earn it confidence and prestige that is, authority from the local population. This allows it to create a local political order, in a somewhat mandarinal sense yen dan, no hot points (diem nong) 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 Party organisations at village level to do so. This then gets taught in provincial party schools. The process does not seem to rely heavily upon particular personalities (here it differs from Da Nang). It seems to be bound up with creation of a local rationality, which is internalised. Here this rationality is expressed initially in aid project documents but then this is read across into teaching materials and guidance decrees of the local Party/state.
Local mandarins?
It is rational in that it self-justifies by reference to
greater efficiency of resource delivery, with little overt political discussion. But the reference to yen dan or the absence of hot spots can easily be linked to mandarinal traditions.
28
Two models?
These two approaches can both be analysed in terms
of the domestic sovereignty problem and its solution, but in very different ways. The mandarinal solutions implication for national level politics is the need for a Party resolution on local level planning and democracy. This combines with a need for some political force to multiply it out into other areas, and this seems lacking The local King solution does not seem so limited. Nationally, it requires some Yeltsin equivalent. This also seems lacking. But, put the two together, and one can imagine such provinces supporting a Yelstin
29
Reflections?
Western analysts tend to think that the VCP was and remained an
effective articulator of national agency, driving change through policy. This naturally encouraged donors to focus upon policy advice as the key to doing development, rather than a political engagement, whatever that might have been Most political analyses of Vietnam buy the idea of the VCP as a national agent, driving change (thus they focus upon 1986 and the VIth Congress, rather than on processes going back to the early 60s
Look at Kerkvliet How peasants changed policy
Note the INGO push to advocacy in Vietnam during the late 1990s
rather than (compare with Cambodia) spending much on building up Vietnamese NGOs. Formal structures were defined as the suitable donor partners [McCall 1998] Thus the seminal nature of Gainsboroughs 2007 article it is nothing to 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
30
Wider implications?
Results?
Dis-interest in the sovereignty issue Lack of interest in spontaneously formed informal
farmers groups and similar indications of emergent civil society focus instead upon policy and how to form CS Schizophrenic thinking: one Ambassador said good things are happening here, an aid Counsellor focussed upon policy-change in their dialogue with the Vietnamese, and thought this made sense, but then reflecting, on what their spouse told them about life outside, saw that policy was usually a dead letter, contradicting the main line.
Summary and conclusions

There has a been a major increase in political tensions in
Vietnam since the early noughties. I argue that this is to do with political failure to address the political requirements of a capitalist and open society, which has resulted in a crisis of authority in the sense that there is no domestic 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 in various areas This points for me to interesting aspects of just how Vietnamese view political activity, their state, and so on. I think one conclusion is that they have been far less creative and proactive than they were often given credit for.
32
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 Party congresses reconsidered, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2(1): 3-26 Gorbachev, Mikhail and Zdenek Mlynar, 2002, Conversations with Gorbachev On perestroika, the Prague Spring and the crossroads of socialism, New York: Columbia University Press Hinsley, FJ, 1986 second edition, Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press McCall, Elizabeth, 1998, Partnership with Government: A realistic strategy for poverty focused NGOs, mimeo, July. Mlynar, Zdenek, 1980, Night frost in Prague the end of humane socialism, trans. Paul Wilson, London: C. Hurst & Co Woodside, Alexander, 1971, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Nguyen and Ching Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press
33
Recent and forthcoming work by me

Post Cold War Vietnam: stay low, learn, adapt and try to have fun but
what about the Party?, forthcoming, early 2014, Contemporary Politics Understanding development economics: its challenge to Development Studies. Forthcoming, Routledge 2013 Vietnams Political Crisis Blocks Needed Reforms, 02 Jul 2013, World Politics Review (and translated in to Vietnamese up on their site the BBC 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, Vol 52 # 1 2012 pp. 176-185 Contemporary Vietnam: political opportunities, conservative formal politics and patterns of radical change, Asian Politics and Policy, 2011Vol 3 No 2, 165-184
34

'Is Vietnam A 'Land Without A King'

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

'Is Vietnam A 'Land Without A King'

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

'Is Vietnam a 'land without a King'?

The middle income trap

1. So is There a King? Participatory Observation experiences in the past few years

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

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

importance of implementation capacity (nang) in his Three Principles of the People

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

$s plus civil society? Or cant do it?

2. Hinsley and the issue of sovereignty

Hinsley and the issue of sovereignty

3. A review of 3 patterns of growth

and the partial emergence of policy swimming with the tide

Capitalism and market economy

3 patterns of growth conclusions?

Summary and conclusions

References not to my own work

Recent and forthcoming work by me

S-ar putea să vă placă și