Vietnam’s Integration into the World and State Sovereignty Issues

Since the end of the 1980s, Vietnamese authorities have simultaneously launched an open-door poli-cy on the outside and domestic economic reforms on the inside, both of which are ambitious and pragma-tic. Even if this policy has not challenged the fundamental ideological principles of political power and its internal organization, it has been associated with a transformation of the legal framework and other important institutional reforms. From a concrete point of view, as well as from a theoretical one, the principles of democratic centralism (art. 6 of the 1992 Constitution) and of the leadership of the Communist Party (art. 4) remain intact. Nevertheless, the State’s authority has been, if not disputed, at least questioned owing to the consequences of open-door and renewal policies.
In fact, some current dynamics, at both the national and supranational levels, weaken the “vertical of executive power” and call into question, at least partly, the sovereignty of the Vietnamese Party-State. From a domestic point of view, reforms have challenged the State’s exclusivity of competence in various strategic fields. At a national level, it would be interesting to examine how the central political power deals with Ho Chi Minh City’s economic weight or the increasingly flagrant regionalist positions of some provincial and local leaders. On the periphery, how does the State manage its border areas, where all sorts of illegal traffic still reign. From a foreign policy point of view, the increasing number of commitments linking the Vietnamese State to its foreign partners constitutes another limitation on national sovereignty. Vietnam’s integration into the world community and international organizations, as well as its open-door policy towards foreign investors, implicitly require Vietnamese authorities to accept some exogenous norms and political decisions, and eventually even some transfers of competence away from the national domain.
In short, in this conference, we will endeavor to think about internal and external dynamics, which weaken Vietnamese State sovereignty; to emphasize State political strategies and regulations designed to reinforce its authority, its internal cohesion and its positions toward its economic partners; and finally to examine the impact of Vietnam’s integration into the world order on Vietnamese society, national identity and state-society relations.

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