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Vietnam as a Nation-State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Dennis J. Duncanson
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Extract

‘It is one thing to divide a country on a map’, writes Lieutenant-General Duong Van Minh, Commander-in-Chief and destroyer of the late President Ngo Dinh Diem (and Head of State for a time in succession to him), ‘but it is not so easy to divide a people—to sever bonds of family, culture, and history. The Vietnamese people are one; they cannot be separated into northerners or southerners’.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , March 1969 , pp. 117 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

1Van Minh, Duong, ‘Vietnam—a question of confidence’, Foreign Affairs, 47, 1968, p. 91.Google Scholar

2Where small Vietnamese colonies had begun to settle before the sixteenth century.Google Scholar

3 These regions, it will be remembered, had only been tributary to the throne in the past; under the French, those in the North had mostly been administered apart by the military authorities. After 1946, France recognized the military areas as autonomous but under its protection, over the head of the Emperor, temporarily in voluntary exile in China. When he returned to preside over the ephemeral ‘State of Viet-Nam’ in 1949, he enacted an ordinance of his own (No. 6 of 15 April 1950) declaring the hill country of both North and South to be domain personal to the throne. The intention was to remove these defenceless and backward peoples from the perils of the fighting among the Vietnamese and from arbitrary administration at the mercy of the new politicians. But the Vietminh early penetrated the hill country, putting its native rivalries to their own use, and after the Geneva Agreement the Emperor was deposed and his ordinance quietly forgotten, in both Hanoi and Saigon. Today most of the hill country of the North is included in two administratively (but not politically) ‘autonomous regions’; that of the South is divided into provinces treated similarly to the plains.