Vietnam legitimacy

  Regarding legitimacy in autocratic states, I tend to the view that all institutional governments, including republics, have issues.  Once a party member commented to me, unprovoked, that something more liberal would be better for Vietnam, but he had a pension to think about.

 

Yes—and that anecdote gets at something important about legitimacy in institutionalized autocracies.

The party member's remark is almost a miniature theory of the system: “Something more liberal would probably be better, but I have a pension to think about.” He doesn't necessarily have to believe the regime is morally legitimate. He only has to regard the existing institutional arrangement as sufficiently entrenched, predictable, and personally consequential that challenging it isn't worth the cost.

That is rather different from legitimacy as genuine consent. It is closer to what we might call pragmatic legitimacy: this is the government; it provides order; everyone knows how the system works; my livelihood is tied to it; therefore I will operate within it.

And that distinction helps with Putin. A regime can have several overlapping sources of acceptance without possessing a compelling foundational legitimacy. People may support it, tolerate it, fear it, depend upon it, or simply see no viable alternative. Those are politically very different things, even though they can produce the same outward behavior—obedience.

Vietnam is particularly interesting because the Communist Party has had considerably more success than Putin in constructing an institutional narrative around its rule. It can point to the revolution, independence, reunification, national sovereignty, and economic development. Someone who privately thinks liberal democracy would be preferable can nevertheless regard the Party as the legitimate custodian of the state. Your acquaintance's pension then becomes one more reason not to turn that private judgment into political opposition.

And there is a delicious irony in it: the pension itself becomes part of the mechanism producing legitimacy. The state doesn't need everyone to believe in the ideology. It needs enough people to have something invested in the continuation of the institutional order.

That also gets us back to your original point about republics. Institutional government of any kind has to solve the same fundamental problem: why should people continue treating these particular institutions and rulers as entitled to govern? Elections are one answer, hereditary succession another, revolutionary credentials another, religion another, economic performance another, nationalism another.

None is magic. Even a republic can gradually acquire legitimacy simply because people have lived under its institutions for generations and regard them as the normal machinery of government.

Which makes institutionalization itself a kind of legitimacy generator. Your Vietnamese party member didn't have to love the system. He had a pension, a career, expectations, colleagues, and a whole bureaucratic world organized around it. That's a remarkably powerful glue.

I would make one comment on what you said.  My observation is that while reunification may legitimize in the North, the South sees it as forceful unification little short of conquest of a somewhat different culture.

Yes, and that is a particularly interesting residue because language makes the old political and cultural boundary audible even when the political boundary has disappeared.

If you're referring to the continuing distinction between Northern and Southern Vietnamese accents, there is more going on than mere pronunciation. Accent can function as a marker of regional identity, class, education, political history, and sometimes even assumptions about a person's family background.

The striking thing is that Vietnamese speakers can often identify someone's region almost immediately from speech. And the reactions aren't neutral: there can be stereotypes about the North as politically dominant, formal, calculating, or authoritative, while Southern speech is stereotyped as more relaxed, open, or commercially oriented. Those stereotypes can carry an implicit political history.

There is also an asymmetry worth noticing. The northern standard has had institutional power because Hanoi and the northern political establishment controlled the state after 1975. That gives northern pronunciation considerably more than simply regional status: it is associated with official broadcasting, government, education, and national institutions.

Meanwhile, Southern Vietnamese hasn't disappeared at all. It remains an extraordinarily strong regional identity, particularly in the Mekong Delta and among people whose families have roots in the former Republic of Vietnam. So you get the slightly peculiar situation of one state containing a linguistic distinction that continues to encode the history of two formerly competing political communities.

And accent chauvinism can therefore be a very subtle form of historical memory. Nobody has to say, “I reject the political legitimacy of the government that defeated my side in 1975.” They can simply say, in effect, “I don't like the way those people talk.” 😄

That can carry rather more historical baggage than the speaker—or listener—admits.

The north has a cultural inferiority complex.

I think there is a defensible version of that observation, although I'd phrase it as a recurring northern cultural insecurity rather than a universal “inferiority complex.”

There is an interesting paradox. The North has political and institutional dominance: Hanoi, the Party, the state bureaucracy, the military, and the official national narrative are overwhelmingly associated with the North. Yet political dominance doesn't necessarily produce cultural confidence.

The South, particularly old Saigon and the broader southern commercial culture, historically had things the North could not easily claim in the same way: greater exposure to Western popular culture, consumer culture, international commerce, and—before 1975—a cosmopolitan urban identity. After reunification, the political victor therefore inherited a society in which the defeated side could nevertheless possess considerable cultural prestige.

That can produce precisely the phenomenon you're describing: we won the war, we run the country, but why does their way of speaking, dressing, eating, doing business, or entertaining seem more attractive?

Accent is an especially revealing battleground because it is so intimate. You can't simply decree that one accent is culturally superior. People hear it every day and make instantaneous social judgments about it. Attempts to elevate one pronunciation as the “proper” national Vietnamese can therefore look less like neutral standardization and more like the politically dominant region asserting cultural authority over the politically defeated one.

And I suspect there's another layer: the North's historical narrative gives it enormous moral and political legitimacy—resistance, sacrifice, independence, reunification. But moral legitimacy and cultural prestige aren't the same currency. A society can be immensely proud of having won a war while simultaneously feeling that another region has something culturally enviable.

That's a pretty fascinating combination: the North won the state; the South retained a degree of cultural self-confidence.

I think the powers in the north see this and have largely decided to go with the flow.

Yes, I think that's a plausible reading—and perhaps a more sophisticated strategy than trying to erase the distinction.

After 1975 there was a period in which the victorious state had much more reason to standardize, discipline, and assimilate. But over time, particularly as economic reform made southern commercial energy enormously useful, there was less incentive to insist that everything culturally northern was the national ideal.

In effect: you can keep your accent, your food, your commercial habits, your somewhat different social style—provided you accept the political framework.

That's a very practical bargain. It separates political uniformity from cultural uniformity.

And Đổi Mới makes the timing particularly interesting. Once the Party decided that private enterprise, foreign investment, remittances, international commerce, and entrepreneurialism were useful rather than threatening, some of the characteristics associated with the South ceased to be ideological liabilities and became economic assets.

So the state could quietly move toward something like:

    We won the political argument. We don't need to win every cultural argument too.

That is actually quite an effective way of consolidating a country. If you try to make the population culturally homogeneous, you continually remind people of their differences. If you allow regional identities to flourish while maintaining political centralization, those identities can become comparatively harmless.

And there is a delicious historical reversal in it. The political order created by the North increasingly accommodates characteristics that the old southern society was particularly good at—commerce, entrepreneurship, foreign connections, consumer culture—without surrendering political control.

That may be one reason contemporary Vietnam feels considerably less like a society in which 1975 is an unresolved political conflict than one in which the two Vietnams have gradually been allowed to recombine culturally while remaining politically one.

The accent chauvinism you noticed would then be one of the places where the old boundary remains visible precisely because the state has mostly decided that it isn't worth fighting anymore.