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Vietnamese Constitutionalism: The Reform Possibilities

The central question taken up by these pioneering papers is: “What does the 2013 constitutional debate and the subsequent constitutional reform signal in terms of political and legal reform in Vietnam?” More particularly, the papers analyze the actors, their debates, and the possible impacts of the constitutional consultation for Vietnamese constitutional reform across a range of issues including land, human rights, the role of the procuracy, political liberalization, and economic change. Ultimately these analyses inform us about the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV)’s vision and pragmatism regarding its political and constitutional retention of power and the reform dynamics created by other state and non-state actors. In this paper, I briefly explore recent China-related commentary on constitutional dialogue, particularly to elicit whether this can be used to explain the Vietnamese constitutional debates and their aftermath. I then turn to recent work on political protest in Vietnam to elicit whether its analysis sheds light on the performance of contemporary Vietnamese constitutional debates as presented in the accompanying papers. I suggest that Vietnamese constitutional dialogue and its aftermath diverges from the Chinese experience in several fundamental ways. Firstly, Vietnam has officially allowed gradually escalating and now greater constitutional debate than its northern neighbour. Secondly, the Vietnamese party-state arguably lost, or at least partially lost, control of the constitutional debate in 2012–2013, which could have far-reaching consequences for the political and legal construction of the party-state over time. Thirdly, the treatment of actors engaged in constitutional dialogue, as portrayed in these papers, evidences some common features with Kerkvliet’s characterization of party-state treatment of Vietnamese dissident activity, in turn, characterized as different from that of China. In consequence, I suggest the Vietnamese and Chinese socialist experience of constitutional dynamics diverge, which in turn, at least leaves open the possibility of different reform trajectories, albeit ones that are not known. Accepting an argument that the Vietnamese party-state is more permissive of