Title

  • Analytical Models for Understanding Constitutions and Constitutional Dialogue in Socialist Transitional States: Re-Interpreting Constitutional Dialogue in Vietnam

Published In

Date

  • 2002

Creator

Bibliographic Citation

  • Sidel, Mark, Analytical Models for Understanding Constitutions and Constitutional Dialogue in Socialist Transitional States: Re-Interpreting Constitutional Dialogue in Vietnam, 6 Singapore Journal of International and Comparative Law 42-89 (2002)

Abstract

  • In Part I of this article, I briefly discuss the instrumentalist background to western understanding of Vietnamese and Chinese constitutionalism. In Part II, I discuss the divergent goals and formulations that informed the constitutional dialogue that occurred in Vietnam in 2001 and early 2002, when a Party-led constitutional amendment process became a wide-ranging if moderated and controlled debate on the appropriate substance of Vietnam's constitution, the role of constitutional amendment and revision, and of a constitution itself. I also review the key themes that dominated the Vietnamese constitutional debate, themes that will dominate the analysis of Vietnamese constitutional debate and amendment in Part III. Part III discusses how those themes fared in a conflict-ridden constitutional amendment process that bears little relationship to earlier constitutional efforts in Vietnam, China and other Party-directed states. This was a process that the Party struggled, ultimately with success, to control, but not before a wide-ranging debate enveloped the National Assembly on key themes on the amendment agenda and on themes that the Party had sought to remove from debate. In Part IV, I develop an initial framework for understanding a new stage of constitutional dialogue in Vietnam and similarly situated states. Part IV analyzes this process in the context of the Vietnamese constitutional revision project and sets out some broader analytical understandings that challenge the traditional instrumentalist theory, a doctrine now entirely unsuited to understanding the complexity of constitutional debate in these transitional societies. It also explains the spectrum of options open to a key political force, such as the Communist Party, in this expanded but moderated transitional constitutionalism, and the ways in which this process can strengthen rather than weaken both the legitimacy and the authority of a ruling group.

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