INTRODUCTION

‘What's clear is that Hanoi can no longer rule by remote control.’ (Far Eastern Economic Review, 7 December 2000)

After one and a half decades of economic reform, the Vietnamese government has recently paved the way for political experiments with decentralization and local democracy. Such reforms are found worldwide and they are generally spurred by worldwide trends of globalization, which can be seen as open-ended renegotiations of power between the state, the market and the civil society. Connectivity has increased together with the flow of resources, information and people (Tomlinson 1999: 2). These flows and the networks sustaining them, or controlling them, are challenging the ‘old’ nation states to an extent where they are forced to find new ways and means to stay in control of at least key aspects of the national political arenas. Vietnam, as a one-party state and a planned economy, has had relatively high control of these flows, but due to the economic crises after the American war (ending 1975), Vietnam was forced to loosen its grip on these flows. From the mid-1980s, the government introduced liberalization and market economy, not least in the rural areas, and Vietnam managed to increase production considerably. As in many other parts of the world, a negative side effect was a widening social gap between the rich and the poor. Other phenomena flourished too in the wake of transformation, like red tape and corruption, which both undermined the legitimacy of the regime and posed problems for the new market sector.

Frequent social unrest at the grassroots level since the mid-1980s and pressure from major donors towards the end of the 1990s forced Vietnam to also consider political reforms. Although it has been an intermittent process with cautious steps on behalf of the leadership in Hanoi, there is now little doubt about the direction towards inclusion of local communities into the political process.