Political Parties in South Vietnam Under the Republic

T HE EMERGENCE OF POLITICAL PARTIES in the United States and Western Europe was intimately related to the development of representative government. As the franchise broadened in various Western countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so did political parties grow as necessary agencies in the competitive efforts of political candidates to gather support from enlarging electorates. Moreover, the development of representative government appears to have been related to the existence of certain social and economic conditions, including urbanism, industrialism, a fairly high standard of living, and literacy.1 In Vietnam, as in Asia generally, the representative tradition has been largely absent. The selection of Vietnamese village chiefs by local populations, which extends from the fifteenth century, was probably done by cooptation, and the same is true of the election of village councils, introduced shortly before the arrival of the French in the middle of the nineteenth century and maintained by them. The French on their part introduced regional elective councils, but these bodies were dominated by them, were chosen by severely limited electorates, and had but restricted powers of consultation. As for the social requisites for representative government, it should be noted that Vietnam is a predominantly agricultural country, with a low standard of living and a high, though decreasing, rate of illiteracy. Thus, Vietnamese political parties developed under different circumstances and had different objectives from those in the West. They were essentially instruments for dealing with the foreign ruler. Some groups, like the Constitutional Party (active in the i920S and i930S), sought accommodation, limiting their demands to greater economic opportunity and political freedom for Vietnamese and some participation in the running of the country; but for most the goal was independence, and as moderation failed to achieve sufficient concessions from the French, extremist parties during the i920S and I930S steadily increased their strength. The only legal avenues to power were the elective councils, the most attractive of which were the Saigon Municipal Council and the Colonial Council of Cochin-china. While indigenous groups, including the Communists and Trotskyites, participated in elections to these

Political science · Politics · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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