External Interventionism And Internal Autonomy:A Comparative Study Of State Capacity Building In North And South Vietnam

The concept of state capacity has been a crucial indicator for the academic community in explaining and comparing the process of modernization in post-developmental countries.State capacity,which constitutes the core of nation-building and the main driver of a nation’s prosperity and development,is one of the central concerns of comparative political theory.The two countries,North and South Vietnam,divided and formed during the Cold War era,were a symbol of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and waged a two-decade long confrontation and war,becoming a microcosm of that era.This situation provides an opportunity to observe the causal mechanism of state capacity,namely that two countries with similar historical conditions took different paths in building their state capacity under different external interventions,leading to distinct outcomes in their war and nationbuilding histories.In previous international discussions of the Vietnam War,the policies of the U.S.and France towards Vietnam were often the focus of research,and the Vietnamese state was viewed as a passive recipient of colonial society and modern civilization,disregarding its autonomy to build its own state.In reality,the interaction between the Vietnamese state’s internal autonomy and external intervention resulted in the different outcomes of the nation-building and war history of North and South Vietnam.To attribute the failure of the Vietnam War solely to the failure of external intervention would neglect and overlook the autonomy of the Vietnamese state.Therefore,this paper examines the actual policies adopted in state capacity building in North and South Vietnam and the policy effects achieved from the perspective of the National Ability Theory.In the specific construction of state capacity,the differences in the three levels of power base,institutional guarantee,and social sources lead to distinct processes of interaction between internal autonomy and external intervention in North and South Vietnam.By reviewing the Vietnamese nation’s resistance during the anti-French nation-building period,exploring state capacity in each of the two countries during the nation-building period,and examining the impact of external intervention on specific governance during the Vietnam War,this paper finds that while external intervention was evident in the nation-building of both South Vietnam and North Vietnam,it was their internally generated autonomy that led the two countries down different paths.