ABSTRACT
As every Southeast Asianist knows, Vietnam is a country, not a war. Yet the legacy of ideological and military conflict that has shaped Vietnam has long impeded dispassionate discussion of Vietnamese society. Writers on Vietnam typically bring with them considerable intellectual baggage. Much work on Vietnam derives – to use a phrase coined by Herbert Phillips in another context – from a ‘scholarship of admiration’ (Phillips 1979: 449). Yet this widespread enthusiasm is a mixed blessing for critical analysis. Commentators and academics who admire the achievements of Vietnam, notably the remarkable achievement of successively defeating both the French and the Americans, have tended to write in broadly positive terms about the country’s performance in a wide range of areas. In particular, Vietnam’s record in the basic education and health sectors, combined with its relatively low socio-economic inequalities, has attracted considerable plaudits. Many of those plaudits have come from writers on the left, especially the European left, who saw in those statistical indicators further evidence that the nationalist struggle with the United States of America had been a just cause. For them, Vietnam was the socialist society that worked. For some American scholars, those same achievements vindicated their own previous opposition to United States (US) involvement in the Indochina conflict. For these writers, Vietnam’s success would be determined by the degree to which the country could defend the socialist ideals underlying the revolutionary struggle.
