Changing concepts of socialist law in Vietnam

Abstract

Few aspects of the Vietnamese legal system are more uncertain and controversial than the meaning of socialist law. It influences the way the Communist Party of Vietnam ‘leads’ the state, the way the state ‘manages’ society and the way officials and the public implement and obey laws. Socialist law resists definition. ‘Socialist law’ generates confusion because it was introduced more than forty years ago to regulate the command economy, but the term is still in use to describe contemporary mixed-market regulation. This flexible usage raises the question what is socialist about socialist law? Does the term have immutable and intrinsic meanings or has it become a convenient label for state law? There are two main problems in assessing continuity and change in the meanings attached to ‘socialist law’. First, core Marxist-Leninist notions underpinning socialist law—socialist legality, democratic centralism and collective mastery—operate at too high a level of abstraction to convey concrete meanings. Marxist-Leninist ideology informs us that law has a class element that reflects state ownership over the means of production, but says little about other social relationships such as housing, family or traffic regulations. Western ‘rule of law’ ideas smuggled into the recently adopted law-based state (nha nuoc phap quyen) doctrine are equally uninformative. They maintain that socialist law should be equal, transparent and consistent, but rarely discuss broader normative issues. Socialist law needs middle-level propositions (an epistemological context) to acquire specific and systematic meanings. The second analytical problem is caused by the rapidly changing and fragmenting conceptual environment shaping ‘socialist law’. Socialist notions that the state owns the ‘means of production’ to safeguard workers’ interests have dissolved into Party policies that encourage foreign investment, international