Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam

Impact

While the independence declaration does not directly touch on inopportune issues such as Russia's October Revolution or the policies that the provisional government stood for, the remainder of the Independence Day ceremony made Ho Chi Minh's intentions for Vietnam clear. He was handed Bao Dai's golden seal and sword, and after an oath sworn by his cabinet members and several more speeches, he declared that the sword would be used to sever the heads of traitors. When two American planes suddenly flew over the crowd, it was announced that they demonstrated U.S. support for the democratic republic. The ceremony concluded with the recitation of an oath in support of the provisional government and its president. The audience was also sworn to defending the nation at all cost.

The most obvious significance of the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was that it symbolized Vietnamese aspirations toward independence. It also boosted the legitimacy of the provisional government and the Vietminh; no other political organization would have been able to profit from the vacuum of authority to seize power on a nationwide level. Historically, the declaration precipitated a series of events that led to the First Indochina War (1946–1954), the Second Indochina War (1959–1975), and arguably even the Third Indochina War (1979). As the first successful Communist-led pro-independence movement in the third world, it also represented a major turning point in the history of early post–World War II anticolonialism.

In terms of its immediate impact on Vietnamese politics and society, the proclamation demonstrated, at least temporarily, the political leadership of the Vietminh and, behind it, of the ICP. Still, while other political contenders, most at the regional level, had lost out in the short term, Vietminh hegemony was far from dominant, despite the assassinations and arrests of those considered political rivals or even traitors, and in November 1945 the ICP officially self-dissolved, although it continued to exist underground. In the north, where the Vietminh were strongest, Ho Chi Minh had to be mindful of and accommodate his Chinese-backed competitors in the Vietnamese Revolutionary League, at least as long as the two hundred thousand Chinese Nationalist troops were present. In contrast, the Vietminh's hold on power in the south was far more tenuous, as Saigon could be taken in alliance only with other parties, while the existence of influential religious sects such as the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai further complicated the political landscape.

These regional differences would be further accentuated by Ho's unsuccessful courting of the United States and his fruitless appeal to the French to live up to French republican ideals. The Potsdam Agreement had tasked neither of these nation's forces but rather British troops to the south of the sixteenth parallel and Chinese Nationalist troops to the north to accept Japan's surrender and disarm its troops. Ho would find a modus vivendi (an expression used in diplomacy to refer to a temporary accommodation) with General Lu Han in the north and profit from the fact that French troops who had retreated into southern China as a result of the Japanese coup were held up by Chinese authorities until early 1946; but General Gracey's troops in the south acted sternly against the Vietminh, liberated the French prisoners of war, and prepared for the arrival of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps under General Leclerc in October.

Despite various attempts by France and Vietnam to attain peaceful resolution over the next fifteen months—including the Ho-Sainteny Agreement of March 1946, the Da Lat conferences, the Fontainebleau negotiations, and the eventual coming into force of a Franco-Vietnamese modus vivendi on October 30, 1946—Franco-Vietnamese relations soon turned sour. After a relatively minor dispute over customs in Haiphong harbor on November 20 appeared to be settled two days later, the French fleet bombarded the city's indigenous quarters on November 23, killing up to six thousand people. Less than a month later, the outbreak of the First Indochina War came on December 19 with a Vietminh counterattack in Hanoi. Nearly ten conflict-ridden years later, the French defeat and the Geneva Accords of 1954 led to the temporary partition of Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel, with the Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the State of Vietnam in the south.

The accords provided only limited reprieve from warfare, as the elections scheduled for 1956 did not materialize owing to southern fears of a Communist electoral victory; these fears spurred the preemptive formation of the Republic of Vietnam in the south in 1955, thus sowing the seeds for the Second Indochina War, also called the Vietnam War. This war ended with the fall of Saigon and the southern regime's surrender on April 30, 1975. On July 2, 1976—two days before the two hundredth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence—the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was inaugurated. Meanwhile, by this time a Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict was already under way, which would lead to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia of late 1978, triggering the brief Third Indochina War, or Sino-Vietnamese War, of 1979.

If not for the ensuing several decades of civil war and international conflict and if not for the eventual success of the Vietnamese Communists in their bid for independence, the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam would have been a curious footnote in world history. Today, the declaration remains one of the most interesting independence proclamations of all time, issued at a crucial juncture when the European-dominated society of nations was being recrafted by a new hegemonic power, the United States. It was one of the first declarations of independence to come from the third world or from Asia. The intriguing content, with a staunch Communist quoting the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, makes for an excellent study in decolonization, the Vietnam War, and world history.

The declaration remains a key document for a state ruled by a Communist Party that seeks to maintain its political domination through reference to foundational documents and events that give it continued legitimacy in times of rapid economic and social change. With the number of adults who can remember the heady days of the August Revolution and the birth of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence fast diminishing, modern-day Vietnamese schoolchildren are required to read and memorize the document. It remains to be seen whether a Vietnamese reinterpretation of the declaration, such as with particular attention focused on individual rather than collective liberty and rights, might eventually be used to change the Communist Party of Vietnam from within or to challenge the existing regime.