Reconciling Nation and Region:Vietnamese

The article sets out to gauge the usefulness of the concepts of legitimacy, sovereignty and nation in theorising a specific, South-East Asian case of nation building. It looks at the interplay between nation building and regionalist ideology inVietnam, within the context of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). As one of the world’s last communist states, the way in whichVietnam has reconciled hard-won sovereignty with regionalisation is all the more intriguing. The article distinguishes the state-led ideology of regionalism from the macro-level process of regionalisation in charting how sovereignty, legitimacy and nation are constructed in theVietnamese case,with a view to drawing parallels with experiences in other regions. The first section looks at the concepts of legitimacy, sovereignty and nation and how they underpin the state construct, before relating these to Vietnam’s ongoing nation-building project in the second section. The final section evaluates the evolution of these concepts within a regional framework, with specific reference to Vietnam’s experience as a member of ASEAN. It concludes that official nation building in Vietnam continues to be based on the premises of state sovereignty and legitimacy, an approach eminently compatible with ‘the ASEAN way’. TheVietnamese Communist party seeks to reconcile regionalism with its ongoing nation-building project in a bid to bolster both domestic legitimacy and external sovereignty. Within the ‘nation-state ’ construct, the hyphen linking the two concepts repre-sents legitimacy.The state needs the nation to legitimate its authority, through the legal fiction of popular sovereignty in a democracy, or via representatives of a national community such as a single political party or an authoritarian leader. Contemporary phenomena such as globalisation, immigration and regionalisation have led to claims of a so-called ‘crisis of the hyphen ’ (Anderson, cited in McCrone, 1998, p. 173), where the link between the state and its legitimating national community is weakened by a dilution of community identity and/or state authority. State sovereignty is variously described as being pooled, transferred or lost through international treaties or the intervention of market forces in