Community Development and Revolution in Ngô Đình Diệm’s Vietnam

• In Event: 357. Comparative Nation-Building in Postcolonial Southeast Asia: Counterinsurgency, Development and Self-Determination in Malaya and the Republic of Vietnam

Abstract

Using sources from Vietnamese and American archives, my paper examines Ngô Đình Diệm’s ambitious community development plan in the First Republic of Vietnam (1955-1963). Community development was a transnational phenomenon that originated with the New Deal and arrived in rural Vietnam by way of advisors from India, the Netherlands and Michigan State University. It was a low-modernist initiative that employed local human and material resources for rural reconstruction efforts. This made it appealing to postcolonial leaders like Ngô Đình Diệm because it was a low-cost means of spurring development and extending the reach of the central government out to the countryside. By offering to support various development schemes from agrarian reform to reconstruction of local infrastructure such as roads, bridges and waterways newly formed national governments that premised their existence on representing the will of the people could boost their legitimacy. This was particularly important in fractured societies like South Vietnam where various groups were vying with each other for power. Community development was clearly intended to demonstrate to the South Vietnamese populace that it had more to gain by siding with the Sài Gòn government than its opponents. But it also reflected a postcolonial desire to establish a politically and economically viable state in the southern half of Vietnam. I argue, therefore, that under Ngô Đình Diệm’s government community development became the concrete manifestation of a revolution intended to transform both the South Vietnamese state and society.

Author

• Geoffrey C. Stewart, University of Western Ontario