The 1946 Vietnamese Constitution: An Early Postcolonial Experiment in Global Constitutionalism

Abstract

This article re-examines the 1946 Vietnamese Constitution from a postcolonial and normative-political perspective, situating it within the emerging global legal order in the aftermath of the Second World War and prior to the full institutionalization of international human rights norms in 1948. Contrary to conventional approaches that treat the 1946 Constitution primarily as a foundational document of Vietnam’s national constitutional history, the article argues that this text functioned as a deliberate constitutional strategy aimed at simultaneously constructing internal political legitimacy and negotiating the position of a postcolonial state within an asymmetrical international order. Drawing on a combined theoretical framework of critical international law, the sociology of constitutions, and contemporary approaches to global constitutionalism, the study analyzes how the 1946 Constitution integrated human rights, popular sovereignty, representative democracy, and the rule of law into a coherent normative framework. The article demonstrates that pre-1948 postcolonial constitutions should not be understood merely as passive recipients of universal values, but rather as political–legal practices that actively contributed to shaping the content and meaning of emerging global constitutional norms.