Vietnam’s 1946 Constitution and the Making of Legitimacy for a Newly Independent State

Abstract

This article examines the 1946 Constitution of Vietnam from the perspectives of international law and postcolonial constitutionalism, with the aim of elucidating the international character and normative foundations of Vietnam’s first constitution. Rather than approaching the 1946 Constitution as a purely domestic legal document or merely a product of national political history, the study argues that it functioned as a deliberate normative statement, reflecting Vietnam’s efforts to assert legal personality and political legitimacy within the post – World War II international legal order. Drawing on constitutional text analysis, combined with a historical – contextual approach and selective comparative constitutional analysis, the article demonstrates that key principles – such as popular sovereignty, representative democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and equality – were internalized at an early stage in the 1946 Constitution, even before these norms were fully institutionalized at the international level. On this basis, the Vietnamese case is advanced as a representative example of how postcolonial states not only received international norms but also actively interpreted and participated in the construction of the universal values underpinning modern constitutional law and international law.