“Unfortunately, realpolitik is the name of the game when dealing with Asian authoritarian regimes, whether it is China or Vietnam, two countries with immense business potential,” says Le Corre, adding that addressing Hanoi’s persistent human rights violations is “not part of the equation.” Hollande knows well that a firm denunciation of the government’s attitude toward dissidents would be antithetical to French economic interests. “There is no chance this will change in the near future.”World Politics Review, Karina Piser Friday, September 9, 2016
On Tuesday, Francois Hollande became the first French president in 12 years to visit Vietnam, a former French colony. Despite their troubled past marked by a nearly decade-long war that ended with France’s military defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954, relations between Paris and Hanoi have warmed during Hollande’s presidency, part of France’s deepening interest in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific more broadly.
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| French President Francois Hollande and his Vietnamese counterpart Tran Dai Quang during a welcoming ceremony, Hanoi, Vietnam, Sept. 6, 2016 (AP photo by Hoang Dinh Nan). |
While the visit was considered a success, Quoc-Thanh Nguyen, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research at Aix-Marseille University, says it must be put into perspective. “Compared to what the Vietnamese signed with the Americans during Obama’s visit—$11.3 billion for 100 Boeing planes—the French deals are quite small,” she says. President Barack Obama made a three-day trip to Vietnam in May. Nguyen attributes the smaller French deals to a “real lack of aggressiveness in the approach of French negotiators and business leaders” that will keep France trailing behind the United States in terms of expanded ties. “Behind the Boeing deals is Vietnam’s desire to get closer to the U.S.,” she says.
While France’s posturing toward Asia might not compare to Washington’s so-called rebalance, Paris has notably increased its outreach to Southeast Asia and the wider region. This spring, France sold $39 billion in attack submarines to Australia and signed defense contracts with the Philippines after selling India 36 Rafale jets in 2015; between 2010 and 2015, defense deals with Asia-Pacific countries constituted 23.5 percent of foreign orders for French defense materials. And at the Sangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said that the European Union would play a more active role in patrolling Asian waters, giving hope that France would help ease tension and mitigate China’s increasingly aggressive posture in the South China Sea. France will be “sailing its ships and flying its planes wherever international law will allow, and wherever operational needs request that we do so,” Le Drian said.
“Hollande may be the first French president to visit Vietnam in 12 years, but his policy toward [the region] started right after his 2012 election,” says Philippe Le Corre, a research fellow at the Brookings Institution and the French Institute for International and Strategic Relations. “Unlike his predecessors, he thought that focusing mainly on China was a mistake.”
As France hopes to become closer with Vietnam—and Vietnam comes to expect more from France—Paris can’t alienate Beijing.
Still, Paris and Hanoi remain far from an extensive and reciprocal relationship. Even with this renewed focus and the doubling of French exports to Vietnam between 2014 and 2015, France continues to import three times that from Vietnam, particularly in the clothing, sports materials and cellphone sectors. France has also redoubled its soft power efforts in Vietnam and Laos, says Le Corre, “hoping that the spirit of ‘francophilie’ inherited from colonial times will encourage students, scientists, artists and especially business people to work in France.”
For Hanoi, deepening defense ties is of paramount importance, and Le Drian’s June statement gave high hopes that Paris would bolster its efforts against Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea.
With more engagement in Southeast Asia, Paris will have to carefully balance its relations with Beijing, especially in light of Hollande saying that France would support Vietnam in securing its “military maritime space.” Given their colonial history, France has quite a bit at stake in its relations with Vietnam. The Vietnamese diaspora in France is nearly 300,000-strong, and cultural ties and connections run deep. Still, “France can’t intervene in a conflict that doesn’t affect it,” Nguyen says of Vietnam and China’s competing claims in the South China Sea. “All it can do is reiterate the need to respect international law. It’s in French interests that international law is respected.”
But as France hopes to become closer with Vietnam—and Vietnam comes to expect more from France—Paris can’t alienate Beijing. For Nguyen, Hollande’s statements on the maritime disputes, and the French position on China’s posturing, were in the bounds of what is “diplomatically correct,” to the disappointment of the Vietnamese media.
Whereas officials in Hanoi were counting on a more forceful condemnation of Chinese actions, Vietnamese activists had hoped that Hollande would speak up on the government’s persistent human rights abuses. Before his visit, the International Federation for Human Rights, the Vietnam Committee on Human Rights and other advocacy groups wrote an open letter to Hollande “to convey their utmost concern over the serious and ongoing human rights violations in Vietnam” that have intensified since a new administration took power in January. The government has persistently harassed environmental activists, with police using excessive force at protests in May. In just one week in March, seven bloggers and rights activists were convicted and sent to prison for “abusing rights to democracy and freedom to infringe upon the interests of the State.” The individuals edited an independent website, one of the few outlets in a system where media is highly censored and tightly controlled.
“Unfortunately, realpolitik is the name of the game when dealing with Asian authoritarian regimes, whether it is China or Vietnam, two countries with immense business potential,” says Le Corre, adding that addressing Hanoi’s persistent human rights violations is “not part of the equation.” Hollande knows well that a firm denunciation of the government’s attitude toward dissidents would be antithetical to French economic interests. “There is no chance this will change in the near future.”
Karina Piser is an associate editor at World Politics Review.