Throughout the millennia-old history of national construction and protection, particularly from the dynasties of Dinh, Ly, Tran, and Le to the Ho Chi Minh era, the Vietnamese people have always expressed indomitable will in combat and peace-loving spirit in our conduct towards others. In this regard, combining military activities with diplomatic ones, fighting while talking, and promoting the important role of diplomacy in wartime have always been our key strategies to gain and safeguard national independence, unity, and territorial integrity.

The Geneva Conference of 1954 on restoring peace in the Indochina (file photo)

70 years ago, on 21 July 1954, the Geneva Accords on the cessation of hostilities in Vietnam were signed, becoming a historic milestone in the country’s revolutionary diplomacy. The signing of the Geneva Accords, which mainly resulted from the Dien Bien Phu victory that “resounded across the five continents and shook the globe”, victoriously ended our country’s prolonged resistance war and completely smashed the nearly-100-year yoke of French colonialism in Vietnam. While France only recognised Vietnam as a free state within the French Union under the Preliminary Agreement signed on 6 March 1946, with the Geneva Accords, Vietnam’s fundamental national rights, namely independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity, were, for the first time, officially affirmed in an international treaty and recognised by France and other countries at the Geneva Conference.

In his appeal on 22 July 1954, President Ho Chi Minh stressed that: “The Geneva Conference concluded, and Vietnam’s diplomacy has achieved a great victory”. The 1954 Geneva Accords laid a very important political and legal foundation for our nation to keep carrying out the struggle for the ultimate goal of liberating the South and unifying the country in 1975. Lessons drawn from the process of negotiating, signing, and implementing the Accords still fully retain their values for the two strategic tasks of building socialism and protecting the socialist Fatherland in general, and building Vietnam’s comprehensive, modern diplomacy in particular.

Peaceful negotiation employed to end war and conflict

The near-modern and modern world history revealed that most of the wars and conflicts ended with peaceful negotiations. Being fully aware of that law and based on the country’s peace-loving spirit, in late 1953, our Party, headed by President Ho Chi Minh, decided to launch a diplomatic struggle closely combined with the military front to end the war and restore peace.  In an interview by Expressen, a Swedish Newspaper, on 26 November 1953, President Ho Chi Minh stated that: “If the French Government has learnt a lesson from this years-long war, and wishes to cease hostilities in Vietnam through negotiations and settle the Vietnam issue in a peaceful manner, then the people and Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam stand ready to welcome such intention”, and “the foundation for the cessation of hostilities in Vietnam is the French Government’s sincere respect for Vietnam’s true independence”.  

According to Professor Anatoly Sokolov from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the 1954 Geneva Accords proved that for colonies, international negotiation was the best way to settle conflicts for the sake of freedom, democracy, and national independence. In spite of different perspectives, it is irrefutable that the Geneva Conference provided an epoch-making lesson on settling international differences and conflicts by peaceful means. In the current situation, this lesson remains valuable.

Taking internal strength as a fulcrum, putting national interests above all else

President Ho Chi Minh said: “With internal strength, diplomacy will be victorious. If the internal strength is a gong, diplomacy is the sound. Only when the gong is large can the sound be big”. Whether our diplomacy is victorious or not is conditional on how to bring into play the country's synergy in economic, military, political terms and to combine the strength of the nation with that of the time. This law was clearly reflected throughout the process of negotiating the Geneva Accords.

Prior to the Geneva Conference, our military and people had won a lot of crucial victories, breaking the enemy’s will to fight. More importantly, without Dien Bien Phu Victory (7 May 1954), France would not have sat at the negotiating table or undertaken “to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity, and the territorial integrity” of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, “to refrain from any interference in the internal affairs” of the three countries, to cease hostilities and withdraw all troops from the three Indochinese countries as enshrined in the Geneva Accords. There was a lesson of combining the strength of the nation with that of the time for Vietnam's diplomacy to learn from the Geneva Accords. In addition to maximising the strength of justice and the national great unity bloc, our Party pursued a sound line on unceasingly expanding international solidarity, particularly with Laos, Cambodia, China, the Soviet Union, international friends, and peace-loving people around the world, including those from France. At the same time, for Vietnam, the Geneva Accords proved the importance of the lesson on national interests. There is a classic saying in international relations: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual”. The developments at the Geneva Conference and the implementation of the Geneva Accords did bear this out. The lesson learnt from the Geneva Conference is that it is our country that decides our national interests.

“Firm in objectives, flexible in strategies and tactics”

The Geneva Accords provided us with a lesson on being firm in objectives, flexible in strategies and tactics.  Just as President Ho Chi Minh affirmed, “Our unchangeable goal is still peace, unity, independence, and democracy. Our principles must be firm, our strategies must be flexible”, when it comes to the Geneva Accords, being "firm" lies in Vietnam's independence, unity and territorial integrity, which served as a common thread and could not be compromised. Being “flexible” means that while the final goal cannot be fully realised, it is possible to flexibly make concessions on a number of unprincipled matters.

Compared to the 8-point plan proposed by the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the ultimate results of the Geneva Conference were substantially different. However, our principled concessions made sense against the backdrop of the historical setting, especially the balance of power between Vietnam and the opposing side.

A thorough grasp of situational development

The Geneva Accords left generations of Vietnamese diplomats with a lesson on situational research, assessment, and forecast. When entering into negotiations at Geneva, due to objective and subjective reasons, we did not have sufficient multidimensional information to properly assess the intent of major powers, even our allied ones. When assessing the lessons learnt from the Geneva Accords, late Deputy Prime Minister Vu Khoan said that it was necessary to keep a close watch on the calculations, moves, and arrangements between major powers as they would significantly impact on the chess board of international politics. Meanwhile, late Senior Lieutenant General Hoang Minh Thao believed that since we entered into negotiations at a multilateral forum dominated by major powers whose intentions we were not fully aware of, the advantages gained from our military victories were not brought into full play.

During our nation’s history, the handling of relations with major powers has always been an inseparable part of Vietnamese diplomacy. Only when effectively applying President Ho Chi Minh's  “five knows” in diplomacy (namely “know yourself”, “know others”, “know the times”, “know where to stop”, “know how to adapt”) could a small nation like Vietnam survive amid intense competition for influence and interests between major powers. With the current upheavals on global and regional scales, we had better understand the importance of the work of research and forecast, particularly at strategic level.

Independence and self-reliance as the key to the revolution’s victory

Independence and self-reliance are one of the fundamental points in Ho Chi Minh’s ideology on diplomacy. He asserted: “Independence means that we can control all our activities by ourselves, without any external interventions”. It is worth noting that prior to the Geneva Conference, he said: “Armistice negotiation should be mainly between the Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the French Government”. In other words, negotiation for ending hostilities must be conducted by warring parties, without any interventions from other ones.

In fact, at the Geneva Conference, it was the first time in the history of Vietnam’s diplomacy we attended an international multilateral conference with the participation of major powers that had their own interests and intentions. Our position, strength, and diplomatic experience at that time were not good enough for us to directly negotiate with France only. Hence, our ultimate goal and military victories were not fully reflected in the Accords. After the signing of the 1954 Geneva Accords, it took 21 years for our people to achieve the goal of unifying the country with countless sacrifices. The process of negotiating, signing, and implementing the Geneva Accords allowed us to more thoroughly understand the value of independence and self-reliance as a principle in international relations. That lesson was extremely important to our negotiation process at the Paris Conference during which we better upheld the spirit of independence and self-reliance. Learning from the 1954 Geneva Accords, in the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, we directly worked with the US without any intermediaries or direct interventions from other parties.

Valuable lessons learnt from the 1954 Geneva Accords were creatively applied and developed in the process of negotiating, signing, and implementing the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and remain so in our today’s performance of diplomatic work. Since the inception of Doi Moi nearly 40 years ago, our Party has consistently pursued a foreign policy of independence and self-reliance. That consistency represents national identity, a crystallisation of our ancestors’ diplomatic traditions, and the foreign policy set by our Party and Uncle Ho.

Given rapidly changing, complex, and unpredictable global and regional situations, it remains important that we research and creatively apply the lessons from the Geneva Conference on fostering the spirit of independence and self-reliance, persistently safeguarding national interests, closely combining political activities with military and diplomatic ones, promoting internal strength, improving the country’s synergy as a firm foundation for diplomatic activities, making contributions to the tasks of building and firmly protecting the socialist Vietnamese Fatherland in the new situation.

VU HUY THANH, PhD

Ministry of Foreign Affairs