Vietnam's role in twentieth century history

Vietnam in the 20th Century

In the year 2012, the country of Vietnam is a united nation which has a Communist government and a people who are predominantly poor. Before this time, Vietnam went through centuries of turmoil up until the war between Vietnam and the United States wherein North and South Vietnam became a single country. What began the process of dividing Vietnam and isolating its people was the colonization of Vietnam by the French government. According to historian Peter Stearns (2008): "History must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings." In a study of the country of Vietnam, it is important to understand the nation's history and events which may have impacted that country's current psychological and sociological makeup.

Everything that happens in the past will have a direct relation on the rest of the events that occur in any given time or place. "The past causes the present, and so the future" (Stearns 2008). Thus, the events that occurred in Vietnam in the time before the present moment have led directly to the way the country is organized and governed now. Vietnam was taken over by France and became a colony of the European nation. Historically, it has been shown that colonized nations become psychologically oppressed by the empirical country. This has a direct relationship with the fact that they people were sociologically oppressed by the dominant country. Instead of having an individual identity as a nation, the country was instead just a part of the larger France which then gave a notion to superiority and inferiority to the relationship between colonizer and the colonized (Meyers 2011). Thus, this period in Vietnam's history is particularly important in garnering an understanding of the subsequent actions of the country and of revolutionaries like Ho Chi Minh.

History is the primary way that a nation's citizenship formulates identity. Individual people create this singular identity by showing their personality and the ways that they react to events in their lives. So, each person is the sum of their life's history. This is the same way that a country's history creates the nation's identity. When a nation identifies itself as a culture, that identification is the culmination of the events that have occurred in that country and with that nation's international relationships. Colonization has broken down all over the world in the last century. What invariably happens is the colonized people unite against their oppressors and demand their independence and the right to govern themselves. In the case of Vietnam, following the French colonization, the United States became involved in the warfare with Vietnam. When both these outsider nations were unable to continue battling in the small Asian country, Vietnam was able to demand its own sovereignty and to create a government system of their choosing.