Frankfurt Book Fair and the two Vietnams

After the Second World War, Germany was split into four parts (think Caesar and Gaul plus one). Three were occupied by Western countries—Britain in the North, France in the two South West areas, and the USA in the Centre and South—while the Eastern sector became part of the USSR.

With the collapse of Soviet power in the late 1980s, East Germany was reunited with West Germany, and able to enjoy a new sense of itself as no longer dispossessed.

Huge economic benefits flowed its way, to right the former imbalance, and once depressed cities like Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz were able to thrive again. But the Eastern sector seems never to have got over the sense of itself as different, resenting its more prosperous sibling, and needing to validate rather than regret its 45 years in the wilderness.

That wish for validation has manifested itself in a continued warmth for Russia (and now Putin) and an opposition to some aspects of Westernism, especially where Westernism seemed to be an American expansionist project.

Like its former masters in Moscow, the once-Communist East became increasingly illiberal, expressing this illiberalism in rightwing language. This rift seemed set to split the country again, except that one aspect of it—extreme hostility to immigration—has now crossed the border and, manipulated by the AFD (in turn sponsored by Russia), is starting to become popular in what had been Western Germany too.

What happens when a country splits in two? Can it ever heal? Looking at the two Vietnam pavilions at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair—one based in Hanoi, the other in Saigon—I could not help but wonder whether Vietnam’s experience came anywhere near to that of Germany.

There were the two stands, side by side, equally deserted, with the government staff in each of them barely capable of recognising the existence of the other.

Vietnam still has a real north–south divide, rooted in the fact that North and South Vietnam were warring states from 1954 to 1975 with very different political and economic systems, and ideologically opposed geopolitical backers.

Now united under communism—the opposite of Germany—regional identity remains important, and distinct northern, southern and central networks remain. The government is said to take geographical balance into account when distributing senior posts but it does not translate into equity. Northern and north-central cadres are heavily over-represented in the Communist Party’s Central Committee, making up about 73% of full members after the 2026 Party Congress, compared with 27% from the South.

This is not the same as Germany’s east–west divide. Vietnam does not have open electoral competition in which a former North and former South can express sharply different voting patterns, nor does it have two clearly opposed regional political cultures visible through party support. The one-party system makes such differences harder to see.

There are nevertheless lingering historical differences. The South had a much shorter experience of full communist economic organisation before the Đổi Mới reforms began in 1986, and greater distance from Hanoi appears to be synonymous with greater comfort with a market economy. 

That does not mean that a simple picture of “communist North versus anti-communist South” persists unchanged into the present, however. The situation is more nuanced.

There are also important generational effects. People born after reunification, and especially those born after Đổi Mới, generally relate to the old division far less directly than their parents or grandparents did. Contemporary political tensions among younger Vietnamese tend to concern issues such as corruption, land, censorship, surveillance, opportunity and the limits of dissent rather than allegiance to the former North or South.

So it would seem that Vietnam still has meaningful north–south differences in political networks, historical memory and economic culture, but not a German-style regional political fault line expressed through radically different electoral behaviour. The old division survives more as background, institutional imbalance and family memory than as two openly competing political blocs.

As for its publishing industry—always an indicator of cultural vitality—forget it.