Vietnam in centre-periphery relationship viewed from the theory of cultural-social space

Tóm tắt

In today globalized world, cultural-social space has one more very important feature, that is the interregional relation. Countries may construct the cultural-social space beyond their own ecological space. Some scientists said about the phenomenon of “freedom from China”, or “de-sinolization”, of Japan and South Korea. The others said about this phenomenon as the “freedom from the centre” for the sake of development. But in author’s opinion, there is the problem of “choice of centre” and not that of  “freedom from the centre” nor “negation of centre”. Japan and South Korea have re-chosen the centre by leaving the old centre for a new and more advanced one that is the Occident, establishing a cultural-social interregional space. By that way, they both have developed to be free from peripheral status and become the new centres of the region and even of the world.

In the relations of Vietnam with East Asia, Vietnam should not see China as the unique centre which would afford to satisfy its requirements of development. The development successes of Japan and South Korea show that one country can choose several centres in order to exploit every advanced condition for development. Vietnam already has the policy of multilateralism of international relations. But if these multilateral relations are in equal level, then the cooperation will spread like rambling, not being able to take full advantage of strong points of some world leading centres. In this spirit, Vietnam may yet take full advantage of positive resources of China, but it also should choose more other centres for partnership. We - the Vietnamese - must put the centre-periphery relation forward as the priority relation and not multilateralizing equally the international relations. Today, centre-periphery relation is the relation of those in cultural-social space of the globalized world, being beyond the ecological space. It requires us to change the traditional view about a closed three-dimensional cultural-social space. This is the sens of the problem of choosing the centre in globalized world that requires us to be aware of, if we don’t want to lag behind in peripheral status.