Introduction
In the late 20th century, many commentators assumed that communism, and autocracy in general, were destined to fade away as the citizens of developing countries became more prosperous and educated (Lipset, 1959) and gradually came to accept liberal democracy as the
ultimate form of government (Fukuyama, 1989). However, recent democratic backsliding worldwide has created renewed interest in analyzing the persistence and nature of authoritarianism in various states. Commentators such as Nathan (2003) have begun to identify possible reasons for the longevity of certain autocratic regimes, including robust institutional structures, input institutions, and carefully controlled ‘civil society organizations’ which create the illusion of independent public participation in governance as well as the co-optation of large swathes of the population in fundamental areas of everyday life such as education, employment, and religion.

Vietnam and Cambodia present interesting cases for comparison. The two nations share a history of French colonialism and extensive pre-colonial cultural interactions and exchange, particularly through the Khmer culture and sister civilizations such as the Cham empire, which dominated Southeast Asia until the 15th Century. Following the Cambodian Genocide in the 1970s, the country even came under direct Vietnamese rule for a brief period. Both are controlled by authoritarian regimes (Freedom House, 2024) but with strikingly different features. Vietnam is an overtly communist autocratic state, with Marxist-Leninist ideology being explicitly promoted by the government to support its legitimacy. Cambodia, however, is a more ambiguous case whose status as a communist nation can be contested (Vu, 2023), meeting many of the criteria put forward by Levitsky and Way (2002) as characteristic of a competitive authoritarian regime (rather than an autocratic one). For example, since the UN-brokered peace deal came into effect in 1993, Cambodia has continued to hold ostensibly democratic elections where the transfer of power away from the ruling Cambodian People’s Party is theoretically possible. There are also significant cultural and historical differences between the two, which I argue has also helped shape the modern Vietnamese and Cambodian states. In the following sections, I analyze the reasons why Cambodia has developed a less robust state bureaucracy than Vietnam in light of theoretical propositions regarding the persistence of authoritarianism and authoritarian state building resulting in less successful co-optation in different contexts by the Cambodian state. Moreover, the strong ideological foundation built by the Communist Party of Vietnam has been more successful than its Cambodian counterpart in integrating elements of traditional culture to create a compelling nationalist narrative.

Party Development, Ideology and Varieties of Nationalism
The Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) developed from a revolutionary political movement which sought to challenge French colonial power and embodied a strong nationalistic element providing the party legitimacy from its outset. Furthermore, membership has always been open to a relatively wide pool of people from differing backgrounds, with a membership of 430,000 by 1949. In subsequent years, whilst property and factories were nationalized - with rural landlords, amounting to roughly 0.1% of the total population, being dispossessed and executed in the process - the party state supplanted rather than dismantled traditional Confucian power structures at the village level by creating local branches in most small villages and urban neighborhoods (known as ‘communes’) in Vietnam (Vu, 2014). In recent years, as Marxism has decreased in global legitimacy, the Vietnamese government has gradually made its focus on national identity and individual national heroes more explicit (Vu, 2007). For instance, this has manifested in shifting the focus of propaganda related to Hồ Chí Minh less on his communist ideology and more on his role as the founder of the modern Vietnamese nation (Vu, 2023).

Cambodian political history has been more complex. During the French colonial period, King Sihanouk remained on the throne, and traditional Khmer elites continued to dominate the countryside. Following the Khmer Rouge atrocities carried out in the name of communist ideology and the subsequent transitional period under the UNTAC mission, the 1993 constitution reinstated the Khmer king as the head of state. After the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) overthrew the Khmer Rouge with the help of the CPV, they played a role in the peace negotiations under the Paris Agreement and emerged as the strongest political actors following the country’s supposed transition to democracy. The CPP and Khmer Monarchy now work closely together to maintain joint control of the country.

Co-opting Belief: Buddhism and Confucianism
Howe (2021) argues that the pre-existing Confucian tradition in Vietnam, absent in Cambodian culture, emphasizes respect for existing institutionalized authorities, including the pre-modern nation state. This has enabled Vietnam to co-opt organized religion in the same way as it did local political structures to prevent social organization activity outside the extensive party apparatus. Following the end of the Vietnam War, the CPV began a focused campaign to purge and repress existing Buddhist organizations such as orphanages and pagodas. Significantly, rather than leaving a vacuum in their place, it immediately created its own institution -the Vietnamese Buddhist Church under the auspices of the Department of Religion and the Politburo. The motivation for this move was made explicit when the Vietnamese National Buddhist Association adopted the slogan ‘Dhamma, Nation and Socialism’ in 1980’ (Howe, 2021, p.399). The substitution of such ‘government organized non-governmental organizations’ (Pei, 2014, p.10) for genuine civil society groups, especially in contentious areas of social life such as religion, can play a key part in authoritarian resilience (Nathan, 2003).

Meanwhile, Buddhism was brutally repressed in Cambodia during much of the Khmer Rouge period and subsequently controlled by the Vietnamese occupying forces following their invasion. The Vietnamese instituted re-education programs and promoted their own nominee to the top of the Buddhist hierarchy, causing it to be viewed with some suspicion by the Cambodian population (Howe, 2021). Following the Vietnamese withdrawal, Hun Sen and his officials began to publicly patronize Buddhist ideology and reopen existing Buddhist schools and temples. Co-optation, however, has mainly been of the form which ensures the personal political subservience of prominent individual monks to serve the interests of the elite and repression of those who protest the regime’s repressive tactics. One example was a crackdown on young monks protesting fraud in the 1998 elections (Howe, 2021). These more personalized, strongman-style tactics, coupled with weak attempts to exert control over existing institutions rather than building new ones, represents a less sophisticated and effective form of co-optation of organized religion.

Higher Education: The Effects of Ideology, Bureaucracy and Historical Legacy within the academy
The first recognizably modern institutions of higher education were established in Cambodia prior to the Khmer Rouge period and, as in Vietnam, were heavily modelled on the French system, with the additional influence of the Cambodian monarchy. Due to the wholesale massacre of students and staff during the Khmer Rouge period, much of the accumulated expertise of these institutions was lost. These institutions were later revived by cadres of Soviet Academics under Vietnamese control and remained the only venues for higher education in the country until 1997 when private universities were introduced.

A key and surprising feature of public higher education in Cambodia is decentralized control - the above listed universities operate under the auspices of various government ministries rather than the Ministry of Education itself (Keng et al., 2014). This stands in sharp contrast to the situation in Vietnam, where the Ministry of Education and Training holds a tight grip on the system, with the party’s institutionalized ideological influence extending into higher education and high-level academics and administrators traditionally coming from top ranks in the CPV. The law also makes explicit reference to ‘Marxism-Leninism and Hồ Chí Minh thought’ (St George, 2011, p. 219) as one of the core purposes of higher education in the country.

Employment: The state in everyday life
The CPV’s early institutionalization and expansion in Vietnam has formed the basis for its continued co-optation of large swathes of the population through employment; one in six Vietnamese are presently employed by the state (Vu, 2014). Nathan (2003) suggests that widespread party membership and co-opting large sections of the middle class into the bureaucracy may inoculate an authoritarian communist society against Lipset’s (1959) prediction that an increasingly prosperous, educated middle class would inevitably rebel against a country’s autocratic regime. By contrast, in 2004 only 20% of Cambodians were in salaried employment and only about a fifth of them worked in the public sector. Instead, both current employment and projected future development in Cambodia are dominated by an expanding private sector featuring tourism and garment production as the most prominent industries (International Labour Organization, 2007). Additionally, Duong (2023) argues that Vietnam’s civil service is meritocratic by design and has become increasingly so since the economic liberalization process of đỏi mới began in 1986. Any potential weakening of ideological authority stemming from decreasing adherence to communist economic principles may have been offset by Pei’s (2021) observation that autocratic regimes built on strong bureaucracies functioning within meritocratic autonomy often strengthen their hold during periods of economic growth.


Conclusion
This paper has analyzed the differences in the structure of the Vietnamese and Cambodian regimes, arguing that the nature of the CPV’s early development and institutionalization in Vietnam created a regime with more stable structures and has successfully co-opted organizations across levels of society. This is largely due to the fact that a single communist party has held power in Vietnam since the end of the colonial period, whereas various regimes have held sway in Cambodia. In particular, the communist Khmer Rouge opted to destroy existing social organizations rather than co-opting them. Consequently, covert societal pressure can be more effectively wielded by the CPV today, while comparatively weaker structures in Cambodia make overt repression through state violence a more common tool for the CPP.

Furthermore, the ideological co-optation of institutions has been much more complete and longer lasting in Vietnam. Even as Marxism-Leninism declines in legitimacy, Vietnam is successfully managing the gradual transition to a more explicitly nationalist narrative. While the CPP also trades Khmer exceptionalism and the support of the monarchy where it can (Noren-Nilsson, 2022), it can be argued that because the party has not had the same opportunity to develop a continued, compelling ideological narrative, the regime has been less effective in wielding such power to support its own legitimacy. This provides an interesting case study of the reasons for the variety of different autocratic regimes which persist into the modern era. 

Editor: Shan Hei Anna Ting

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