Democracy and Vietnam: Visceral perspectives

This commentary considers proceedings from the workshop, "Can the Case be Made for Asian Democratic Theory or Practice?: Local Asian Perspectives," held in Hanoi in February 2015. Particular attention is paid to the presentations of the two presiding professors, Pham Quang Minh and John Keane, both of whom argued that the Asian democracies of the twenty-first century would and should depart from the Western liberal democratic models of the late twentieth century. They also assuaged some of the visceral sentiments and tensions between the author (a boatperson who fled the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1979) and the local workshop participants (who were avid Vietnamese socialists).