By Sumit Ahlawat

That Independence Palace is now known as the Reunification Palace, and April 30 is celebrated as Reunification Day. April 30, which marked the victory of a third-world agrarian country over the US, the military superpower since the end of World War II, could have been called many things.
For instance, Vietnamese people could have remembered this day as Freedom Day, Victory Day, or Anti-Imperialism Day. However, strangely enough, they decided to call it ‘Reunification Day.
The choice was strange since ‘Reunification Day’ made no reference to the decades-long heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against imperial powers, first the French and then the US.
It made no reference to the shameful US involvement in the internal struggle of a poor, agrarian society. It made no reference to how the Vietnamese people were able to defeat and humiliate the most advanced superpower of their day through their sheer determination.
In retrospect, however, ‘Reunification Day’ seems to be the most apt choice.
Had Vietnam not managed to stay fully reunified as a united, sovereign country, it would still be dealing with a perpetual conflict, an unstable border, an unsustainable arms race, foreign military bases, and a constant threat of missiles, even nuclear war.
The Vietnamese people understood that their struggle was not just limited to defeating imperialism but ensuring that imperial powers could not partition their country through arbitrarily imposed borders.
In fact, such an arbitrarily imposed border partitioning the country would have pushed Vietnam into a never-ending arms race, a continuous low-level conflict, and a gateway for outside powers for further interference in the internal matters of the country.
In other words, the Vietnamese people understood that absolute sovereignty is not possible without taking complete control of their borders.
In hindsight, it may seem surprising how the Vietnamese could have had this foresight. However, even a cursory look at the history of imperialism and its rollback in the 20th century would show that Vietnam had more than a few basket cases, India, Palestine, Germany, and Korea, to look at and learn from their mistakes.
Imposing arbitrary borders on native societies has always been integral to modern imperialism. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish established coastal colonies in various regions of the Americas and Asia, thereby severing the connections between these coastal areas and their broader native societies.
The Portuguese colonies in Goa and Bombay, the Dutch colony in Galle (Sri Lanka), and the Spanish colonies in America come to mind.
Later on, the French and British also joined this bandwagon for colonies. However, the “Partition of Africa,” also known as the “Scramble for Africa,” at the end of the 19th century was a high point of colonialism.
Between 1880 and 1914, a handful of European colonial powers divided the continent of Africa among themselves, creating and imposing artificial borders on native societies and partitioning cultures and civilizations that had existed for centuries.
The 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, convened by Otto von Bismarck, formalized the partition of Africa. It led to a frenzy of treaties, conquests, and boundary-drawing, often disregarding African ethnic, cultural, or political realities. This partition of Africa was also a significant contributing factor to the outbreak of the First World War.
The two World Wars were essentially a struggle between the old and new emerging European colonial powers over the re-division of colonies. However, these World Wars considerably weakened the colonial powers, thereby indirectly contributing to the decolonization of the world.