From Thwarted Ambitions to Strategic Convergence: Fifty Years of Euro–Vietnamese Relations[Des ambitions contrariées à la convergence stratégique : 50 ans de relations euro-vietnamiennes]

Inspired by the Helsinki spirit, the EEC sought to "export détente" to Southeast Asia: it granted the reunified Việt Nam a hybrid trade regime, channelled food aid, and launched the first technical projects under DG VIII. Pragmatic Việt Nam courted this opening to avoid exclusive dependence on Moscow. The Third Indochina War marked the beginning of the end. Aligning with Washington, Beijing, ASEAN, and London, the European Council suspended development assistance in 1979. Subsequent debates turned the Vietnam dossier into a laboratory for testing conditionality, solidarity, and competence-sharing. Hà Nội, meanwhile, leveraged European interlocutors to mitigate its isolation while prosecuting the Cambodian war, a move that prefigured the Đổi Mới reforms of the late 1980s. The belated establishment of official relations in 1990 thus reflected a double reconfiguration: the Community learned to manage a socialist partner "outside the bloc" and Việt Nam confirmed its diversification strategy. From 1991 onward, the relationship shifted scale. The Cooperation Framework Agreement (1995), the inaugural ASEM summit (1996), and the establishment of an EU Delegation in Hà Nội solidified the partnership within post-Cold War multilateralism. While Việt Nam joined ASEAN and normalised ties with Washington, the Union crafted an Asia strategy (1994), an Indo-Pacific strategy (2021), and the Global Gateway; it concluded a PCA (2016), the EVFTA (2020), and a Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) in 2022. These instruments reveal how Brussels blends market access, normative diffusion, and security projection—yet also underscore the prerequisite of enhanced internal competitiveness, as highlighted by the recent Letta and Draghi reports. The trajectory thus runs from quickly frustrated ambitions to a still-incomplete strategic convergence. Once peripheral, Việt Nam has become a testing ground for Europe's normative power, while the EU offers Hà Nội a vital balancing lever between Beijing and Washington. Tracing this intertwined path shows how an initial "non-issue" ultimately shaped the Union's external profile and Việt Nam's international insertion.