Hi; I'm currently researching the Paris Peace Accords for my homework and, according to this wikipedia article, two of the aims were to:
allow the South Vietnamese people to "decide themselves the political future of South Viet-Nam through genuinely free and democratic general elections under international supervision."
Reunification of Vietnam was to be "carried out step by step through peaceful means".
The two seem quite contradictory, unless I'm missing something here. Thanks :)
The main goal was reconciling with China:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nixon_visit_to_China
Everything else was lip service.
And "democratic South Vietnam" is very misleading.
South Vietnam was, at that time, the most democratic in Asia. No where else in the region could the press ran headlines calling the Prime Minister fertilizer(the same word for sh* in Vietnamese) eater, for allegedly embezzlements of fertiliser.
Sure it was nowhere as "democratic" as in the West. But one should keep in mind that Japan was pretty much a one-party-state from 1955 to 1995, patronized by the US. And I don't think politicians there "ate" fertilizer, I mean on the headlines.
One of the main aim of the Paris Peace Accords was to give, as Henry Kissinger puts it, a "decent interval" (listen to the recording of the conversation between Kissinger and Nixon here: http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/nixon-kissinger-and-the-decent-interval) between the US troop withdraw and the fall of the Saigon regime so it's less politically damaging.
Absolutely nobody expected the peace to be carried out in a meaningful way, it's a bare admission of American defeat dressed up enough so that defeat wasn't obvious until 1975.