The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has long been considered a global policy in language education. It has been borrowed and adopted by different polities across the world. However, it is still not clear why the CEFR, intended for European usage, has become a ubiquitous tool for overhauling the quality of teaching and learning English in many education contexts. In this paper, we examine the CEFR in Vietnam in order to gain an understanding about the underwritten socio-economic and political conditions, which induced the employment of this global language education framework. The paper proposes to consider the borrowing of the CEFR in Vietnam as a socially constituted phenomenon to elucidate the historical and social background of its local adoption. We argue that the Vietnamese authorities' decision to adopt the CEFR can be explicated on the basis of at least three sociocultural conditions: (1) recent changes in English language policy; (2) need for concrete economic and political innovations, and current efforts to reform higher education; and (3) the current tendency for administrators to look outwards for solutions to domestic issues in contemporary Vietnam.