Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (29 page)

For this analysis, what is critical about the international humanitarian order is its transparent political ambition to engage with cross-border issues of justice, to address not merely local symptoms but also both local and global causes. While humanitarianism often conjures notions of emergency response to disaster, the new order extends well beyond that in being neither restricted to crisis situations nor simply focused on catastrophe.
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In place of misfortune it finds injustice.
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In place of humanitarian gestures it puts duties of justice. Moreover, in overseeing this transformation and endorsing a principled commitment to abrogating state sovereignty in pursuit of justice, the UN has sponsored an evolution in understandings of a key principle of international society. What was once “sovereignty as authority,” implying control over territory, is now increasingly “sovereignty as responsibility,” mandating respect for human rights.
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The shift, far from complete but certainly visible, is driven by emergent conceptions of global justice.

Faced with these profound systemic changes, the challenge for the analysts of social justice in domestic settings who largely dominated political philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s was to develop ways of dealing with wider demands.
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How could they handle the justice claims of Singer’s “Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away?”
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How, in the context of the Myanmar case, might they respond to the plight of individuals living in the state next to Bangladesh, equally unknown to most global theorists, and equally distant from their main bases of activity?

One response was to dispense with the focus on the local. In cosmopolitan accounts, the entire world is treated as a single place, a kind of global village in which borders have limited or zero salience for issues of justice. Thomas Pogge writes that “The central idea of moral cosmopolitanism is that every human being has a global stature as an ultimate unit of moral concern.”
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Once the individual is established as the key category, other matters such as race, nationality, citizenship, and so on become strictly secondary. Onora O’Neill explains why frontiers cannot be accorded priority: “When boundaries are taken wholly seriously … transnational justice is not just played down but largely wiped off the ethical map.”
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In
Political Theory and International Relations
(1979), Charles R. Beitz thus countered Rawls by allowing the original position to embrace the whole of humanity and trigger global redistribution.
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Henry Shue in
Basic Rights
(1980) and O’Neill in
Faces of Hunger
(1986) reached similar conclusions.
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Against this, a competing response was to insist that political spaces marked by historically contingent frontiers remain key sites for justice. In this sphere Simon Caney identifies first realism with its fixation on states wedded to the national interest fighting things out in a lawless world, second the society-of-states English School focused on an “anarchical society” at the international level, and third nationalist analyses looking not to states but rather to nations as critical units in world politics.
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However, the key distinction is frequently binary. In opposition to cosmopolitan accounts seeking at least a measure of universal justice are broadly communitarian accounts promoting diverse forms of bounded justice in states, nations or political communities.
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On this latter side of debate, a Burkean approach focuses on a metaphorical contract generated by fine-grained local attachments holding people together through time and space. For Walzer, the communal integrity central to this line of thinking “derives its moral and political force from the rights of contemporary men and women to live as members of a historic community and to express their inherited culture through political forms worked out among themselves.”
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While this is therefore an argument about self-government, it also points to restricted possibilities for cross-border understanding. The state, Walzer argues, is a union of people and government. “Foreigners are in no position to deny the reality of that union … They don’t know enough about its history, and they have no direct experience, and can form no concrete judgments, of the conflicts and harmonies, the historical choices and cultural affinities, the loyalties and resentments, that underlie it.”
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The result is that outsiders have no alternative but to assume that there exists “a certain ‘fit’ between the community and its government … This presumption is simply the respect that foreigners owe to a historic community and to its internal life.”
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David Miller makes a parallel case on a foundation of national responsibility. A nation is a group with a common identity, a public culture, acknowledged mutual obligations, a valued ongoing existence, and an aspiration to political self-determination.
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Together, these elements generate a meaningful sense of national identity, which in turn entails a responsibility shared by every member in just the same way as beliefs, attitudes and benefits are held in common. National responsibility underpins an understanding of justice that cannot be faulted “for ignoring the special responsibilities we properly owe to our compatriots, for failing to take proper account of the value of self-determination, for insufficient sensitivity to cultural difference, and so forth.”
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Like Walzer, Miller maintains that outsiders must respect communal integrity. Even in acute situations, people grouped together in nations are not only needy, but also “choosing agents” keen to control their own lives.
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Finally, for cosmopolitans and communitarians alike the core contemporary interest is the demands of justice: not what people might want to do to help distressed individuals and societies, but rather what they must do as a duty of justice. Moreover, those duties are shaped by a series of dichotomies. While none is uncontroversial in either theory or practice, three major distinctions can be drawn. First, duties can be negative or positive. If negative, they mandate that things not be done on the principle of do no harm. If positive, they direct that things be done on the principle of actively helping the needy. Second, duties can be perfect or imperfect. If perfect, they are owed to a named person or set of named persons possessing a corresponding right against the duty-bearer. If imperfect, they are owed to no one individual or set of individuals and enable nobody to demand performance of anyone in particular. Third, duties can be special or general. If special, they are created by a verifiable historical connection. If general, their grounding has no such trace.
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In what follows, this final distinction is used to structure analysis of the Myanmar case. In the next section on historical injustice the focus is on special duties. Have foreigners visited harm on the Myanmar people that now demands rectification? In the subsequent section on universal justice, the focus is on general duties. Are there claims outsiders must deliver on purely because at least some of the injustice inside the country is intolerable in the world of the twenty-first century?

Historical injustice

For many theorists of global justice, corrective action based on thorough historical documentation has not been a central concern. Indeed, in much the same way as analysts of social justice have rarely traced Nozickian entitlements all the way back to something akin to the state of nature, so proponents of global justice have often declined to engage in a full unpicking of the past. Given recent experience in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, where deep historical claim and counter-claim have frequently provoked ideological and nationalist controversy, there is good reason for this neglect. Rather, when focused on the demands of global justice both cosmopolitans and communitarians have tended to frame analysis in general terms. Nevertheless, on each side there has been some interest in special duties produced by historical injustice. On this basis, an initial set of grounds for external engagement with Myanmar can be developed.

Among cosmopolitans, the requirements of justice are typically cast not only generally, but also positively and imperfectly. Without contesting this, however, Pogge also argues for negative, imperfect, special duties, holding that the rest of the world visits harm on the global poor in several ways. One is by conferring legitimacy on any elite able to sustain a monopoly of violence throughout (the bulk of) a designated territory. As Robert H. Jackson shows, quasi-states draw enormous benefit from
de jure
sovereignty in international society.
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Another is through vesting in all governments, no matter how generated or constituted, two important privileges: an international borrowing privilege allowing rulers to borrow extensively in the country’s name, and an international resource privilege enabling them to dispose freely of its natural resources. Still another is through global institutions such as the World Trade Organization that play into the hands of rich nations by denying market access to poor people.
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The resultant duties are special because they address specific elite decisions. They are negative, and thus notably stringent, because they require the wider world to stop making matters worse by operating a system that sustains global inequality. They are imperfect because they are owed to no particular person and enable no one to demand performance. In practical terms, they mandate broad-based global institutional reform rather than targeted remedial measures. Pogge argues notably for a Global Resources Dividend requiring all governments to share a small part of the value of any resources they use or sell, and for reforms confining global borrowing and resource privileges to democrats.
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This is a contentious agenda. One clear challenge to the restriction of key international privileges to democrats can be found in the late work of Rawls, which rejects the exclusion of governments of other well-ordered peoples such as decent non-liberal states.
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Moreover, at a very practical level, denying Beijing access to a range of standard privileges makes the proposal thoroughly unworkable for at least as long as China remains non-democratic. Pogge’s reforms are not especially vulnerable to communitarian critique, however, for none of his suggested measures mandates the assault on communal integrity frowned upon by Walzer and others, and none overly restricts the functioning of domestic politics.

While these prescriptions are not specific to any contemporary case, they are clearly relevant to Myanmar. Indeed, the point about the role of the international community in conferring
de jure
sovereignty on almost any elite able to control national territory was made by SLORC when it declined to honor the result of the 1990 general election.
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Furthermore, many activist reports testify to the generals’ penchant in the 1990s and 2000s for making ample use of the international resource privilege, and evidence of the resource curse has long been widespread.
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More controversially, economic sanctions imposed by the US and its major allies deny considerable market access to the Myanmar people. Implementation of even a small part of Pogge’s reform agenda would thus have major consequences. First, the resource tax would certainly be applicable. Second, the denial of global privileges may well come into play, for, while Asian states beg to differ, leading western states forcefully repudiate the notion that Myanmar today is in any sense democratic. Third, the entire sanctions debate would be reopened to consider whether ongoing exclusion of Myanmar citizens from much of the global market is just.

At some distance from the cosmopolitan core, though sympathetic to many of its main commitments, Richard W. Miller argues that “People in developed countries have a vast, largely unmet responsibility to help people in developing countries.”
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Through a relational account tracing a panoply of cross-border interactions, he makes a case for special duties toward the global poor that may be negative or positive, and perfect or imperfect. Central to his analysis are rights and duties created by exploitation in the transnational economy, inequity in international trade arrangements, negligence in climate harms, and imperial irresponsibility. Critical in identifying actual duties of repair are specific links and ties. In much the same way as relationships within sovereign units generate complex webs of onerous rights and duties, so transnational interactions create parallel entanglements. When relations are abusive, they trigger demanding duties to desist and repair. In this way, a case for global civic respect, trust and friendship is made.