Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (31 page)

Although most of these proposals operate at some distance from current political reality in the UN Security Council and elsewhere, their practical implications are worth probing for they would drastically reshape Myanmar’s position in the global system and considerably extend foreign involvement with the country. Looking beyond high-level reform of international institutions to measures likely to impact on the ground, Caney’s UN volunteer force would be deployed to address a lengthy action agenda designed to enhance civil and political rights. Alongside it would be persons from religious groups, professions, corporations and INGOs championed by O’Neill in the name of justice. Together, these agents would be charged with reshaping Myanmar in line with contemporary human rights norms. An array of cosmopolitan theorists would fully support their engagement.

On the communitarian side there is widespread agreement that the notion of universal justice can sometimes justify cross-border action. Walzer concedes that border violations are permissible when there is evidence of “acts that shock the conscience of humankind,” though he expects this to happen only rarely.
⁷²
“The common brutalities of authoritarian politics, the daily oppressiveness of traditional social practices—these are not occasions for intervention.”
⁷³
Nevertheless, many possibilities remain: massacre, ethnic cleansing, slave labor, famine and malnutrition, and maybe even pandemic disease.
⁷⁴
At a lower level of abuse, he allows for coercive measures falling short of force, such as economic sanctions, since they “still assume the value, and hold open the possibility, of domestic politics.”
⁷⁵
In this way, though starting from premises making it very difficult for outsiders to interfere with the politics of a community they played no part in shaping and can never fully comprehend, Walzer endorses most of the military intervention witnessed globally in the past 20 years or so. In 2007 he wrote that the list he was prepared to accept was “more or less actual in many parts of the world.”
⁷⁶

David Miller similarly recognizes that obligations of cross-border justice arise when fundamental rights go unprotected: “the global minimum that people everywhere can claim as a matter of justice … is … respect and protection for their basic human rights.”
⁷⁷
He focuses particularly on core material needs: “only certain rights-violations are urgent enough to trigger remedial responsibilities in outsiders: being denied material subsistence triggers such responsibilities, whereas being denied equal participation in politics does not.”
⁷⁸
He also acknowledges two limits to national responsibility, each of which could justify foreign engagement. First, “where nations are subject to external or to autocratic rule, it is usually difficult to identify acts undertaken by individual members or by the state as genuinely national acts, and so it becomes inappropriate to spread responsibility for those acts throughout the population in question.” Second, “where cultural divisions run deep, we may decide that talk of a single nation … is out of place.”
⁷⁹

Finally, late in life Rawls looked beyond closed systems to consider how just rules might be set globally. Taking a non-cosmopolitan, non-communitarian approach focused on liberal peoples with domestic contracts, he devised a world system of bounded justice.
⁸⁰
Rawls first stands firm against Beitz and others: there can be no global analogue of the original position. Instead, he posits a second-stage position in which representatives of liberal societies, again ignorant of specifics, meet to agree laws to govern the interactions of peoples. He contends that they will consent to a contract with eight principles designed to entrench political independence, civil liberties and the self-respect of a people, and to generate a duty of assistance toward peoples in need.
⁸¹
Next he acknowledges that liberalism cannot reasonably be expected of all peoples, and argues that the principle of toleration will prompt respect for decent hierarchical peoples who uphold basic human rights but do not acknowledge all of the equal political rights that characterize liberal democracy. Liberal and decent peoples will come together as well-ordered peoples, but will exclude three types of not well-ordered peoples: outlaw states prone to belligerence, burdened societies prevented by historical factors from becoming well-ordered societies, and benevolent absolutisms that deny their citizens a political voice.
⁸²
He holds that well-ordered peoples will establish institutions and practices to guide their relations with non-well-ordered regimes, and especially with outlaw states and burdened societies. Toward outlaw states, they may direct public exposure and pressure, economic and other sanctions, and even armed intervention.
⁸³
Toward burdened societies, they have a duty of assistance to help develop just institutions, rights-based political cultures and self-government.
⁸⁴

Even communitarians and those close to them in debates about universal justice thus encounter few problems in justifying positive, imperfect, general duties of engagement with Myanmar. Walzer, who insists on respect for communal integrity and limits on cross-border knowledge, draws up a long list of permissible and maybe required foreign action, though whether any or all of them apply to Myanmar is an open question. In the country’s recent history, the most plausible causes look to be massacre, military targeting of ethnic nationalities, and forced labor. Miller, who stresses national responsibility, presents a list focused on basic material needs and suggests that arguments about indigenous national responsibility may not apply fully in Myanmar because of its autocratic regime and deep ethnic faultlines. Rawls, who builds on the contractarianism of the domestic original position, sees only limited scope for external involvement in all but a small range of circumstances. Broadly, however, Myanmar falls within that range, generating a duty of assistance as a burdened society and permitting engagement up to and including military action as an outlaw state.

On this side of the argument duties of global justice remain comparatively limited, and differences in tone are significant. Walzer stresses the importance of domestic politics, Miller prioritizes choosing agents at the local level, and Rawls insists that “well-ordered societies giving assistance must not act paternalistically, but in measured ways that do not conflict with the final aim of assistance: freedom and equality for the formerly burdened societies.”
⁸⁵
Nevertheless, communitarians agree with cosmopolitans in finding Myanmar an appropriate candidate for considerable external involvement.

Demands of justice

In the Myanmar case the demands of justice are undeniably and inevitably complex. An immensely tangled fabric of rights and duties has to be unpicked, and much of it stretches far beyond the country’s borders. Some duties are perfect, identifying named persons or legal entities on both sides of the equation. Much damaging business engagement may be of this kind, with individuals in affected communities appearing as rights-bearers and foreign corporations engaged in exploitative practices featuring as duty-bearers. However, the isolation decreed for Burma by Ne Win after 1962 and the ringfence of sanctions imposed on Myanmar by the US and its allies after 1988 jointly ensured that transnational interactions became quite restricted. The result is that most duties are imperfect, owed to no one person or set of persons and demanding performance of nobody in particular. This is clearly the case with all general duties of universal justice. It is certainly also the case with most special duties of historical injustice, which do little more than distinguish broadly harmful impacts of decisions and actions taken or not taken by outsiders. In these circumstances, contemporary debate about global justice becomes centrally relevant.

Starting from a premise of positive rights vested in all members of international society and progressing from there to contest territorial boundaries blocking their realization, many cosmopolitans readily construct an argument for external action. Diverse individuals are authorized to enter the country and work for justice. Looking to functioning political communities held together by Burkean ties and moving from there to insist they be accorded respect and collective responsibilty, communitarians are nevertheless also able to build a case for external engagement through specific provisions applying in this case. The political community prioritized by Walzer is fragmented and the nation to which Miller appeals is fractured and beaten down by authoritarianism. Again, then, outsiders can go into the country to promote justice, though there is a clear sense that their action will be more limited, designed only to remove constraints on the proper functioning of domestic politics. Standing aside from both camps, but closer in this debate to communitarians than cosmopolitans, Rawlsians readily sign up for external engagement since the state is outlaw. Positive, imperfect, general duties are rapidly mandated on all sides.

Doubts however remain. Even in this case that seems to tick all the right boxes for all the right analysts, the notion of positive duties up to and including military action raises major questions. It is certainly hard to square such an aggressive mandate with Asian values that applaud communal harmony, prioritize economic development as the great social solvent, and work from there to repudiate cross-border involvement of almost any kind. Clearly no single set of precepts spans the whole of Asia, and at least some regional thought declines to rule out foreign engagement in all circumstances.
⁸⁶
Undoubtedly, values of social harmony and sovereign integrity are more contested than elite figures such as Lee Kuan Yew and Mahathir Mohamad might think.
⁸⁷
Nevertheless, the point made by Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell in 1999 remains valid: these sorts of claims are “met by receptive audiences throughout the region.”
⁸⁸
Indeed, the principle of non-intervention has always been the cornerstone of foreign policy in ASEAN, to which Myanmar was admitted in 1997.
⁸⁹

Against this it could be argued that in practice Myanmar’s military rulers have not delivered on their side of the implicit bargain, for both communal harmony and economic development are far below desired levels. For this reason, external engagement with the country’s politics is permissible, and even among Asian states has been witnessed to some extent in recent years.
⁹⁰
Nevertheless, at a time when no state within 4,000 miles is prepared to impose economic sanctions on Myanmar, and when regional leaders such as China and India find no basis for visible involvement in its domestic affairs, it is difficult to see how yet more aggressive forms of foreign engagement mandated by notions of global justice could get off the ground.
⁹¹
While communitarians are clearly likely to come closer to much Asian thinking than cosmopolitans, there is still a great divide.

That there should be doubts of this kind is all the more remarkable when Myanmar in many ways looks incapable of creating the conditions necessary for functioning domestic politics and operative national responsibility. It is on this basis that communitarians are able to endorse external action. Yet even in this case the demands of communal integrity remain at least as important as those of global justice. Partly this is because Myanmar has a still recent history of foreign dominion, exercised both by the British over many decades, and by the Japanese over just a few years. In the end neither experience turned out well, and neither features positively in the collective memory. Partly it is because in the years since 1988 the country has been targeted in many ways by foreigners, and none of this action has registered demonstrable success. Partly it is because a potent aspect of local culture, stoked by imperialist intrusions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and by ineffectual foreign sanctions and embargoes more recently, is a belief that people must be allowed to fashion their own destiny. In 1958, Cady paraphrased an evaluation reached half a century earlier by Fielding-Hall. Under the British, the Burman “lost his pride of being a Burman; he resented being lectured about the West, being told to learn new things and to forget his traditional ways.”
⁹²
In 1976, he wrote of “the population’s deep-seated assumption of prideful superiority.”
⁹³
Such feelings remain prevalent.

In authoritarian minds beliefs of this kind assume perverse and extreme forms, as in this 1991 remark by a SLORC leader: “There is no other race that can love you except your own … foreigners can never love you. … They love us just to exploit us and because they want our natural resources.”
⁹⁴
Even in routine comments made by ethnic nationality people who have suffered most at the hands of Bamar xenophobes, however, the demand for local citizens to control their future is clear. In interviews conducted in 2009, the broad message was that foreigners could help local people in many ways. An important parallel theme, though, was that they should not be arrogant in delivering assistance. This is how an older Rakhine female INGO worker put it: “‘International experts’ should not belittle us. Don’t come with the attitude that Myanmar people are stupid or don’t know anything … When you come don’t think we don’t know anything. There are some things we don’t know, but there are things they don’t know.”
⁹⁵
Pye’s take on this cultural dimension is that when Europeans imposed nation-states on the region in the nineteenth century, Asians responded by developing a powerful form of nationalism based on paternalistic authority.
⁹⁶
While the result may not be a full Millian drive for liberal freedom, there remains a strong preference for local autonomy. In Burma, this was publicly displayed in the late 1940s, and embodied above all in the person of Aung San. In the democratic interlude of the long 1950s it fed skepticism about foreign entanglements and for decades made Burma the quintessential nonaligned nation.
⁹⁷
In the 1960s it was taken to extreme lengths by Ne Win’s autarky. After 1988, it saw the military elite fully confirm Pye’s analysis.