Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (33 page)

Expressive state pressure
finds an exemplar in diplomatic pressure. “Diplomacy is an instrument of governments,” Adam Watson wrote 30 years ago.
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While today it also embraces non-state actors in global corporations, INGOs, opposition movements and terrorist groups, all of these examples lie outside this statist category. Within states, diplomacy increasingly spreads beyond diplomatic corps to encompass defense, trade, environmental and other officials. Despite many changes of form and substance, diplomacy remains central to international relations, enabling states to “articulate, coordinate and secure particular or wider interests, using correspondence, private talks, exchanges of view, lobbying, visits, threats and other related activities.”
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This type requires an element of pressure because routine diplomacy, “the dialogue between states,” is not intervention at all but rather maintenance of ongoing relations between long-term dialogue partners.
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The stronger form thus becomes necessary, though to fit the category it must be non-coercive. A new dataset reported in 2009 identified 438 diplomatic interventions in 68 civil conflicts from 1945 to 1999.
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For the UN, “preventive diplomacy” is “action to prevent disputes from arising between parties, to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflicts and to limit the spread of the latter when they occur.”
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In the years since 1988, diplomatic pressure has been the major instrument used by states across Asia to try to shape political development inside Myanmar, with ASEAN, China and Japan in the lead.

Expressive civil pressure
is a diffuse category comprising discursive forms of non-state political action undertaken in spheres external to the target jurisdiction. Letter-writing and internet campaigns, protest marches, and other events designed to raise political consciousness and increase pressure on target regimes all feature. Today, AI and HRW are the leading human rights INGOs, with AI notably adept at humanitarian pressure. Other INGOs engaging in direct aid provision also undertake such mobilization, with MSF a prime example. Some headline global issues generate their own protest groups and activity. Since 1988, Myanmar has been a major target of this form of intervention, with ongoing military control generating considerable concern among established INGOs, and also spawning single-issue protest groups around the world.

Consensual state engagement
is also a broad category, for states can take discursive cross-border action in many ways. Visible recent instances are peacekeeping operations closely associated with the UN, which sends blue helmets on missions mainly to monitor ceasefires.
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“Peace-keeping,” Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali claimed in 1992, “can rightly be called the invention of the United Nations.”
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However, a UN mandate is not required. Rather, what is needed is consent, “the first principle of all peacekeeping” and the basis for its separation from peacemaking.
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Critically important in debate about humanitarian intervention between established western powers and rising China, this distinction ensures that peace operations appear in two parts of this typology.
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Beyond peacekeeping, states can directly provide many forms of development aid to distressed societies and thereby influence their domestic politics. Today, UN relief agencies, the EU’s humanitarian aid office, the US Agency for International Development and similar state bodies make direct inputs to countries all over the world. In Myanmar, post-Nargis work undertaken with ASEAN and UN involvement falls into this category.

Consensual civil engagement
can be launched by many actors and institutions in global civil society. Major corporations are, for instance, increasingly significant forces in international politics.
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However, the main agencies in this sphere are INGOs, which commonly engage in cross-border provision of goods such as food, water and clothing, and services such as medical care, shelter and education. The focus here on political forms means that new humanitarians such as MSF are especially relevant. As even formally impartial organizations like the ICRC are rarely entirely neutral though, they too come within the analytical frame. While some of these agencies receive state funding, they act in largely or wholly autonomous ways and therefore are best viewed as part of the non-state sector. Their activities stretch from reshaping discrete policy domains to building capacity in civil society and thereby having an impact on broad political development. Sometimes they embrace conflict mediation, resolution and transformation activities. As with the parallel state form, intervention within this type must have a measure of target jurisdiction consent. In Myanmar, INGO action has been increasingly visible in recent years, spanning diverse policy sectors and a small set of conflict resolution initiatives and training programs.

Aggressive state pressure
in archetypical form comprises sanctions, which can be economic or political, and can be applied by individual states or by coalitions brought together in the UN, EU and so on. In principle, embargoes can be general or directed. In practice, however, making sanctions truly “shrewd” or “smart” is inherently difficult.
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The leading analysis finds the main mode to be economic, defined as “the deliberate, government-inspired withdrawal, or threat of withdrawal, of customary trade or financial relations.”
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Typically, the sender tries to inflict costs on the target in one or more of three ways: by limiting exports, restricting imports, or impeding the flow of finance.
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While such sanctions can be traced to antiquity and in modern times formed part of the Wilsonian response to the First World War, they only came to the fore after the Second World War. Then the US emerged as the principal sanctioning power, imposing unilateral embargoes on Cuba, Iran, Libya, Vietnam and many other nations. In little more than 50 years after 1945 “Congress passed 61 pieces of sanction legislation as an expression of its disapproval of almost half of the countries of the world.”
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Multilaterally, the UN has in recent decades also become a major sanctioner. In the 1990s the organization, having previously imposed embargoes only on Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977, placed full or partial sanctions on Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Libya, Liberia, Somalia, parts of Cambodia, Haiti, parts of Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. In addition, UN member states applied unilateral, bilateral or regional economic sanctions.
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By the end of the decade, many moral and practical concerns were being raised.
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Nevertheless, in the new millennium sanctions have retained broad policy appeal.
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Additionally, a threatened referral to emergent institutions of global justice, notably the ICC formed in 2002 on the basis of 1990s experience in a number of countries, is best viewed as a form of aggressive state pressure. Ever since the 8-8-88 uprising was crushed, Myanmar has been the target of US and other sanctions on political ties, development aid and economic activity. Referring the junta to the ICC for alleged war crimes is also supported by states in the broad western camp.

Aggressive civil pressure
is an amorphous type that captures assertive political action led by non-state agents in spheres external to the target jurisdiction. Just as sanctions are the archetype for aggressive state pressure, so activist campaigns designed to have an economic impact on the target jurisdiction are prime forms of aggressive civil pressure. Boycotts of South African goods, culture and sporting events organized by the Anti-Apartheid Movement from the 1960s to the 1990s are leading examples. However, also included in this category are attacks on diplomatic compounds and expatriate nationals, and violent demonstrations against governments held to fall under the target regime’s diplomatic sway. Riotous anti-US protests in many parts of the world after the March 2003 Iraq invasion, and vehement anti-Israeli, anti-US demonstrations are all examples. In Myanmar, disengagement of leading global companies in the 1990s was driven chiefly by activist campaigns.

Belligerent state engagement
has historically taken the paradigm form of war, which looks straightforward but is actually complex. A classic definition from 1952 holds war to be “a contention between two or more States through their armed forces, for the purpose of overpowering each other and imposing such conditions of peace as the victor pleases.” Against this, Yoram Dinstein holds that only making war something states do is acceptable “with no demur.”
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This element is also questionable, however, as cases such as Spain in the 1930s and Yugoslavia in the 1990s quickly demonstrate. In practice, some civil movements are now treated as if they were states for the purposes of international law. Equally, some inter-state hostilities, such as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the early years of the Iran-Iraq conflict in the 1980s, and various US “police actions” during the Cold War, are usually regarded not as war, but merely as armed conflict because no formal cessation of diplomatic relations takes place.
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For this analysis, though, the latter refinement is irrelevant, and Michael Howard’s definition of war can stand: “all armed conflict between political entities, whether or not these are or claim to be recognised as sovereign states.”
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In the 1990s, the creative form of peace operations known as peacemaking became another instance of this type of cross-border engagement.
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While the objectives are markedly different, the mode of intervention is similar in being both military and hostile to the target jurisdiction’s political agenda.
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In the past quarter-century Myanmar has not been subject to belligerent state engagement.

Belligerent civil engagement
is most prominently represented by cross-border terrorism, currently the dominant mode of assertive non-state political action. Modes of coercive non-state action such as banditry and racketeering that operate across frontiers but are apolitical are not captured here. In this category the clearest instance is the September 11, 2001 strikes on US targets, with the 1993 New York World Trade Center bombing a further example. Both can be said to mark a switch from old terrorism, wanting “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” to new terrorism, seeking “a lot of people watching and a lot of people dead.”
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However, the type is not confined to new forms, as many earlier variants also worked across borders in pursuit of political change. Less visible forms of this mode of engagement are assertive acts undertaken by foreign corporations and INGOs that run counter to the target’s political agenda. Since the late 1980s Myanmar has not experienced any significant measure of belligerent civil engagement.

Even when attention is restricted to political forms, intervention is conducted by a broad range of actors and a large number of agencies in a wide variety of ways. The typology presented here orders the diversity of current interventionist experience, though the eight types remain somewhat complex and fluid. In a very loose way, the distinct modes can be viewed as parallel ladders of intervention in the state and non-state sectors. The analogy is not exact, for there are two different possibilities of escalation: from discursive to assertive, and from external to internal. Nevertheless, the notion of parallel ladders can be taken as a rough way of visualizing the eight interventionist types.

Justifying intervention

Once intervention has been sorted and classified, attention can turn to determining when it is permitted or even mandated. In many analyses, such issues are examined only at the most assertive end of the spectrum, above all when war is on the agenda. Then there is considerable interest in underlying rationales and justifications. However, it is not only at the extreme that matters of this kind come into play. Rather, if the notions of communal borders, integrity and sovereignty that infuse intervention with meaning are taken seriously, as they are not only by all communitarians but also by many cosmopolitans, then any attempt to shape politics across an acknowledged frontier must be fully justified.
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The requirement is therefore to devise a procedure for ethical analysis that can be used at any point in the broad span of interventionist types.