Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (44 page)

If the darkest assumptions about stances and motivations of regional states are correct, possibilities for outsiders to assist Myanmar’s reformist cause are certainly reduced. A core principle of interactive intervention is that neighboring states occupy a special position. While not holding veto power over more distant actors, they are privileged because of physical proximity and close understanding of the target society. If it really is true that Asian states are strictly predatory in their approaches to Myanmar, then it will be difficult for more distant states to launch engagement strategies. However, there is little reason to endorse such negative assessments. Statements made by leading politicians from ASEAN, China, India and Japan, and action taken by them to coax Myanmar’s military rulers out of their bunker mentality and into regional society, suggest that Asian states are positioning themselves in more complex ways than the notion of pure predation would imply.
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The ideas and norms currently being diffused among them are not cynical.
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Moreover, even if the bleakest assumptions were valid, it would still be possible for non-state actors to facilitate reform, thereby changing some grassroots political realities.

In these circumstances, options for building a coordinated international approach to an issue of shared concern become very feasible. To move forward, western powers would need to embrace generalized Asian preferences for low-profile engagement. In so doing, however, they would be building on studies of past intervention showing that nation-building works best if not too ambitious and pursued in a generally supportive context.
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Equally, they would have ample opportunity to insist that any actual cross-border action took place on a clear ethical foundation. In this way, they would be able to promote considerable enhancement of aid agency action, and give a real boost to corporate social responsibility across Asia. They could also use the opportunity to reflect on the kinds of external engagement they themselves wish to promote. For many observers of Myanmar’s still highly distinctive local cultures, this would preferably not be insensitive inward investment and a rapid switch to mass tourism, but rather forms attuned to local conditions. While the logic of economic globalization suggests this will probably not be possible, a coordinated regional approach could at least promote efforts likely to be welcome to many local people. A strategy of consensual engagement implemented through intercession and investment undertaken first and foremost at the local level thus looks like a viable way forward.

Burma in the world

The central aim of the argument made here is to find a way for outsiders to join with local people to open up opportunities for both individual and group action inside Myanmar. In this way, foreigners can deliver on some of the demands of justice in this case, and citizens can create space to determine their collective future rather than have it imposed on them by a small and isolated elite. For external actors, the task is thus strictly facilitative, focused on creating a political context in which internal political preferences can play out. Joining hands with individuals in communities throughout the land, their work is to help recast the framework in which political issues are addressed, deliberated and decided in Myanmar.

For local people, by contrast, no clear task can be specified by an external analyst. The belief underlying this study, picked up from listening projects and other in-country reports, is that citizens seek overwhelmingly to move Myanmar broadly in the direction of democracy, and that implicit in that shift will be attempts to entrench inter-communal diversity and cross-cultural respect. However, while there is anecdotal support for such a belief, things may play out very differently if ever a program of interactive intervention were launched inside the country. Indeed, if the economy were to boom under disciplined democracy and a measure of civic renewal, local people may choose to follow their Chinese neighbors in accepting authoritarianism, at least for a while.
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Alternatively, they might actually decide to pursue a process of large-scale political reform designed to recapture much that is bound up in contemporary understandings of Burma. While outsiders can harbor preferences, they cannot make choices.

Although much external interest and engagement is driven by a desire for the world to be more present and active inside Myanmar, there is also a parallel motivation for Myanmar to be more present and active in the world. When full military control was imposed on Burma half a century ago, one clear consequence was international isolation. Until the end of the Ne Win period, Burma was one of the closest approximations to a hermit state known to the Cold War world. Thereafter, the military junta promoted a degree of opening through erratic economic liberalization, periodic measures designed to boost the tourist trade and a range of foreign policy initiatives centered on close contact with Beijing and ASEAN membership.
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In return, most of the US alliance responded to grave human rights violations by cordoning off a pariah state. The result was not an extension of Burma’s effective quarantine into the Myanmar years. Rather, it was skewed reengagement with the outside world as trade and other links with many parts of Asia became quite developed while ties with the western world remained strictly limited. Integral to that reemergence was a pattern of mutual distrust and fear among Myanmar leaders and their western counterparts. Indeed, the gulf that separated them in 1988 remains wide to this day.

For that there is good reason, as world views on the two sides are vastly different and disdain and contempt are often primary emotions projected across the divide. From each perspective this is understandable. Nevertheless, outsiders clustered around the US gain little by blockading Myanmar and sentencing it to a lengthy period of seclusion, for in place of a broad array of external influences playing out inside the country there is only a narrow spectrum of shared links and experience. Even communitarians can agree that for any modern state that would be regrettable. For one facing as many deep challenges as Myanmar, it is especially so. This is not to imply that the aim is to make the country a quasi-colony or clone of western powers, but rather that the desire is to see it return with confidence to the give and take that comes with active participation on the world stage.

Looking again to Burmese history, in the late 1940s and for much of the 1950s a newly independent state moved quickly beyond colonialism to become an early force in Asian regional development and, ultimately, creation of the Non-Aligned Movement. In the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution, Burma was a key player in facilitating regional responses, and a regular presence at regional conferences. In April 1954, it was a founding member of the non-interventionist grouping of Colombo powers formed by India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia and Ceylon at a time of growing crisis in Indochina.
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In June 1954, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai introduced the landmark Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, he did so in collaboration with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Burmese Premier Nu.
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At the subsequent April 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, where in Richard Wright’s contemporary report “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting,” Burma was a key organizer alongside the other Colombo powers.
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Ahead of the conference, Nehru hosted Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong in New Delhi, and the two then traveled to Rangoon, where Nu joined them for the onward journey to Indonesia.
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In Bandung, Nu was a leading figure keeping easy and respected company with Zhou, Nehru and counterparts from other countries.
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As prime minister for most of the 1950s, Nu also made other overseas trips, and for years was an active regional and international statesman.
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Throughout, Burma was viewed as the strategic state it clearly is, lodged between India and China, located in Southeast Asia but with historical ties and contemporary links to South Asia, keen to develop alternatives to great power rivalry. As Nu remarked in the Cold War context of September 1950, “If we … thrust the Union of Burma into the arms of one bloc, the other bloc will not be content to look on with folded arms.”
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Today, however, the situation is very different. Myanmar was admitted to ASEAN in 1997 as a problematic state, and has remained an embarrassment to the organization ever since. The Asian diplomacy undertaken by Burmese leaders in the 1950s is inconceivable in current circumstances, and unlikely to reappear in the foreseeable future. One great sadness of the country’s postwar experience is how thoroughly the self-assured nationalism of much of the Burmese elite of the 1950s was destroyed in the 1960s, and replaced by the uniformly mistrustful xenophobia that persists to this day.

Grounds for hope nevertheless remain. Recent years have witnessed quite substantial change in Myanmar’s contacts with the outside world as technologically adept activists and young people living in cities and even small towns find ways to log on to the internet, evade regime censorship and become virtual global citizens. Most fully visible in high-profile confrontations such as the 2007 saffron uprising focused above all on Yangon, this emergent social revolution now spreads to urban centers throughout the country and embraces significant numbers of people. Conscious of opportunities available to peers around the world, including in hitherto rigid neighboring states such as communist China and caste-ridden India, connected young people in Myanmar could become a key constituency for change designed to return the country to mainstream international society. Enhanced foreign contact through grassroots aid agency and corporate engagement would considerably augment the process. As Aung San Suu Kyi said in a taped audio address to the January 2011 World Economic Forum in Davos, “We yearn to be a part of the global community … We have already missed so many opportunities because of political conflicts in our country over the last 50 years.”
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Indeed, one eventual measure of the success or otherwise of interactive intervention in Myanmar may well be registered in the impact made on the wider world by the future Burma so many people inside and outside the country wish to see. While the current fascination with rising China and India may not be fully replicated, for both are many times bigger, broad interest in the degree to which this long hidden Asian culture offers lessons for the rest of humanity is very possible. At present, however, dynamic regional forces are all too often absent from Myanmar, and intriguing forms of Asian modernity have little or no parallel in a society only dimly and distantly aware of the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. While China remains far from democratic and India may not strike everyone as a perfect exemplar for a future Burma, they nevertheless offer life chances to their people extending well beyond anything known in Myanmar.
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If interactive intervention could stimulate change in this regard and permit a reenergized and reconfigured Burma to move from the narrow margins into the broad mainstream of international society, it would already make an important contribution. If it could also enable local people to chart a course toward the national reconciliation and sustainable democracy urgently sought by opposition figures, it would deliver on many of the demands of global justice generated by the quest for political reform in the difficult Myanmar case.

Notes

Introduction

1.
     The last full census, conducted in March 1983, gave a population of 35.4 million. However, when a constitutional referendum was held in 2008 the total population was recorded as 57.5 million. Human Rights Watch,
“I Want to Help My Own People”: State Control and Civil Society in Burma after Cyclone Nargis
(New York, NY: Human Rights Watch, 2010), p.63. Also see Anthony Ware and Matthew Clarke, “The MDGs in Myanmar: Relevant or Redundant?,”
Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy
16 (2011), forthcoming.

2.
     Oded Shenkar,
The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing, 2005). Bill Hayton,
Vietnam: Rising Dragon
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

3.
     The Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University measures conflict years within states by isolating specific civil conflicts and calculating their total duration. It places Myanmar at the top of global rankings with 246 conflict years from 1946 to 2008, meaning that on average each year has been marked by four civil conflicts. Human Security Report Project,
Human Security Report 2009/2010: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War
(Vancouver: Simon Fraser University, 2010), Table 10.2.