Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (32 page)

Quite where things now stand on other parts of the political spectrum is hard to say. For many years Aung San Suu Kyi made repeated appeals to the outside world not to visit Myanmar, not to do business, and not to invest. Indeed, putting pressure on major corporations to disengage from the country was the basis in 1997 for her most famous request: “Please use your liberty to promote ours.”
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From time to time ethnic nationality leaders echo some of her pleas. However, whether this string of negatives retains broad support, and whether there is any appetite for positive political engagement on the part of outsiders, are today issues that need to be thoroughly and systematically explored.

Perhaps at base, then, the concern is that a debate so readily reaching dramatic conclusions about external action is conducted almost wholly at a great distance, physical, emotional and intellectual, from Myanmar and its neighborhood.
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This is not to insist that theorists of justice set up shop in the country, or even in the region. Equally, it is not to mandate that in examining the demands of global justice they focus overwhelmingly on this case. Clearly they have wider and more abstract interests. Nevertheless, at a time when Myanmar remains one of the most commonly cited targets of foreign action, greater attention might properly be paid to it. Although its designation as an “outpost of tyranny” alongside Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe may have lapsed at the end of the Bush administration, for many activists it is still the “last good cause.”
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In these circumstances, there is reason to think it might be more fully studied. On a broader plane, when the evaluation reached by many theorists is that duties of direct and aggressive engagement are properly triggered in distant parts of the world, determining whether that conclusion is by and large acceptable to local people appears to be at least a requisite courtesy, and in all probability a necessary moral and practical basis for action. In the Myanmar case, the fact that so much global theorizing has generated so little foreign engagement may be tacit acknowledgement of that. Nevertheless, there remains a major shortfall.

To bridge the gap in Myanmar minimally necessitates finding a way to understand the wishes of people who continue to subsist under authoritarianism. Certainly, exile opinion should also be surveyed. However, it can be accorded no more than subsidiary status for the life choices made by individuals in the diaspora, and the interests they now have, often put them at variance with citizens still living and working inside the country.
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Almost 25 years ago, though making a slightly different point, Judith N. Shklar wrote that “For an inquiry into the preferences of the oppressed to mean anything at all, one would have to conduct it under conditions that make it possible for the most deprived members of society to speak without fear and with adequate information.”
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Given the repressive nature of the military machine and the pervasive terror that stalks the land, that is in no sense easy.
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Equally, however, it is not mission impossible.

One way forward might be a quasi-Rawlsian approach of identifying representatives to speak on behalf of the broader population, with political, religious, NGO and business leaders an obvious constituency. More direct and practical would be a less formal attempt to build on recent listening projects. In 2009, the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies argued that “at the very least, those inside need to be heard as loudly and clearly as those who live and speak outside the country … Hearing voices from the inside is paramount.”
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In 2010, it held that “international discourses on Myanmar are increasingly shaped by those ‘outside’ the country, while the voices of those on the ‘inside’ are rarely heard.”
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Moreover, when CDA Collaborative Learning Projects partnered with local and regional agencies to take an established global initiative to Myanmar in the closing months of 2009, it found that talking was easier than expected: “most of those approached were very willing to discuss [assistance] issues, in groups as well as individually, and seemed to feel comfortable in the process.”
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As things now stand, however, support inside Myanmar for external action of any kind is only partially known. Despite clear evidence of indigenous mobilization for change, notably in 1988 and 2007, it is impossible to say with confidence how local people might react to foreign involvement in general, and how they would want to frame specific projects. At the end of a decade of difficult outside action in the equally distant and complex settings of Afghanistan and Iraq, this is a major concern. Also worrying is a broad global dismissal of regional views, notably advanced by such critical powers as China, India and Thailand. Inconvenient though it may be for some proponents of global justice, hearing voices from Asia is an essential moral and practical precondition for external engagement with Myanmar.

In this way, communitarians’ argument about respect for local cultures comes to the fore. “Isn’t intervention presumptuous? Aren’t we just imposing our values on someone else?,” Caney asks in mimicry.
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For four reasons he thinks not. First, such questions should also be asked of oppressors. Second, in an interdependent world outside agencies will always make an impact. Third, countervailing risks of indifference and callousness must be borne in mind. Fourth, foreign action may be welcomed by some members of the target society. While each point is telling, none enables outsiders to circumvent the critical moral step of paying close attention to expressed local values and desires. Moreover, there truly is some presumption in a debate conducted primarily in the seminar rooms, conference halls, academic journals and position papers of elite western universities, policy thinktanks and state agencies, and rarely making contact with people on the receiving end of proposed action.

Communitarian prescriptions are thus centrally relevant. Even citizens of a benighted country like Myanmar are not only victims, but also agents keen to shape their collective fate. To CDA interviewers at the end of 2009, one person commented: “This Listening Project is the first time anyone has come to ask us about our experience. I am very happy about it.”
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Two men from Loikaw in the eastern borderlands made this remark: “For some NGOs, the projects come from above, top-down. They should listen to the people from the communities.”
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Still more critical than finding out what local people think about cross-border aid programs is grasping how they feel about a broad span of political action. Equally, it is important to acknowledge that regional neighbors are invested far more deeply in what happens inside Myanmar than are distant strangers with, as Walzer would note, little or no local knowledge.

In the Myanmar case, then, debates about global justice in and of themselves enable the demands of justice to be framed no more than provisionally. Some perfect duties can perhaps be picked out, enabling obligations of repair to be specified with some precision. Mostly, however, duties are imperfect and lead nowhere in particular. This is clearly true of general duties, but also the case with many special duties. While arguments for pressing duties of global justice are thus readily and compellingly made, much more needs to be said about practical implications. Exactly what are outsiders required to do, and how should they undertake their task? To what extent are local people content for foreigners to engage with their country, and what do they consider the best way forward? Which forms of action are broadly endorsed within the wider neighborhood, and which are not? In this regard, Caney’s follow-up point sets a better tone: “Whether intervention is regarded as presumptuous would depend, in part, on procedural factors, such as
how
the intervention takes place (whether there is dialogue and consultation with people within the regime being intervened in) … [and]
who
intervenes.”
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Decisive here is the parenthetical remark, directing attention away from cosmopolitanism and toward the communitarian insistence that local agency expressed through domestic politics is key and must be prioritized.

In these circumstances, little can be said about substantive matters. Beyond a small number of perfect duties, the demands of justice are abstract and obscure. To make practical progress in the critical domain of imperfect duties, it is therefore necessary to construct a procedure that can be used to sort distinct modes of external action, facilitate choice between available options, and enable local and regional voices to be heard as fully as possible. Without this, theories of global justice are inadequate, for the real-world obligations triggered by them can be specified only in a radically incomplete manner.

7

Intervention and interaction

Examined from the standpoint of global justice, a prima facie case for external engagement with Myanmar is readily made. Viewed solely from that perspective, however, the demands of justice can be established only very imprecisely. While a small set of perfect duties can perhaps be identified and necessary tasks of repair specified, a much larger set of imperfect duties generates few clear pointers to action. This chapter therefore follows up by developing a procedure to help sort distinct modes of engagement and allow for justifiable choices to be made between alternatives. It also seeks to ensure that both rights-bearers and duty-bearers are brought within the frame, and that the opinions of people likely to be most affected by any cross-border action are fully heard. The opening section examines the core concept of intervention. The second turns to ethics of intervention, drawing on the long tradition of just war theorizing to develop a framework for use in wider contexts than simply warfare. The third examines how and by whom interventionist options might properly and fairly be considered. The fourth takes the resultant concept of interactive intervention and applies it to Myanmar. The argument has several strands. In today’s world, intervention is multifaceted and draws in a large body of actors. Rules of engagement to embrace this diversity can nevertheless be worked out and should be respected by all agents. Extensive efforts must always be made to affirm that any actual intervention takes place as interactively as possible. In the Myanmar case, outsiders should follow these procedures to perform imperfect duties of global justice.

Types of intervention

The concept long used to capture involvement in the affairs of a society other than one’s own is intervention. However, the many forms cross-border action currently assumes in the real world of international politics make it difficult to say exactly what meaning should now attach to the term. That task has been especially difficult since the end of the Cold War saw an expanding array of individuals from both public and private agencies launch a wide range of transnational action. In these challenging circumstances, the approach taken here is first to set down a broad, bedrock definition, and then to develop a conceptual framework capable of capturing the many modes falling within its parameters.
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Catherine Lu writes that “The very intelligibility of the concept of intervention relies on a structure that distinguishes between an internal and an external context, insiders and outsiders, private and public. The concept of intervention paradigmatically entails the situation of an outsider acting within the insider’s preserved domain.”
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She further remarks that in the global realm the notion takes on a political dimension and issues of sovereignty become central. Here are encountered complex webs of Walzerian political communities, Millerian nations and Rawlsian peoples, all largely self-determining behind acknowledged international frontiers. Even for cosmopolitans the component parts of this conception have meaning, unless they really do insist on a single world government. For this reason, Lu’s definition can be taken as a foundation stone: “The concept of intervention encompasses any action by an outside party in the internal affairs or jurisdiction of a distinct unit.”
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Reading into this formulation the political element fully endorsed by Lu, intervention is defined here as engagement designed to alter the governance arrangements of an alien jurisdiction.
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More simply, it is cross-border political action.

Building on this, a full conceptualization can be constructed by focusing on three key dimensions.
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The first is the nature of the intervening agent, where a critical matter for global politics is whether it is a state or non-state. With many agencies operating in a gray zone of partial state control and partial agency autonomy, this demarcation is not hard and fast.
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However, problems of real-world categorization raise no major conceptual issues. Similarly, whether an intervening agency is one state or many, and in the latter case whether it is a formal intergovernmental organization such as above all the UN, may have ethical importance but is of no relevance to a conceptualization.
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The second dimension is the mode of intervention, where an important question is whether it is non-coercive or coercive, or in slightly different language discursive or assertive. While there may again be boundary issues, the distinction is reasonably straightforward. Discursive identifies attempts to engage argumentatively and thereby facilitate local change. Assertive denotes attempts to engage forcefully and thereby compel local change. The third dimension is the domain of intervention, and whether in a physical sense action is initiated outside or inside the target jurisdiction. External indicates engagement outside relevant borders, and internal identifies action inside them. Using these three dimensions, an eight-part typology emerges. In both the state and civil sectors are four modes of intervention. Expressive pressure is discursive and external to the target jurisdiction. Consensual engagement is discursive and internal. Aggressive pressure is assertive and external. Belligerent engagement is assertive and internal.