Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (41 page)

Unmaking Myanmar

For reformers intent on unmaking Myanmar, the two key political tasks above the level of the individual are a major injection of democratic principle and practice, and a reevaluation of ethnic relations. While proposals for engineering such changes are promoted in varying degrees by key figures in the democratic and ethnic nationality camps, core aspirations are broadly shared. Shortly before the November 2010 general election, prominent individuals from both main strands of opposition called jointly for a second Panglong conference for national reconciliation. When Aung San Suu Kyi returned to public life after the election, veteran politicians and ethnic leaders invited her to lead an effort to convene the conference, and she agreed to do so.
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At the same time, however, the dynamics are not entirely the same in the two domains, and rolling reformist demands into a single catch-all plan of moving beyond military control needs some unpacking if future challenges are to be fully understood. Put another way, unmaking authoritarian Myanmar is not the same as unmaking centralizing Myanmar, and while there are clear overlaps it is important also to focus on elements of difference.

On the side of democracy, a generalized belief is that a state not underpinned by a measure of popular consent and a functioning social contract will be vulnerable to contestation and challenge.
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In this regard the military machine clearly has much still to do. Nevertheless, the history of Myanmar and many other countries reveals that governments with apparently only limited popular support can extend their dominion for quite long periods. In
The Logic of Political Survival
, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and colleagues seek to explain why it is that autocratic leaders manage to stay in office for roughly twice as long as their democratic counterparts. While this question differs from one addressing the sustainability of distinct political systems, the answer remains relevant to the Myanmar case. Their analysis focuses on individual incentives in building a winning coalition of support from within a broader selectorate of potential members. The argument is that in autocracies winning coalitions are relatively small and exclusive, creating strong loyalty to political leaders. In democracies, by contrast, winning coalitions are relatively large, generating a real chance that members of the current coalition will also be included in rival coalitions capable of delivering equally good benefits. The result is that bonds between leaders and coalition members are weak.
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In Myanmar, precisely these kinds of incentive structures have long been in place, building sufficient support within the
tatmadaw
and a small circle of key figures for ongoing military control, mandating that policy decisions be driven chiefly by concerns for coalition maintenance rather than broad public welfare, and making it very difficult to trigger democratic change. When infused with the informal institutional mechanisms identified by Kyaw Yin Hlaing as critical bonding agents, military government becomes formidable.
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In the wider society, moreover, several structural features underpin and reinforce authoritarian control. By and large, the substantial literature on the resource curse assembled since the late 1990s predicts civil conflict and system breakdown in resource-rich contexts. In many respects, Myanmar looks to be a strong fit.
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However, analysts also document other possible outcomes, such as emergence of a predatory state capable of imposing a measure of public order through control of natural resource revenues.
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This is what has happened in Myanmar, with income from substantial off-shore natural gas deposits giving state leaders extensive latitude in generating a fragile but workable rentier peace throughout most of the society.
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Similarly, the consensus is that democracies are typically far less controlling and abusive than dictatorships, meaning that revolt is always possible in a repressive state.
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Again, though, alternatives are conceivable. During the Stalinist Great Terror of 1936–37, Soviet leaders arrested more than 1.5 million citizens and killed some 700,000. Yet imposition of a tyrannical peace was feasible because the 1936 constitution created an elaborate cloak of legality designed to suggest that everything was taking place within the rules.
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Here too may be found parallel Myanmar concerns, for with the 2008 constitution firmly in place military leaders can claim that the rule of law is being respected throughout the land.

Looking to the future, China’s model of Communist Party legitimation through economic growth charts a further option for system maintenance.
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In 2010, Teresa Wright reported on five main social groups of private entrepreneurs, professionals, state-sector workers, private-sector workers, and farmers, showing that in the reform era of rapid economic development each has a different but no less clear rationale for “accepting authoritarianism.”
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Similarly, drawing on a 2004 survey of perceptions of inequality and distributive injustice, Martin King Whyte in 2010 exploded the “myth of the social volcano,” arguing that triumphant economic resurgence has created widespread support for the political system.
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This successful construction of an authoritarian state on a foundation of booming economic growth implies that a reasonably robust social contract need not be articulated through democracy and human rights. While the jury is still out on how long Communist Party leaders will continue to deliver sufficient prosperity to manage the incipient stresses and strains of an unwieldy social system, there does appear to be in the Chinese model a medium-term option for Myanmar’s political elite. Indeed, if the level of basic state efficiency found in the People’s Republic can be replicated by the increasingly technocratic officials filling senior positions under disciplined democracy, a workable authoritarian settlement may prevail.

Dramatic popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East at the start of 2011 clearly show that the chance authoritarianism will one day collapse can never be eliminated. After 30 years of domestic stability and global support, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was hustled from office by 18 days of peaceful street protest. One day tactics of nonviolent revolution developed in Serbia under President Slobodan Miloševi
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and applied in Cairo’s Tahrir Square may also fuel change in Myanmar.
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At the same time, however, the continuing existence of long-standing authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world, including much of Asia, opens up the possibility that Myanmar’s military machine will succeed in sustaining a measure of political passivity and regime longevity beneath the veneer of disciplined democracy. This is especially likely for as long as the major opposition figurehead remains above all a moral leader rather than a political strategist. In the early 1990s, Gene Sharp worked with key individuals from Burma’s 1988 uprising and ongoing ethnic struggle and wrote
From Dictatorship to Democracy
, a manual for strategic nonviolent protest, as a blueprint for liberation from military rule.
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Interviewed in March 2011, when many of his ideas were widely credited with shaping the Egyptian revolution, he argued that the failure of revolt in Myanmar resulted from a strategic deficit. “If you don’t plan, if you don’t have a bigger strategy, you’re not going to win.”
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On the side of ethnic relations, prospects for meaningful progress are even cloudier. Although the democratic opposition gathered around Aung San Suu Kyi has long captured global attention, in many respects the key social reality underlying military control is not confrontation with democratic forces, but rather overt ethnic division.
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It was above all elite fear of secession, not entirely unwarranted, that prompted the military coup half a century ago and subjected Burma to dictatorship. Despite all the popular energy and hope invested in mass democratic mobilization a quarter-century later, 1962 rather than 1988 remains the decisive year in modern political development. Moreover, whereas in their struggle with democratic groups military leaders have implemented a plan to make selective use of opposition rhetoric while allowing no more than minimal political change, in their long-running battles with ethnic nationalities they have only limited strategic direction. The ceasefires of the early 1990s had very narrow aims. More recently, the 2008 constitution registered more progress by creating territorial assemblies and incorporating some militias into the
tatmadaw
through BGF provisions. Nevertheless, while insurgency now appears to be on the decline, the imagination and vision needed to craft a sustainable ethnic settlement remain absent.

Examining structural features of the current situation, Myanmar has many standard triggers for endemic inter-communal violence, with the resource curse again dominant. Economists find a direct link: abundant natural resources heighten the chance of ethnic conflict by creating malign incentives for rentier activities. Political scientists posit an indirect mechanism that is no less compelling: extensive natural resources generate weak political institutions based on patronage systems that boost the likelihood of civil war.
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However, not all natural resources have the same disfiguring social impact. In general, oil is most damaging and is associated with civil conflict in many lands.
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Even then, though, location is important, with offshore holdings typically generating less violence than on-shore. In Myanmar, revenues from large-scale marine natural gas deposits contribute critically to regime maintenance through predatory rentier social order imposed on the entire country.
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They do not drive interethnic violence, however, since they are wholly inaccessible to insurgent groups. Nevertheless, other natural resources found to have negative impacts elsewhere are relevant to this case. One analyst reported that narcotics cultivation extends civil conflict.
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In Myanmar this is very much an issue, as above all the UWSA ceasefire group in eastern Shan State secures core funding through opium and methamphetamine production.
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By contrast, another found that drug production can reduce the degree of violence by giving both state and rebel leaders incentives to switch from fighting to business. That too is the case in Myanmar, where the emergence of state militarization and armed opposition as a way of life has nevertheless seen actual fighting tail off in the past 20 years and entrepreneurialism pick up.
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Still another argued that contraband activities linked to natural resource holdings tend to prolong civil conflict, a finding again confirmed in Myanmar.
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Looking beyond natural resources, further structural features of the contemporary state are widely held to intensify interethnic strife. Taking societies as a whole, poverty, strong cultural identities and dysfunctional institutions correlate positively with conflict.
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Sheer demographic and military strength of rebel forces is also important, as is distance from the capital city and roughness of the terrain in which fighting takes place, with mountainous regions being especially advantageous to insurgents.
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All of these elements are present in Myanmar. Additionally, ethnic group concentration lengthens conflict not so much by enhancing motivation and making people more likely to fight, but rather by facilitating militia coordination.
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Finally, rebel location along a remote international border extends conflict, and rebel camps on its external side have a reinforcing effect.
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In Myanmar, the fact that all ethnic militias are based in peripheral parts, with some maintaining clandestine bases in neighboring states, clearly prolongs combat. The long KNU fight against
tatmadaw
control is a case in point, with refugee camps in Thailand providing an important base for insurgent activity and implicitly legitimizing the struggle.
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There are thus many reasons to doubt whether progress will be made in managing Myanmar’s convoluted ethnic relations. On the positive side, there is in Chinese practice a series of pointers to special governance arrangements for specific regions or areas. Indeed, learning from its neighbor the SPDC created many industrial zones and, more significantly, in 2011 formed the Dawei Special Economic Zone on the Shenzhen model.
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One day, this archetype could perhaps be replicated for different purposes in peripheral parts. Additionally, scholars have floated proposals for a Tibetan Special Cultural Zone in China that could provide a useful template for Myanmar.
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Moreover, to handle the return of Hong Kong (1997) and Macau (1999) to the motherland, Beijing created Special Administrative Regions with extensive autonomy guarantees over a 50-year period. In this array of Chinese possibilities are options that could contribute to an agenda for national reconciliation in Myanmar.