Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (42 page)

At least three darker alternatives are, however, conceivable. One is a final showdown that sees government forces use the mandate written into the 2008 constitution to push for total victory over ethnic militias. As insurgency visibly weakens throughout peripheral zones, many rightly fear this is all too probable. A second is a partial peace seeking to do little more than codify contemporary interethnic relations.
³⁶
As an extension of established ceasefire agreements, this is also feasible. A third, related to the second, is emergence of a set of unrecognized pseudo-states as war-making gives way to profit-making in border regions.
³⁷
In 2001, Charles King examined what he called the wars of the Soviet succession and discovered that in their wake four
de facto
states had arisen: Nagorno-Karabakh (in Azerbaijan), the Dnestr Moldovan republic or Transnistria (in Moldova), and the republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (in Georgia).
³⁸
In a context of stalled or frozen conflict, each was able to field armed forces, control territory, educate children and maintain an economy to much the same degree as the larger state to which it notionally belonged. The August 2008 armed conflict between Georgia and Russia later showed that such situations are not entirely stable. Nevertheless, in Myanmar the long-running civil war of the colonial succession has prompted similar patterns of informal state building, with some ethnic nationalities creating quasi-official structures such as schools and education departments.
³⁹

In much popular commentary, the tendency is to view Myanmar futures as essentially dichotomous: brutal dictatorship versus pacific democracy, chaotic civil war versus tidy federal state with extensive autonomy for ethnic nationalities, and so on. By and large, one side of these binary divides is quite plausible, for there is a strong likelihood that under the banner of disciplined democracy the country will remain authoritarian and centralizing.
⁴⁰
By contrast, the other side has to be judged a distant prospect. Indeed, the chance that Myanmar will move all the way from its current authoritarian political system to the other extreme of stable, federal democracy is small. Even a major fragmentation of
tatmadaw
control would still leave many competing visions of national progress in the political arena, with military, democratic and ethnic nationality groups all seeking power. In common with other developing states in Southeast Asia and beyond, Myanmar is thus likely to find that armed forces remain a visible part of the political scene for years to come. Similarly, whether or not the
tatmadaw
overwhelms ethnic militias, the possibility that the country will find a stable solution to its ethnic nationality problems is slim. The balance of probability is thus that domestic politics will be messy for years to come, and that no comprehensive unmaking of Myanmar will take place.

Remaking Burma

The many challenging features of Myanmar’s current situation generate a framework within which local people must act, but do not determine what they will do. Addressing that issue, a point often made by Aung San Suu Kyi is that ultimately the task is to stimulate broad national renewal at the level of each and every citizen. To remake Burma it is necessary to develop a new generation of Burmese. With very different objectives in mind, military strategists reached much the same conclusion in the course of the 1950s and have engaged in projects of national reshaping ever since. In both cases, the ultimate aim is to evade constraints imposed by the country’s many structural problems and move directly to a fresh future. Among opposition leaders, both democratic and ethnic, this line of thinking returns analysis to broad-based national reconciliation designed to bridge cleavages not only between the country’s many ethnic groups, but also between the regime and the democratic opposition and, more generally, between the state and its citizens.

In ethnically-divided societies where identities rather than interests are the main issue and symbolic politics predominate, attempts to project mediation programs across communal fault lines have generated a wealth of new approaches. However, while such procedures have attracted a great deal of attention, they are in no sense a panacea. In the celebrated South African case, the available evidence shows that truth and reconciliation did contribute to change by filling out the core democratization process.
⁴¹
In other contexts, however, the record is patchier. Indeed, in Rwanda after the 1994 genocide truth telling generated widespread trauma.
⁴²
The point made by Laurel E. Fletcher and colleagues thus looks valid: there is no evidence that any society can make an easy start over, or that truth commissions provide a happy ending for tales of violent ethnic division. In such circumstances, they argue, an ecological approach is essential and humility and openness work best.
⁴³
In other words, reconciliation must take place at all levels of the society from the grassroots up.

Fundamental to most studies is the finding that there will always be limits to what can be accomplished by mediation. Ultimately structural attributes of dysfunctional societies have to be addressed, and incentives pointing in the direction of authoritarian system maintenance have to be recast to underpin a democratic order. In many respects this is an extension of arguments about the logic of political survival in an autocratic setting, as well as about resource curse impacts. In the Myanmar case, the reshaping tasks are legion. Above all, behavior supportive of authoritarianism and Bamar nationalism needs to be made less profitable than behavior supportive of democracy and ethnic diversity. As is widely recognized, this will not be easy. Typically the legacy of dictatorship is negative for civil society, and has a dampening effect on political agency, though type and duration are relevant mediating factors.
⁴⁴
Certainly the damaging effects of Myanmar’s long, controlling dictatorship are likely to be felt for years throughout society.

Again, then, for a program of remaking Burma to gather momentum an urgent need to rebuild civil society and boost grassroots action in contemporary Myanmar emerges as paramount. Moreover, after many years of limited hope that change of this kind might ever be possible, the current situation does look more hopeful. Indeed, interviews conducted with local leaders in the late 2000s in the most vibrant zones of civic action quickly turned into a paean to civil society, and supporting evidence of change, though anecdotal, was impressive. The main conclusion of a post-Nargis report was emphatic: “A dynamic, varied, active, mobilised and intelligent civil society exists in Myanmar.”
⁴⁵
On all sides, it was fully acknowledged that the cyclone, while devastating in its impact, had also created an opening for rapid local development. “Prior to this we had no track record. Now we manage a budget of one million dollars … We originally had 100 volunteers and now we have over 2,000 … Before Nargis, our partner had three staff and we had five. After Nargis, our organisation has 46 staff.”
⁴⁶
The catastrophe also energized agency workers and drove them out into the community. “We are more active than before. Before, we only sat in the office in Yangon and conducted training. After Nargis, we know our way and are able to work and mobilise more in the field.”
⁴⁷
Myanmar NGO Network, formed at the end of 2007, only became fully established once Nargis had struck, bringing together 20 local agencies to work in a coordinated manner. “Many more NGOs emerged after Cyclone Nargis. We are all better networked and more visible. We have over 100 civil society groups in Myanmar from different places all over the country but mainly from Yangon.”
⁴⁸

The Burma subjected to authoritarian control in 1962 and subsequently written off the map by military decree in 1989 was rapidly reduced to a feeble replica of its former self. In the process, it experienced a drastic reduction in its capacity for self-renewal that today remains a major impediment to social change. The Burma to which many citizens look back, however, was characterized by meaningful political space and extensive community action. Particularly for some 50 years down to 1962, the society was plural not only in the negative sense coined by Furnivall, in which distinct races rub shoulders but do not mix, but also in the positive sense intended by political scientists from Dahl forward, in which diverse groups compete for power and none holds a dominant position.
⁴⁹
If this is the Burma many local people wish to remake, then building on recent growth in a still nascent civil society looks to be essential.

The world in Myanmar

For the best part of 25 years, the world has not worked out a satisfactory means of dealing with the Myanmar problem, and both insiders and outsiders contest current strategies. At the same time, however, the country is only rarely a pressing strategic concern for any external power, and the chance that productive foreign engagement will be implemented in the years ahead is perhaps slight. Inattention is still a key problem. In these circumstances, it is therefore important to determine where the most substantial duties of global justice lie, and how this bedrock of external obligation might generate a platform of support for domestic reform efforts.

Perfect duties are almost certainly limited. Similarly, imperfect duties incurred at the international level are perhaps not the most pressing concern. Clearly, any move to implement proposals for a worldwide resource tax and rules limiting global borrowing and resource privileges to democrats, or at least to decent non-democratic states, would have an impact on Myanmar. Indeed, one task activist groups might take up is lobbying for global reform of this kind, for it would materially reshape the country’s domestic political environment by removing or recasting key foundations of ongoing military power. Nevertheless, most attention remains focused on Myanmar itself. There, imperfect duties are significant. Whether amassed through injustice visited on local people in the past, or entailed by universal membership of the human race, it is in this domain that the burden of obligation weighs most heavily on outsiders.

Taking Harold D. Lasswell’s classic understanding of politics, the argument made here about external engagement with domestic reform efforts addresses each of the four key elements: who, what, when and how.
⁵⁰
Who? An analysis of global justice and the Myanmar case picks out several responsible outside agents. Under the heading of historical injustice are two cohorts of foreign powers: damaging imperialists from decades ago, and both isolating and engaging states in the present day. Under the heading of universal justice, the UN represents the wider global community as the critical actor. What? The case made here is for discursive intervention designed to enable aid agencies and global corporations to work with and for local people to reanimate Burma through intercession and investment. At a later stage in the process states also need to engage in elite-level mediation to solidify and institutionalize grassroots progress. When? For different reasons, both isolationists and engagers hold that now is not the time to make radical changes to their Myanmar policies. Isolationists wish to see more reform before rewarding the generals. Engagers believe Myanmar is beginning to make some progress toward political renewal. Against each broad camp, the argument advanced here is that strategies of discursive intervention should be launched as quickly as possible. How? The simple answer given to this question is by making rights-bearing local people the policy drivers and seeking to empower them as much as possible. Oppressed citizens in civil society hold far greater rights than oppressive rulers in the military machine.

The important remaining task is to consider the broad thrust of this analysis through the strategic prism of contemporary international politics. An initial point is that when viewed from the perspective of one medium-sized Asian country in a complex global system, much current debate has distant themes. In particular, the question of whether the US will remain the international hegemon well into the twenty-first century, in other respects intriguing, is largely irrelevant to this case.
⁵¹
In dealing with Myanmar, the US is not now, never has been and in all likelihood never will be the dominant external actor.
⁵²
Only at the extreme, then, in the remote possibility that it will be usurped at the peak of international society by a very different kind of Chinese power, is analysis of the unipolar moment germane.
⁵³
On the realistic assumption that such a dramatic change will not take place in the foreseeable future, the US will find itself largely where it always has been with regard to Myanmar. Though not uniformly evident in policy debate and choices, Washington has little option but to work with regional powers and at least for this case to come to terms with a China model in the making.
⁵⁴
In this regard the age of nonpolarity dawned decades ago, and a Global-Asian Era is already apparent.
⁵⁵