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17 september 2019
Page 41 :
“The most striking aspect of the Burma debate today is its absence of nuance and its singularly ahistorical nature. Dictatorship and the prospects for democracy are seen within the prism of the past ten or twenty years, as if three Anglo-Burmese wars, a century of colonial rule, an immensely destructive Japanese invasion and occupation, and five decades of civil war, foreign intervention, and Communist insurgency had never happened. A country the size and population of the German Empire on the eve of the First World War is viewed through a single-dimensional lens, and then there is surprise over predictions unfulfilled and strategies that never seem to bear fruit. Burma is a place with a rich and complex history, both before the time of King Thibaw and Lord Randolph Churchill and since. Burmese nationalism and xenophobia, the ethnic insurgencies and the army dictatorship, and the failure of successive governments to keep pace with the rest of an increasingly peaceful and prosperous Asia – all these things have a history, a reason. And what emerges from these histories is not an answer to all of today’s ills but at least the beginnings of an explanation. And from this explanation perhaps a richer discussion and a better intimation of what may lie ahead.”
What Myint-U explains is that it does not make sense to assess the quality of welfare or democracy in states (In this case Burma) without taking into account its precedents. Liberal Democracy cannot be imposed in one day, welfare cannot be created overnight, based on simple voluntaristic decisions. Structures which were built over decades, if not centuries (?), determine the (im)possibility of the creation of a successful society, based on democracy and generating wealth for all its citizens. With an expensive word : the success of the implementation is path-dependant.
However, in his quote Myint-U probably does not focus on the main weakness of Burma; It contains an important set of minorities with for us in the West mostly unknown names : the Shan, the Karen, the Kachin, the Mon, the Chin, the Arakans, the Rohingya and many others. Burma’s existential question is probably whether it can survive without some level of dictatorial centralizing force.