It hasn’t been a good year for Myanmar’s reforms.
Journalists have been arrested and killed. A committee in the military-dominated parliament has refused to amend a constitutional provision that blocks Daw Aung San Suu Kyi from running for president, robbing her story of its fairytale ending. Meanwhile, the loosening of political controls has uncorked the genie of Burmese religio-ethnic chauvinism, dormant during decades of dictatorship, and the country’s ethnic periphery remains conflict-torn and far beyond the control of the central government—as it has for the bulk of Myanmar’s history. More than three years after President Thein Sein took office and initiated the reforms, there is backtracking on nearly every front.
Two decades ago, another Southeast Asian nation made a similar emergence from isolation, and experienced similar challenges. Indeed, Cambodia’s progress over the past 23 years offers a cautionary tale not only about the likely course of Myanmar’s “transition”, but also the assumptions we make about such transitions to begin with.
Cambodia opened to the world on October 23, 1991, with the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements. By the time the accord was signed, the country had been at war for more than 12 years; before that had come the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge, which led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people; and, before that, more civil war. The Paris treaty sought to finally bring peace, democracy, and some semblance of normality to a long-suffering country. To implement the accords, it created the UNTAC mission of 1992-93, under whose benign auspices Cambodia would be reborn. As Cambodia opened, the world rushed in. Thousands of foreign consultants, UN staff, and aid workers arrived. Development aid typhooned in. Phnom Penh, a ramshackle capital of golden spires and potholed streets, became a steamy outpost of what Alex de Waal has termed the “humanitarian international”.
Cambodia’s progress over the past 23 years offers a cautionary tale not only about the likely course of Myanmar’s “transition”, but also the assumptions we make about such transitions to begin with.
As with Myanmar’s reforms, expectations were high, all the more so since Cambodia’s opening coincided with a crucial historical juncture: the fall of the Soviet Union and the wave of liberal optimism that followed in its wake. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama had famously proclaimed the “end of history”, arguing that communism’s collapse heralded “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. After four decades of ideological stalemate, history had chosen a winner.
Cambodia quickly became a symbol and subject of the new global optimism. With history at an end, the “international community”, working with empowered local NGOs, would usher a victim of Cold War realpolitik along the road to the democratic promised land.
But while the West had experienced a “revolution of moral concern,” as Michael Ignatieff described it, no such change had taken place inside Cambodia. The government that emerged from the $2 billion-plus UNTAC mission in 1993 was an unstable coalition between two wartime enemies: the steely Hun Sen, prime minister of the regime installed by Vietnam after it overthrew of the Khmer Rouge in 1979; and the feckless Prince Norodom Ranariddh, head of the royalist Funcinpec party. When UNTAC wound up in late 1993,the civil war resumed. In July 1997, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh in bloody factional street clashes; 18 months later, the Cambodian army finally defeated what was left of the Khmer Rouge. And so the Cambodia civil war came to an end — not through resolutions and treaties, but through military force and political deals. Hun Sen has ruled the country in much the same way ever since.
Today, Cambodia remains far from the promised land. Hun Sen’s achievements over the past 23 years have been substantial — peace, political stability, economic growth — but they are also highly contingent. The country’s stability rests not on any deep social consensus, but on a delicate balance between competing patronage networks. The gap between rich and poor grows wider, while tens of thousands have been thrown off their land to make way for large-scale agribusiness projects—some little more than cover for lucrative logging operations. Cambodia’s political system has little apparent aim beyond its own perpetuation, leaving many ordinary people to live off the crumbs.
But the “humanitarian international” lives on. Twenty years after the UN struck its blue tents, Cambodian civic culture is awash in democratic symbols and human rights narratives. Government officials speak the language of universal values and “good governance”. Artificial UN events like International Human Rights Day are official holidays. Colourful NGO insignia can be seen everywhere, on posters, banners, t-shirts, bumper-stickers, calendars, coffee mugs, and the sides of the white 4WDs that roar around the capital Phnom Penh. But that’s about as deep as it goes. In Cambodia, the end of history produced not democracy, but a façade—an almost pure abstraction.
Now, with Myanmar’s own reforms heading in a similar direction, development experts and human rights groups warn that the country is in danger of becoming “another Cambodia”. Their warnings contain a presumption that things could have turned out substantially otherwise. But could they?
The lesson of Cambodia is not that things somehow took a wrong turn on the road to democracy; it’s that the political road meanders, reverses, splays off in countless directions. There’s no iron guarantee it will end at the desired destination at all.
Though Francis Fukuyama’s controversial thesis has fallen out of fashion, his central idea still seems to pervade the way we think about development. The “end of history” brought us to a point where all the important social, political, and economic questions had been supposedly settled. “Development” was seen as merely a matter of bringing in proven expertise to implement proven solutions. For the Swiss critic Gilbert Rist, the choice of the biological metaphor was telling: “development” implied a rational, predictable course to social and political growth. As an acorn grows into an oak, so would the “developing” world become “developed”, politically (via democracy), economically (via free markets) and morally (via human rights). All this radiant troika required was the necessary sunshine and nutrients — the necessary “capacity building”.
These assumptions are still very much in evidence today in Myanmar. With reforms faltering, the reaction of many people is to question not the model, but the implementation. The international community gave too many concessions too quickly, say the international human rights groups. The US government should “ensure” Myanmar respects its “commitments”, and reimpose sanctions if they fail to do so, say the Republicans in Congress. At its extreme, the case is made that foreign countries should drag Myanmar’s leaders kicking and screaming into the promised land.
But what if it’s not the implementation that is flawed, but the model itself? In my new book Hun Sen’s Cambodia, I describe how the international intervention in Cambodia produced not democracy, but a “mirage” of democratic government behind which power works much as it always has — through relationships of patronage between powerful individuals. Meanwhile, the international commitment to Cambodia has devolved into a “development complex” that has entrenched dependency and now largely escaped the control of a fictive and divided “international community”. The lesson of Cambodia is not that things somehow took a wrong turn on the road to democracy; it’s that the political road meanders, reverses, splays off in countless directions. There’s no iron guarantee it will end at the desired destination at all.
This is an important lesson for Myanmar today. Cambodia’s recent history shows the limits of what can be achieved by moral suasion and international pressure. True, outside pressure has forced Hun Sen to release political prisoners and prevented the most overt forms of repression — as it has to some extent in Myanmar. These achievements are noteworthy, but limited. Such pressure can buy some short-term gains, but it can do little to force either countries’ leaders to adopt the normative outlook that respects democracy or human rights as concepts. This change can only come from below—from the Cambodian and Myanmar people themselves.
According to the American historian Mark Lilla, the problem with thinking about countries in terms of where they lie on a linear scale of development is that it obscures the importance of local history and context, which do more to determine a country’s political fate than the templates of international development.
Lilla writes, “If the only choices we can imagine are democracy or le déluge, we exclude the possibility of improving non-democratic regimes without either trying forcibly to transform them (American-style) or hoping vainly (European-style) that human rights treaties, humanitarian interventions, legal sanctions, NGO projects, and bloggers with iPhones will make a lasting difference.” The only sensible question to ask about countries like Myanmar is therefore a sobering one: “What’s Plan B?”
Published in the Myanmar Times, October 31-November 6, 2014
