Changes in Myanmar over the past three years have indeed been dizzying. A cursory look at the turn of events since 201 in will persuade any doubters of the genuineness of the country\u2019s transition. The question, however, is where it is transitioning to and how best to understand the transition?<\/p>\n
After their visits to Myanmar, Thomas Carothers and Larry Diamond, two of the world\u2019s leading scholars of democratization, reached a similar conclusion: Naypyidaw\u2019s goals, definition and modus operandi of \u2018democracy\u2019 are at odds with the essence of a representative government.<\/p>\n
Carothers likens Myanmar\u2019s reforms with the Arab leadership\u2019s top-down reforms in the decade prior to the violent Arab Spring. In his own words, \u201cThe steps taken by Arab governments were not democratizing reforms, rather they were carefully circumscribed efforts designed precisely to head off the possibility of true democratization by alleviating popular dissatisfaction with regimes.\u201d 1<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Diamond was more direct, \u201cI think the transition is still very much in an early stage and it is not clear by any means at this point that electoral democracy will be the outcome of it or that electoral democracy is the intended outcome.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> But why is the international community cuddling the country\u2019s ex-generals and generals and showering Naypyidaw with \u201caid packages\u201d worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of the people, reforms and democratic transition? These global words of praise and aid for the reformists are taking place at the same time as the unfolding Rohingya\u2019s ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, 3<\/sup><\/a> the anti-Muslim mass violence by the \u201cneo-Nazi Buddhist campaign\u201d 4<\/sup><\/a>, the sharp rise in Kachin war refugees, and Naypyidaw\u2019s widely reported complicity and responsibility? 5<\/sup><\/a> The blunt answer is \u201cglobal capitalism.\u201d Myanmar\u2019s generals have agreed to the externally assisted transformation of the country\u2019s ailing political economy along free market lines in exchange for access to the emerging lucrative frontier economy. However, noteworthy is the fact that the full-scale reengagement of the liberal Western Myanmar is largely on Naypyidaw\u2019s terms, a few concessions here and there notwithstanding. 6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n Factually, through the typical eyes of the global capitalists, Myanmar is first and foremost a \u201cresource brothel\u201d, the hottest \u201cfrontier market\u201d 7<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0and a strategic linchpin for respective \u201cgrand strategies\u201d in the seemingly eternal game of Great Powers, on the rise or on the wane. Human communities as \u201cmarkets\u201d and \u201csources of resources and labour\u201d have been a rather durable view of any country on earth with land, resources and labour since large-scale, technologically driven capitalist transformation was unleashed several hundred years ago.<\/p>\n Fast forward to the World Economic Forum in Naypyidaw in June 2013, it was about the elite-led \u201cdemocracy\u201d, skilled \u201ccivil society\u201d and a socially responsible corporate-assisted \u201cfree market\u201d.\u00a0 But in essence, the international policies toward Myanmar are designed to extract optimal spoils out of one of the world\u2019s last few remaining frontier markets; the other is North Korea.<\/p>\n This June, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright was seen drinking Coke straight out of its fat plastic bottle at a ceremony in Yangon where Coca Cola, one of her corporate clients for her Albright-Stonebridge Consulting Firm, 8<\/sup><\/a> opened the first-ever bottling factory in Myanmar. 9<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 As Chair of the US National Democratic Institute, Albright was reportedly in the country to promote democracy, interfaith and to teach \u201cthe people who have never had a sip\u201d how to drink Coke properly.\u00a0 But the Americans are not alone.<\/p>\n Amidst the unfolding pogroms against the Rohingya and other Muslims and the documented complicity of the authorities at the highest level, 10<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0the Islamic state of Qatar has no qualms about co-winning and accepting multibillion dollar telecom contracts in Myanmar along with Norway. The official peace-mediators in Oslo have indeed secured a rather lucrative phone contract for its national Telenor from the 2012 Nobel Peace short-listed President Thein Sein, while the Kachins, the Karens, the Shan, the Karenni and the Mon are still waiting for the successful outcome of Oslo\u2019s peace mediation. 11<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Phones before peace! Telanor for peace!<\/p>\n Were Karl Marx alive, he would have defined the process Myanmar is undergoing\u2013the pervasive land grab, resultant economic displacement, the working poor, filthy labour conditions, forced migration, violent conflicts, import of technology, new modes and lines of production, capital infusion, mega-development projects and so on\u2014as a marginally cash-based economy dragged through the ruthless process of what he termed \u201cprimitive accumulation\u201d.<\/p>\n Here, I propose that a new way of reading Myanmar that reflects critically on why Myanmar studies have been an Orientalist backwater, and recalibrating and updating a Braudellian approach which Victor Lieberman has argued for Southeast Asian Studies. 12<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0We need to zero in on the single most consequential ongoing global process, namely the capitalist transformation of Myanmar as a frontier market. For it is this process, more than any other factors, which affects both our research objects\u2014the people and our research itself.<\/p>\n The perspective which I have found most empirically verifiable and suitable in explaining the dizzying array of changes is a security perspective which I call the \u201cThree Insecurities Perspective\u201d, namely, (traditional) national insecurity, global insecurity and human insecurity.<\/p>\n First, national insecurity straightforwardly refers to the permanent sense of insecurity of nation-states, which, at its crudest, is about the uncertainties with respect to \u201cregime survival\u201d. Second, global insecurity is defined as the overall sense of insecurities and vulnerabilities of the world\u2019s economic and political order, which in turn rests on the security of the nation-states making up the world\u2019s political economy. Third and finally, human insecurity refers to the absence of \u201cthe <\/i>security of the individual and communities in which he or she lives as opposed to the security of the states and borders\u201d. 13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n In a nutshell, the proposed \u201cThree Insecurities Perspective\u201d argues that since the end of the Cold War, global capitalism has brought communities, the Environment and national political-economies into a single overarching whole in the process widely referred to as globalization. Here, the three discourses of in-security compete for primacy in policy making and practices. While talking about the rule-based, predictable international order, every nation-state is preparing for eventualities such as war. \u00a0Driven by a profound sense of insecurities, domestically and internationally, even the United States is found spying on allies, citizens and rivals alike as shown by the latest PRISM scandal.<\/p>\n While all three are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the issue of vulnerabilities, such as refugees, internally displaced persons, and the unemployed, is typically placed on the policy backburners.\u00a0 The security and well-being of persons and communities are trampled upon, literally and figuratively, especially when the other two insecurity regimes\u2014national and global insecurity regimes\u2014team up to form an exclusive symbiosis out of strategic calculations and political expediency.\u00a0 This is why one often reads stories about how the policies and practices of states, 14<\/sup><\/a> corporations, multilateral agencies and international financial institutions collectively contribute to the detriment of marginal communities and faceless human persons, their natural habitats and their access to livelihoods, safety, freedoms of movement, association and so on.<\/p>\n I believe the proposed \u201cThree Insecurities Perspective\u201d best explains Myanmar affairs (as well as other similar \u201cnational\u201d cases) and reflects the country\u2019s objectively verifiable realities. It also locates both the study of Myanmar and the country\u2019s affairs within the context of the single most profoundly consequential process of capitalist transformation that the country as a \u2018frontier market\u2019 is going through.<\/p>\n Seen through this prism of insecurities, the country\u2019s top-down democratic reforms are less about Myanmar\u2019s democratization, but primarily about the country\u2019s national ruling elite making an elite pact with the globalist capitalist forces, while morphing into a social class of their own, namely military-crony-capitalists. \u00a0In this pact, the people open up their hotly sought after frontier market in exchange for normalization, recognition, legitimacy and access to capital and global market, and technology. \u00a0Naypyidaw is opening the country up on terms agreeable and favourable to the country\u2019s most powerful stakeholders\u2014the military and its national insecurity regime. In this process, even the country\u2019s most influential politician and global icon Aung San Suu Kyi has found herself on the global capitalist stage where she no longer controls the script, the staging, the tune or the lyrics.<\/p>\n The still unfolding case of the ethnically cleansed Rohingya Muslims presents itself as an empirical test case for the Three Insecurities Perspective. Despite the widespread abject poverty in Rakhine State where the Rohingya co-inhabited with the Buddhist Rakhines and recently marked by waves of mass violence, this area has become strategic and lucrative in the emerging capitalist economy of Myanmar\u2014a strategic deep sea port, fertile agricultural land with potential for industrial agriculture, a fishing industry, a multibillion dollar special economic zone and the place of origin for China\u2019s twin gas-and-oil pipeline.<\/p>\n In the civil war between East and West Pakistan in 1971, West Pakistani General Tikka issued a chilling order to his troops, \u201cI want the land, not the people.\u201d 15<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0Chillingly again, this time in Western Myanmar, the country\u2019s national security regime may simply have reacquired the land, without the (Rohingya) people.<\/p>\n Without properly contextualizing Myanmar\u2019s transition in the entangled web of this three insecurities outlook, our understanding of reforms, changes and democratization will remain half-baked\u2014no less half-baked than a democracy being mid-wived by Naypyidaw\u2019s national insecurity regime and the global insecurity capitalists.<\/p>\n NOTES:<\/b><\/p>\n ________________________________<\/p>\n Maung Zarni<\/i>, Associate Fellow, the University of Malaya. <\/i>Dr. Maung Zarni is a <\/em>member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment,<\/i> <\/em>founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press.<\/em> He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website www.maungzarni.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n
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