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Amitav Acharya, "Tragic Nation: Burma--Why and How Democracy Failed" (Penguin Random House, 2023)
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An interview with Amitav Acharya
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New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is.
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Sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute.
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The Griffith Asia Institute, the New York.
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Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of.
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Asian Studies, and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre. Welcome to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies, a podcast on the New Books Network. I'm Duncan McCargo, one of the hosts on the channel and the director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where I'm a professor of political science. I'm delighted to have with me today Amitav Acharya, Distinguished professor at the School of International Service at the American University in Washington, dc. We're going to be discussing Amitav's new book, Tragic Nation Burma why and How Democracy Failed, published by Penguin Random House in 2022. Amitav, welcome to the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel.
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Thank you very much, Duncan. Very pleased to be here.
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Amitav, you're best known as one of the world's leading scholars of international relations, and you've drawn on your own background as an Indian national who spent long periods of time in Southeast Asia to offer alternative readings of the current world order that challenge some of the dominant paradigms in the field. So many of our listeners might therefore be surprised to learn that you've just published a book specifically on Burma and one that's aimed at a broader audience than the usual academic circles. Can you explain how you came to write this book?
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Thank you, Duncan. Yes, even though I was born and did my up to my master's degree in India, I actually spent my professional life studying Southeast Asia and the wider world. In fact, I don't consider myself as a India or South Asia expert. I consciously chose to study Southeast Asia immediately after I did my doctorate in Australia. A lot of my early work is actually on Southeast Asia, so in fact I can't say what percentage. But in my earlier work, in the first 15 to 20 years of my academic career, most of the work I did was on southeast Asia, especially ASEAN, and which by the way, covered ASEAN's dealing with Burma or Myanmar from the military regime from the 1970s onwards. And also I've written books on Indonesian foreign policy, Singapore's foreign policy, and the relation between Southeast Asia and China. One should not be totally surprised by me going into going to write this book. I have actually taught in both Yangon and Mandala universities in the 2010s when Burma opened up, and I have visited Burma many, many times. In fact, I would say I've visited Burma more than any other place in India, except my home state for Odisha to visit my family. So that probably explains why I decided to do this book. I have always been fascinated by Burma and about its culture, but also about its politics. This is my first major study of Burma itself, but it has always been part of my study or research into Burma ASEAN relations or ASEAN's, for example, constructive engagement policy during the 1990s and leading up to the 2008 constitution and elections in Burma. So I hope that answers your question a bit.
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B
Right? Yeah. A central feature of transignation is your engagement with the views of those you call these thought warriors, the young Burmans with whom you've been in close communication in the aftermath of the 1 February 2021 military coup. Can you tell us a bit about these anonymous key informants who keep popping up in italics in the text and the research process that you used for this book?
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Yes, thanks for the question. So the thought warriors are basically members of the civil disobedience movement cdm, and they are mostly young people, mostly students, who took to the streets after the military coup to protest nonviolently against military takeover. I said nonviolently because that's why they're called civil Disobedience as opposed to the People's Defense Groups, which are basically paramilitary organizations that actually take off armed Resistance to the military. So why did I go for the civil Disobedience movement people? Because many of them are students and some of them actually followed my work in international relations. I don't want to tell any more about their identities except what I just said because there is a significant risk to them for being revealed in any way in the hands of the Burmese state. But let me tell you why I decided to go rely on them to write this book. So I had planned to write a book about Burma for some time, but never really had the chance or the time to put my energy into it. Then came COVID 19 and COVID 19 was both a blow and an opportunity. It was a blow because I couldn't go to anywhere. I couldn't go to even Thailand to do research in the Thai Burma border. And not to mention going into by myself. I thought of abandoning the book, but my publisher, Penguin Random House editor, they encouraged me to somehow do this book. So I devised a kind of a research by stealth, so to speak. And using my contacts inside the Burma. Again, I cannot tell you any more than just my contacts. I decided to conduct surveys and interviews and conversations, or sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly with my contacts inside there. Now ask my contacts to focus the research or the interviews. The conversations on the CDM activists, not armed resistance or even political leaders. Of course, political leaders are either in prison or agile. So I decided to focus on this group, do a series of interviews, conversations over a period of one year to get their views on how they see the reasons for this military takeover, reasons for the breakdown of democracy, why and how democracy failed, what's going on inside the country, what are the chances of resistance sort of in some way pushing back the military? Although nobody thought the coup can be reversed anytime soon, but still, what will be the outcome in the long term? So all these questions we asked them over a period of one year, kept updating and then finally I found that there was really enough material for me to write a book making those conversations at the centerpiece. Now I decided to go like full blast with CDM's. I call them thought warriors because they are not actual warriors. They renounce violence, they're nonviolent people, but at the same time they have ideas, they have emotions, they have sort of visions about the country's future. So the idea of a thought warrior seemed quite appropriate to me. And once I touched base with them, I think I decided to organize the book mostly around their thinking and their vision for Burma.
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Right. I guess a lot is captured in this subtitle. Of the book, which is why and how democracy failed. And perhaps I could ask you succinctly to take that in terms of two questions in a nutshell. First, according to the argument of your book, why did democracy fail in Burma?
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C
That's basically what the book is about. But the why question is actually in some ways more important than the how question. Yes, there have been a lot of work already done in Burma by academics and also some journalists who have longtime watchers of Burma. They are all very good. But I think some things are missing. One of the objectives of my book is to make sense of all these different arguments. So the larger question here is are developing countries post colonial nations really suitable for democracy? There is a big question out there. In fact, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, used to say that in fact about Burma, that only the military can rule Burma. I discussed that in the book. Only the military can effectively govern Burma. And there is also the view in academia, as you know, that the conditions that allow democracy to flourish in the west largely absent in developing or post colonial countries. And there have been many explanations and especially in the context of Burma, it has been said that this is too fragmented, there are too many ethnic groups. Even postcolonial nations tend to have a lot of ethnic groups but political divisions. But Burma is extreme case. Then there is the explanations about foreign elements that interference from outside destabilizing the country and making it ungovernable, such as the Kuomintang after the China Chinese revolution, the Japanese, of course, the legacy of the Japanese occupation of Burma and during the Cold War, you know, the general intervention in Southeast Asia and by superpowers. So there is a. Then blame foreigners for these foreign human rights groups, for example. I thought there is something more to it. One objective of the book was to provide a sort of organized explanation, organized narrative of different explanations of Irma's kind of democratic failure or why democracy didn't take root or when it did take appear to take root, collapsed. So that's the one thing the book does. The other thing is to add something to it. And my explanation revolves around the question of regime security, which is very different from state security. And this is both an academic but also a very well observed pattern in the post colonial countries. So I believe that originally the military had no intention the 1960 coup by General Ne Win. The military had no intention or little intention of staying on in power for this long. But once they got power and once they enjoyed the benefits of power, they did everything possible to stay in power and become a self perpetuating dynamic. Even though there was occasions where they could have let go and they tried to do after the elections based on the 2008 Constitution, but they just can't stay away from it because they felt that the regime, the military, so deeply entrenched in the political system, with all the economic benefits, material benefits and political benefits they get, they're not prepared to give up that. And they are also afraid if they give up power, the civilians and political parties will not only marginalize them, but maybe even prosecute. So regime security, the regime survival became a self enforcing dynamic once the military came into power in 1962. And that was always there, that never really disappeared. Even after the 2008 constitution, the elections, 2011 and 2015, there was always this danger lurking that the military may one day find that being too marginalized, they are no longer going to be in that privileged position that they're so used to. And there's an entire culture system built around military privilege and those things are going to be compromised if there is genuine democratic transformation. And that's why, sort of a result of the 20 elections which by the military and it's a Paris, it backed lost ground, the military stepped in.
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Right? Yeah, I think you've gone a long way there to answering also a bit about the how question. And those of us who work on Thailand will be feeling a very strong sense of deja vu when you talk about some of these senses of military entitlement, power and privilege. Is there something else you'd like to add about the argument in the book about how democracy failed?
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Well, the how question probably has to do with the immediate dynamics, immediate development surrounding the coup. And of course, if you take a long term view, the how question revolves around the history of constitution making an unmaking in the country. But to cut a long story short, I think when the 20 elections showed that the military backed parties are basically decimated and the National League of Democracy is going to be in a position that it may be able to, at least in a better position to push for a change in constitution that eliminate the provisions of the constitution that gave military special privileges and special 25% representation. Now around that time, one thing led to the other. So this was of course the time when there was Covid, there was the economic crisis induced by Covid, but also general economic crisis. The Burma's economic reforms were not undertaken by nld, were not going very well. But when this election results came in, there was an immediate fear in the military that this will lead to kind of a long term civilian or take over of the country that may lead to the military being sidelined. And then there were of course conversations and meetings, contacts between the NLD and the military regime. I'm not going to name any names, there are too many. You can find them in the book. But nothing went far enough to indicate any kind of compromise. So I think the immediate, the months preceding the election, the military had indicated that they're not going to just give up power without their aspirations, their demands being met. And in the immediate aftermath month of the election, the conversations between the senior general and Aung San SUU Kyi did not really produce any breakthrough. And there was also some amount of animosity between them and it led to the sort of what you call breakdown. So the how question revolves around the immediate context, immediate situation. Just before and after. Just before the coup, just before the election and before the February coup.
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Right. Clearly the coup of February 2021 was a terrible setback for democracy, politics, human in Burma. It's been followed by some appalling violence and repression. There is this argument that some of us have made. There's a kind of silver lining here. There's an emergence of a new democratic alliance between lowland Burmans who oppose the military and various ethnic armed organizations that have been fighting against the military for years. So you've now achieved something that hadn't really happened before. What do you think about that argument? The silver lining argument?
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Yes, that is definitely a silver lining. But it is a silver lining that may be fading as the military takeover over and the regime, the new military regime post 2021 coup regime stays in power longer, it's going to find different ways of consolidating itself and even legitimizing itself. To answer your specific question about this new window of opportunity of unity between the majority Burma group and the ethnic minorities, that is a real, that's a real development because in this resistance against the military coup after the February 2021 coup, there is a highlight of that is the fact that this is a situation when the military regime is fighting the majority, the Myanmar group, not just a minority. The most of the history of post colonial Burma is when the military is actually fighting in the ethnic organization, ethnic groups, and only occasionally, but those are significant occasions with a lot of bloodshed that should not underestimate them. Generally military puts down any protests, rebellion, political rebellion like situations. But generally the sustained fighting happens in between the military and the ethnic groups which are non Bammar. Now this time with this resistance which is actually blamed some ways by the ethnic majority group, the Burmar creates a new situation. It's a majority fighting the military rather than the minorities fighting the military. And that creates a new situation. And beyond that, you can see a genuine desire to bring in the minority groups into the mainstream of Burmese politics. There have been, of course, efforts throughout Burma's history, hung along agreement by General Aung San which tried to create a sort of national unity of government or governance system for Burma. There has been things, attempts like this to bring national unity in the past, but none of them really lasted very long. And there was kind of no common enemy, so to speak. This time the military takeover has really antagonized, alienated a whole cross section of Burmese society. And that creates an opportunity window for opportunity, the long term unity whereby the majority, the Mama group, are willing to provide concessions and representation to the ethnic groups. So that does create an opportunity. But this has to be exploited. This has to be acted upon. And longer the military regime stays on, there will be disunity surfacing. It's already surfacing in the National Unity government. And because it is always a hot spots coalition and there is always a lingering distrust of the majority Burma group among the ethnic minorities, including those represented in the National Unity government.
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Right, you've mentioned the National Unity government. Perhaps I can ask you a little bit about that too. Obviously, from the perspective of anyone who studies international relations, you get into an, shall we say, an interesting situation where there are two bunches of people both claiming to be the government of the same country at the same time. Why do you think it's been so difficult for the NUG to get recognition by what we. And you don't seem to like the term very much in the book, but the international community, why have they been so reluctant to acknowledge and recognize the NUG despite paying sort of lip service to this cause?
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Sure. So I can also answer this question from the prism of the thought warriors because a lot of the conversations I had about when writing this book was about the NUG and the resistance as a whole. There may be different aspects to my answer to this question. One is that the NUG itself is a coalition, is a coalition put together by the exigencies of the military coup. And there was no real long term negotiation or kind of deeper understanding about strategy, tactics or even the future vision of Burma, the idea of a democratic federalist Burma. So those things would have taken time. But this coalition was put together very quickly and in a sense in a very surprisingly quick. And I won't Say, efficient way, but yeah, in a way that might have surprised some people. So that's part of the reason why it hasn't really. I mean, it took time for the NUG to get a hold of the situation and that led to the fact that its international diplomacy was not as well organized as it could have been. So things like lobbying in Washington or lobbying in the Western capitals, some of it is happening, but it wasn't really quick or efficient in my observation. And because this is a rather new sudden creation of sudden entity that basically came because of the coup, if we didn't have the coup, you can ask yourself, would there have been anything like the Nahla unity government in Burma? I don't think it would have. To the extent that we have it now, there would have been some sort of unity and coalition that always was between NLD and some other parties. But we should not have come to the scale that NUG now claims to represent. So this is part of the answer. The suddenness, the lack of time to prepare to be an alternative government and the lack of resources, lack of experience in loving in Western countries. So the so called international community, those are part of the reason why NUG has not been as effective in securing recognition from international community. Another thing that thought warriors pointed out is that NUG doesn't necessarily command the support it claims to comm within the country. And I was quite surprised by some of the comments made by the thought warriors. A lot of them can't really count the numbers, but there was definitely one distinctive view among the thought warriors I interviewed that NUG is not to be trusted, it's not going to be effective. It's a bunch of same politicians playing the same kind of politics where it's convenient to them. They sided with the military as with the Rohingya crisis, but now that the military has marginalized them, they're coming together. So who knows what will happen when, if and when there's a big if. The military regime gives way to a civilian regime. Can this unity survive? Can the promises made by NUG to the minorities hold? So there is still this distrust between the majority bomber NLD and the ethnic minority political parties and groups and leaders. That really also creates a perception of nug's fragility in the international community. But final point on this is that the international community, so called internal community, the Western countries is like the United States in particular and the eu, are too busy with their own other security issues. So immediately after the coup we had the Afghanistan fiasco that the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in a very messy way. Then of course the Russia Ukraine war. So the United States and the European Union west in general is too busy with the Ukraine issue, which it takes far more seriously as an existential security challenge than the situation in Burma Myanmar. When it comes to Burma, it's basically used sanctions, use rely on asean, but not put the kind of energy, attention and resources into supporting the NUG or the Burmese resistance to the military.
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Right. You mentioned asean, obviously that's what I was about to ask you next. Talking about the international community, are those a little bit closer to Myanmar? There have been moments when ASEAN seemed to be on the verge of taking some useful initiatives. How would you assess the ASEAN response overall?
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C
Yes, this is one issue I have studied for a much longer time than the Burmese internal politics. So I can remember looking at ASEAN's response to or ASEAN dealing with Burma going back to the 19, when I started looking at Southeast Asian affairs in the late 1980s. Here is a sense of deja vu in some ways. To be fair, ASEAN in general is more opposed to the coup, this coup, than it has ever been to the military regime in Burma in the past. So countries that had any issue with a military government in Burma, for example Singapore or Malaysia in the past now have spoken out against the military takeover. So ASEAN has tried to express, at least express his displeasure, disapproval of the coup. And ASEAN of course had this five Point Consensus immediately after the coup, trying to find a compromise between the military regime and the opposition, find a roadmap for not so gradual transition to civilian democratic rule in Burma. But that was premature and it actually failed, as I had actually warned when the five point consensus was issued. But generally ASEAN's problem in dealing with Myanmar is nothing different from what it used to be in the past, although some characters and some countries approaches have changed. So ASEAN is divided. Asean of course, is not a paragon of democracy. We have authoritarian regimes in ASEAN and they see that trying to promote democratic change, reverse the coup in Burma, will come back to hunt them. So, and you can talk about also Thailand's attitude. It's partly because Thailand's current regime is an offgrowth of the military coup. And how do you expect them to react to a military coup in Burma? There's a sense of a kindred spirit, so to speak, among the generals in Thailand and the generals in Burma. But then there is of course the issue of sanctions and outside intervention. ASEAN doesn't want too much Chinese influence in Burma. That's the reason why ASEAN had welcomed Burma into its membership in the 1990s. And they also don't want too much pressure, too much outside pressure that will lead to instability in Burma and also entrenched military regime. So those are divisions within asean. There are some countries, Indonesia in particular wants to find a peaceful solution in Burma, basically restoration of democracy, I would say Singapore, Malaysia in the same boat. Philippines has not been very concerned. It's a bit far away from Burma. Thailand is of course playing all sides. Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos really not very democratic regimes and they are very careful, in fact reluctant to join any strong ASEAN action against the military regime. In some ways it mirrors what happened in the 1990s and early 2000. Although this time I would say Singapore has spoken out against the military takeover quite bluntly in a way never did in the past.
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Yes. Now you completed the book, I gather, nearly a year ago and how do you currently view the future prospects for Burma? Is there now an end of any kind in sight or are we really no further along than we were say this time in 2022?
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So the thought warriors I talked to, they were kind of divided, but there was a sense of optimism which I felt, felt I should of course report, but maybe a bit naive, but these are young people and young people tend to be optimistic. They are fired up by this resistance that they were part of, but in a nonviolent way. They really had a very romantic view of the EAFs, Ethnic Armed. EAOs, Ethnic Armed Organizations. They actually, and I should have mentioned this earlier, some of these are quite a few of the thought warriors felt that they can trust the ethnic armed organization more than they can trust the. So they were very fired up. They felt that ethnic groups have been marginalized in the past. Now we have a new situation, as you asked me earlier, and we are fighting the majority Burmar resistance groups. The majority Burma groups are fighting alongside the ethnic groups against the common enemy. So there was a bit of romantic optimism among the thought warriors, but there were also some who felt that, ah, we are back to the future in some ways the military is back again. They couldn't believe it, but they said, you know, what can we do about it? So kind of fatalistic way. So my own reading of this was that this is not going to be easy to reverse the coup. And I also mentioned in the book that military regime will try to legitimize itself by calling a sham election. And that's what exactly what happened, by the way, after my book was written, although it was published only a few months ago, as I had anticipated, it's not difficult to anticipate. The military regime will say, we're going to organize an election. Of course it'll be boycotted by the NUG, but you can still organize an election even if 80% of the country boycotts it and you claim victory. And once you claim victory, you use that to say, okay, we are legitimate now, and then there will be countries that will support you or at least come to terms with it. And this is also very important to remember that one of the reasons why it is going to be difficult to reverse the coup is because Burma is big. Regional neighbors, including China and India are really not supporting the pro democracy forces. They're actually continuing their dealings with the military regime, some more so than others. China is of course much more closely involved supporting the military regime. India is having contacts, including military contacts with the regime. So all this makes it very difficult to think of an immediate reversal of the code. The international Western community. Western countries are still busy with Russia, Ukraine fighting Russia more than anything else. United States is more interested in sort of limiting Chinese influence, countering China than promoting democracy in Burma. So all this means and all these things I had anticipated and discussed in the book and that's basically coming to play as we speak, right?
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B
Yeah. I'd like to end with a slightly different kind of question. I think the two of us and quite a number of other academics working on Southeast Asia share this aspiration of writing books that are not in the classic academic mode, crossover books that might be published by trade presses. In this case, a Penguin published this book that would include academic insights and research, but present it in a more readable and accessible format than most academic books. It's something I try to do with our book about Thailand's future Forward Party. Could you say something about your attempts to write a different kind of Burma book?
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Yeah, this is in a sense my first book which is published by a so called trade press. I did a couple of books earlier called Asia Rising and Age of Fear that were published by Singaporean publisher, but they were like a collection of op EDS I wrote for newspapers. This is really the first seriously researched book for a general audience, so to speak. So you can call it a trade book or a crossover book, maybe more crossover is more.
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B
Right.
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But it is certainly published by like Random House, which is the largest trade publisher, book publisher of trade books in the world. So it is a challenge. Academics like us tend to be very careful about everything we say, qualify everything with footnotes and references and in fact one of the issues, maybe possible criticisms of the book is that there are too many footnotes, much more than what a normal trade book should have. The thing is, I did my best to have a language that is accessible to at least an informed audience. There is no real storytelling in this book or too many personal anecdotes. I have been to Burma so many times that I could have filled this book with my personal anecdotes. Like now when I'm. For example, when I took a flight to my maybe second trip to Burma and I was at the airport and I wanted to have. I'm getting out of Yangon to Singapore and I wanted to have a last meal, Burmese food meal. I was sitting at the airport cafe with the old airport, I mean not much facility there and the restaurant owner or the server said we don't have any that kind of food that you're asking for. And I just sat there. Ten minutes later he brings in a tiffin box and says, mister, this is the food that my wife gave me for my own lunch. But since you are so keen to have Burmese food, please could you have this food? And you know that kind of story that really completely throws you off your feet. And I have so many stories of kindness and generosity, so many friendship and also political conversation I had with a whole bunch of military officers, civilians, professors, my students. I taught in Yangdon and Mandalay universities. So I could have put all this and written a book about this, but I still wanted to stay within the modes of my academic norms. The training basically solved. But on the other hand, I think every academic should write something like this at some stage in their career because their message should now they owe it to themselves and to the society that their message should have a wider reach. For me, that was the main reason for writing the book. One final thought about this. This book is not a conventional academic book. It may be relevant to academics, but the only reason I wrote this book in the way I wrote is that I wanted to write something that will be useful to the younger generation of Burma, the thought warriors. It's actually more written, co written in some ways with them. And the way some of the people who read the manuscript before it was published and commented back was so moving, so overwhelming. This is a book meant for the thought warriors, the younger generation who will decide the future of Burma. It's not meant for academic experts or journalists. If they may find it useful, so be it. But if the book is useful and encouraging and inspiring to the younger generations, I think my job is done.
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B
Thanks so much, Amitav. I've been talking to Amitav Acharya of American University about his new book, tragic Nation Burma, which is just out from Penguin Random house. I'm Duncan McCargo, one of the hosts here on the New Books in Southeast Asian Studies channel on the New Books Network.
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C
It.