Burma's Ambiguous Breakthrough

When Burma¹ held its first multiparty elections in 30 years this past May, most of the coverage in the Western media drew analogies with recent events in Eastern Europe. Comparisons with more similar polities in Southeast Asia would have been more illuminating. Readers were led to believe that Burma began shaking off 26 years of one-party political obscurantism in mid-1988, when prodemocracy demonstrators rocked the foundations of an authoritarian regime. The Burmese people, having apparently borne an arbitrary and incompetent government with little protest for decades, seemed to have joined the tide of opinion sweeping similar socialist polities and demanded an end to single-party government.

Though the socialist one-party state collapsed in the face of this popular uprising, the old order held on with help from its formateur, the army, which repressed the demonstrations. Nonetheless, because of the economic sanctions imposed upon the country by Western governments, the weakened junta, named the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), held elections for a new People's Assembly. Despite the detention of major political leaders and arbitrary curtailment of democratic rights during the campaign, a "free and fair" vote took place. That vote proved conclusively that the demand for democracy was real, and that the army would have to abandon power immediately.

Like most analogies, the comparison of Burma with Eastern Europe distorts more than it illuminates. Just as each democratic revolution in Eastern Europe emerged out of the unique conditions of its own society, the events of the past two years in Burma have their roots in a particular historical and cultural context that in some ways helps, but in others hinders, the emergence of a democratic polity. The differences with Eastern Europe are apparent in many forms. The major impetus for efforts to achieve socialist autarky in Burma came not from a foreign hegemon, but from a tradition of radical nationalist politics. Burma's army, politicized since its formation in 1941 as an anti-British force, upholds a self-sustaining myth of being both a populist and autonomous vanguard movement. Socialism's intellectual appeal in Burma traces back to the 1930s, when the last anticolonial nationalist generation came to see it as the wave of a more equitable postcolonial future. The army and socialism came together in 1962 to form the order that collapsed in 1988. While socialist ideology has now been largely abandoned, the politicized army still dominates the state.

Just as the economic collapse that preceded the political upheaval of 1988 revealed the failure of socialism in Burma, the outcome of the May elections convincingly revealed the illegitimacy of continued military rule. The National League for Democracy (NLD), the most outspoken opposition to the military, won the election with about two-thirds of the votes and 80 percent of the seats in the 485-member legislature. The army, however, has yet to hand over power because it feels that it has no alternative but to shape the political future. The country is now faced with the question of whether the army really means to relinquish power to a civilian government, or whether it will attempt to hold on indefinitely. Is the present period one of transition to democracy, or is the army merely trying to rebuild its shattered power and retrench for another quarter century of stasis? The continuing role of the military in the politics of neighboring countries such as Thailand and Indonesia suggests that while a transition is possible, it will be less rapid than most observers might have believed.²

Journalists have been tempted to personalize the current situation into a struggle between the forces of darkness, led by General Ne Win, the dominant figure in the government since 1962, and the forces of light, represented by NLD General Secretary Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Unless one transcends such simplifications, however, one will never be able to grasp the underlying forces at work, or understand how the institutional basis for a lasting democracy may be established. Like the Rangoon newspapers of the 1930s with their incessant search for a political strongman, many in and out of Burma are...