Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (review)

386Book Reviews The book treats the pattern of Indian policy towards Burma within the idealist-realist framework. The attitude against the regime and support for the democratic opposition is characterized as an idealisthumanist impulse (p. 121) while the turnaround is depicted as a swing towards realism. However, in the opinion of this reviewer a more appropriate framework to analyse the policy reorientation could have been drawn from the foreign policy change literature thereby highlighting the adaptive nature of foreign policy behaviour and pinpointing the degree and level of change. The sources, conditions and consequences of foreign policy change could then be more systematically analysed and policy reorientation placed along a continuum stretching from moderate, significant to extreme restructuring. In the absence of such a framework the study is more like a compendium ofmutual interactions. In sum, the main merit of the book lies in bringing together the recent developments in India's Burma policy without neglecting the historical and regional contexts within which this bilateral relationship has evolved. Those who are interested in one minor facet of India's Look East policy might find this book quite useful. Kripa Sridharan Department ofPolitical Science National University of Singapore MakingEnemies: Warand StateBuildinginBurma. By MaryP Callahan. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003. 268pp. On 2 March 1962 the Burmese military (tatmadaw) led by General Ne Win seized power and went on to rule Burma for the next 26 years. Mary P Callahan provides a cogent and complex narrative of the events leading to this seizure ofpower that challenges many ofthe conventional explanations of the coup. These range from the official tatmadaw justification ofits action to save the Union from disintegration following the concessions that Prime Minister U Nu had made to insurgent ethnic groups challenging the Union, to analyses that argue for the military's growing appetite for political power following its first taste of it in 1958, when Ne Win first seized, or was "invited" by U Nu to take over a government besieged by factional fighting. Callahan's account starts with the 19th century British colonial state which found itself increasingly reliant upon armed coercion to administer its territories because the indigenous institutions which it could have deployed for indirect rule had been destroyed in a series of Book Reviews387 Anglo-Burmese wars. This for Callahan is the legacy of colonial rule: "the primacy of coercion in state-society relations". The colonial institutions which replaced the old indigenous institutions were destroyed by invading Japanese forces in World War II. World War II is central to Callahan's narrative because it is in the long Burma campaign that the origins of the tatmadaw are rooted — in the warring factions of the Burma Independence Army sponsored by the Japanese and the anti-Japanese armed resistance supported by the Allies. The British returned to confront these warring armed groups and factions and sort out "who would hold the guns, who would tell whom what to do, and who would have authority over what territory". It was in the negotiations and political manoeuvring between 1945 and 1948 that the seeds of divisions in the military were laid, especially in the British decision for a "two-wing" army of ethnic Burman soldiers and non-Burmans. The new Army's acceptance of civilian control in 1948 appeared to be more out of expediency rather than conviction. What then transformed this weak, faction-ridden force in 1948 to the powerful military in 1958 that stepped in to save the Union? Putting down mutinies and combating ethnic unrest and insurgency in the horseshoe-shaped periphery around the heartland of the Burmese state certainly provided the opportunity for the military to expand its role and capacity for armed coercion. However, Callahan argues that it was more the KMT crisis that provided the impetus for the tatmadaw to transform itself. Fear that China might move to annex the parts of Burma occupied by some 12,000 US-supplied KMT troops led Burma to transform its still fragmented, decentralized guerrilla force into a modern army to take on the KMT. By the late 1950s the tatmadaw was not only a conventional war machine, but also a thriving business enterprise via its...