Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (28 page)

Taken as a whole, one striking feature of external action is the sense of missed opportunity. Within Asia, the sense of crisis has always been underdeveloped, and business as usual has been an easy policy choice. Beyond Asia, the sense of crisis has long been overdeveloped, for once the junta stabilized control temporarily after 1988 and more permanently after 1990 it was not likely with one more heave to collapse into the abyss. Rather, the situation called for creative approaches designed to build trust across deep internal divisions and, more broadly, reshape the domestic political environment. Though hinted at in minor policy initiatives, however, no new strategy materialized in the period down to the installation of disciplined democracy in 2011. Today, only very few diplomats, aid workers, activists and corporate executives are making concrete efforts to facilitate positive political reform inside the country.

In consequence, a still more striking feature of external action is the open debate it has provoked among Myanmar people. The NLD holds firmly to isolationism, calling in a February 2011 statement for no more than an impact study and talks with the US and allied powers.
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Interviewed a few days later, Aung San Suu Kyi said that it was too early to “reward” the generals by removing sanctions.
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Several weeks later she insisted that “Sanctions must remain in place. Sanctions should only be lifted when something has changed here.”
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Against this, however, minor parties with elected members of parliament from both the democratic and ethnic camps articulate a frank desire to move on.
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In March 2011, leaders of 10 such parties issued an open letter asking the EU to use its annual policy review to “rethink its current approach of isolating Myanmar.”
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This is also the message transmitted by individuals interviewed by listening projects inside the country, less through overt denunciations of sanctions than through the many constructive alternatives that are floated.
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Furthermore, in those possibilities can be found implicit critique of anodyne engagement strategies launched during the past 25 years.

The result is that global policy responses to Myanmar’s dominant military machine are in some disarray. Outsiders have registered only small success in promoting political reform, or even economic development and social stability. Insiders are fiercely divided about ways forward, manifesting little confidence in either isolationist strategies or engagement policies as currently implemented. In these circumstances, a thorough reexamination of options for external action is urgently required.

6

Injustice and implication

While Myanmar has long triggered deep concern among foreigners, policies implemented to date have registered limited success and are now openly disputed by both insiders and outsiders. It is therefore necessary to think again. In an age of humanitarian engagement driven by generic notions of global justice, this chapter seeks to do that by turning to core principles. Specifically, it looks to contemporary political philosophy to clarify the duties of justice in this case and determine not what the wider world might do to help local people, but rather what the dictates of global justice indicate it must do. The aim is to build a secure theoretical foundation for policy options in the world of practice. To this end, the chapter addresses two main issues. One is the extent to which outsiders are directly implicated in injustice in Myanmar, and the requirements that flow from that. Have foreigners visited harm on local people, and if so what must they do to rectify matters? The other is obligations owed to Myanmar citizens not because of any traceable course of action or inaction on the part of external agents, but merely through bonds entailed by universal membership of the human race. Are there claims foreigners need to deliver on purely because at least some of the injustice in contemporary Myanmar is intolerable in the world of the twenty-first century? The chapter opens with a brief survey of debate about global justice. It then examines the issue of external responsibility for injustice inside Myanmar. Following on, it considers duties of global justice with no readily identifiable historical imprint. It closes by aggregating the demands of justice in this case. The argument is that outsiders clearly do owe duties of justice to the people of Myanmar. Without taking a further analytical step, however, ways in which they might be performed can be described only very provisionally.

Global justice

Stretching back to the ancients, justice has always been at the heart of political inquiry. Of more recent vintage, however, are subsidiary strands of debate. One is the interest in social justice that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century and came to dominate political philosophy in the twentieth.
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Another is the preoccupation with global justice that developed at the end of the Cold War and expanded interest beyond bounded contexts. Global justice is currently a leading theoretical concern.

Landmark studies of social justice published by John Rawls and Robert Nozick in the early 1970s confined deliberation chiefly to a single society, and focused mainly on distributive matters. To argue out requirements of justice in the original position, where free and equal persons assemble behind a veil of ignorance about individual circumstance, Rawls put not the many billions of people who inhabit the earth, but rather representatives of the inhabitants of a particular place. In this thought experiment, cross-border issues of justice were scarcely considered. As Rawls wrote in the opening pages of
A Theory of Justice
, “I shall be satisfied if it is possible to formulate a reasonable conception of justice for the basic structure of society conceived for the time being as a closed system isolated from other societies.”
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Only later did he fully address issues of global justice. Similarly, although Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice did not have to be constrained in this way, for in principle the “framework for utopia” created in the minimal state need have no territorial bounds, in practice it too was seen both by Nozick and his critics as generating a series of closed systems.
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Moreover, theorists such as Peter Singer, who dispensed with territorial issues through an insistence that the justice claims of distant strangers are on an equal footing with those close by, were mainly confined to the margins of debate. While the 1971 Bengal emergency across the border from Burma in the nascent state of Bangladesh was used as a framing device by Singer, it did not reshape mainstream theory.
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In the 1980s, the appearance of communitarian critiques, notably in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael J. Sandel, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer, served only to reinforce the focus on specific societies and cultures.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the abrupt termination of the Cold War occasioned a redirection of interest, placing justice beyond borders at the heart of analysis. Combined with rapid advances in information and communication technology that saw crises in hitherto hidden and mysterious parts of the world begin to flash across television and computer screens, it triggered a significant reorientation of theoretical debate. Although Burma’s 1988 uprising slightly predated this broad international shift, and in consequence was largely disregarded by the wider world, the country nevertheless soon became a staple of global concern. Though rarely at the heart of analysis, it retains a committed following in transnational activist networks.

Furthermore, the refocusing of global attention rapidly generated institutional impacts in international society. Before long, an order designed to address issues of broad global welfare was set in place alongside orders devised decades earlier to oversee global security and the global economy.
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Clearly there were antecedents. Michael Barnett looks in the nineteenth century to abolitionist campaigns against the slave trade, missionary work, creation of the ICRC and gradual emergence of international humanitarian law, and in the twentieth to a steady accumulation of humanitarian norms, rules and institutions.
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By contrast, Samuel Moyn holds that an understanding of rights as applicable to all and protected by the global community was not widely held before the 1970s. Then, however, in reaction to the failure of revolutionary projects, and especially of anti-colonialist struggles, a modern humanitarian turn took place, captured above all in President Jimmy Carter’s pioneering late 1970s attempt to situate human rights at the heart of US foreign policy.
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As Barnett again writes, though, only post-Cold War experience fully grounded the new order, generating both a “surfeit of conventions and treaties” designed to protect the right to life, and a “metropolis of organizations” dedicated to reducing suffering and lending a hand.
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The case of Burma down to 1989 and Myanmar thereafter is better explained by Barnett. Although ODA to Burma increased 20-fold in the decade of the 1970s emphasized by Moyn, it was only in the post-Cold War world that the country became a pariah state subject to the full panoply of activist concern. More widely, the trend of emergency relief aid across the span of international society also supports Barnett’s interpretation. Though somewhat rough and ready, the data chart a dramatic upward trend during the 1990s and 2000s.
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Equally, changes registered at the UN after 1990 were significant, with
An Agenda for Peace
, issued in June 1992, identifying new global challenges of preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conflict peace building.
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These themes were then picked up in other reports, notably
Supplement to An Agenda for Peace
(1995), what became known as the Brahimi report (2000), and
In Larger Freedom
(2005), which embraced the responsibility to protect agenda of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.
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Completing an adjustment only partially checked by the dampening effects of the 2001 terrorist attacks on US targets, the 2005 UN World Summit formally acknowledged a collective responsibility “to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
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When the UN Security Council debated the escalating Libya crisis in March 2011 and through Resolution 1973 authorized measures to protect civilians under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, it took another important step by making the responsibility militarily enforceable.
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At the same time, INGOs have played ever more substantial post-Cold War roles in global humanitarian missions, and are now deployed in many desperate settings.
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Though sidelined by many agencies in the 1990s, Myanmar is today a case in point. In this sphere, a dividing line is often drawn between old and new forms. Old humanitarians are impartial, apolitical and neutral, symbolized above all by the ICRC.
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New humanitarians are openly radical, political and campaigning, with secular co-religionists assembled as “keepers of the flame” in AI to the fore.
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The concept of
témoinage
(or bearing witness), promoted by the disaffected French doctors who in the early 1970s broke with the ICRC in Biafra to create Médecins Sans Frontières, is emblematic.
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While the contrast is ultimately unsustainable, for even the ICRC cannot fully evade politics, there clearly has been a reorientation as INGOs increasingly prioritize human rights over human need.
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Key steps in the broad movement of change were the formation of AI in 1961, of MSF in 1971, and of the organization that became HRW in 1978.
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These agencies are currently at the cutting edge of global humanitarianism.

More broadly, even major corporations from a sector long wary of visible political involvement now sometimes take public positions on matters of global justice. In the Myanmar case, it is very much because of pervasive injustice, policed actively and aggressively by campaign groups, that businesses with visible brands in western consumer markets have disengaged. In international society, leading companies are today key members of human rights forums at the UN and elsewhere.
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The UN Global Compact, articulated through 10 principles of responsibility and sustainability in the areas of human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption, is one of the clearest institutional manifestations.
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In this way, the corporate sector has assumed a place in the broad humanitarian movement that partly defines contemporary global politics.