Burma Redux: Global Justice and the Quest for Political Reform in Myanmar (39 page)

Pulling these various arguments together, the key point is that external engagement must be undertaken within the context of domestic politics, and do all it can to ensure that its mechanisms and procedures are able to function as fully as possible. The role of outsiders is to offer facilitation and support. The orientation already taken here is thereby strongly reinforced, indicating that investing in capacity and reform at the grassroots level should be a top priority for global aid agencies in both the state and non-state sectors. As Greg Mortenson has shown by building girls’ schools in remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, such activity can be a distinctive and significant form of foreign engagement.
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More widely, Easterly’s searchers are precisely the kinds of people now reanimating civic action inside Myanmar, and bolstering their work is a central task for outsiders.

Equally, however, it is important to look beyond the aid business to mainstream corporate business and consider how it might also help build a platform for long-term change. Here too widespread debate opens up as proponents of globalization confront analysts of exploitation in development contexts.
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On one side, economists and peak global agencies such as the World Bank and UN Global Compact argue that globalization can operate to the benefit of the poor.
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On the other, many observers point to the catastrophic impact much foreign trade and investment has on local communities.
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In parallel, while some note the development gains that can flow from corporate action even in repressive contexts, others view business engagement with rights-violating regimes as thoroughly unprincipled and impermissible. Located at the heart of much analysis is debate about corporate social responsibility, and the positive need for companies to add to the core economic value acclaimed by liberal economists an explicit commitment to morally acceptable practice.
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At base, corporate social responsibility mandates that enterprises make a deep rather than superficial commitment to host communities, eschew all forms of malpractice, and join local people in securing a range of broad social benefits. In Myanmar, such action has been seen only in small ways, for companies subscribing to this agenda are thin on the ground and the very concept has only recently started to gain any purchase.
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Indeed, the best example lies in the most controversial sector of natural gas exploitation through off-shore fields and on-shore pipelines.
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There French oil giant Total has for years been targeted by activist groups for forced labor and other abuses along a pipeline in southern Myanmar distributing natural gas to Thailand from the Yadana field in the Andaman Sea.
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In response, the company has employed mainly local personnel, created a socioeconomic program focused on health, education, economic development and infrastructure, and formed village liaison teams to implement it. Consultants appointed by Total to conduct independent impact assessments attest that forced labor was not used on the project, and commend the outreach activities.
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In a 2003 evaluation, Kouchner, co-founder of MSF, French health minister 2001–02 and French foreign minister 2007–10, noted that Total’s engagement with dictatorship “underlies all criticism of the Group,” but nevertheless held that many specific allegations were “refuted by an onsite investigation.” He embraced the “real success” of the socioeconomic program.
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At the same time, he called on all actors engaged with Myanmar to speak out: “One day, indifference or silence will be construed as guilt.”
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Clearly evident from the Total case and others around the world is the need to ensure that companies investing in repressive settings meet the high demands placed on them, and do not backslide or free-ride. Indeed, a clear incentive in authoritarian and impoverished contexts is to draw considerable benefit from cheap labor and low operating costs, and deliver no more than minimal salaries and exploitative conditions to local people and communities. Means of changing the incentive structures facing inward investors therefore need to be found. In the Myanmar case, however, the chosen mechanism of boycotts and sanctions has gone to the other extreme of persuading most major companies to have nothing to do with the country, thereby denying local people employment opportunities and engagement with key forces of globalization. Among corporations targeted by western activism, only those with large sunk costs like Total will attempt to maintain their investments and map out a middle way guided by broad social commitments.
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Central to the argument made by corporate social responsibility advocates is thus the need for ethical framing of business action. In part this can take place through domestic criminalization of overseas corruption. Pioneered by the US through the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act 1977, this emergent global movement was joined by China in February 2011 when the National People’s Congress outlawed foreign bribery.
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For the Myanmar case, this was a critical move. Also necessary, however, is corporate embrace of mechanisms such as a publicly-displayed stakeholder statute, value statement, or code of conduct.
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In authoritarian contexts, where rights violations are commonplace and there is a high possibility that business will merely reinforce existing structures of repression, measures of this kind are notably important. In the case of Total in Myanmar, the company has a code of conduct underpinned by principles drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the ILO Charter. Appended all to subcontractor agreements, it is a legally binding document. In analogous settings around the world, this approach was pioneered in the Sullivan Principles in South Africa (1977) and later developed in the Caux Round Table Principles for Business (1994), the Global Sullivan Principles (1999), and the UN Global Compact with Business (2000).
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Each calls for extensive consultation among a wide network of business leaders, and requires that responsible corporations deal with all stakeholders in a fair and equitable manner, act as positive and proactive change agents, and adopt compliance standards that are mandatory, transparent and subject to external validation.
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Indeed, independent monitoring, undertaken by competent evaluators, is generally held to be essential.
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The Total experience demonstrates that boosting external engagement with Myanmar through direct corporate investment remains highly controversial.
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Even getting such an approach off the ground would be difficult. On one side, it is hard to see why executives would sign up for it, as it would provoke the sanctions lobby and trigger wider exploitation charges. It would also place companies in a tough business setting, and could expose executives to illegal practices. For major corporations that have chosen to duck the international sweatshops debate and prefer not to invest in corrupt societies, there is little incentive to get involved with Myanmar.
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On the other side, it is equally hard to imagine military leaders showing any interest in this agenda when they have successfully rebuffed all previous attempts to use investment as a lever for domestic political change.
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Some indicators are nevertheless favorable. Among companies, long-term strategic issues come into play. “Today’s operations are not commercially viable,” said a representative of Japanese corporation Mitsui in 1996, “but we believe this country has big potential.”
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Other businesses recognized that potential in the late 1980s, but chose to forgo it as political problems mounted in the 1990s. Among military leaders, an awareness of the need for development has long been visible in infrastructure projects, and in attempts to boost investment and employment in defiance of sanctions. Myanmar’s National Sustainable Development Strategy identifies agriculture, forestry, energy, mining, transportation, communications and tourism as priority areas for future investment.
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For these reasons, a requisite approach in the Myanmar context would almost certainly be group-based engagement, with participating corporations jointly making a public commitment to principled and sustainable investment. Then the chance that individual corporations might be picked off by the sanctions lobby would be reduced, and the extent of leverage over a venal military machine would be enhanced. One possible facilitator is the Caux Round Table, committed to human dignity and the Japanese
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concept of “living and working together for the common good enabling cooperation and mutual prosperity to coexist with healthy and fair competition.”
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Rooted in Confucian thought but expressive of values with currency throughout Asia, this ethic could provide a powerful foundation for engagement.
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In particular, it is likely to be viewed positively by the Asian corporations that are leading investors in Myanmar and now have nascent corporate social responsibility programs.
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More broadly, another potential promoter is the UN Global Compact, which already animates corporate networks in difficult settings around the world. As with INGO involvement in grassroots capacity building, external state action may well be needed to entrench this strategy. Again, political leadership could be supplied by a coalition of countries drawn from both regional and western powers.
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In the Myanmar case, many options now exist for delivering on imperfect duties of global justice through strategies of discursive intervention. Once the demands placed on major duty-bearers have been identified, possibilities for investing in reform can be pursued. Indeed, through both aid agency and business engagement in communities across the country, foreigners can help rebuild a society subject to many decades of devastation, and thereby construct a platform for long-term political renewal. In particular, INGOs and global corporations can take the lead in delivering on the capacity-building agenda now surfacing within domestic civil society as it slowly finds its feet in a still-hostile operating environment. In the longer term, states can play a supportive though no less important role in entrenching grassroots initiative through elite-level mediation.

Interventionist strategy

In more than two decades of engagement with Myanmar, no external agent or agency has registered much success. Indeed, even after the launch of disciplined democracy a huge governance deficit remains and widespread human rights violations continue. At local levels, however, away from most media interest, many minor triumphs have been secured. In detailing variable but significant amounts of progress in a range of disparate sectors in 2010, Allan reached the important conclusion that “opportunity is far more common than most would expect.”
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Today, then, openings for interactive intervention do exist, and must be explored by committed outsiders willing to respond to the demands of justice in this case.

The argument made here for consensual engagement through intercession and investment focuses on local capacity building by both aid agencies and responsible global corporations, and aims to empower local people to lead political change as much as possible. It thus runs counter to much current interventionist activity. While remaining within the discursive domain, it moves far beyond the mainly Asian focus on expressive state pressure through diplomacy. Though not taking up assertive options, it is also in many respects more developed than the mainly western focus on aggressive state and civil pressure through sanctions and boycotts. By reaching inside Myanmar to try to reshape political realities on the ground, it places greater demands on external agents. The first task in this final section is to determine how this fresh approach might be grafted onto existing external engagement with Myanmar. The second is to evaluate its potential political impact. The third is to examine the degree of local support it might command.

Implementing a strategy of consensual engagement in a context of expressive pressure applied above all by Asian states is reasonably straightforward. Although in the Myanmar case many domestic hurdles stand in the way of enhanced intervention, few external problems are likely to be encountered by a low-profile approach seeking to build mainly from the grassroots up and to involve states in high-profile political negotiation only at later stages in the process. By contrast, the constraints placed on consensual engagement by existing modes of aggressive pressure imposed mainly by western states are substantial. Extensive state sanctions mean that much aid agency action is either severely reduced or even ruled out. Sanctions supplemented by consumer boycotts eliminate a large spectrum of corporate investment. In these circumstances, practical options for consensual engagement need to be examined.