The forlorn hope of progressive political change in Burma using all modern means suggests that reaching back in time and resurrecting the long-dismantled monarchy could provide a prescription to cure the ills of one of the world's most isolated countries, which on Thursday honored the 59-year anniversary of its independence from colonial rule.
There was a popular uprising against military rule in 1988 which failed, followed by nearly a decade of international economic sanctions which have failed as well. Regional engagement conferred legitimacy on Burma's military junta as an Association of Southeast Asian Nations member, and there have been a string of special envoys from the United Nations promising aid in return for democratic progress. These carrots were ignored and brushed aside by the current ruling junta, known as the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC).
Burma seems destined to drift through the first decade of the 21st century much as it has for the past 60 years: teetering on the brink of economic collapse, cut off from the wider world and led by a bombastic clique of military officers convinced they are the only true defenders of ethnic Burman nationalism. All this suggests there is a much deeper malaise afflicting Burma's society, one that is only partially explained by the faulty logic of military rule and perhaps rooted deep in the country's traumatic history.
To be sure, it's hard to visit Burma today without sensing a society that long ago lost its bearings. A once proud and assertive culture now languishes listlessly among the scant and dusty remnants of a glorious pre-colonial past. There are few material remains of the Konbaung dynasty's determined and victorious armies, or the meticulously kept royal courts of Ava and later Mandalay.
By far the most important fulcrum of Burma's history was the sudden and undignified removal of Thibaw, the last king of Burma after the fall of Mandalay to British forces in 1885. Never restoring the monarchy, something the British colonial rulers considered but casually rejected, created a cultural vacuum that condemned Burmese society to its modern fate.
"Burma without a king," writes Thant Myint U in a new history of the country "would be a Burma entirely different from anything before, a break with the ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times".
The significance of The River of Lost Footsteps, Thant's rather personal and passionately written history, is that it helps us understand that the roots of Burma's malaise lie in a deeply wounded historical psyche.
Burma after 1885, he writes, was adrift, "suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past, rummaging around for new inspirations, sustained by a more sour nationalist sentiment". With these elegantly expressed words, Thant, who is former UN secretary general U Thant's grandson, drives at the heart of modern Burma's problem, which is the fruitless search for missing pieces of history.
Historical isolation
Too often Burma is considered in isolation to other mainland Southeast Asian states like Thailand and Cambodia, a sad legacy of the fact that the British ruled Burma as a part of British India. In fact, the traditions and cultures governing the organization of these societies spring from the same root. Mainland Southeast Asian Buddhist societies are anchored in a blend of animistic and Buddhist beliefs layered and ordered by rituals of kingship derived from Brahmanical Hinduism. And neither element on its own provides quite enough social stability and direction.
Just ask the Thais. Thailand at the end of the 18th century was disoriented following the sacking of their glorious capital of Ayudhya by the Burmese army in 1767. For decades the countryside was plagued with banditry as rice production broke down and people preyed on one another to survive. These were dark chaotic years barely remembered in Thai history because they were succeeded by the establishment of a new royal line, the current Chakri dynasty, which built a shiny new capital on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, restoring the old ritual and order of the kingdom and even using bricks from the ruined capital of Ayudhya.
Fast forward to 1990 and the end of the long civil war in Cambodia; who knows what the final death toll was after the 1975-1979 period of tyrannical Khmer Rouge rule. Two million people may have perished in the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, as a brutal self-styled peasant government moved to erase Cambodian history through its ill-conceived utopian "Year Zero" policy and moved everyone out of the towns and cities and put them to work on the land, weeding out intellectuals and professionals for execution.
Significantly, despite such a wrenching and bloody break with the past, there was little hesitation about restoring Cambodia's ancient Hindu-Buddhist monarchy when the resulting civil war was finally settled. Like a talisman, the monarchy, though powerless, has helped repair and store a center of gravity to Cambodian culture, with its religious rituals and exquisite royal ballet somehow masking the inexplicable Khmer Rouge past but also tempering the monopoly of power cleverly exercised by Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Burma had no such luck. At one point in River of Lost Footsteps Thant wistfully wonders if King Thibaw had lived longer whether he might have become king again after the British left. He relates several forgotten half-hearted attempts by minor princes to restore some of the former Konbaung dynasty glory, all to no avail. Independence, when it finally came in 1948, was driven by young army officers imbued with strident Japanese martial values and politicians fired up by socialist principles.
More importantly, as Thant points out, the nature of British rule emasculated Burmese pride and culture. Burma was made an adjunct of British India, never a colony in its own right; Indian workers were brought in to fill all the coveted new jobs in the civil service. "What had been urban and cosmopolitan in old Burma had vanished. And what was modern in the new Burma was alien."
So, unlike Thailand, with its unbroken tradition of bureaucracy serving the monarchy, or Indonesia with its Dutch-trained civil service, or for that matter Malaysia with its pampered but socially dominant Malay rulers, modern Burma was pretty much at sea without a captain or cultural anchor. The result is a country dominated by a 400,000-strong army (the 15th-largest in the world) and no institution of comparable strength or reputation to balance its power.
Resurrecting royalty
Could re-established monarchy help restore equilibrium to modern Burma? Would it help repair the strong sense of alienation felt by those in power and endow them with a sense of cultural confidence? Would it help relieve the army of its self-assigned burden of saving the country and averting disintegration and chaos?
In one practical and rather modern respect, the monarchy as an institution might help ease the military out of power. The monarchy in Thailand has long balanced the civil and military wings of the Thai bureaucracy, making sure that neither dominates the power structure by playing one off the other.
In much the same way, were a Burmese general to ascend to a restored throne, he would logically seek to limit the army's power by creating his own bureaucratic counter balance. Not, grant you, the most efficient path to civilian rule, but one which would nonetheless achieve that same goal using arcane methods.
"Unity" and "discipline" was the great Burmese nationalist leader Aung San's twin slogans, later echoed by his daughter and current opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi during the 1988 popular uprising in Yangon against the army, which was brutally crushed. During Thursday's Independence Day celebrations, the SPDC's aging leader General Than Shwe called on the nation to unify to uphold "sovereignty" and "independence", which he contended are still under foreign threat.
A restored monarchy in Burma could arguably help to achieve unity, at least if it rose above the bitter and protracted armed struggles with the country's various ethnic minorities that the military has fought since 1948. Fanciful as it sounds, consider the latest moves by Than Shwe to rekindle some of the old royal symbols of Burmese unity, including the recent relocation of the capital from colonial Rangoon to the central heartland in Pyinmana, once the original base of the pro-axis Burma Independence Army led by Aung San.
The new capital, now renamed Naypyidaw, which translates from the Burmese to "Royal Palace City of the Kingdom", is home to an ornate state room tiled with jade, where Than Shwe now receives guests. It is said that locals are made to kneel in his presence because there are usually no chairs for them to sit on.
It's not uncommon in Southeast Asian history for successful soldiers to establish new royal dynasties. For instance, that's how the modern Chakri dynasty was founded and after a period of decay resurrected in the 1940s in Thailand. The problem is that no one seems to think that Burma's contemporary military strong man is up to the task. And well into his mid-1970s with frequent reports of health problems, he probably doesn't have the time to prove that he is. Perhaps Than Shwe has the right idea, but is simply the wrong man for the job.
What is certain is that something different needs to be done. For as Thant concludes in his River of Lost Footsteps: "In Burma, it's not just getting the military out of the business of government. It's creating the state institutions that can replace the military state that exists." In other words, Burma needs to start over again and some of those missing pieces of history might help.
Michael Vatikiotis is the former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is currently regional representative for the Henry Dunant Center for Humanitarian Dialogue based in Singapore.