An unwelcome addendum to yesterday’s post is news from the Irrawaddy that a Mandalay literary event planned for last weekend (presumably to run in parallel to ILF 2014) was cancelled following protests from dozens of monks about the scheduled appearance of three Muslim speakers. A statement released on Tuesday by the 88 Generation Peace and Open Society group noted that four such events have now been called off this year. One cancellation took place in Yangon last week.

The wider context is well known. In the contemporary era, sporadic waves of violence against Muslims date from June 2012. Nationalist monk Wirathu’s 969 movement, preaching fear of Muslim incursion, a boycott of Muslim traders and a shunning of Muslim people, came to prominence around the same time. Only rarely have political leaders said anything to counter such chauvinism.

One of the success stories of the reform period is an extension of liberal freedom, still imperfect but nevertheless real. “We have to admit that we now enjoy more freedom,” said Min Ko Naing in an interview last August marking the 25th anniversary of the 8-8-88 uprising. Already, though, that freedom is being curtailed by spreading Buddhist intolerance.

In an essay published last week by YaleGlobal, Professor David I Steinberg of Georgetown University notes that while Myanmar’s dominant Bamar Buddhist culture has a long history of strength, of successfully resisting challenges from near and far, local people believe it now faces momentous internal and external threats. Alongside anti-Chinese emotion is virulent anti-Muslim sentiment triggering violence across the country. He warns that a growing sense of Bamar vulnerability could feed an anti-western, anti-modern, anti-US backlash, and to avert that argues for deft diplomacy on the part of the US and its allies.

This caution is timely, for western nations must not squander the opportunity they currently have to help shape a fragile transition. However, the worry in Myanmar is that antipathy towards Muslims is distinct from anti-Chinese bias and any future anti-US blowback, generating a categorically different danger of ethnic cleansing. Indeed, Human Rights Watch already reached this conclusion 10 months ago in a 150-page report on the plight of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State. In these circumstances, the issue western nations need to confront is the link between democracy and order in the Myanmar case.

Back in 1968, Samuel P Huntington argued in Political Order in Changing Societies for a sequenced shift away from authoritarianism, starting with economic growth and the rule of law, then moving to democracy and civic activism. In 2000, Jack Snyder published From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict. In 2003, Fareed Zakaria produced The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. In 2004, Amy Chua released World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. In 2005, Michael Mann wrote The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. The arguments are overlapping, and often evident from the titles.

Among these works, Mann’s is the most magisterial. He holds that ethnic cleansing is a modern phenomenon, not a product of atavistic hatreds. In early phases of the career of modern democracy it swept the global North. Today it is engulfing the global South. It comes about when the demos in democracy becomes entwined with the ethnos in ethnicity, when “We the people” is cast in ethnic terms. It can happen from a position of weakness, when an oppressed group elects to fight rather than submit in the belief that aid will come from outside. It can happen from a position of strength, when a dominant group chooses to cleanse at an acceptable cost to itself. Rarely is it fully planned from the outset. As it escalates, even ordinary people become perpetrators.

The dark side of Myanmar’s partial democracy is already visible. To mount an effective policy response, western nations will certainly need to engage in deft diplomacy. They will also need to invest more heavily in national reconciliation, fully embracing Muslims, than in democracy promotion. While democracy and its discontents (currently Aung San Suu Kyi’s chance of a fair run at the presidency) will remain preoccupations, the US and its allies should pay greater attention to the problem of peace in a country still prone to murderous violence.

The Irrawaddy Literary Festival 2014 was held in Mandalay this weekend. I wasn’t there and can’t report from the frontline, but I would like to salute an event now in its second year and hopefully looking to a successful future. A striking consequence of Burma’s long retreat from the world is how rarely its dark past has been written into novels published in English. Thankfully the country knew nothing on the scale of the Soviet gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Khmer killing fields. The years after 1962 were nevertheless deeply destructive, as an entire economy was brought to its knees in a matter of months. Still today, Myanmar lives in the shadow of that madness. Leading the way in making creative use of such rich material is Wendy Law-Yone, a panelist at ILF 2014. This passage is from her bleak, mystical debut novel, The Coffin Tree, published in 1983:

“After these brushes with the black market, my aunts would join the lines at one of the People’s Stores, with its air of a raffle or a lucky dip.

But when my aunts’ turn came, the clerk at the counter would have little to offer.

If they said, ‘Salt, please?’ he would invariably say, ‘Yes, Auntie. We have no salt.’

‘Oil?’

‘Yes, we have none.’

‘Sugar. Give us some sugar, in that case.’

‘Sugar? Yes. No sugar.’

‘Aspirin, then.’

‘Yes. We don’t have.’

‘Hè! Then what do you have?’

‘Ointment, Auntie; ringworm ointment.’

‘What for? We are a bathing family, not a scabby one.’

‘Take it, dear Aunt. You never know.'”

Yangon faces many urgent challenges in the drive to make up for 50 years of isolation and neglect. Sewers, street lights, public transport, traffic flow, affordable housing, heritage conservation, and so much more all require immediate attention. But on Valentine’s Day 2014, an opera lover can perhaps indulge a more frivolous interest.

As Yangon turns into an international zone, relating to the rest of Myanmar much as New York does to the rest of America, its cultural resources are looking increasingly threadbare. Certainly the local scene is vibrant. But any cosmopolitan city also needs to draw in culture from outside, and that is happening only in limited ways. A few Hollywood blockbusters are now screened alongside regional staples, and foreign institutes stage isolated events. Beyond that, not much.

New York’s pioneering Metropolitan Opera offers one quick and easy way to plug the gap. Currently, the Met beams world-class opera to nearly 2000 cinemas in 64 countries, and has a global audience of three million. A screened season typically comprises 10-12 productions priced at around $20 a ticket. Adding Myanmar to the list would surely be simple.

For the Met to succeed in Yangon, though, it needs to sharpen its act. In cities not too many time zones from New York, Met Opera is streamed live and necessarily follows the rhythm of the actual show. In Asia, real-time screening is not possible and tapes are sent instead. Yet the full Lincoln Center schedule is still adhered to. The result is that in the Met’s 2013-14 season even the recorded version of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, a two-hour opera, takes three hours 40 minutes to screen.

Some of the material making up the additional 100 minutes is reasonable. Brief messages from sponsors merit a place, for they reduce ticket prices. Quick interviews with principal singers can enhance the operatic experience. But the Met’s Tosca also includes scenes from the rehearsal room (Giuseppe Verdi’s comic Falstaff in the middle of Puccini’s tragic masterpiece), an irrelevant Charlie Rose interview, and two 20-minute scene-changing segments.

Met Opera in Yangon would have to dispense with all this, for it would kill off audiences before they’d even begun to build. If a taped Tosca can’t be screened in two hours 30 tops, it shouldn’t be screened at all.

Yesterday the International Crisis Group issued a Myanmar conflict alert. At issue is the nationwide census planned for March 30 – April 10, 2014. Long viewed as a necessary technical exercise in a country that last enumerated its population in 1983, the current census is now generating deep political anxiety. Chiefly concern focuses on complex issues of identity that the census seeks to map, though its probing interest in a range of taxable items is also a worry. One consequence is that ethnic minority leaders are objecting to a requirement that individuals select a single identity from a discredited list of 135 ethnic groups drawn up by the Ne Win government in the early 1980s. Another is that communities on both sides of a growing divide between Buddhists and Muslims are mobilizing to ensure that census returns on religious identity come out in their favour. In Rakhine State, there is a potent risk of violence as majority Buddhists seek to ensure that no significant Muslim population is registered, and minority Muslims work to secure documentation for blocked citizenship claims. In these circumstances, the proposal made by the ICG looks sensible. In this fragile transitional period, cut the census down from a sprawling 41 questions to just six addressing basic demographic issues of age, sex and marital status.

It’s a forbidding term, but it conveys an interesting idea. It’s taken from a public lecture given yesterday evening at the University of Hong Kong by Harvard’s Professor Grzegorz Ekiert. His topic was the great transformation in east-central Europe, 25 years on from 1989. He argued that history matters in shaping transitions. Paradoxically, distant history matters more than recent.

Ekiert opened with a puzzle: the countries of the former Soviet bloc are now extremely diverse. Broadly, they fit into four categories. Central European countries today look quite like their west European counterparts. Southern European countries are now similar across the divide that once disfigured the continent. Russia and its Slavic neighbours flirted with democracy in the 1990s but are becoming increasingly authoritarian. Central Asian countries scarcely ever veered from the autocratic path. By and large, there’s no convergence between the four groups. These outcomes are especially surprising because 40-plus years of communism wrought massive social change, making these countries by 1989 reasonably close copies of each other. Yet the legacy has been limited.

Turning to explanations, Ekiert mapped three generations of scholarship. The initial belief was that the immediate past would be determining, that it would be impossible to escape the ravages of communism and build democracy. But that has not been the case. Then attention turned to the present and future, and possibilities for making democracy in almost any context were floated. But that too no longer looks plausible. Now it appears that deep historical trajectories are key, that patterns established at critical junctures many decades or even centuries ago remain shaping factors today. Moreover, those patterns may reflect maps from the distant past, and not fit neatly onto the boundaries of contemporary states.

What are the implications for Myanmar of this palimpsest problematic? In a general sense, they’re that when seeking pointers to the future we need to look well beyond the authoritarian experience of the last 50 years. That doesn’t get us far, though, for the key task is to identify the critical historical junctures that laid down deep paths still taken today. Ekiert argued that building democracy depends to a large extent on having had a previous democratic experience – even a failed one. So Burma’s fractious democratic interlude from 1948 to 1962 could play a positive role in the 2010s. What about before that, though? Was colonialism decisive? Possibly it was in shaping not only contours of ethnic division, but also robust civic contestation of undemocratic rule. How about the late monarchical period? Again it’s difficult to say – but surely the debate is worth having.

At least in academic circles, it’s hardly possible to write or speak about the country on which this blog focuses without making an opening remark about terminology. Burma or Myanmar? It’s an established routine. My own policy (which I won’t impose on anyone submitting a post to this blog) is to use Burma and associated terms (Irrawaddy, Pagan, Rangoon, etc) if discussing the period up to June 1989. If focusing on the quarter-century thereafter, I use Myanmar and associated terms (Ayeyarwady, Bagan, Yangon, etc). Why so? Partly it’s because this is the practice adopted by most of international society. Mainly, though, it’s because the terminology officially decreed by a small clique of senior generals in 1989 strikes me as a fitting way to describe the country they sought, and in many respects still seek, to shape in their own image. Burma and associated names can then be used not only in appropriate historical ways, but also as aspirational terms for the time when the land is liberal, democratic and respectful of human rights.

Each year on February 12, Myanmar celebrates Union Day. The anniversary looks back to the date in 1947 when nationalist leader Aung San met with representatives of several indigenous peoples to sign the Panglong Agreement. The aim was to smooth relations between the majority Burmans and the many minority ethnic groups making up what was soon to be sovereign Burma. In the event, history took a different course. Aung San was assassinated in July 1947, and within months of independence in January 1948 the country descended into civil war. Even today a comprehensive peace has not been achieved, and national reconciliation remains the most urgent political task. Thukhuma launches on Union Day 2014 to celebrate the diversity of Myanmar culture. The site is far from complete, and much still needs to be (and soon will be) done to profile the artists and paintings brought together here. All sorts of technical issues remain a mystery to me. At a time when diversity is under growing threat in Myanmar, I nevertheless figure it makes sense on this day to launch a site that looks to the positive side of disparate strands in national culture.

In the closing days of July 2003, my late friend Norman Geras launched a blog with what he termed the immortal words of Sam Peckinpah – let’s go. For more than 10 years until his untimely death in October 2013, normblog was one of the finest blogs on the planet. Setting thukhuma on its way today, I do not aspire to the depth of analysis or breadth of coverage routinely found on Norm’s site. For sure the focus will be narrower, and even matters of great interest to us both (such as cricket) will likely gain no airtime here. Nevertheless, I do hope to follow Norm in generating a forum for civilized discussion – in this case of art, culture, education and politics in Myanmar. I am thus very keen to carry guest posts on this site. The easiest way to make a submission is by email to [email protected].