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.