Each year, on February 12, Myanmar celebrates Union Day. A few months ago, I chose that date to launch this blog. Until I read Sadan, though, I hadn’t realized that it was only five years after independence, in 1953, that the anniversary was raised to the status of national holiday. At the same time, the Panglong Agreement, signed on February 12, 1947 and celebrated through Union Day, began to be consciously and publicly identified with the notion of Panglong Spirit. Sadan argues that the intention was to promulgate an official understanding of ethnic and cultural politics in a complex state. Panglong Spirit thereby emerged to fill one of the ideological gaps of a multiethnic nation.

From the start there was a problem, however, which Sadan identifies as the artificial, inorganic nature of the new ideology. “The ‘Spirit’ posited ahistorical notions of harmonic pasts that never existed and in which no one believed… The notion of Panglong Spirit represented all that was failing in the new state and the centre’s capacity to engage meaningfully with its multiple peripheries. It gave no sense of whether the Union should be premised upon assimilation, incorporation or progressive convergence. It was void of political direction, detail or accountability other than that everyone should somehow ‘get on'” (304).

She draws contrasts with Burma’s two large multiethnic neighbours. “While the Indian and Chinese states acknowledged the importance of developing ideological visions of the nation and how it should relate to its diverse range of communities, in Burma there was little time or scope for developing complex realignments of ideologies of nationhood. The dominating public idiom was of an increasingly militarised Burmese nationalism apparently opposed to the political structures that supported the federal Union” (302).

Broadly this is the heritage that has come down to today, the political worldview of contemporary elites based chiefly in Naypyitaw and Yangon. That worldview remains artificial, inorganic and void of political direction – signaling just how much work still needs to be done to build a truly multiethnic nation.