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.