Emerging Democracy and Ethnic Identity Crisis in Myanmar

Abstract

Democracies have been emerging around the world in the last decade of twentieth century after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which marked the end of the Cold War. Since then, globalizing democracy and liberalizing centralized economies were thought to be the only viable options to rescue dismantling socialist countries around the world. Just a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialism in Myanmar had been toppled by the student-led democratic uprising in 1988. However, this was not entirely associated with the domino effect of the great changes in Eastern Europe, but mostly with the Burmese-style utopian socialist state led by the dictator General Ne Win and his socialist clientele who abused power and impunity, resulting in long-term economic decline and widespread poverty in the country. Despite the demise of socialism in Myanmar, the country could not initiate a political transition toward a democratic form of governance as it was seen in Eastern Europe. Instead, it ended up in a more brutal form of military dictatorship for the next two decades. Not only did the nation miss out on a great opportunity to grasp democracy, development, and prosperity in time with the changing world order, but it also did not escape from the vortex of decades-long internal ethnic armed conflicts.