HISTORY ENDS AT 8,000 FEET TOO:

A shakeup for Bhutan (Murari R Sharma, 1/05/07, Asia Times)

In December, King Jigme Singye of Bhutan made headlines by suddenly abdicating and handing the throne to his Oxford-educated son, Jigme Geshar. He has also pledged to grant some measure of democracy to his subjects by holding elections in 2008. [...]

Pressures for change have been building up both inside and outside Bhutan. Bhutanese citizens have been clamoring for democracy and freedom. Nearby Nepal is contemplating the future of its monarchy and passing through its own democratic transformation. The Bhutanese king appears to have wanted to grant his people limited democracy before they, like the Nepalis, actually take to the streets. His plan is to introduce a guided, two-party democracy under a new constitution that has long been in the making.

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The case for royalty in Myanmar (Michael Vatikiotis , 1/05/07, Asia Times)

Myanmar seems destined to drift through the first decade of the 21st century much as it has for the past 60 years: teetering on the brink of economic collapse, cut off from the wider world and led by a bombastic clique of military officers convinced they are the only true defenders of ethnic Burman nationalism. All this suggests there is a much deeper malaise afflicting Myanmar's society, one that is only partially explained by the faulty logic of military rule and perhaps rooted deep in the country's traumatic history.

To be sure, it's hard to visit Myanmar today without sensing a society that long ago lost its bearings. A once proud and assertive culture now languishes listlessly among the scant and dusty remnants of a glorious pre-colonial past. There are few material remains of the Konbaung dynasty's determined and victorious armies, or the meticulously kept royal courts of Ava and later Mandalay.

By far the most important fulcrum of Myanmar's history was the sudden and undignified removal of Thibaw, the last king of what was then called Burma after the fall of Mandalay to British forces in 1885. Never restoring the monarchy, something the British colonial rulers considered but casually rejected, created a cultural vacuum that condemned Burmese society to its modern fate.

"Burma without a king," writes Thant Myint U in a new history of the country "would be a Burma entirely different from anything before, a break with the ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times". [...]

Like a talisman, the monarchy, though powerless, has helped repair and store a center of gravity to Cambodian culture, with its religious rituals and exquisite royal ballet somehow masking the inexplicable Khmer Rouge past but also tempering the monopoly of power cleverly exercised by Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Myanmar had no such luck. At one point in River of Lost Footsteps Thant wistfully wonders if King Thibaw had lived longer

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whether he might have become king again after the British left. He relates several forgotten half-hearted attempts by minor princes to restore some of the former Konbaung dynasty glory, all to no avail. Independence, when it finally came in 1948, was driven by young army officers imbued with strident Japanese martial values and politicians fired up by socialist principles.

More importantly, as Thant points out, the nature of British rule emasculated Burmese pride and culture. Burma was made an adjunct of British India, never a colony in its own right; Indian workers were brought in to fill all the coveted new jobs in the civil service. "What had been urban and cosmopolitan in old Burma had vanished. And what was modern in the new Burma was alien."

So, unlike Thailand, with its unbroken tradition of bureaucracy serving the monarchy, or Indonesia with its Dutch-trained civil service, or for that matter Malaysia with its pampered but socially dominant Malay rulers, modern Burma was pretty much at sea without a captain or cultural anchor. The result is a country dominated by a 400,000-strong army (the 15th-largest in the world) and no institution of comparable strength or reputation to balance its power.

Could re-established monarchy help restore equilibrium to modern Myanmar?

Others ought not make the Western mistake of abandoning monarchy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 4, 2007 9:27 AM