The biggest country in continental South East Asia, one of the few remaining military dictatorships in the world, will hold elections for the first time in twenty years this coming November. By the look of it, it seems like the junta that rules the country will use the occasion to essentially go on as before, only with a civilian hat. But why is Myanmar—or Burma as some prefer to call it—in this situation? Can we learn something about the country today by looking at its recent past?

Burma enjoys a strategic position between India and China, and once had the region's most prosperous agriculture. As the Asia-Pacific War came to its shores, this proved a curse more than a blessing: much of the country's infrastructure was reduced to rubble during the long and costly Burma campaign. The essentially 'foreign' nature of the war ensured that all subsequent governments would shun any involvement in international organizations, from the British Commonwealth to ASEAN (until 1997). Right after the 1950 independence, Prime Minister U Nu steered the country away from the deadly dangers of the cold war and of the budding Sino-Indian rivalry. He saw Burma as a 'tender gourd among the cactus' and declared that only neutralism could save it. As his government succumbed to intra-ethnic disagreements, with some of the minority groups populating the borderlands threatening to secede from the Union, the head of the armed forces, General Ne Win, took hold of power and effectively began an outright retreat from the outside world that has more or less lasted to the present day.

The other major tendency that, along with isolationism, has been present in all Burmese governments since at least the early 1960s is nationalism. This grew out of the shock for British India's occupation of the country. Unlike with most other colonies and dependencies, the British decided to get rid of Burma's whole ruling class and civil servants, even at the lowest levels. This was done in reaction to the Burmese Crown's stubborn resistance to political and commercial submission. Indeed, as Thant Myint-U reminds us in his The Making of Modern Burma, conquering the whole country had not been in the plans of the Raj at all. Writing to the governor general of India in 1867, secretary of State Lord Cranbourne said "Our influence in that country ought to be paramount. The country itself is of no great importance. But an easy communication with the multitudes who inhabit Western China is an object of national importance." When faced with the elites' total refusal to compromise, though, the British finally seized the whole country and in 1885 made it an Indian province. Distrustful of the ethnic Burmans, the British entrusted the administration and the military to Indians or members of the numerous ethnic minorities. As a reaction to this, the ethnic Burmans developed in the early twentieth century one of the strongest anticolonial movements within the British empire. U Nu's project of a Union inclusive of all nationalities was doomed to fail; governments since 1962, including the military junta now in power, have had very little patience for the non-Burmans, whom they consider traitors for their earlier support of the British and for having cultural, religious and linguistic ties with groups living outside the confines of this artificial nation-state. Only the army can keep the country together, or so the official story goes, obviously. For the army top brass, governing the country after the British said the Burmans were 'lacking of soldierly discipline' is a source of considerable pride. I have little doubt that at least some of them, when they are not too busy hoarding the precious stones the country is famous for or selling its virgin forests to Chinese or Thai logging companies, really think they are defending Burma from interfering foreigners and their henchmen.