Will the West give Myanmar back to China?

Myanmar is rich in natural resources, including oil, gas and hydropower, and also has an exceptionally strategic geostrategic location, sharing land borders with both China and India and providing China with an alternative access route to the sea.

During the unilateral rule of the military junta, Myanmar was increasingly isolated and left to the Chinese. They used the opportunity to get heavily involved in Myanmar, especially in the energy sector. One of the main reasons why the generals decided to open up the country and share power with Aung San Suu Kyi was to escape from the embrace of the Chinese, whose projects were increasingly unpopular among the Myanmar population. Myanmar’s political transition was welcomed by the Western countries with open arms.

It was a deft move on the part of the Myanmar military. Sanctions were removed and they increasingly gained access to Western capital, technology, markets, banking. It made it possible to orchestrate international competition for Myanmar’s valuable energy and other assets. As Myanmar was one of the last “white spots on the map”, there was a rush of interest. And there was a big bonus: if anything went wrong in Myanmar politics or economics, it could be blamed on Aung San Suu Kyi’s team, while the military retained a fixed number of seats in parliament and control over key ministries and could thus continue to secure their interests.

The Rohingya issue marks the end of the honeymoon between the Myanmar and the West. As the New York Times writes, Naypyidaw is increasingly turning to its old friends in Beijing – who are unwavering in their support for the Myanmar government on the Rohingya issue.

This development illustrates one of the main arguments made in our book about the Caspian petro-states: Seen from the perspective of the Myanmar military, or any of the many other semi-authoritarian outfits around the world, closer relations with the West is highly attractive, but carries certain risks. When such rulers do the things they occasionally do—such as cracking down on dissent, attempting to get rid of an ethnic minority or engaging in large-scale corruption—it is possible that the West will react. There is an element of unpredictability, because sometime the West turns a blind eye; but especially if it is something that looks bad on television, the West is likely to act. Hence the term “risk” is very appropriate, in the sense of a probabilistic chance of a problem arising.

The question is whether the West sees what is happening to Myanmar foreign policy now, and is so outraged over the treatment of the Rohingya that it is willing to give Myanmar back to the Chinese.

An extract on this from the book where the logic of the argument about semi-authoritarian resource-rich regimes and their (democratic and non-democratic) great-power partners is laid out:

As in domestic politics, the need to maintain a balance between short-term and long-term considerations affects the foreign policy and external energy relationships of the Caspian petro-states. Clearly there are significant short-term incentives to establish partnerships with the West. Positive reports in the domestic media and high-profile meetings with Western diplomats and politicians provide the Caspian leaders with some domestic legitimacy, and create a sense of higher status in international affairs. Also, in the longer term, relationships with the West appear attractive because they offer relatively stable energy markets, as well as capital, technology and organizational skills that – at least in theory – might ultimately help these governments to build sustainable development.

           On the other hand, cooperation with the West may involve significant irritants and risks. While the corruption, election fraud, imprisonments and occasional violence so widespread in petroleum-rich hybrid regimes are often ignored by Western partners, under certain circumstances they may force Western politicians and diplomats to dissociate themselves from the country in question or to put greater pressure on it to reform…

           The irritants and risks for authoritarian and hybrid regimes involved in working together with Western democracies raises the question of whether they might in the long term gravitate towards cooperation with like-minded regimes, and how such cooperation works in practice. Partnering with like-minded countries such as Russia and China offers the short-term advantage that these countries will not push for democratic measures, thus removing a number of potential irritants from the equation. (In the case of China, the Caspian petro-states can also be relatively confident that there will not be intervention in their domestic affairs, as Beijing itself has been wary of such practices; in the case of Russia, the shared Soviet past and knowledge of the Russian language are additional pluses for cooperation despite the risk that Russia might seek to gain special influence for itself.)

Reference: p. 6, Indra Overland, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Heidi Kjaernet (2010) ‘The Resource Curse and Authoritarianism in the Caspian Petro-States’, in Indra Overland, Heidi Kjaernet and Andrea Kendall-Taylor (eds) Caspian Energy Politics: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, London: Routledge, pp. 1-11

See also the introduction to part II of the book: Indra Overland, Stina Torjesen and Heidi Kjaernet, ‘China and Russia: Partners or Firewalls for the Caspian Petro-states?’, in Indra Overland, Heidi Kjaernet and Andrea Kendall-Taylor (eds) Caspian Energy Politics: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, London: Routledge, pp. 93-100