INTRODUCTION

The term “nation-building” is enjoying a revival in scholarly circles as well as becoming common in international politics. It has come to prominence in the debate on failing states, conflict management and development theory. In the post-colonial nation-states of South and Southeast Asia particularly, it has been on the political agenda since the 1950s (Derichs and Heberer 2006). This earlier usage needs to be distinguished from the term now widely being used, especially in the United States, to mean creating a “nation” in a country undergoing conflict. The latter usage denotes the employment of armed force and civil authority in putting together a workable government in a country recovering from war or still embroiled in it. There is a growing literature on this, but the meaning differs greatly from that intended in this paper.

Anthony Smith defines the nation as “a named human population which shares myths and memories, a mass public culture, a designated homeland, economic unity, and equal rights and duties for all members” (1995, pp. 56–57). It does not take much effort to realize that by this definition Myanmar still has a long way to go before attaining nationhood. At the present time, there is little sharing of myths among its peoples, and there would be marked differences particularly in the memories of the post-independence period, which has been witness to what is perhaps the longest-running civil conflict in the world.

According to Jochen Hippler (1998), nation-building consists of three major elements:

1. An integrative ideology, that might be nationalist, but could also be religious, racist, developmentalist, or shaped along other lines, as long as it provides for integrating the sub-groups of the inhabitants of a country into one society.

2. An integrated society, with its several elements communicating more often with each other than with outsiders. This implies a “nationwide” integration of geographic regions, economic sectors, and politics. It also presupposes a functioning infrastructure and intellectual discourse of “national” scale.

3. An existing state apparatus, which actually fulfils its functions on all of the national territory.