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Engagement succeeded where sanctions failed in encouraging Myanmar’s political reform, Bryan R Early writes.
Economic sanctions are coercive instruments of statecraft that seek to compel a change in their targets’ behaviours. Yet sanctions are frequently imposed when they have few prospects of success, in cases where policymakers want to isolate or punish their targets for objectionable behaviours. For example, the United Nations Security Council has cycled through multiple rounds of sanctions against North Korea in response to its nuclear and missile tests with little to show for it. Even so, continuing to sanction North Korea is viewed as important for demonstrating the international community’s condemnation of the regime’s provocative weapons tests.
There’s a downside to adopting symbolic but ineffective sanctions, however, as they can encourage target governments to become more repressive and damage the welfare of innocent citizens. In the case of the human rights-related sanctions imposed by the United States against Myanmar, for example, there are strong reasons to think that the US sanctions actually made the situation within the country worse for two decades. Foreign policy observers should thus be sceptical of claims that Myanmar represents a sanctions success story, even if it can be argued that the removal of sanctions has become a useful bargaining chip for more recent political reforms in the country.
The United States first imposed economic sanctions against Myanmar in 1988 after its military-led regime’s violent crackdown against political protesters. US sanctions were imposed to curb the regime’s human rights violence and encourage Myanmar’s military regime to democratise. Numerous other sanctions were added via legislation and executive order over the subsequent decades. Not only did Myanmar’s regime fail to democratise in response to these sanctions, but it also got more repressive and engaged in consistently high levels of human rights abuses.
According to Freedom House, Myanmar’s government had the lowest possible scores on its measures of civil liberties and political rights from 1990-2011. The US Department of State’s human rights reports say that Myanmar’s government frequently relied upon political terror, including torture, murder and disappearances, during this period. Amnesty International also documented substantial, continued repression against Myanmar’s ethnic minority populations during the 1990s and 2000s.
That Myanmar’s government was just as or even more repressive after it was sanctioned is neither anomalous nor coincidental. Numerous studies have documented how being sanctioned encourages leaders to consolidate domestic power, crack down on political dissent and ethnic minorities, violate human rights and curb media freedoms. Leaders can exploit internationally-imposed sanctions in labelling dissenters as disloyal or unpatriotic in light of external threats and use the sanctions as justification for moving against them. They can also use the sanctions as scapegoats for other issues that their regime may be confronting, such as economic problems. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s response to US and European Union sanctions perfectly illustrates those strategies at work.
While the sanctions against Myanmar did adversely affect the country’s economy, they were not salient enough to seriously jeopardise the regime’s power such that it was willing to make concessions. Instead, the regime only further consolidated power and doubled-down on the tactics that had gotten it sanctioned in the first place. Simply put, the economic sanctions imposed by the US against Myanmar at best failed to improve Myanmar’s human rights policies and, at worst, contributed to more severe crackdowns and more grievous human rights violations for the two decades that followed.
In recent years, Myanmar’s ruling regime has made substantial strides in relaxing its repressive policies, freeing political prisoners, and allowing free elections. This major shift in Myanmar’s policies was aided by a substantial change in President Barack Obama’s approach towards Myanmar when he took office in 2009. Rather than relying solely on sanctions, the Obama administration adopted a diplomatic approach of constructive engagement. While President Obama did not immediately repeal sanctions, he instead focused on finding areas in which to engage in limited cooperation with Myanmar’s government. This approach helped to assuage the regime’s security concerns and allowed its leaders to feel more confident about relaxing the draconian policies it had adopted during the previous two decades.
In April of 2016, formerly imprisoned political dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to take power after her party won freely-contested elections in the country. While the removal of US sanctions served as a bargaining chip for enhanced reforms by Myanmar’s military regime, that only became possible by virtue of President Obama’s initial efforts at using positive engagement. In September of this year, the Obama Administration fully lifted US sanctions against Myanmar while continuing its policy of enhanced engagement with Myanmar’s government.
Significant work remains in improving Myanmar’s human rights record and its treatment of ethnic minorities, but the Obama administration viewed engagement—as opposed to sanctions—as the best strategy for encouraging continued improvements in those areas.
The Myanmar case suggests that economic sanctions that fail in coercing their targets to change their behaviours but are left in place to punish and isolate them can be counterproductive. If Obama hadn’t adopted a new engagement-based strategy, there is little reason to think that the US sanctions would have played a constructive role in encouraging Myanmar’s military regime to adopt reforms. Engagement and cooperation are much more responsible for the recent political transformation that has taken place in Myanmar than the pain and isolation inflicted by US sanctions. If policymakers want to learn a positive lesson from the Myanmar sanctions case, it is in how engagement-based strategies can be effectively used where sanctions policies have failed.
Bryan R Early is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY and the Director of the Center for Policy Research.
This piece is published in partnership with Policy Forum – Asia and the Pacific’s platform for public policy analysis and debate.
The counterproductive nature of sanctions generally has long been attested. In the case of Myanmar Lee Jones exposed remorselessly in his “Societies under Siege” last year the extent to which Western sanctions had little practical effect in persuading the junta to introduce political reform. The present persuasive article by Bryan Early is equally unchallengeable.
We should however not overlook the importance to Western politicians of using sanctions for their own domestic political agendas. During the height of the sanctions regime imposed by the EU against Myanmar, I found no official in the British Foreign Office who thought that sanctions were making any useful contribution at all in persuading the Generals to hasten political change. In Brussels, the EU Commission produced a number of confidential analyses showing how counterproductive sanctions were. While the Generals wallowed in a financial bonanza of revenues from natural gas, jade, precious stones and timber exports to their neighbours, it was the Burmese people who suffered from the denial of development aid and the Western assault on the private sector industries of garments, tourism and agricultural exports.
But views from officials, in both London and Brussels, were continually disregarded and their recommendations swept under the carpet. On no occasion between 1988 and 2012 did the British or European Parliaments ever debate sanctions seriously, on the basis of any informed and objective assessment of their effectiveness. Only in the House of Lords on 12 October 2007 did peer after peer, representing all political parties, unanimously mock the British Government’s pretensions in a debate on the report of the Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs into sanctions generally. Chapter IV of that Report on Burma was an indictment of UK and EU policy, and also of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi for demanding them.
Lord Eccles summed up the views of the House when he said: “In essence, the West has opted out of Burma. The sanctions are, in my view, irrelevant. What we are watching reminds me of an ancient Greek tragedy. There is a degree of inevitability. The events will unfold. Nobody can do anything about them. The awful generals are the villains of the piece, but also the victims. Nobody knows what to do, so we retreat into disapproval. This in no way measures up to the needs of the Burmese or the interests of the western world.”
The domestic political imperative at the time however was to be seen to be doing something, however inane and counterproductive, to respond to the fully understandable popular demand from pressure groups and the general public that “something must be done” to counter appalling human rights abuses in the country. But the reality is that both Western interests and the welfare of the Burmese people generally were sacrificed on the altar of UK domestic political expediency for almost 25 years.
Populism did not start with Brexit and Donald Trump. The Post-Truth era has long existed in Western policies on Myanmar. For some, perhaps many, emotion and political gain are more persuasive, and indeed more real, than logic and technical merit.
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Thank you, Derek, for mentioning my book (published last year), which indeed makes the argument that sanctions did not work in Myanmar. It also corrects the misapprehension that US policy change was eventually what spurred, or at least contributed (“aided” as Professor Early puts it), to change in Myanmar. If that was true, how can we explain the fact that the regime announced a 7-step ‘roadmap to democracy’ in 2003? And reconvened the National Convention from 2004-2007? And held a constitutional referendum in 2008? And planned elections thereafter? This was all before Obama’s so-called “pivot” to Asia. The truth is that the regime followed its own timetable, advancing not because it felt externally secure but because it felt internally secure, having crushed the NLD outside of Yangon and having gained far more power and leverage over the country’s ethnic-minority rebels than any Burmese government had achieved since independence. These domestic dynamics gave it the power and confidence to dictate the timing and nature of the transition, on its own terms. Unfortunately, too many Westerners instinctively seek to understand political outomes in developing countries as being somehow driven by Western agency. The argument for engagement is simply the liberal version of this, a nicer alternative to the hawkish approach of confrontation. But it is equally flawed in exaggerating the extent of external leverage over domestic political change. The truth is that nothing the US did had very much influence over political developments in Myanmar. But that is a much harder pill to swallow.
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What a difference 1 year made. Kudos again to Mr Tonkin whose, unswerving yet correct views were unjustly labeled as “junta apologist’s”. is now enforced by an American academic, from New York, openly.
The gripe is why does it take the west that wrong for so long to realize the throw away the key policy, while Vietnam as an example persist.
Obama may yet have the last laugh in Cuba just like in Myanmar. Otherwise engagement with the Kim and Ayatollah will bare no fruit at least the Kim.
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