My mind turns to Myanmar/Burma (Burma hereinafter, as it’s shorter). A faraway country of which I know nothing.

Burma is larger than Ukraine in geographical terms and (with some 50 million people) than Spain in population terms. So comfortably towards the top of global country rankings on both counts.

But in GDP per capita terms it is well towards the bottom. Its place on the Corruption Perceptions index is appalling (almost bottom, a notch above North Korea haha). WHO says it has the world’s very worst health care system.

What’s happening? It has resources, it’s in Asia and it should be booming.

Simple. The country has been run by different sorts of military dictatorship since 1962(!). And military dictatorships are rubbish at running countries.

Burma’s chronic underperformance has attracted plenty of Western obloquy down the decades and latterly some stiff EU/US sanctions. But now there’s change and hope, symbolised by the release of veteran democracy campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi (ASSK) who has been released from long years of house arrest and has triumphantly entered Burma’s parliament. Her forthcoming Nobel Prize acceptance speech next month will be a major world event.

So what has made the regime loosen up? Is it part of a deep-laid plan going back to 1993 to move to some sort of pluralism? Or has the ruling elite decided that they can get richer faster Asian-style by being crafty enough to get those sanctions lifted and stay substantively in control? Or something else?

This takes us straight to foreign policy technique:

… there are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: Isolation, or Engagement. And that both can have perverse consequences, because it is impossible to deal with perverse regimes without some perverse outcomes

Isolation (plus or minus sanctions) invariably drags on unhappily, mainly because the regimes are never in fact that isolated: see the wild success of those policies for eg Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Belarus. In some cases the regime may isolate itself, all the better to oppress its own citizens: see decades of North Korea.

An interesting aspect of Technique is that if Western sanctions and political pressures have compelled the regime to loosen up and emerge from ‘isolation’, it will suit everyone not to say so!

The ruling elite of course will deny it – they don’t want to look weak. ASSK will be cautious: she can’t afford to be seen as a stooge of the West. And Western governments (if they are smart) will tone down the rhetoric, as they do not want to encourage those in Burma who fiercely oppose ‘reform’ to use the excuse of ‘outside interference’ to try to block things.

How might Burma’s transition unfold? In Europe after the Cold War ended the ex-communist countries had a popular model to aim at (Western European social market democracy) and a robust institutional framework (EU/NATO/OSCE etc) within which to make their changes. This ruled many options in, and many out.

Burma is much more on its own. Different models present themselves. China Lite. India. South Korea. Indonesia. Malaysia. Vietnam. The regional institutional framework (eg ASEAN) is far less intrusive than the EU and has a high tolerance of oppression by its own members.

So no-one knows. The ruling class will be determined to hold on to quite a lot of power and most of their privileges. ASSK and other Burmese opposition forces will want much faster change and a clear strong say in what happens. Amazing and quasi-saintly as ASSK certainly is, are her principles and tactics robust enough to survive contact with hard political day-to-day realities as things grind on?

Insofar as these two views can be synthesized it may well come from developing the economy, so that amidst the likely boom political rivalries can be bought off and creative power-sharing options emerge.

If we in the creaking West want to help and support this new process, how best to do so? Sanctions have been suspended following the release of ASSK, and once suspended are next to impossible to reinstate unless something appalling happens. So that leverage (whatever it was worth) has largely gone. Maybe we simply do nothing, but do it well?

Want more? Check out Network Myanmar, a terrific resource in which a former FCO senior colleague Derek Tonkin plays a leading role.