Introduction

All too often when discussing contemporary Myanmar, the focus tends to shift quickly to its national politics, its ethnic schisms, or its state–society relations, crowding out everything else. Some have referred to this phenomenon as the “hostage” model, a one-dimensional approach to change in Myanmar in which any such discussion unrelated directly to the struggle between the military and the opposition over national power bumps hard against heavy scepticism or cynicism (or both) because political reform is seen by some as the sine qua non of everything else.

While not discounting the importance of any of those issues, the aim of this chapter is an attempt to redirect some attention among Myanmar watchers and researchers to something seemingly more innocuous but of no less importance: the country's anodyne but enduring civil bureaucracy. Socioeconomic research and analysis has long been preoccupied with the role of public institutions, particularly the “bureaucracy” in fostering or impeding socioeconomic transformation. That socioeconomic growth crucially depends on governance is not only a widely acknowledged fact today, but is also the basis for continuing fascination with the role of bureaucracies in any country for theorists and practitioners alike. Specifically, this chapter tries to make the sometimes not so obvious case that understanding the history bequeathed by Myanmar's various postcolonial governments to its contemporary civil bureaucracy is critical not only to understanding the bureaucracy's tribulations, but also for prescribing appropriate remedies. Indeed, regardless of its various ills, Myanmar today has a public service that refuses to wither away; for the moment it is all the country has. Accordingly, the first principle when considering reform options is to accept that it is crucial, at least in the medium term, to work with the existing bureaucratic machine, and seek merely to turn it from its negative attributes inherited from past legacies. In the absence of a fair dose of realism to inform any bureaucratic reform, there is always the risk of compromised change. Such realism demands that any starting point is to comprehend how Myanmar's current civil bureaucracy came to be what it is today.