Daily Blague

The one article that you have to read this week is "Walled Off," John Lanchester's review, in The New Yorker, of The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U (FSG, $25). If you know anything about Burma, it's probably that a ruthlessly corrupt but notably incompetent military junta rules the country along severely isolationist lines, and that Aung San Yuu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has lived under house arrest for years because of her commitment to democracy. And that's all correct. What you probably don't know anything about is the peculiar nature of Burmese nationalism, a toxic hormone that responds to international sanctions with a troublesome vibrancy.

One of the subtlest things in The River of Lost Footsteps is the connection Thant charts between Burma's current predicament and its colonial past. A deep sense of humiliation gave rise to a curdled nationalism that eventually made the military dictatorship possible. The great British experiment in regime change created a Burma that was, in Thant's words, "entirely different from anything before, a break with ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times" - a Burma "adrift, suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past."

Hmm, might something similar have happened with all the post-World-War-I regime change in the Middle East? At least Burma is geographically Burma, notwishtanding its imperial pretensions. (Yes!) Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were all wrenched untimely from the womb of an Ottoman Empire that was too old to be giving birth; they are all profoundly bogus nations.

I used to be a big believer in sanctions. Just cut people off from the advantages of participating in the international community until they cry "uncle"! It seemed to be working with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, especially given the no-fly zones, under which certain cities prospered in peace. Mr Lanchester's essay suggests that I may have been simplistic (how American!). What one really wants to do, he points out, is to create a middle class, using whatever works.

A middle class. More and more, we recognize this property-owning but non-elite class as the binding force in any civil democratic society. But even in English, the "middle class" is contemptible for reasons having nothing to do with the care and feeding of civil societies. Anyone in a governing position has undoubtedly been subjected to an anti-bourgeois bias in the course of his or her education. We come back to a familiar Western conundrum: nobody from any background - aristocratic/plutocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian - can tolerate a "middle class" after a first-class education. It may be nothing more the crazy legacy of poets who romanticized the well-mannered ancien régime, but it clings like kudzu. Westerners have had a genius for creating middle classes. Why is it something that we understand so poorly that it's the last thing we think of exporting?