ABSTRACT
The political geography that post-independence Myanmar inherited from the British presented some formidable challenges. Sandwiched between two rising populous neighbours, China and India, the Indian Ocean and its potentially strategic maritime lanes, as well as a mainland Indochina rapidly drawn into Cold War power games, the country’s first postcolonial leaders early on acknowledged that their approach to foreign and security policy had to reckon with Myanmar’s peculiar geographic position. The Burmese polity indeed straddles several regions – South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia – but culturally, historically and economically belongs fully to none of them. Furthermore, the civil war that emerged in the late 1940s between the ethnic Bamar majority – who soon dominated the country’s political elites – and a myriad of ethnic nationalities dwelling in Myanmar’s border peripheries rapidly undermined its relations with its five direct neighbours. Ethnic and communist insurgents developed large-scale underground networks across the borders with China, Thailand, India, Laos and even Bangladesh (or East Pakistan before 1971) where they found sympathy, if not open political support, for their struggle against Myanmar’s central authorities and other rival ethnic armed groups (Smith 1999; Lintner 1999).
