construct a serious communications, education, and transportation infrastructure for national integration.50 In addition, as was already evident with the Kuomintang invasion in the early 1950s, Burma’s location and the porosity of its
borders rendered effective enforcement of national sovereignty especially difficult. With China sponsoring the Burmese Communist Party’s armed insurgency until the late 1980s and Thailand abetting Karen and Shan
independence struggles, and with the international narcotics trade in the
“Golden Triangle” providing additional fiscal bases for effective autonomy if
not independence from Rangoon, stalemate persisted for decades. The military
regime in the late 1980s regained some effective sovereignty over its territory
with Rangoon’s rapprochement with both Beijing and Bangkok and the consequent disappearance of foreign support for various separatist insurgencies. But
even today, instead of effective national integration in Burma there persists a
patchwork form of sovereignty based on a complex welter of ceasefire agreements and live-and-let-live arrangements outside the core ethnic-Burman
areas.51
Whereas Burma developed a decidedly Mainland Southeast Asian pattern
of “essentialist” nationalism, in Indonesia a distinctly “Island” Southeast Asian
pattern of “epochalist” nation-building has unfolded since the onset of military
rule. Unlike in Burma, the strengthening of military rule under Suharto was
accompanied by a sharp reduction in economic nationalism, the opening of
the economy to foreign direct investment, and a shift to heavy reliance on
loans from foreign governments and international financial institutions.
Thanks to these flows of foreign capital and large oil and natural gas reserves,
the 1970s and 1980s were a period of sustained import-substitution industrialization, followed in the mid-1980s by a decisive shift into export-oriented
industrialization, with foreign companies dominating the export sector.52
The diminution of economic nationalism in Indonesia in the mid-late
1960s was accompanied by a commensurate abandonment of anti-imperialist
nationalism in the political realm. In 1965 and 1966, Suharto engineered the
de-escalation of Konfrontasi with neighboring Malaysia (derided by Soekarno
as a British-controlled “neo-colony”), and in 1967 he helped to create the
Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), establishing Indonesia’s
newly found eagerness to strengthen relations with neighboring Malaysia,
Singapore (with its British military bases), and the Philippines and Thailand,
both deeply involved in the American war effort in Indochina. In the meantime,
even as Suharto’s lieutenants were orchestrating large-scale anti-communist