ABSTRACT
The previous chapter described the British government’s military response to the insurgent crises that confronted Burma’s leaders in the months after independence. This chapter looks more closely at the financial and political aspects of British post-independence policy, and the wider context within which this policy was made. In the wake of Burmese appeals for help in January 1949, British planners developed measures designed to stabilize the Burmese government’s precarious finances and tide the country over its immediate problems. In providing aid, the British also sought to exert political influence in Rangoon; in particular, they hoped that they could take advantage of the goodwill aid was expected to generate to persuade the Burmese government to settle its differences with the Karen, thereby freeing up resources to tackle the communist insurgency. More broadly, British policy-makers sought to use the issue of aid to
Burma to support wider efforts to reframe relations with the newly independent states of the Asian Commonwealth. In the responses to its problems, Burma, ironically itself a Commonwealth refusenik, gave the British a chance both to buttress the Commonwealth as an organizing principle of international politics and to give it an early sense of practical purpose by involving Commonwealth members, India primarily, but also Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and New Zealand, in providing assistance. As Bevin put it in September 1949, Burma constituted a ‘practical problem of common concern on which he could bring the countries in this area together’.1 Commonwealth ministers met in Delhi in February 1949 in an attempt to hammer out an agreed position on the Karen revolt, and discussed Burma again in London the following April. In Rangoon, a Commonwealth ambassadors’ committee was set up to scrutinize Burmese requests for financial and military aid. When financial assistance was finally agreed in June 1950, it was explicitly a Commonwealth initiative, not a British one. By involving Commonwealth countries in the problem of Burmese aid, Brit-
ish planners were trying to give substance to a set of ambitious regional policies they had been thinking about since the end of the Second World War.2 By the close of the 1940s, as communist insurgencies flared up in Burma and Malaya and Mao Zedong’s forces tightened their grip on China, British policy-makers
had concluded that only Asia’s economic and, to a lesser extent, political development could check communism’s advance. The key to post-war recovery, as in Europe, lay in cooperation and collaboration, both within the region and between the region and the West. In the short term, the objective would be to reinforce local capacities to resist communism; in the long term, this regionalist project would aim to create what officials hoped would in time become ‘a system of friendly partnership between East and West’.3 The new Asian Commonwealth was the primary target and key vehicle of these regional plans. India in particular was useful now not as a colonial possession, but as a newly independent partner. Aligning Delhi with London in Burma offered policy-makers a practical expression of what cooperation might mean – ‘an opportunity to develop relations on a new basis’, as well as a tool for familiarizing new partners in the requirements and modes of British policy-making and diplomacy.4
