ABSTRACT
Nationalism is a major theme of this book because it has been a dominant feature of Burma's history. However, the presentation and analysis of the first edition of this book showed that nationalism is embedded in other, more or less cognate subjects and features of Burma, such as colonialism, religion and politics, ethnicity and ethnicism, as well as other subjects that are not included in this book, for instance language, literature and eco nomics. The reason is that the nation and nationalism are modern ways of imagining state, society and culture in the form of unity and identity. Thus, nationalism canot be analysed per se; only as specific ways of imagining this unity and identity, and always from specific positions of power in a social hierarchy. 1 Theories of nationalism may inform the analysis and the discussion, but a reification of nationalism as if it were an autonomous agent in history produces erroneous conclusions. Nationalism is not a force above the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) in Burma's history, and the SLORC and the army are major agents of violence, rather than nationalism as such. To make nationalism an agent in itself is a gross fallacy, which unfortunately has entered the debate recently. For example, Anthony D. Smith states that nationalism has the capacity to generate widespread terror and destruction, and, further, that it functions as the unrivalled socio cultural framework, based on the historic ethnic community (’ethnie’) of the modern nation-state. 2 Such functionalism cannot explain the particular way in which the SLORC manipulates nation alism and history to construct a symbolic power with its rhetoric, and uses symbolic violence to orchestrate its use of physical violence. 3
