When a country is at its core diverse, patriotism is the best means of holding the strings together to create a notion of ‘one people and one nation.’ The United States is a point in case. The USA is a country with a relatively short history and a shallow culture that is a mixture of diverse immigrant influences. As a result Americans frantically cherish their stars and stripes and feel it is their patriotic duty to foster American ideals in far flung countries, some of which might already have a deeper sense of national identity.
Myanmar is a country of great diversity as well. The country has always been a hodge podge of peoples and cultures. The area that is now called Myanmar was fiercely contested by kingdoms in what are now Thailand and China. Mon and Rakhine rulers wreaked havoc in Bamar dominated areas, during historic wars that are still remembered by school children and grand fathers alike.
The borderlands in Shan, Chin and Kachin - ‘frontier areas’, as the British colonialists called these separately administered areas - only really became part of mainland Myanmar after the country regained its independence in 1948.
Then again, it took until 1962 for the largely autonomous Shan saophas to be dethroned, when General Ne Win took over power under the guise that an ethnic conference on federalism might lead to the disintegration of the country. His subsequent agenda of Burmanisation only served to fuel the civil wars and pushed back peace for several decades. (Courtesy of Frontier Myanmar)
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