Myanmar Spring Chronicle – View from September 28
(MoeMaKa), September 29, 2025
The Core Political Ideologies Underpinning Nearly 80 Years of Myanmar’s Civil War
The span of Myanmar’s civil war has become almost as long as the country’s period of independence. I’ve read in some histories that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill predicted Myanmar would fall into civil war once it became independent.
We can’t know exactly which data points Churchill relied on to foresee a post-independence descent into civil war, but it’s plausible he extrapolated from Myanmar’s history: the posture of left-wing political forces, the reality of a multi-ethnic state, and the relationships certain ethnic groups—who had served in the British colonial forces—maintained with Britain. Those factors could have informed such a forecast.
After Britain annexed Upper Burma in 1885, it faced domestic uprisings for well over a decade. That historical backdrop may also have shaped expectations about Myanmar’s political trajectory.
At independence, Myanmar’s fate, as Churchill had augured, was grim: it plunged into civil war. Both Communist parties took up arms, and several ethnic groups launched intense, nationwide insurgencies between 1948 and roughly 1951 in pursuit of national liberation.
The Burma Communist Party led by Thakin Than Tun, the Karen National Union (KNU) led by Saw Ba U Gyi, the People’s Volunteer Organization (PVO) created as an auxiliary after the reorganization of the national army, and other ethnic armed groups all fought in the civil war era that followed World War II.
Here, the lens of analysis is the political ideologies of the armed actors in that civil war. The government led by U Nu under the AFPFL (Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League) had an anti-colonial ethos, but it can’t be called left-wing: it governed through a parliamentary democratic system representing national capitalists. Although some self-styled “socialists” within the PVO and the national army leadership existed after World War II, they were not in practice adherents of the then-ascendant global left. Meanwhile, some AFPFL leaders and commanders had personal ties with certain leaders of the Burma Communist Party, and there were gestures toward “left unity,” but in reality they neither avoided nor halted the civil war.
In 1962, after the AFPFL split into two camps, Commander-in-Chief General Ne Win seized power from the U Nu–U Tin government. He proclaimed a “Burmese Way to Socialism,” adopting a socialist label popular globally at the time, yet in practice ruled as a military dictatorship for 26 years—hostile not only to capitalists but also to socialists and communists.
Throughout that period, ethnic armed organizations continued guerrilla warfare along the borderlands, establishing “liberated areas” in pursuit of ethnic self-determination; the civil war persisted.
For many ethnic armed organizations, the guiding ideology has not been a left/right doctrine but ethnonational aims: national liberation and a state (or state-like unit) with the right to self-rule. Some groups have held to that position continuously from 1948 to the present. A number advocate a confederation model that confers broader authority and decision-making power; some are already practicing arrangements resembling that.
Before 1989, the two main adversaries in the civil war were the state military and the Burma Communist Party (BCP/CPB). After the CPB collapsed in April 1989, the contest shifted to one primarily between ethnic armed groups and the military regime. The junta that seized power in 1988 abandoned Ne Win’s state-socialist economy for a market-oriented one, but politically it remained a highly centralized military authoritarian system.
From 2011 until the February 2021 coup, there were numerous peace talks and conferences, and many groups signed agreements at the state and union levels.
When the coup on February 1, 2021 reignited and accelerated the war, the principal forces on the battlefield were again organizations advancing ethnonational liberation and ideology.
The National Unity Government (NUG)—formed after the 2020 election in which the NLD won decisively and composed of many actors—now sits at the political center of the Spring Revolution. Ideologically, it espouses a market economy, liberal norms, and a federal system regarding the ethnic question.
That ethnic armed groups hold to national-liberation goals is not itself a problem; what matters is how ethnonationalism is conceived and to what degree it is applied.
Differences among ethnic groups over territory, administrative authority, and the scope of political autonomy—as well as mutual suspicions and inter-ethnic conflicts—can emerge even as everyone is confronting the military dictatorship.
Such dynamics can become key factors that delay or set back the armed struggle against the dictatorship and the broader Spring Revolution.