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Military Mayhem in Myanmar: the end of a democratic experiment

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A group of monks walk in the streets of Yangoon, Myanmar’s largest city. Photo Credit: Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

On February 1st 2021 a coup d’état ended Myanmar’s decade-long experiment with democracy, ushering back in the ruthless military rule of the Tatmadaw. Since then, the “lady of Myanmar,” Aung San Suu Kyi, who became an icon for democracy after spending 15 years under house arrest, has been detained in an unknown location. She now faces various charges, including the possession of illegal walkie-talkies – an obvious pretext intended to keep her away from Myanmar’s political scene. Meanwhile, under the blazing sun of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw has re-established its reign of terror. Security forces have killed hundreds of opponents and injured thousands more. Authorities have also suspended most television programs and blocked access to Facebook and other social media sites.

Myanmar’s coup d’état has significant domestic and regional implications. Internally, historical ethnic divisions have seemingly softened, and formerly divided actors are now uniting against a common foe – the Tatmadaw. Regionally, the coup is sowing uncertainty throughout Myanmar’s neighboring countries, with serious consequences in two particular domains: first, the ASEAN bloc; second, China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Ethnic minorities and the Bamar majority

Squeezed between India and China, Myanmar is a melting pot of cultures that counts more than 135 ethnic groups within its territory, with Buddhism being the dominant religion.
Since 1962, Myanmar’s ethnic division was cleverly exploited by Tatmadaw military forces as a tool to legitimize their rule. According to their distorted narrative, a military regime is necessary to defend Myanmar from the enemies of the nation, which consist of a cabal of ethnic minorities claiming autonomy and undermining national unity. Thus, in the Tatmadaw’s words, the military forces are the real guardians of the Buddhist nation of Myanmar.

The reality is quite different. The military rule has merely instrumentalized Myanmar’s ethnic diversity in order to cling to power. The mastermind of the February coup, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, is widely known for commanding the extermination of entire villages belonging to various ethnic minority groups such as the Shan and the Kokang, and for authorizing the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. In such a fragmented reality, the Tatmadaw has always feared an alliance between the Bamar majority, which mainly inhabits the country’s heartlands, and ethnic minority groups, who largely inhabit border areas. Such an alliance could in fact lead the civilian population to unite against the military, undermining their rule.

Today, in the mountainous periphery of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw’s worst nightmare is coming true.

In the frontier regions, groups of armed ethnic minorities have been fighting for autonomy for decades, for them, the military brutality that Bamar anti-coup protesters have experienced since February is nothing but a continuation of the same oppression they have been enduring for decades. In this sense, ethnic minorities provide important insights on the best tactics to fight against the Tatmadaw. Thus, since February, anti-coup protesters, namely members of the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM), have fled to the mountainous periphery of Myanmar to collaborate with ethnic armed groups. Thousands of activists are now learning from these resistance groups how to load a rifle, throw hand grenades, and assemble firebombs, de facto transforming into a guerrilla force.

People like Nerdah Bo Mya, a member of the Karen National Union (KNU) - the oldest rebel group which protects the Karen ethnic minority - are showing their solidarity to Bamar anti-coup protesters. “We have heart for these kind of people, because we have gone through this ourselves and we know what kind of pain, what kind of suffering… what kind of atrocities they’re going through, so we can put ourselves in their shoes”, said Nerdah. Similarly, many among the Bamar population are now apologizing on social media for not acknowledging the minorities’ experience of repression over the past years. The military coup has now clearly revealed to the Bamar population the real extent of Tatmadaw’s brutality, leading Myanmar’s majority to soul-search and change their perspective towards ethnic minorities.

Thus, for now, the Bamar population and ethnic minorities are united against the military regime, with both parties applying the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” leaving aside old tensions to fight against a common foe. However, looking to the future, doubts arise. Although this newly-emerged unity represents a great leap forward in Myanmar’s fractured social reality, the Bamar majority and the ethnic minorities seemingly have different plans for Myanmar’s future. Anti-coup protestors want democracy under Suu Kyi, while minorities want self-determination and autonomy, thereby leaving many questions unanswered.

A Kayan woman, a sub-group of the Karen people. Women are known for wearing neck rings as part of their cultural identity. Photo Credit: Flickr, licensed under Creative Commons.

The ASEAN bloc

At a regional level, the reaction to the military coup appears slow and limited. Like never before, Myanmar’s crisis has exposed an uncomfortable truth about ASEAN: the bloc is unable to reach a cohesive response to any common problem.

On one side, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore have criticized the use of violence against Myanmar’s civil society. On the other side, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam have remained largely silent, which does not come as a surprise, considering that Thailand’s prime minister himself gained power after a coup in 2014. Even worse, ASEAN recently invited the mastermind of the coup itself, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, to their official summit in Jakarta. Thus, not only did ASEAN not show any effective response, such as suspending Myanmar’s membership, but it also indirectly legitimized Myanmar’s brutal generals. In addition, after Western states applied several sanctions on trade to punish the military regime, ASEAN members undermined these efforts by continuing to trade with Myanmar. Injecting billions of dollars of investment into Tatmadaw’s business empire, they are helping to cement a de facto military-oligarchic ruling class. Paralyzed in a permanent state of indecision, ASEAN is now facing the prospect of a civil war in one of its member countries, with the potential of a disastrous regional spillover effect. And on top of this, its coordinating power is inevitably losing credibility in front of the international community.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative

The military coup has also posed serious threats to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Before, Beijing had closely collaborated with Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratic parliament, signing various contracts for future projects in Myanmar. In 2017, the two governments agreed to the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor agreement (CMED), which included various infrastructure projects that were intended to revitalize Myanmar’s economy, while providing China with a land route to the Indian Ocean via Myanmar. This would diminish Beijing’s over-reliance on the Strait of Malacca for oil and gas imports. Now, some analysts believe that these projects will be delayed due to Myanmar’s instability.

Conclusion

Only time will tell what the future holds for Myanmar. But there is no doubt that the military coup has unleashed a sequence of effects that will have impacts not only inside the country but also across the region. On one side, the coup offers opportunities for domestic social cohesion. On the other side, it represents a testing time for the ASEAN bloc and significant instability for China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Vietnam: a power on the rise?

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By Carlotta Rinaudo

The lush vegetation of the Mekong Delta (Credit: Carlotta Rinaudo, 2017)

In April 1975 the Vietnam War was over. Roads and bridges were left in rubble, and orphans were walking barefoot in the streets of Saigon. Following the war, the US had imposed a trade embargo prohibiting any commercial dealings with Vietnam, isolating the country from international trade.

Unsurprisingly, in the early 1980s Vietnam was one of the poorest places on earth. The Vietnamese Communist Party adopted a centrally planned economy that led to stagnant agricultural production, explaining why a country covered with lush paddy fields had to import rice from abroad. One-fifth of the Vietnamese population was on the brink of starvation, and electricity was available only 4 hours per day.

This situation changed in 1986, when the country opened to the world. Vietnam launched a set of reforms known as “Doi Moi”, successfully replicating the Chinese model: the country would preserve its single-party system while shifting towards a market-based economy. These reforms quickly boosted the economy and attracted massive Foreign Direct Investments. If a few years before Vietnam had had to import rice from abroad, by 1989 it had become the second largest rice exporter in the world.

Over recent decades, Vietnam has presented itself as a good international citizen, earning recognition and respect within the ASEAN group. It has signed a wide array of bilateral trade agreements, while joining the WTO, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and recently, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). In 2019 it took a mediating role in global diplomacy by hosting the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, and in 2020 it assumed the ASEAN chairmanship while successfully handling the Covid19 pandemic. Hanoi was in fact praised for giving one of the world’s best responses to the pandemic, quickly introducing a massive program of contact tracing while mobilizing the Vietnamese society in a collective fight against the virus.
These factors suggest that Vietnam is walking the path of a rising middle power, demonstrating a growing ability to shape international events in three particular areas: the global supply chain, the South China Sea, and the realm of 5G technologies.

Vietnam’s place in the global supply chain

Amidst the China-US trade war, many multinational companies have been looking to relocate their supply chain outside of the Chinese mainland, adopting a “China Plus One” business strategy. In this context, Vietnam has emerged as the ideal “Plus One” candidate, thanks to its ability to offer solid infrastructure coupled with a large low-wage workforce. Nike and Samsung have been outsourcing their production to Vietnamese factories for years, and recently Apple has started to assemble its AirPod earphones on Vietnamese soil too. This is not to say that “Made in Vietnam” will ever be able to replace “Made in China”: Vietnam doesn’t have the capacity to become the new factory of the world. To Vietnam’s 55 million manufacturing workers, China has 800 million; and while Ho Chi Minh City’s container port can accommodate 6 million containers annually, Shanghai reaches 40 million. Yet, in a “China Plus One” world, Vietnam has been able to emerge as a valid alternative, thereby securing an important position in the global supply chain.

Vietnam in the South China Sea

According to scholar Do Thanh Hai, Vietnam’s psyche has been shaped by its cyclical and perennial struggle against Chinese invasions from the North. This traditional Vietnamese perception of China remains in the country’s consciousness. Vietnam often sees China not as a conventional neighbor, but, rather, as a force of nature - “like floods and storms that feed into the deltas (…) to which Vietnamese, like reeds, must at once bend while remaining firmly intact.”

Aware of its military inferiority, Vietnam does not seek direct confrontation with its northern giant, instead it resists, “firmly intact”, protecting Vietnamese interests.

When, in 2014, China deployed one of its oil rigs in Vietnamese waters, Vietnam responded with a policy of “cooperation cum struggle”, displaying extraordinary pragmatism. First, Vietnam resolutely responded by raising global media attention to China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea, therefore internationalizing and securitizing a bilateral issue. Then, when China pulled the oil rig back, Hanoi sent its officials to Beijing to heal their diplomatic ties.

Although this approach might appear unusual, Vietnam only revived an old tradition of the past, when, after a territorial dispute, it used to send symbolic homages and annual tributes to Chinese emperors in order to secure peace, harmony, and recognition. This policy of “cooperation cum struggle” is a mix of soft and hard methods that helps Vietnam escape a battle it cannot win, while vigorously standing up for its own territorial sovereignty.

While other Southeast Asian countries like Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines have now softened their attitude in the South China Sea, Vietnam is increasingly perceived as the ASEAN champion that can contain Chinese maritime ambitions. This security leadership role has been widely acknowledged by the international community, with countries like Japan offering their support and providing offshore patrol vessels to Hanoi. With regards to China, Vietnam is indeed “bending like reeds, while remaining firmly intact.”

Vietnam in the technological race

Not only did Vietnam not include Huawei in its 5G network: Hanoi built its own domestic infrastructure and appears ready to deploy it for commercial use by 2021. Viettel, a Vietnamese state-owned telecom company, has collaborated with Ericsson to create its own 5G technology, and plans to expand the product to Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia. Hanoi has also provided a cheap mass access to the Internet for its citizens, while aiming to become a key player in e-commerce and online payment methods. After Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung and ZTE, Viettel is the sixth producer in the 5G race, an impressive result for a country that 40 years ago was not able to keep up with food shortages.

Conclusion

A latecomer to the international community, Vietnam is now increasingly emerging as a regional middle power: it is well-integrated in the world economy, it operates on the front lines in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, and it is one of the only domestic producers of 5G technology. ASEAN was deliberately created to survive without a formal leader to ensure equality between its 10 member states – yet this has translated into mutual weakness rather than collective strength. For this reason, many scholars see in Vietnam a country that will be able to fill this leadership vacuum. From its isolation in the 1980s, Vietnam has come far: today, the vibrant streets of Hanoi tell the story of a place of possibilities.

Chinese Threats to Australia’s Power in the South Pacific

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By Jorge Medina

Frankhauser, J. (2020, June 20). China and Australian Flags [Digital image]. Retrieved December 04, 2020, from https://www.abc.net.au/cm/rimage/11847262-16×9-xlarge.jpg?v=2
Since the Covid-19 pandemic has taken a stranglehold on the world, many Western powers are eager to blame China for the global downturn, Australia, however, has been exceptionally outspoken in its recent statements about China’s actions regarding the pandemic. As the Covid-19 continues to surge, Australia uses this reason to make their voice louder about their concerns regarding China’s behaviour in the region. Australia has started behaving in a defensive way that has caused it to call-out the threats they have received from Chinese expansionism in the South Pacific. With this article, I would like to detail what are the Chinese threats that threaten Australian hegemony in the South Pacific and the significant change it is having in the region.

In the past few decades, a substantial number of Chinese students have flocked to Australian universities for education. This has brought a significant amount of cash flow and funding into the higher education sector, university funding dependent on the enrolment of these students. But this money does not come without strings. The Chinese government has set up many methods of surveillance on university campuses across Australia. It has led to self and forced censorship by academics who conduct research that involves anything to do with China. Students are not allowed to express themselves freely without the fear of facing retribution. When the Hong Kong protests erupted in 2019, Hong Kong students across Australia protested against the actions of the Chinese Communist Party back in Hong Kong, and Chinese diplomatic missions organized counter protests where Hong Kong and local students faced physical and vicious online retaliation.

Another way in which China threatens Australia’s regional power status is its increasing its investments into countries such as Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. China has reached out to these small island nations, and has not only offered to help fund investment projects, but has also promised to aid the economies of these isolated nations. As these nations have traditionally relied on Australia for investment and protection, China’s increased influence, threatens Australia’s legitimacy in the South Pacific. In contrast to Australian aid and investment which is highly conditional on improving human rights and have significant corruption-fighting mechanism in place, China’s funding has no such preconditions. Accordingly, island nations have been accepting Chinese loans and funding to build grand infrastructural projects. These projects not only have limited benefits towards the growth of local economies and can be seen as ‘roads leading to no-where and can be seen as useless vanity projects used to perpetuate China’s debt-trap diplomacy initiatives. With a considerable amount of money floating into these nations, China is subverting Australia’s presence in the region and is shifting the patronage role. These physical projects are creating a significant amount of influence, even if they are roads that lead to nowhere. It is building roads figuratively connecting these nations with China and blocking Australia’s influence and subverting Australia’s power status in the region.

During the spring of 2020, in the first wave of the pandemic, many Australian leaders called for an inquiry into China’s role in the way that the pandemic has spread. Since then… (contemporaneous examples please). Australia sees China’s actions on Covid-19 as dangerous to the stability of the world, and counts China as the responsible actor at fault for its initial handling of the pandemic. China has seen this as an attack to their nation and started pulling Australian products across the country. Many Chinese citizens also started to advocate for a boycott against Australian products. China refuses to allow Australia to declare whatever it wishes on the world stage. It is making sure that Australia’s securitization of the pandemic occurs significant economic costs in order to deter other states from criticising its handling of the pandemic, and broader activities in its sphere of influence.

All of these actions threaten Australia’s role in their own region. China continues to influence in the local higher educational and political sphere. China has been investing with Australia’s traditional allies in the South Pacific. China seems to be changing the way that Australia functions as an actor in its own region and is significantly changing the security landscape of world politics. And as China continues to rise, it will continue changing the rules to the existing international world order.

 

Jorge is a MA student in the Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies program at King’s College London. Jorge is originally from the US and did his undergrad at UC Irvine and spent time at Yonsei University in South Korea. Jorge has previously spent time studying conflict in the Middle East through the Olive Tree Initiative and working for the Mexican Embassy in the US for the Office of Border Affairs. You can follow him on Twitter @medina_jorgeUK

Korean unification: what can Seoul learn from Berlin?

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By Carlotta Rinaudo

Image Credit: Flickr

“If we let Korea down, the Soviets will keep right on going and swallow up one place after another”, President Harry S. Truman, 1950.

As Truman spoke, North Korean forces were crossing the 38th parallel thereby invading the South, American troops were poised to intervene, and the Korean Peninsula was on the brink of becoming a first battleground of the nascent Cold War. Thus, in 1950 the Korean War began, and it has yet to conclude. While an armistice was agreed in 1953, no official peace treaty was ever signed, and the two Koreas have been divided by a demilitarized zone (DMZ) for almost 70 years. In this time their peoples have known very different lives and their societies have concurrently diverged, so that now, the peninsula is both governmentally and societally bifurcated.

North of the parallel we find a country pursuing its own variant of “Juche” Socialism, an ideology that promotes state control and economic self-reliance. However, Juche Socialism, in practice, has produced a very different reality. State control has transformed North Korea into a family-run kleptocracy, and the idea of economic self-reliance has instead made North Korea largely dependent on foreign aid. North Korean people have resorted to informal economics in order to survive, with women manufacturing goods in their homes and selling them in black markets. Furthermore, North Korea embraced the doctrine of “asymmetric escalation”, which sees the Kim family amassing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in order to protect their rule from exogenous pressure, including invasion and regime change. In contrast, South of the parallel, there is a highly-productive capitalist and democratic society, which has boomed into the 11th largest economy of the world, and is widely-known for its Samsung products, K-pop music, and pop-art lights.

Despite these drastic differences, the political elites of both countries advocate for the integration of the two Koreas. In 1972, President Kim Il Sung formulated the Three Charters of National Reunification, and The Arch of Reunification was erected in Pyongyang in 2001. In South Korea, a Ministry of Unification was established in 1969, with President Moon Jae-in pledging to achieve a reunification of the Korean Peninsula by 2045. Therefore, if unification is a possibility, what would be the implications?

The article aims to evaluate costs and benefits of a hypothetical reunification of the Korean Peninsula, assessing the case from a South Korean perspective. In a follow-up article, the same question will be tackled from a North Korean perspective.

The current situation on the Korean Peninsula can be compared to that of Germany during the Cold War: today’s North Korea and yesterday’s East Germany share a communist regime and an inefficient planned economy, while their counterparts adopted a democratic government and a market-based economy. Therefore, the German unification can provide valuable insights into the issues that the two countries would face should the Koreas become one again. It is exactly for this purpose that the German-Korean consultative body on unification issues was formed in 2010. What are, then, the implications at an economic, military, political and social level, if we draw from this German experience?

Many South Koreans fear that the process would simply be too expensive, with Seoul having to carry the burden.
In 2017, South Korea’s per capita GDP was $29,743, while North Korea’s was $1,214, the former being twenty-five times bigger than the latter. It would doubtless be a long process for the two to converge. Similarly, today the Eastern part of Germany still lags behind its Western counterpart, with salaries being only 84% of those in the West, and Germans often migrating from East to West as most of the major companies are headquartered there. Today German citizens still pay the so-called “Soli”, a controversial solidarity tax that is invested by the German government to fill the gap between West and East.

Despite these concerns, experts suggest that long-term economic benefits of a Korean unification will outweigh its costs, just as it has in Germany, first of all by creating a single market of 75 million people. North Korean citizens would be liberated from starvation and malnutrition, while South Korea would benefit from a significant injection of cheap labor in the economic system, but also from a huge amount of natural resources like coal, iron ore, and rare earth materials, which abounds in the Northern half of the Peninsula.

At a geo-economic level, North Korea’s geographical position has always isolated South Korea from import and exports via land. With a united Korean Peninsula, this would no longer be the case: Seoul could finally connect with the rest of the world via rail, with goods being shipped from Busan to Europe, whilst also integrating Pyongyang in global supply chains. Meanwhile, it could enable the construction of pipelines that transport natural gas from Russia to Seoul.

Nonetheless, the denuclearisation and demilitarisation of North Korea still pose a challenge.
East Germany was a base for Soviet nuclear weapons, but it did not have arsenals of its own. Similarly, at the point of unification, the 175,000 soldiers of the East German Soviet National People’s Army either left the army, or simply joined the military force of West Germany by swapping their uniforms.

In terms of military capabilities, North Korea is a different case. It has an army of 1,2 million, a stockpile of various missiles, chemical and biological weapons, and more than 60 nuclear warheads. It is one of the world’s largest conventional military forces, and the question of how to deal with it still remains largely unanswered.

In addition, how to ensure that the political elites that violated the rights of the North Korean people will be held accountable? What will happen to the Kim family? How to build a future where the North Korean people are equally represented in the government and other spheres? Germany still has a long way to go in this sense: while some “Eastern Germans” have become top political leaders, such as Chancellor Angela Merkel and former President Joachim Gauck, very few of the business leaders of big German companies were born on the Eastern side of the Berlin wall.

Finally, integration will come with social consequences.

Although the injection of cheap labor might be advantageous to big companies, it could also reduce the salaries of South Korean workers, or even replace them, generating further discontent among a society that, like the Japanese one, already suffers from a high level of old-age poverty.

In addition, North Koreans might struggle to fit in the capitalist world of South Korea.

Thae Yong-ho, one of the most famous North Korean defectors, once declared that for North Koreans in the South “the first difficulty (…) is that they don’t know how to choose”, because “in North Korea there is no opportunity to choose.”

After a period of timid and cordial relations, tensions between North and South Korea recently escalated again, with North Korea blowing up the inter-Korean liaison office and executing a South Korean official last September.

Although a Korean unification often appears like an impossibility, the issue should nonetheless remain open to discussion and the search for new solutions, especially regarding economic balance, North Korea’s huge military capabilities, the Kim family, and the integration of North Korean citizens.

Unification is a process, not an end-state: in Germany it has not concluded yet – in the Korean Peninsula, it might take even longer.

Better Late than Never: Late Arrivals of the First World War

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Learning to fight: from civilian to soldier during the First World War (Image credit: Imperial War Museum)

The decision to go to war is one of the toughest a policymaker can face. We can see as much from the First World War, as statesmen found themselves drawn into the growing conflagration. Kaiser Wilhelm II pleaded with his cousin, the Tsar of Russia and fondly called Nicky, to stop his mobilisation before it was too late. King Albert I enlisted his German-born wife to choose the weightiest words in the Belgian king’s final plea for peace. Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, noted ruefully on the outbreak of war that ‘the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ Such was the fate of the First World War’s main belligerents.

However, when considering these humanising anecdotes of Western leaders, it is easy to forget that the First World War was truly a global war. Japanese forces helped to suppress an Indian uprising in the British colony of Singapore. T.E. Lawrence (and the lesser-known Gertrude Bell) fermented revolt in Arabia and the US led a punitive expedition into Mexico to secure its southern border. At some point, every cabinet, cabal, or king had to consider how they would react to the war. At first glance, some decided to involve themselves very late in the day. The cavalry had already arrived, these nations were seemingly following the great charge with oats and hay. However, closer inspection of motives and efforts, explains the careful political movements of these ‘secondary’ powers.

Whilst the Pacific theatre of the Second World War is well-discussed, little attention has focused on the role of Asian countries in the First World War. During this Great War, India joined immediately, sending one million soldiers to serve the Allied cause. Japan joined on the side of the Entente in 1914, aiming to solidify its position as a regional power. Arguably one of the greatest photos demonstrating the truly global aspect of the First World War is that of the Nisshin, a cruiser from the Imperial Japanese navy docked in the then-British Mediterranean port of Malta.

A rendition of the Japanese cruiser “Nisshin” in Malta (Image credit: Imperial War Museum)

Japan was not the only party intend to increase its international prestige. China declared war on the Central Powers in August 1917, but its contribution to the Entente war effort already started the year before. In the hope of regaining the lost territory of Shandong from Germany, and then later from Japan, China offered Britain 50,000 troops to assist in capturing Qingdao. Although Britain refused this proposal, it did accept a later offer of Chinese labourers to help dig trenches, repair tanks and transport ammunition.

Over 100,000 Chinese labourers were employed by France and Britain during the war, some serving as far away as Basra, Iraq. China’s ‘neutrality’ ended on August 14, 1917. In what would become a recurring theme, the impetus for this declaration was the German pursuit of unrestricted submarine warfare; five-hundred Chinese labourers had been killed earlier that year when the French ship Athos was torpedoed. China continued to send labourers but was not authorised to send its own forces to help roll up the enemy. As a consequence, China was offered fewer seats at the Paris Peace Conference than her more militant Japanese neighbour, who prevailed in convincing the other victors they should keep Shandong. Despite their many offers and a far more measured approach to the alliance of the Entente, China was left feeling deeply betrayed by the post-war peace process.

Members of the Chinese Labour Corps wash a British tank in Teneur, Spring 1918 (Image credit: Imperial War Museum)

Two months after the Chinese declaration of war, Republican Brazil followed suit. The coffee and rubber-rich nation had attempted to sell to both sides at the beginning of the war but the British blockade of German ports soon meant they had to become more reliant on trade with the Allied camp. This affected foreign policy; Brazil and the United States grew closer. It is no coincidence that Washington’s only Brazilian institute is based at the Woodrow Wilson Centre. Increased trade with the Allies made Brazilian ships a target to German U-boats. Pro-Entente public opinion was confirmed in April 1917, when anti-German riots across Brazilian cities followed the sinking of a Brazilian freighter.

However, a declaration of war was slow to follow because the Brazilian Republic was a relatively new state; it had to spend several months amending their constitution to give the government the legal right to declare war. Little changed militarily after the declaration was presented to Germany. Brazil sent a small naval division to assist the British in late 1918. It arrived in Gibraltar one day before the Armistice. Brazil was given three delegates at the Paris Peace Conference, one more than China and Portugal, the latter having sent 60,000 troops to fight on the Western Front. The war had increased the prestige of Brazil; it became one of the founding members of the League of Nations and continued its lucrative and close relationship with the United States.

President of the Brazilian Republic, Venceslau Brás, signs declaration of war on the Central Powers (Image credit: WikiMedia)

Accordingly, a declaration of war on the Central Powers was seen as the best way to gain an invite to the post-war peace conference. But some states found themselves in circumstances that forced them to join (what appeared to be) the losing side. Azerbaijan is a fascinating example. Following the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, diasporas of Russians and Armenians (who had suffered greatly under the Ottoman Empire) seized power in Baku and declared a Marxist republic.

In response, Muslim nationalists declared their own state in May 1918, enlisting the help of the crumbling Ottoman empire to drive out the Bolsheviks. The ‘Army of Islam’ marched into Baku two months before the signing of the November Armistice. This force never formally cemented its reign; between May 1918 and April 1920 the country went through five governments in rapid succession. A changing of the guard took place at the end of the war, from Ottoman troops to British, but this was not enough to save this new state from a Soviet invasion in April 1920. Azerbaijan’s complicated relationship with a member of the Entente, a former member of the Entente and a member of the Central Powers shows how joining the war was not as cut and dry as predicating the winning side.

The 4th Gurkha Rifles marches through Baku in July 1919. The British occupation had been preceded by that of the Ottoman Empire and was followed by a successful invasion of Azerbaijan by Soviet Russia (Image credit: Imperial War Museum)

What conclusions can be drawn from these three very different countries, unified by one very loose concept of ‘being late’? Despite the arbitrary lines I have drawn in this article, there is something to be gleaned from a study of great alliances at a localised level. The war started by the larger European powers permeated the borders of neutral states. It created opportunities for countries disgraced by the previous impositions of imperial powers.

Equally, it offered the chance to improve relations with other powerful actors, a proposal bolstered by great financial incentives. But perhaps most interesting is how the war created competition between states who were, in theory, on the same side. China saw an opportunity to side-line the influence of Japan, Brazil became a regional power in South America (and created a minor diplomatic incident by one-upping their former rulers), and Azerbaijan attempted to wield the clashing interests of neighbours and rival great powers to safeguard the world’s first Islamic parliamentary democracy.

It is all too easy to view the First World War as a clash of two almost indefatigable alliances, with final victory only accomplished with the complete surrender of the enemy. But many smaller nations did not see this endgame as their overarching goal. Perhaps an hourglass is a better analogy: as the Armistice grew ever closer, each falling grain of sand became a lost opportunity to upend their misfortunes.

James Holtby is a part-time Masters student at the War Studies Department at King’s College London. He is interested in exploring the long-term organisation of national and international intelligence gathering institutions, especially concerning future efforts to combat global pandemics and climate change. As part of such a long-term strategy, James also has a keen interest in assessing how intelligence organisations should interact with and educate the public on issues relating to security, whilst still remaining effective at covertly gathering and collating information when necessary.