Displaying the “Shadow Metropole” in the 1947 Constitutional Mission of Burma to Ireland

In November of 1947, Mr. Chan Htoon—Constitutional Adviser to the Government of Burma—visited Ireland as part of an effort to study the Irish Constitution as a potential model for the state that would gain its independence in January of the following year. A report from the Irish Press stated: ‘Mr. de Valera, whom [Mr. Htoon] saw on Thursday, was as well-known in Burma as in Ireland, and the strategy of the nationalist parties in Burma had been largely based on the republican movement in Ireland since 1916.’ Further, Mr. Htoon stated: ‘The fact that we patterned our Constitution on yours is the greatest tribute we could pay to your country.’ Such events resulted in many people referring to Burma as the ‘Ireland of the East.’ As will be shown, Ireland played a subtle, yet important role in influencing Burma’s nationalist endeavors and the latter’s efforts to withdrawal from the British Commonwealth. This is but another example of Ireland’s status as what I have dubbed the ‘shadow metropole.’

This paper addresses the conference theme of “Historical Scale: Linking Levels of Experience” and compliments the other papers on this panel by further examining Ireland’s place within such larger historical phenomena as global decolonization. The example of Burma’s constitutional mission to Ireland is one of many examples in which Dublin, and Ireland writ large, served as a physical and imagined space in which myriad anti-colonial leaders were able to facilitate their withdrawal from Empire by rhetorically aligning their own movements to that of Ireland. Whereas London was the space from which withdrawal from Empire was negotiated, Dublin became a place to which nations would seek entry into the community of the newly free.