Not the next Yugoslavia: prospects for the disintegration of Indonesia (original) (raw)

Indonesia is both the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and one of its most ethnically diverse. Home to approximately 230 million people, of whom more than 85 percent follow Islam, there are almost as many Muslims living in Indonesia as in the entire Arabic-speaking world. The Sunni branch of Islam predominates, while approximately one million Indonesians adhere to the Shia variant. A signifi cant number of Sufi communities also exist in the archipelago state. Indonesia is also the world’s third largest democracy, after India and the United States. President Suharto’s New Order regime, one of the most repressive dictatorships in Southeast Asia, collapsed in May 1998 after controlling Indonesian politics for more than 30 years. Since Suharto’s downfall, the most dramatic reform initiative has been the introduction of an extensive regulatory framework governing the conduct of executive and legislative elections. Based on the new system, three national legislative and presidential elections, as well as balloting in several hundred localities, have occurred throughout the last decade. Overall, elections in Indonesia are considered free and fair. The quality of democracy remains low, however.

Indonesian Politics and Society is an exceptional tool for understanding social and political change in Indonesia over more than three decades. It contains more than eighty translated extracts of carefully selected speeches, pamphlets, manifestos and poems, providing a unique insight into the social thought and political concerns of a wide range of actors intimately involved in the struggle to shape modern Indonesia following the triumph of Soeharto’s New Order in the 1960s. This volume introduces and assesses the thinking of state ideologues, modernising pluralists, social radicals, and of political Islam, during a period of tumultuous change and sometimes violent conflict. It also relates the ideas of the major protagonists in political struggles to important events in Indonesia following the fall of Soeharto. Much of the material presented is made accessible for the first time to English-language readers. As such, the book is an invaluable text for scholars of modern Indonesia, and for those who seek to understand the ideas that continue to be relevant to the actors currently reshaping the country’s social and political terrain. (From front matter in book)

This paper is based on a talk I gave to the Royal Institute of Asian Affairs in London in late 1984. At that time, Suharto's 'New Order' regime (1966-98) was just 18 years old and my paper attempts to assess its achievements and challenges. Rereading it now at a distance of over 30 years brings up a certain poignancy. 'The past is a foreign country they do things differently' (Hartley 1957). But it may be of contemporary interest as many of the New Order's problems are still with us in the Jokowi era (2014-19), corruption not least.

We argue that Indonesia’s path to democracy was borne out of necessity brought about by a state of extreme precariousness and then molded by its lack thereof. Its lack thereof precisely reflected the internal power struggle and elite competition between remnant groups of the New Order vying under a different set of circumstances. Notwithstanding the given peculiarities of Indonesia’s transition, the current state of democracy in Indonesia is clearly one that is also shaped by the patrimonial character of the New Order. While imminent necessity acts as a temporary stop to ensure that these predatory tendencies of Indonesia’s political system do not come to the fore, its dissolution subsequently opened up the avenues for them to remerge. For even necessity has its limitations and these limitations lie in its eventual demise. Such a pattern inevitably contributed to perceptions of Indonesia’s reform process as being perceived as a vacillating “two steps forward, one step back.” The stu...