Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia

David Bourchier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135042202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Asia

Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia charts the origins and development of organicist ideologies in Indonesia from the early 20th century to the present. In doing so, it provides a background to the theories and ideology that informed organicist thought, traces key themes in Indonesian history, examines the Soeharto regime and his 'New Order' in detail, and looks at contemporary Indonesia to question the possibility of past ideologies making a resurgence in the country.

Beginning with an exploration of the origins of the theory of the organic state in Europe, this book explores how this influenced many young Indonesian scholars and 'secular' nationalists. It also looks in detail at the case of Japan, and identifies the parallels between the process by which Japanese and Indonesian nationalist scholars drew on European romantic organicist ideas to forge 'anti-Western' national identities and ideologies. The book then turns to Indonesia's tumultuous history from the revolution to 1965, the rise of Soeharto, and how his regime used organicist ideology, together with law and terror, to shape the political landscape consolidate control. In turn, it shows how the social and economic changes wrought by the government's policies, such as the rise of a cosmopolitan middle class and a rapidly growing urban proletariat led to the failure of the corporatist political infrastructure and the eventual collapse of the New Order in 1998. Finally, the epilogue surveys the post Soeharto years to 2014, and how growing disquiet about the inability of the government to contain religious intolerance, violence and corruption, has led to an increased readiness to re-embrace not only more authoritarian styles of rule but also ideological formulas from the past.

This book will be welcomed by students and scholars of Southeast Asia, politics and political theory, as well as by those interested in authoritarian regimes, democracy and human rights.

1 Starting points

In 1990 I was living in Jakarta, researching the prospects for democratisation in Indonesia. The collapse of right-wing regimes in Latin America in the 1980s followed by communist regimes in Eastern Europe created a great deal of excitement, leading many to believe that Indonesia would be next. After all, Indonesia had many of the supposed preconditions, including a liberalising economy, divisions among the elite and a rapidly expanding middle and working class.¹ The extraordinary florescence of oppositional activity in the late 1980s appeared to presage the end for Soeharto’s repressive military regime that had come to power a quarter of a century earlier.

Convinced that meaningful democratic gains are won through popular demands for participation rather than granted from above, I concentrated my research on groups at the forefront of the democratic movement: human rights and other NGOs, grass-roots activists, reform-minded intellectuals, students, middle-class dissident groups and Indonesia’s nascent workers movement. A central issue for all of these groups was the struggle for the right to organise: to form independent unions, professional associations and political parties such as had existed in the period between independence in 1945 and the coming to power of the military.

This soon led me to examine the numerous obstacles to asserting this right, from the capillaried state security and intelligence apparatus to the labyrinthine legal system. Yet the harder I looked, and the more time I spent talking to Indonesian political activists, the more questions of ideology and discourse came to dominate. Surveillance and low-level terror undoubtedly played a crucial part in insulating the regime against its domestic critics. But for many activists a more insidious barrier to effective political action and to democratic reform was the Soeharto government’s intensive, sustained propagation of an ideology that rejected the very idea of opposition, depicting it as un-Indonesian.

Even while advocating ‘accelerated modernisation’, Soeharto’s ideologues consistently presented his New Order as a champion of ‘indigenous values’. The corporatist political arrangements put in place by his regime were said to reflect a uniquely Indonesian approach to authority and decision making, one that gave pride of place to harmony and consensus. Officials frequently likened the state to a big family or village, presided over by a wise and benevolent father figure. In Soeharto’s ‘Pancasila Democracy’, opposition and conflict were condemned as alien notions, deriving from individualistic, Western culture.

The notion that Soeharto had rescued Indonesia from contamination by foreign ideologies and returned it to its true nature was a leitmotif of the regime’s nationwide indoctrination programme launched in 1978. Over the next decade government ideologues attempted to consolidate this set of ideas into a coherent theory. Quietly at first, and then with more vigour, ideology textbooks and officials began referring to Indonesia as an ‘integralist state’. The term came from a speech by Professor Supomo, a customary law expert, who in the Japanese-sponsored constitutional deliberations of 1945 had outlined his vision of a state in which harmony and reciprocity prevailed between rulers and ruled. According to the integralist theory of the state, which Supomo associated with the thinking of Spinoza, Hegel and the nineteenth-century German romantic Adam Müller – but which he stressed was also inherent in Indonesia’s traditional constitutional order – all groups in society formed an organic unity. In a state based on integralist principles there would be no need for any political rights, separation of powers or indeed any distinction between state and society, violating what historian Jakob Burckhardt (1921) took to be the cardinal principle of democracy.²

By 1989, Indonesian officials had begun referring to integralism as Indonesia’s Staatsidee – the central concept behind all aspects of state organisation and law, including the constitution. This innovation was greeted with some alarm in opposition circles because the 1945 Constitution provided the only guarantees – brief and ambiguous as they were – of protection against a powerful state.

Two key premises of the government’s position were that Supomo’s integralist theory reflected indigenous Indonesian patterns of social and political organisation, and that Supomo’s ideas defined the spirit of Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution. Marsillam Simanjuntak, a former student activist and independent intellectual, challenged both. In his 1989 Master of Laws thesis, Simanjuntak accused government ideologues of concealing Supomo’s positive references to totalitarianism, Nazi Germany and wartime Japan in his speech. Taking a cue from the Dutch legal historian J.H.A. Logemann, who in 1962 had likened Supomo’s vision to ‘what we call the organic state’ (1985: 29), Simanjuntak maintained that the main source of Supomo’s integralism was not indigenous tradition as claimed by the New Order but rather the ideas of Friedrich Hegel. He also argued that the government’s claim that the constitution embodied Supomo’s ideas was a perversion of history. Drawing on transcripts of the 1945 debates and articles of the constitution, which he argued guaranteed political rights, he maintained that Supomo had been defeated in 1945 by advocates of popular sovereignty and that the constitution was therefore more democratic than totalitarian in inspiration.

Simanjuntak’s audacious assault unnerved the regime’s ideologues and prompted journalists, academics and public intellectuals to ask: had the New Order wilfully distorted such a crucial episode in the nation’s history? If Simanjuntak is right, shouldn’t the 1945 Constitution be seen as a first step towards democracy rather than as a blueprint for authoritarianism and cultural exceptionalism?

The ensuing debates on integralism in the media and in public forums, coupled with the considerable efforts by New Order ideologues to preserve their version of history – including locking away the archival records on the constitutional debates of 1945 – convinced me that this was an issue that could provide a key to understanding not only New Order ideology in its own right but also how it related to conservative ideologies elsewhere.

Because integralism was not a new phenomenon, it was clear that any study of it would need to have a historical dimension. And because ideologies do not arise of their own accord, it would need to explain who its bearers were and what social and political purposes it served. Simanjuntak provided some helpful pointers, but his framework was a narrow one. He highlighted tantalising parallels between Supomo and Hegel’s concept of the state, but did not explore the question of how a customary law specialist like Supomo may have come to be influenced by Hegel. Another limitation of his analysis was its preoccupation with terminology. Simanjuntak’s contention that Indonesian constitutional lawyers shunned integralism for 40 years after 1945 rested on the observation that the term was rarely used during this time. His work implied that Supomo’s concept of state organisation was exceptional, if not unique, in the history of Indonesian political thinking and that few took Supomo’s ideas seriously for most of the post-independence period.

Yet as David Reeve had shown in his pathbreaking 1985 history of corporatist forms of political organisation in Indonesia, Supomo’s ideas were shared and admired by a variety of Indonesian thinkers from the 1950s onwards. Reeve had taken a very different view of the significance and origins of the ideas propagated by Supomo in 1945. Far from being marginal, Reeve had located them in the mainstream ‘collectivist’ tradition of political thinking, which he argued had prevailed among Indonesian nationalists since the 1920s. Reeve’s study was very useful in illuminating certain commonly held ideas among nationalists, including antipathy to ‘Western individualism and liberalism’ and a commitment to building a broadly collectivistic society in which the state would play a major role in regulating the economy. His notion of collectivism, however, was diffuse, spanning – and to some extent conflating – diverse streams of nationalist thought. If Simanjuntak’s thesis suffered from its narrow frame of reference, Reeve’s had the opposite problem, blurring the boundaries between Supomo’s conservative integralism, Mohammad Hatta’s social democratic ideas and Sukarno’s radical populism.

Reeve saw Supomo as having derived his concept of integralism primarily from his study of customary law in Indonesian villages as well as from aristocratic Javanese principles of philosophy and statecraft. He emphasised the importance in Supomo’s thought of the Javanese mystical notion of the ‘unity of kawula and gusti’. These terms are variously interpreted as meaning ‘microcosmos and macrocosmos’, ‘man and God’ or ‘ruled and ruler’. Reeve’s highlighting of the cultural and historical authenticity of Supomo’s vision led to criticism of his work by Buyung Nasution (1992: 3), among others, for buying into and reinforcing a tradition of scholarship on Indonesia, associated perhaps most strongly with Harry Benda (1972a), that assumed a close fit between authoritarian rule and Indonesian culture.

Attempting to make sense of these divergent accounts of the origins of the philosophy by which the government claimed to be guided, I immersed myself in the writings of the New Order’s foremost theorists and defenders of integralism such as Padmo Wahyono, Abdulkadir Besar and A. Hamid S. Attamimi, and of the older generation of Indonesian lawyers and legal thinkers on whom they drew, including professors Supomo, Djokosutono, Notonagoro and Hazairin.

Reading these authors presented a paradox. Most were enthusiastic advocates of basing Indonesia’s political institutions and procedures on indigenous cultural principles, yet their main frame of reference was European legal philosophy. All of them, it turned out, had studied law. Following the signposts to Europe it became clear that Hegel was only one of many thinkers on whom Indonesian integralists drew.

All were strongly influenced by the work of professors at the law faculty at Leiden University, the home of adat (customary law) scholarship in the 1920s and 1930s, where the first generation of Indonesian lawyers was educated. We know from the memoirs of early nationalists such as the Leiden-educated Subardjo that the Leiden scholars’ ‘discovery’ of basic similarities between the adat of communities all over the archipelago excited Indonesian students by providing them with a way of conceptualising ‘Indonesia’ as a single cultural entity. The Leiden school contributed two other ideas that have had an enduring impact. One was the general proposition that a nation’s law and government should reflect its unique culture and traditions. The other was that Indonesian culture is quintessentially communally oriented, spiritual and harmony loving – the opposite of mainstream Western culture, which the Leiden scholars, reflecting a broader malaise in interwar Europe, saw as individualistic, materialistic and conflict ridden.

Since these ideas had such a far-reaching influence in Indonesia, and underpinned the arguments of the integralists, the next step was to discover the logic behind them. This involved examining the theoretical premises of the Leiden scholars, and in particular their intellectual leader, Cornelis van Vollenhoven. Drawing on van Vollenhoven’s writings in translation and a range of scholars, including legal historian Peter Burns (1989 and 2004), it became clear that the Leiden school owed much to a specific tradition of legal philosophy stemming from the German romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. This romantic tradition, which had its roots partly in Catholic teachings, and partly in the conservative reaction to the French Revolution, was anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal, anti-individualistic and in many ways anti-modern. Its key thinkers, who included Adam Müller and Friedrich von Savigny, rejected what they saw as the ‘mechanistic’ philosophies and doctrines of the Enlightenment in favour of an ‘organic’ conception of law, society and the state. Societies were for them not collections of individuals with inalienable human rights but harmonious wholes, bound together by the force of custom and tradition. Law, they maintained, could not be imposed from outside. Rather it had to grow organically out of the history and circumstances of specific communities – to express their Volksgeist. They rejected ‘Western’ (i.e. French) notions of democracy based on universal suffrage and social contract theory, favouring instead the notion of an ‘organic state’ based on a corporatist model of representation. For these reasons, this tradition of political and legal thought, like its more dynamic and forwards-looking Hegelian cousin, is often called ‘organicist’.³

Linking the Leiden school with the romantic stream of organicist theorising helped clarify many of the assumptions of the Dutch scholars – and of their Indonesian students – about the nature of Indonesia’s Volksgeist and about the perceived need for modern legal structures to rest upon indigenous foundations.

Organicist political theory was a fertile source of ideas for a whole range of conservative political thinkers and leaders. It made little headway in the Anglo-Saxon world, but had an enduring influence in Catholic Europe and beyond as a ‘third way’ – a philosophically distinct alternative to Marxism and liberalism. Indeed its adherents often regarded Marxism and liberalism (both economic and political) as equally threatening. As a social ideology, organicism appealed historically to conservative or aristocratic elites whose position was under challenge from new social forces. Emphasising the idea of society as an integrated whole and appealing to ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘tradition’ was frequently a means of staving off perceived threats to the established social order posed by rising working and middle classes. It is no coincidence that organicism was strongest during periods of social upheaval: the aftermath of the French Revolution, the years after the 1848 revolutions and in the 1920s and 1930s, when parliamentarism was widely seen as incapable of preserving political stability in Europe. In each case support for organicist state ideologies and political–constitutional forms grew considerably. Right-wing Japanese corporatism in the 1920s and 1930s was inspired in part by the same set of European organicist ideas, for similar reasons.

This tradition of political thinking faded in Europe and Japan after the Second World War, but did not die out everywhere, least of all in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America. It was the revival of interest in Latin American and Iberian corporatism by US scholars in the 1970s that brought organicism back into the discourse of Anglophone political science.⁴ Alfred Stepan (1978) argued, in The State and Society, Peru in Comparative Perspective, that the prevalence of corporatist political forms in Latin America could best be explained with reference to the ‘organic statist’ tradition of thought. Though Latin American organicism owes more to Roman law theories of association than to the Volksgeist theorists, it shares the main assumptions and principles of romantic organicism, including the idea that there is a natural order to society and a knowable ‘common good’. It is the task of the state, represented in this tradition as the embodiment of the whole of organised society, to shape and articulate this common interest.

Stepan suggested a useful way of thinking about organicism. He proposed that it could be understood as three things at once: a normative framework, a set of organising principles and a legitimising formula ‘available’ for use and adaption. Latin American elites, he argued, had often invoked organicist formulas, including communitarian ideologies and corporatist administrative devices, in response to ‘their perceptions of impending crises of modernisation and control’ (Stepan 1978: 40).

Stepan’s study marked a significant advance in the analysis of corporatism by charting a path between purely structuralist approaches such as that of Schmitter (1974), and the ‘culturalism’ of Wiarda (1973: 229–32), who saw the basis of corporatism in traditional, mainly rural, institutions. While Stepan favoured structuralist approaches over culturalist ones, he argued (1978: 54, fn.19) that ‘a sophisticated analysis of political cultures includes such non-Weltanschauung concrete characteristics as different legal, institutional, and administrative historical traditions … ’. By focusing on these often neglected aspects of the Iberian colonial heritage, and by identifying their ‘cultural carriers’ – most notably the legal system and the Catholic church – Stepan was able to transcend standard structural approaches without resorting to essentialising and ahistorical Weltanschauung-based arguments.

There is no causal relationship between organicist legacies and corporatist patterns of political organisation. In many parts of Latin America where the ‘Iberian Catholic’ ethos was strong, corporatism was relatively weak. Stepan (1978: 56) argued that the historical record showed that the decision to adopt corporatist formulas was almost always taken in crisis situations by elites who ‘for programmatic reasons rather than for traditional cultural reasons, want to use the power of the state to reconstruct civil society along new lines’ (Stepan 1978: 56). It is also significant that in some Latin American countries, such as Chile, Argentina and Brazil, there were contending liberal political traditions that acted as counterweights to corporatism (ibid.: 53, fn.18).

These ideas helped inform my working hypothesis that organicism in Indonesia was best understood as part of the structural legacy of colonialism, which was developed and used as a political–ideological formula by sections of the elite that felt threatened by populist pressures. In treating organicism more in instrumental than cultural terms I have no wish to deny that some of its promoters (including Supomo) saw it as congruous with their own genuinely held commitments to holistic philosophies. There is no doubt that Javanese cultural traditions, especially the notion of the ‘underlying unity of all things’ common to most strains of Javanese mysticism, helped sustain organicism and to give it some cultural legitimacy. Yet if we look at the history of organicist political ideology in Indonesia it is clear that what its leading proponents had in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. Starting points
• 2. Organicism and the Volksgeist
• 3. The allure of Japan’s ‘family state’
• 4. 1945: organicism versus rights
• 5. Revolution, democracy and corporatist antidotes
• 6. Against politics: Soeharto in power
• 7. Engineering hegemony
• 8. Indonesianising Indonesia
• 9. Twilight of the ideologues
• 10. Conclusion
• Epilogue: legacies and rejuvenation
• Glossary of terms, abbreviations and acronyms
• References
• Index