Behind the smokescreen of politics after Soeharto

Behind the smokescreen of politics after Soeharto

Marcus Mietzner, Contributor, Jakarta

Reorganizing Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy
in an Age of Markets
Richard Robison and Vedi R. Hadiz, RoutledgeCurzon, 2004
304 pp
US$22.99

Since Soeharto's downfall in 1998, several academic authors have
published accounts of the events that led to the disintegration
of the New Order regime and the evolution of the post-
authoritarian polity.

Van Dijk's and O'Rourke's voluminous works are the most
prominent examples of this chronicle-like genre. There have been
very few attempts, however, to analyze and interpret the
political changes of the post-Soeharto era beyond their merely
narrative description.

After three decades of conveniently classifying the static
system of the New Order as a centralistic authoritarian regime
led by an increasingly sultanistic ruler, observers appeared to
be at a loss when asked what kind of political structures had
taken its place.

Was post-Soeharto Indonesia to be called a democracy, a semi-
democracy, a transitional polity or a quasi-anarchic political
entity on its way to become a failed state?

In their effort to address these questions, Richard Robison
and Vedi Hadiz have delivered the most comprehensive and
analytically sound book on the politics of post-New Order
Indonesia written so far. They conclude that the vested interests
of political and economic elites at the fringe of Soeharto's
regime have survived its downfall and successfully appropriated
the institutions and power systems of the post-authoritarian
state.

This process is described as the victory of deeply entrenched
social structures and oligarchic coalitions over the attempt to
establish democracy via the creation and reform of political
institutions.

Not surprisingly, Robison and Vedi Hadiz present their
argument as a critique of neo-liberal theorists who blamed the
breakdown of Soeharto's regime largely on its corrupt
intervention in the market economy, and viewed the post-
authoritarian polity as an entry point for both liberal economic
policies and democratic governance.

In his 1986 book Indonesia -- The rise of capital, Robison
argued that the interests of Indonesia's corrupt elites were
perfectly compatible with the dynamics of global capitalism, and
that therefore liberal market reforms were unlikely to result in
democratic change. The current book extends this argument into
the post-Soeharto period.

The explanatory framework offered by Robison and Vedi Hadiz is
helpful in analyzing a multitude of political phenomena of the
post-Soeharto polity: the election of New Order bureaucrats to
key positions of central and local government despite the
creation of political parties and the organization of free and
fair elections; the evolution of parliaments into powerhouses of
corruption despite improved institutional mechanisms of control
and transparency; the continued influence of the armed forces on
politics despite the formal abolition of the TNI's dual function;
and the persistence of major conglomerates despite their
financial collapse during the crisis.

The strong theoretical emphasis of the book is an asset and a
liability at the same time. The authors conceptualize political
events and connect the Indonesian case to a larger academic
debate on regime change and the impact of globalization on
national economies, and they set their work apart from the mainly
narrative texts of many of their predecessors.

But the sharp theoretical focus on politico-business interests
and the forces of global markets also narrows the perspective on
other factors that may have had an equally strong effect on the
way Indonesia's post-authoritarian transition evolved.

There is little appreciation, for example, of the personal
failures of political leaders and the religio-ideological
conflicts that motivated them. The fact that no democratic
alliance has emerged to replace the authoritarian framework
inherited by the New Order has not only to do with the
persistence of "old structures of political capitalism" (p. 259).
It is largely related to the inability of key political figures
to establish what Diamond has called "unity of democratic purpose
among civilian political elites".

The political fragmentation that caused and aggravated this
inability is as much nurtured by the long-standing religio-
political cleavages between secular nationalism and political
Islam, modernist and traditionalist Muslims, Javanese centralism
and federal sentiments in the Outer Islands, as it is catalyzed
by the socio-economic conflicts that Robison and Vedi Hadiz
describe.

In their structuralist approach, the authors portray
Indonesia's political leaders as agents (and antagonists) of
vaguely defined social structures, rather than as decision-makers
with considerable influence on the shape of the political system
they operate in.

Hence the failure of the Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid
presidency is explained by his being "drawn into" the embedded
structures of the old forces (p. 254), rather than by his
inherent drive to exploit the resources of the state for himself
and his traditionalist community. Better leadership and more
political will to cooperate with reformist forces at this crucial
juncture of democratic transition could have made a substantial
difference; arguing otherwise tends to absolve political leaders
from their responsibility for the future course of their country.

Robison and Hadiz acknowledge this problem (p. 258), but their
book is likely to revive the academic dispute between
structuralists and proponents of political agency. Thus their
work is not only a valuable contribution to the literature on
Indonesian politics, but also to larger theoretical debates of
political science.

The writer is a doctoral candidate at The Australian National
University, Canberra.