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.