RI should decentralize system

By Imron Cotan

JAKARTA (JP): In less than two hundred days, the international community will enter the 21st century, leaving behind the current second millennium which is marred by conflict and posing unprecedented challenges to human beings.

All nation-states, particularly Indonesia, should fully prepare themselves before entering this new era of obscurity. A fundamental question needs to be raised as to how Indonesia as a nation-state will react to this rapidly-changing international environment in order to survive in an uncertain and challenging third millennium.

One needs to reflect on the history of human beings to get a clear picture of the subject. It was, indeed, painfully tainted with many bloody conflicts inflicting incalculable damage upon mankind and its environment. It is still fresh in our memory that during the cold war era, although those superpower countries were relatively successful in avoiding direct conflict and maintaining stable yet awkward relations, they managed to manipulate their political allies to become involved with, and engaged in, proxy wars.

The expansion of ideologies, western-based or eastern-based, has been pinpointed as the root of these proxy wars. True as it might be, these superpower countries have used the cold war as a pretext to develop sophisticated weapons, especially weapons of mass destruction. These include chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

In the 1970s and 1980s, these countries, especially the United States and the former Soviet Union developed sophisticated weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying the world in a short period of time. But sanity prevailed and these superpowers managed not to use them, thereby saving mankind and its entire civilization from being annihilated. But proxy wars have used the conflicting states as a testing ground for their newly inverted conventional weapons.

The simmering tensions between the Western and Eastern blocs and the open conflicts among those proxies have diluted the international community's attention from the basic and recurrent issues, originating from the French Revolution (1789), namely: "liberte, egalite et fratenite". At this particular juncture, these issues were suppressed below the surface and the threat to the survival of nation-states was perceived as coming from a head-on collision between blocs, involving the use of weapons of mass destruction.

When the cold war ended, the international social, political and economic spheres went through fundamental and rapid changes, beyond people's imagination. From a political perspective, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the political independence of Eastern and Central European nations was regarded as the victory of democracy against communism. But from an economic viewpoint, it was perceived as the victory of capitalism or the free market economy against a closed and centralized economic system.

In the context of development, expansion and change of the international society or system is related to the resurgence of these recurrent issues. They have resurfaced in their wildest forms and manifested in so many other issues, including: democratization, liberalization, human rights, labor standards, social clauses and the free market economy. They have become the bone of contention not only between or among nation-states but within nation-states as well and, to some extent, caused the disintegration of countries as was the case in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Burundi.

With today's information revolution, these recurrent issues recognize no borders, especially when the major countries strongly consider them as: "les affaires mondiale" over which they think they have the right to interfere and mingle in other countries' affairs. The high hopes expressed at the beginning of the post cold war era asserting that the world would enter an era of cooperation and mutual partnership have gone unheeded. Instead, conflict persisted and was further aggravated by the fierce competition among nations in trying to secure world resources for their own benefits, disregarding environmental sustainability and the interests of others, especially those of developing countries.

Consisting of thousands of islands and ethnicities, Indonesia is now being confronted with this delicate international environment. Our nation's history does not have an excellent record, particularly in terms of internal dynamics as it was tainted by separatist movements.

We have gone through and are still experiencing a series of internal conflicts, such as East Timor, Irian Jaya and Aceh. Worse still, some quarters have persistently tried to interfere with our domestic problems, using those recurrent issues as the pretext. The latest enactment of a resolution in the House of Representatives in the United States criticizing Indonesia's human rights record in East Timor is one of many examples. Fortunately, President Soeharto has moved to the level playing field between the two countries by canceling the purchase of F-15 fighter planes and canceling the E-IMET.

The delicate international environmental situation which now confronts Indonesia has prompted us to raise a fundamental question as to how Indonesia could enter the uncertain third millennium as a united nation-state. This question is indeed difficult to answer. To start with, Indonesia as a nation-state should quickly adapt itself with this rapidly-changing world. It can only do this by opening its social, political and economic systems, thereby allowing people to participate more in the decision-making process which would lead to transparency and political accountability. The other alternative would be to let Indonesia disintegrate into smaller subnation-states, as Hazel Henderson predicted in her book titled Building A Win-Win World: Life Beyond Global Economic Warfare (Berret-Koehler Publisher, 1996). This would attempt to nurture the culture of cooperation and avoid conflict. The price would be expensive for the nation's founding fathers and the Indonesia people, who have made tremendous sacrifices to gain independence from the colonial powers and to maintain this country's unity.

Hazel Henderson's thesis asserted that to succeed in the third millennium, nation-states need to become smaller entities as was the case in the first millennium. This cannot be entertained by Indonesia, for it would seriously damage our nationalism and sense of unity (small welfare subnation-state versus nationalism).

But we can opt for a combination of the two. To survive the third millennium, Indonesia should decentralize its political system, giving more power to provincial or local governments. This should be coupled by the broader participation of people from the grassroots in the decision-making process which leads to transparency and political accountability.

The writer is a former United Nations Disarmament Fellow and is an expert on international peace and security affairs, residing in Jakarta.

Window: The delicate international environmental situation which now confronts Indonesia has prompted us to raise a fundamental question as to how Indonesia could enter the uncertain third millennium as a united nation-state.