The genius of civil society in cultural reform

The most popular slogan heard on the streets during the last few weeks of Soeharto's regime was "Reformasi!" (Reform!). It was the magic word that united people from all walks of life all over Indonesia and eventually forced Soeharto to quit his presidency.

It has been more than three years now, with three consecutive presidents, and that magic word seems to be running out of steam. In reality, Soeharto's downfall has brought about many changes, politically, socially, and economically. However, nagging questions remain: do those changes reflect crucial reforms toward a more humane, civil society in Indonesia? Does culture, or the lack of it, have something to do with the elusiveness of real reforms?

The Jakarta Post's panel of experts seems to agree that cultural reform, at least, is lagging.

The 1998 political reform movement was a watershed in the development of various aspects of Indonesian life, particularly that of cultural development. The end of the New Order saw the collapse of cultural regimentation. At the same time, it became a new beginning for cultural liberation.

Consequently, the nature of cultural problems is now undergoing significant changes. Indonesia is no longer faced with the dilemma of cultural restrictions characterized by state control from above and cultural inhibitions from below. Rather, the nation has to deal with cultural liberation, meaning that freedom is now no longer just an opportunity to be exploited but also a new challenge to be overcome. Cultural resistance is replaced by the demand for cultural initiative and creativity.

There were many cultural achievements during the New Order, which resulted precisely from cultural resistance. The protest poems and theater performances of Rendra, the short stories of Putu Widjaja and Seno Gumira Ajidarma are just some examples of the cultural resistance carried out during the New Order.

The most successful resistance was of course that mounted by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who succeeded in making use of his 14 years of exile on the island of Buru to write no less than six great novels, one book on the genealogy of the Indonesian press, one on the origins of modern Indonesian literature and two volumes of a diary, all of which have appeared in the Indonesian language and most of which have been translated into various foreign languages.

This means that cultural creativity and cultural freedom can never be identical. History shows that cultural creativity can flourish during times of repression, while periods of unlimited freedom can produce a total lack of cultural activity.

One has to differentiate between cultural freedom as a sort of freedom "from", and creativity as a freedom "for". The present dilemma is that not everybody is well prepared to cope with the new freedoms brought about by the political reforms of 1998.

There are many parties and groups involved in the current cultural renewal -- so many in fact that it is sometimes difficult to identify them correctly. However, there are three main groups involved in cultural reform that deserve particular attention. They are the state, civil society, and communities, each with its different cultural interests.

As a political entity, the state needs culture only insofar as it can help legitimize the state's power and encourage citizens to submit to that power. The attitude of the state toward cultural reform is very much dependent upon whether such reform will strengthen and maintain the establishment of the state and its power, or rather undermine and subvert it.

At present, the Indonesian state is fairly indifferent towards cultural reform, first of all because it is faced with the rising demands of civil society and traditional communities. Besides that, the state's loss of legitimacy due to ongoing KKN (corruption, collusion and nepotism) practices puts it in an increasingly shaky position vis a vis the civil society and traditional communities.

In contrast, it is the local communities that are most concerned with cultural development, simply because the members of communities live and behave in their everyday lives according to the values and norms of their own cultures. The outlook of these communities depends on whether cultural reform constitutes a break with the existing cultural norms and values, or rather a modification and continuation of existing cultural patterns. In the first case, they are inclined to reject cultural reform, whereas in the latter case they are more willing to accept it.

Civil society assumes a position somewhere in the middle. It is obliged to domesticate state power by transposing the rule of power into the rule of law, while on the other hand it is expected to transpose cultural values of particular local communities into norms of a more general nature. This can be done by removing the particularities of each cultural system while maintaining its core values.

In that sense the dominant value of egalitarianism in Islam for example can be universalized and applied to other social groups if the underlying Islamic doctrines remain limited to Muslim communities, whereas the public campaign for greater equality should be made on the basis of a more universal rationale. In a sense, every cultural system can become a source of civic culture within the civil society, if they are universalized so as to become acceptable to other cultural systems.

In this sense, civil society is a social movement that aims to change the whole society and not just to transform a political system or to strengthen a particular, socially dominant class. Accordingly, it is expected to comprise as many social classes as possible and is by no means limited only to the middle class or national bourgeoisie.

The genius of civil society is that it can become a domain in which the struggle for justice and freedom is made possible by uncovering unjust practices and turning them into public issues that concern everybody in civil society. Domestic violence is therefore no longer merely a private matter for individual families and the minimum wage level is no longer simply a private issue for each industrial enterprise.

Thus there evolves a paradigm shift, from government to governance. Government refers to the institution, which is to rule on the basis of a delegation of power, whereas governance emphasizes the capability and spontaneity of every social group to rule itself.

Governance turns the state-society relationship upside down. It is the society that is imbued with primacy and the ability to direct the state through social control. It calls for a wider and more active involvement of the people in every stage of political decision-making. The visibility of this process is called transparency, while the condition in which the results of the implementation of a political decision are made accessible and contestable is called accountability. Accountability can be improved if there is greater transparency.

However, the transition to governance is still hampered by the strong attachment to the idea of government. Less attention is given to issues of governance, such as people's participation, social empowerment, the advocacy of the economic rights of the poor, the integration of female workers in the labor force, the protection of child workers and the rights of the disabled.