What is lacking in Indonesian politics?

What is lacking in Indonesian politics?

By Ignas Kleden

JAKARTA (JP): The rising demand for political reform needs
serious rethinking of the prevalent basic tendencies within
Indonesian politics. This is required in order that the people
and the government can avoid repeating past mistakes, simply
because they are not aware of past wrongdoings stemming from such
tendencies.

The initial reaction to the demise of the New Order was the
mushrooming of political parties (at present 49 parties have been
registered), which of course is easy to understand considering
the limitation of party politics during the Soeharto regime. Two
questions will soon arise if one takes Indonesia's history since
independence into account.

First, will this reaction end up as mere political commotion,
as was the case with the Old Order owing to the protracted
ideological conflicts and the uncontrolled interparty rivalry
which resulted in political instability? Second, what can be
taken as a social base for the building of political parties,
that is, what can assume the role of the principle of political
integration?

From a sociological perspective, three possibilities can be
envisaged. If one proceeds culturally by taking cultural
orientation as the basis for political integration, one will soon
return to sectarian politics, as was the case with the Old Order
of Sukarno. In that case, politics would be divided into
different cultural mainstreams according to their relation to
Indic, Islamic and Javanese cultural origin, which is coined as
priyayi, santri and abangan. This type of politics was renounced
during the New Order because polarizing sentiments were not
compatible with national sentiments and because it was incapable
of bringing about sustainable political integration.

Second, political integration can be founded upon common
economic interest. If this happens, class formation takes place.
However, it is very likely to confront two constraints. On the
one hand the social class is quite underdeveloped in a society
such as Indonesia whose integration is generally culturally
based. The new middle class which has come out of economic
development is generally too state-dependent to be class
conscious. Though their contribution to the economy is
undeniable, their position as a partner and intermediary of the
state makes it impossible for them to become autonomous. On the
other hand, there is still a strong reluctance toward class
formation which is seen as unwanted due to its alleged
association with the now defunct Indonesia Communist Party.

The third possibility is that political integration could be
founded upon political ideologies. This would become very
difficult for various related reasons. At the global level, the
ideological heyday ended after the defeat of socialism vis a vis
world capitalism. At the national level, the three decades of
systematic depoliticization during the Soeharto regime rendered
ideological thinking and the production of ideology all but
miserable. The political creed of the New Order that Pancasila is
the only single ideology of Indonesia, and the regulation that
allowed the interpretation of this can only be provided by
government in a monolithic manner has made most Indonesians
ideologically illiterate and politically indifferent.

Given the above situation, one may wonder how on earth
political stability could have been fairly well maintained for
more than three decades. What was the base on which the Soeharto
regime built political integration and could keep it going? It
seems that political stability during that period of time was not
based on political integration but rather on political
mobilization.

It was a clever combination of various actions which can be
simplified as follows. The first was the technocratic management
of politics whereby decision making was not made by people
through their representatives but by experts whose legitimacy did
not rest on political representation but on technical expertise.
The urgency of the improvement of the economic situation made
this management apparently reasonable and acceptable. Political
participation seemed a nuisance at a time in which economic
growth appeared to be the most desirable goal of political
undertakings.

Second, the security approach was quite effective in handling
political conflicts and differences of opinion. Security actions
were legitimately taken in the name of political stability, this
being looked upon as a prerequisite for the government to work
out economic planning and economic development without too much
political interruption. Besides, political stability was a
precondition for foreign investors to bring in their money
without having to gamble with uncertain prospects.

Third, people were persuaded to believe that what they
sacrificed politically would be compensated for with economic
benefits. The carrot-and-stick strategy of Soeharto turned out to
be very successful in combining repressive actions and was
combined with persuasive propaganda that this was only a
transitional situation which would be terminated as soon as the
goal of economic development was attained.

The end result of Soeharto's government was 32 years of
economic development without democracy and a political
mobilization without any efforts to encourage political
integration with democratic participation in it. In that sense,
there has been no progress whatsoever since the period of "guided
democracy" in political maturation as far as political
integration is concerned.

If we look at the present situation, there are enough reasons
to be concerned about Indonesian politics. There have been so
many recent efforts to establish new political parties, but so
little and limited intellectual effort to settle the problem of
political grouping and its social base. This has something to do
with the very obvious general tendency within Indonesian
political habits whereby the attention given to elite circulation
is incomparably greater than that given to the formulation of
political agenda, possible options and operational priorities.

Many discussions keep turning around the question of whether
or not Habibie will stay after the end of his present term, who
will take over if he steps down, what Megawati is doing with the
PDI, whether or not Abdurrachman Wahid will join Megawati in
setting up a new nationalist party, or whether Amin Rais should
be considered as a prospective figure. The effort to solve the
economic crisis seems to have been left solely to economists,
while politicians are fussily speculating about candidates,
opportunities and chairs.

In that sense Indonesian politics has much less to do with
planning and building a better future than with competing for
present opportunities. No wonder that, after students succeeded
in toppling Soeharto, no political group is ready even with a
tentative agenda to offer to the political community to consider.
Political shops are open but no political commodities are on
sale. Political reform becomes nothing but an issue to be talked
about but not a program to be worked out. In other words,
aggressive sales promotion is visible at every corner of the road
but without a corresponding production of consumer goods. Reform
as an issue launched by the students to fight Soeharto and to
terminate his governance cannot be translated by professional
politicians into a political agenda aiming at a new political
structure and new political culture.

This is shown by the fact that the slogan against the old
practices of corruption, collusion and nepotism (KKN) is heard
loud and clear every day but little effort is made to look into
the problem seriously and consciously. How, for example, can
corruption within the bureaucracy be radically eliminated without
a proposal about a new incentive system? It is generally known,
though not generally admitted, that corruption has long become an
effective, albeit illegal, incentive which motivates the workings
of bureaucracy. Ruling out corruption without giving an
alternative legal incentive system may bring about a clean but
possibly unproductive bureaucracy.

The same can be said of nepotism and cronyism. Indeed,
nepotism and cronyism were extensively and abusively practiced
during New Order, and therefore the present countervailing
rejection is understandable. However, in view of the fact that
the political elite of Indonesia is so small whereby so many of
its members are either related or well acquainted with one
another, how can one reject any possible nepotistic or friendly
relationship in recruiting qualified people into the bureaucracy?
This far from justifies such bureaucratic behavior. What is to be
pinpointed here is that the elite circle is still very much
confined to the same families of upper-middle class or to the
alumni association of the same institutions of higher learning.
It is all but impossible to get rid of this social hard fact
without having nobody remaining within bureaucracy.

What is typical of political behavior in Indonesia is that it
consists mainly of acceptance or rejection of a political
culture, without moral courage and political imagination to
embark upon clever and tough negotiations. It is an either-or-
choice between celebrating and denouncing, between glorification
and condemnation, with too little deliberation and too much
exclamation.

Political language is full of rhetoric but void of solid
logic. Political parlance is characterized by more flowery
expressions rather than by political intelligence. Political
training is concerned with winning more people rather than with
helping them make good and mature decisions. This is the case
because politics in Indonesia is basically charismatic in nature.
It depends much more on personal figures than on political ideas.
Its progress and set-backs are determined by rising enthusiasm or
decreasing sympathy and much less by the conceptual validity and
persuasive power of political ideas. The prospects of a
politician depend on how well he can talk, and not on the sense
of relevance he gives to his ideas.

One proposal which can be brought up to improve this condition
is that people should be made aware that politics is not only a
competition between people and groups but also a competition
between ideas. Those ideas are made of the fiction of new
realities and the way how to turn the fiction into fact.

Of course one is reminded of a typology of political
leadership in Indonesia as suggested by the well-known Melbourne-
based Indonesianist, Herbert Feith. Following Feith, there were
two types of Indonesian political leaders in the 1950s:
solidarity maker on the one hand and administrator on the other.
Sukarno was an example of the first, whereas Sjahrir and Hatta
belonged to the second. The first aims to mobilize people, the
second aims to build an administrative body. In that connection
Soeharto seems to have stood in-between. He was able to retain
the national solidarity created by Sukarno without having
Sukarno's charisma, and he was successful in building political
machinery to serve his purposes without having the educational
concerns and educational know-how of Hatta and Sjahrir. Put
simply he proved to be a combination, but not an ideal one.

Indonesian politics is still at the cross-roads of
mobilization and integration, unity and participation, in which
the former part still dominates the latter. The important and
legitimate question is therefore: can political reform which is
now on the way turn the tendency around by making political
education for integration a number one agenda, since this has too
long been set aside by the polarizing inclination toward
mobilization? Or to put it more blatantly, it is a question of
turning a political mass into a political critical mass, and of
transposing the accumulation of political feelings into organized
political division of labor.