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.