Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period: The Foundation of the New Order State (1950–1965) by Farabi Fakih

Abstract

Reviewed by: Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period: The Foundation of the New Order State (1950–1965) by Farabi Fakih Mattias Fibiger Review of Farabi Fakih. Authoritarian Modernization in Indonesia’s Early Independence Period: The Foundation of the New Order State (1950–1965). Leiden: Brill, 2020. 316 pp. The 1950s have long sat uneasily in the historiography of Indonesia. The palace historians of the Suharto regime branded the decade one of political chaos, institutional decay, and economic stagnation, a characterization that justified the army’s assumption of national leadership in the wake of the September Thirtieth Movement. Nugroho Notususanto’s final volume of the Sejarah Nasional argued that ceaseless political turnover and economic deterioration in the 1950s “proved that liberal democracy did not comport with conditions in Indonesia.”1 The trope of the vanishing state inflected scholarship on the 1950s as well. No less a figure than Benedict Anderson famously claimed the 1950s were a decade of “the penetration of the state by society”—a curious interregnum between the triumphs of the state-qua-state in the late colonial period and the New Order.2 Onto this well-worn terrain steps Farabi Fakih, a historian at Gadjah Mada, who sees an entirely different landscape underfoot. He contradicts the prevailing wisdom by arguing that the state did not disappear in the 1950s. Far from it: the decade was one of profound innovation in which a “new managerial class” established the institutional and ideological foundations for the New Order developmental state. In the civil service and the military, Indonesian elites tapped into transnational circulations of capital and expertise that emphasized the creation of a powerful state capable of charting a course toward modernity. Such managerial ideas found a particularly hospitable terroir in Indonesia, where countervailing ideologies of liberalism and individualism possessed shallow roots compared to longstanding traditions of collectivism and feudalism. Inasmuch as it focuses on how Indonesian elites adopted the premises of managerial ideologies within their particular context, the book marks a step forward from the analysis of modernization theory in Brad Simpson’s pathbreaking Economists with Guns.3 But it sustains Simpson’s emphasis on the importance of the United States. “Indonesianization,” [End Page 125] Fakih writes of efforts to transcend the legacies of colonialism, “was Americanization” (88). In this respect Fakih’s book might be put into conversation with David Bourchier’s tremendously insightful genealogy of the organicist ideologies that undergirded the New Order, which despite their indigenist pretensions possessed similarly international origins.4 Fakih is to be commended for his creative use of source material, including seldom-consulted sources like journals of education and administration (including Bulletin Lembaga Administrasi Indonesia and Madjalah Manager). A particularly engaging chapter in this vein traces the rise of educational programs in public and business administration. Dutch programs in public administration hewed toward legalistic-juridical thinking, which some Indonesian elites considered inimical to efforts to establish an effective managerial state. In much the same way, Dutch programs in business administration focused almost entirely on the firm, which some Indonesian elites believed elided the role of the state in economic development. Postcolonial Indonesian elites thus contracted with US public and business administration specialists to train faculty, translate texts, and establish new educational programs in the American mold. Seminars replaced the lectures that predominated in Dutch educational programs—part of an effort to achieve what State Administrative Academy chief Prajudi Atmosudirjo called “changes in the spirit of our civil servant,” from “one who ‘merely follows the rules’” to “one who has an entrepreneurial spirit which embodies the spirit of the ‘managers of the state’” (155–56). Though the content of these new educational programs was not adapted to the Indonesian milieu, leaving trainees conversant in jargon but no more effective as managers, Fakih argues their emphasis on dynamic managerialism contributed to the erosion of the trias politica (separation of powers) and the rise of authoritarianism under Sukarno. Among the key findings in the book is that the ideological footprint of aid was not necessarily isomorphic with the financial footprint of aid. Soviet aid dwarfed American aid in monetary terms and undergirded a particular constellation of political and economic power in Indonesia. But it...