Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy by Jamie S. Davidson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy by Jamie S. Davidson Thomas Pepinsky (bio) Jamie S. Davidson. Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 76 pp. Jamie Davidson’s Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy is an excellent overview of Indonesian politics since 1998. It offers enough basic detail to attract readers with no background in Indonesia, but also an argument that will interest Indonesia experts. Its format is unique, something between a long article and a short book. Cambridge University Press calls this publication format an “Element,” part of a new push by the press to find new ways to reach new audiences.1 My review nevertheless treats Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy as more or less a book, one that does not present new material so much as it integrates existing research to make a broader argument. I briefly speculate about the the promise of the Elements series for Indonesian studies at the end of this review. Davidson’s basic approach is to periodize Indonesian politics since democratization into three spells: Innovation (1998–2004), Stagnation (2004–14), and Polarization (2014–present). In describing each, he reviews the main political issues, economic developments, and what he calls “identity-based mobilizations” (6). As Davidson recognizes, this approach encourages him to focus on issues such as religious and ethnic conflict instead of things like law, globalization, or nationalist movements, but it is nevertheless an effective way to weave together discussions of political, economic, and social change over time. Following this periodization allows Davidson to show that Indonesian democracy—while faring much better than Indonesia’s Southeast Asian neighbors—is still “wobbly” (4), and that it is possible to see changes over time in Indonesian democracy since 1999. That conclusion is sensible and well-supported by his evidence. It corresponds to the first of what Davidson identifies as three arguments made throughout the book. His second and third arguments—that “democracy, and its related process of democratization, is the most appropriate overarching framework for studying Indonesia” (4) and that “the post-Soeharto period can be divided into three main periods” rather than conceptualized through “changes and continuities” from the New Order (6)—receive rather less explicit attention. It is not clear who the main interlocutors or detractors are for these two arguments. It stands to reason that those who emphasize factors other than democratization, or who do follow a changes-and-continuities approach, may just have different objectives in mind than Davidson does. The book’s contribution does not depend on those two arguments, although it might profitably be cited as advancing each of them. My own interest in the political economy of Indonesia’s transition and its immediate aftermath leads me to some quibbles in interpretation. Davidson’s description of the divide between the right and the left with regard to understanding the 1997–99 [End Page 137] Indonesian financial crisis (6) is provocative but too simplistic. Many conservative-leaning economists interpreted the Indonesian economy under Soeharto as nothing more than a mafia-like protection racket fundamentally concerned with “rent harvesting.”2 More progressive observers attribute the crisis to the panicked reactions of “capital controllers” in an era of reglobalized finance.3 The Indonesian financial crisis, as economic crises often do, made a mess of traditional ideological camps. Likewise, the discussion of how the International Monetary Fund drove post-crisis economic reform may be overstated (“The IMF, a US-controlled organization, used the crisis as a pretext to pry open what was only a partially protected economy” [15]). This discussion is certainly under-sourced. The statist flavor of economic nationalism runs deep in Indonesia’s political economy, which explains why so many of the IMF’s reforms proved so unpopular. But there is also a long history of powerful economic actors exploiting liberalizing reforms for their own interests, dating back to the earliest days of the New Order. It would be a shame if readers without a background in Indonesian political economy concluded that IMF measures were the main driver of Indonesia’s halting and uncertain economic reforms, rather than one of many forces shaping the political and economic environment of the early 2000s, one operating with real...