Indonesia's Democratic Past and Future

Abstract

Very briefly, from 1950 until about 1957 Indonesia was a representative democracy. The country had no democratic experience prior to its 1945 declaration of independence from Dutch and Japanese colonial rule. Since the late 1950s, it experienced two types of authoritarianism, the personal rule of President Sukarno's Guided Democracy until 1965 and the army-backed New Order of President Soeharto from 1966 to the present. At the turn of the 1990s, the New Order's grip on Indonesian society appears, at least on the surface of observable events, as firm as it ever been. Under these circumstances, why write about Indonesian politics from a democratic perspective? I have several reasons, but let me highlight three, one broadly theoretical, one methodological, and one concretely empirical. First, as is well known, there is an extremely high correlation between representative democracy and advanced industrial capitalism among contemporary nation-states., Indonesia's economy is far from advancedit is in fact still below the threshold of NICdom-but it moved steadily in that direction for more than two decades.2 Analyses of Indonesia's political progress (or lack of it) can add the evidence of another case to our still limited understanding of the relationship between capitalist development and democratization. Second, there is a vigorous recent literature on democratization in southern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia in the 1970s and 1980s.3 These new studies examine elites and leaders and the negotiating and bargaining that have characterized transitions from authoritarianism to democracy. Their approach several qualities attractive to a student of Indonesian democratization. It focuses on proximate causes, in the form of the goals, perceptions, resources or capabilities, strategies, and actions of domestic politicians in and out of power. It is dynamic, directly examining processes of change. And it seeks patterns through analysis in depth of particular cases, aiming at a balance between the uniqueness of historical events and the universality of human experience. Third, President Soeharto is sixty-nine years old. He held the presidency since March 1967 and been elected to the office by the People's Consultative Assembly for five consecutive five-year terms beginning in 1968. Since March 1988, his most recent election, the succession issue dominated domestic political discussion. Soeharto hinted that he might step down in 1993, but he also allowed or encouraged others to act, and himself acted, in ways that indicate he intends to stay on. Given the apparent solidity of the New Order, succession politics is not identical with democratization. Nonetheless, succession has always been the most sensitive internal management problem for authoritarian rulers.4 A crisis, or even a carefully managed transfer of office, can provide opportunities for presidential candidates and others to take actions that may lead toward or away from a more democratic form of government. It may