The Technocratic Model of Modernization: The Case of Indonesia's New Order

Abstract

IN INDONESIA's NEW ORDER, economists-technocrats, as non-party, professionally-trained experts, have replaced politicians in policy making posts, most visibly as members of a team of academics that moved into government posts laterally, from the University of Indonesia (U. of I.). In a bureaucratic state, these technocrats have functioned as policy innovators, as courtiers of foreign investment, and as relatively systematic administrators. They have provided a repressive military regime with a progressive civilian image and initiated their military patrons into the mysteries of their science. In this paper, the views on modernization that the economists bring to their important tasks and impart to the military and to the nation are presented. Prior to 1966 and their recruitment to high public positions, the team of professor-economists borrowed time from academic pursuits to serve on the Staff of the Army Command and General Staff School (SESKOAD) and of other military institutions in order to introduce their ideas to would-be military professionals of their new political generation. At SESKOAD, according to interviewers for a study in 1969-1970 by this writer, the youthful team successfully inserted its views on economic development into the curriculum, persuaded its peers in the military that national security depended on economic progress and helped write a new Army Doctrine reflecting its views.' In 1966, when General (President) Suharto and Sultan (Vice President) Hamengkubuwono suddenly replaced a regime headed by aging civilian populists contending with political and economic crises, they were personally untrained in the science of economics. Needing such knowledge, they enlisted the expertise of the academic team that had, for years, been developing its ideas and imparting them at key military institu-