What's Wrong with Indonesia's Democratization?

Abstract

It is no longer what it used to be, the discourse and practices of democ ratization. For a long time, democratization in the third world was regarded as difficult, and resting with a whole series of conditions that had to be achieved through rather long-term structural change and hard political work. The major thesis was that of liberal as well as Marxist moderniza tion theory, which stressed the lack of social, economic and political pre requisites. In East and Southeast Asia, modernization, institution building, and the rise of sufficiently strong middle classes were the celebrated per spectives among adherents as well as liberal critics of the developmental states.1 Others added the conservative and elitist character of the processes that had started anyway, or pointed to the predominance of so-called illib eral democracy.2 The major rival dependency thesis, moreover, was even more pessimistic, stressing economic globalization as a major threat against democracy.3 Since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, however, the idealist idea of democratization as something natural and almost inevitable has attained worldwide adherence. Actually, it began with the defeat of fas cism in southern Europe in the 1970s and the defeat of authoritarian regimes in Latin America in the 1980s. Post 1989, the thesis was quickly exported to Eastern Europe as well, and, most remarkably to Africa, as the soft backpack of structural adjustment schemes. East and Southeast Asia, however, seemed rather immune to democratization, aside from some NGO activists. Just as elsewhere, it took economic and political crises, and those crises remained local until 1997. By now, however, the post Cold War truth on 'democratization' has settled here as well, and it is time for a contextually based critique. The scholarly backup for this trend was celebrated studies of democ ratization in southern Europe and Latin America, which then spread to Africa and Eastern Europe.4 This was the proposition (quite against pre vious thinking) that it was possible, after all, to craft instant democracies almost no matter what the given conditions. One could compensate unfavourable internal structures with external support for the introduction of elementary human rights, 'free and fair' elections, and 'good' institutions. For some time now, supplementary studies have emerged on the difficulties