ABSTRACT This article explores the implications of Indonesia’s official state ideology, Pancasila, and its articulations in contemporary Indonesia from the perspective of ‘post-foundational’ agonistic theories of democracy. A set of five precepts created by Soekarno, the nationalist leader and founding president of Indonesia, Pancasila was integral to strategies of social control during the authoritarian ‘New Order’ regime of Soeharto and continues to function in Indonesia as a potent empty signifier, well over two decades after the fall of that regime in the Reformasi of 1998. By engaging with domestic scholarly and political discourses of Pancasila and Pancasila democracy from the agonistic perspective on democracy shaped by theorists such as Étienne Balibar, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, this article points to the tension between the aspiration of the advocates of Pancasila to present Pancasila as democratic and their commitment to seeing Pancasila as an embodiment of traditional culture and values that is essential to the consistency of Indonesian national identity. The relation between the two terms that constitute ‘Pancasila democracy’ is further complicated by the tendency of contemporary proponents of Pancasila to attempt to ‘immunize’ the state ideology from the possibility of interruption and contestation.
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