This book argues that to understand the rise of the New Order state an analysis is required of the way in which post-independence elite creation shifted during the 1950s as a result of the impingement of the need for state-led development: the rise of the so-called managerial state. The rise of a new managerial elite prompted Sukarnoâs decision to co-opt this new group into a corporatist form of developmental state. As we have seen, there was a difference between the objective of the new managers to create stable efficiency and Sukarnoâs tendency to thrive in political crisis whether in nation-building or in a confrontation with imperialism, be it in Papua or Malaysia. Yet, this was not so much a clash as it was a feature of the Guided Democracy state: counter-insurgency institutions to combat separatism and control the Outer Islands had been in place since 1957 and continued to develop even after the fall of Sukarno with the New Orderâs military pacification campaign in Papua, Aceh, and East Timor. This combination of managerial efficiency and societal control and counter-insurgency appears to have developed during the Guided Democracy and continued after its end. Sukarnoâs main problem was his inability to create the kind of environment that was conducive to development in this new stateâsociety relationship. Instead, he maintained his dream of incorporating the various elements of society, whether communist or Islamic, and societyâs organization as a means of ensuring societyâs participation in the state. The main problem with the communists was not that they had the potential to usurp state power itself, but that they were a form of non-governmental or non-state power locus that destabilized the position of the managers. The managerial state had a strong and rigid hierarchy of authority that was, in many ways, antithetical to civil society.
This, perhaps, explains why the rise of the New Order state had an extremely violent character. Should we imagine the destruction of the communist party as being akin to a military counter-insurgency operation, a tactic that the army had deployed to combat separatism and fanaticism since the late 1950s? Should we also consider that it was not merely the pki that was the target of destruction but Indonesian civil society itself and the concept of a non-state power locus? Disciplining the population through strategies of control had been on the agenda of army and civilian managers since the Guided Democracy period. The application of control strategies during Suhartoâs reign through indoctrination courses, Civic Action programmes, and counter-insurgency operations in far-flung regions like East Timor, Aceh, and West Papua showed the extent to which the Guided Democracy model continued to be deployed throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. The 1971 parliamentary (mpr) decision to depoliticize Indonesian society and implement the âfloating mass systemâ was part of this emasculation of civil society. The killings of gang members in the 1980s and the dumping of their bodies on the streets as a spectacle of violence1 were effective because of the indistinguishability of these victims from the rest of Indonesian society. The fear of being labelled a communist during this period was also based on the lack of a distinctive physical, cultural, and mental picture of the âenemyâ. Its effectiveness lay precisely in this fungible nature of the Indonesian. In this context, the enemy of the state could be any Indonesian. The New Order actively sidetracked discussions on distinctive identities, for instance banning discourses of the âsaraâ groupings â suku (ethnicity), agama (religion), ras (race), and antar-golongan (inter-group relations) â as both an effort to create a united Indonesian national identity and as a way to ensure the blurring of the boundaries between Indonesians: the enemies of the state and its citizens became one.2 This was seen as Indonesiaâs communist spectre, but what really became a spectre was not communism but civil society itself.
Indonesiaâs managerial state thus required not engagement with civil society but its reduction under a simplified grouping that separated the managers of the state and the economy from the rest of the population. The deeply held suspicion of civil society and representative democracy had its roots in Indonesiaâs experience of parliamentary democracy in the 1950s, yet I would argue that such a viewpoint was also ideologically generated from scientific management and public administration science. The proponents of scientific management during the period were suspicious of democracy â recollect one of the foremost scholars of public administration during the period, Dwight Waldo, and his fear that democracy would reduce efficiency.3 In the context of Western society, a strong tradition of rule of law and belief in liberal values contained this suspicion, yet in a country that had a strong dislike of liberalism, this suspicion reached greater heights. There were many books in the West warning of the dangers of liberalism and a whole panoply of neoliberal thoughts originating from European social science, including the Austrian School of Economics and stalwarts such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and later its Chicago variant, with the famous Milton Friedman.4 It is also worth mentioning that many of the most famous technical experts working in Indonesia believed in liberal values such as democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. We can perhaps see their position as being on a slippery slope: scientific management provided legitimation for a bias towards a particular form of stateâsociety relations, and this was then extended by Indonesians with no pretentions of liberal values to its logical conclusion.
This book has tried to present the development of this managerial class and the ideology that was carried by them during the transition period of the Guided Democracy. It has shown that the rise of the managerial class could not be separated from the creation of an international technical-aid structure that was built to help newly independent post-colonial nation-states modernize and develop. The introduction of a series of institutions that catered to their position legitimized their role as the elite of the new state: the Five-Year Plan, the universities and officer schools, the management classes, and so on. Following on from this was the development of new sciences: macroeconomics and developmental economics, public and business management science, industrial and labour relations, industrial engineering, and so forth. Various new tools and technologies, from the calculation of national productivity through tools such as gdp/gnp to labour programmes such as Training Within Industry, provided an indispensable distinction between the managers and the general public. Many in the upper echelon of this elite became part of the âcommunity of scholarsâ who had personal relationships with fellow scholars and officers in American universities and officer schools. The inter-institutional relationships between universities and other institutions continued to grow. It was these managers who could read graphs, conduct tests, and implement programmes â all of which were essential for the modernization of society. These managers and their military counterparts became the Praetorian Guard for the successful implementation of democratization, while at the same time securing access to investment in Indonesiaâs massive natural resources.
No doubt the implementation of this ideology could be seen as a positive move for the welfare of the people. In 1994, a famous World Bank publication named Indonesia alongside South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and others as one of the so-called Asian Miracle economies.5 The miracle took the form of high economic growth with increasing equity; thus, these economies were not only getting richer but also becoming fairer. The managerial state replaced parliamentary democracy with a structured programme through which the state had extensive control of Indonesian society. This resulted in the formation of a relatively strong developmental state that was able to create significant economic growth of around 7 per cent per year for much of its reign, reducing poverty and integrating Indonesia into the global economy. It expanded education and created the basis for a sustained industrialization policy. It made pro-rural and pro-poor public-goods investments that resulted in a great reduction in rural poverty, particularly in Java, and were seen as a continuation of the security idea behind the Civic Action programme of the 1950s and 1960s. It heralded an expanding middle class in the 1980s and 1990s, and saw significant growth in manufacturing after the deregulation actions implemented in the 1980s by a new generation of technocrats that was open to neo-liberal ideas.
Yet, it lacked democracy and respect for human rights. It perpetrated violence against many of its citizens and implemented continued counter-insurgency measures in order to quell unrest in the peripheral territories of the state. It stymied cultural and intellectual expression, banning the discussion and publication of various ideas related to Marxism. What is particularly difficult to understand is that both the developmental state and the counter-insurgency state had the same ideological underpinning. Development occurred as a result of violence, not in spite of it. This ideological discourse is central to understanding the duality of the New Order: that it was simultaneously beneficial and violent, technocratic and army-dominated. This uncertainty between military and civilian mirrored the uncertainty between enemy and citizen. This dual function allowed it to operate within an emasculated legal system.
The emasculated role of the legal system is central to understanding the kind of post-colonial state Indonesia was burdened with. It was and, to an extent, remains an illiberal state. The weak courts system resulted in weak rule of law. The function of the police force to provide a safe space for public discourse weakened as a result of its integration within the army in the late 1950s. Sukarnoâs effort to ârevolutionizeâ the courts, coupled with continued lack of support for the judiciary in the form of adequate remunerations and facilities (for instance, the provision of transport for judges), resulted in many members of this institution becoming demoralized. The executiveâs tendency not to follow through with the courtsâ decisions effectively led to the slow destruction of its authority in the eyes of the government and the people. Suspicion of the legal system thus came from both the new managerial class, which saw it as a burden that decreased efficiency, and the nationalist politicians, who saw it as manifesting continued colonial and imperial tendencies and thus as something that had to be ârevolutionizedâ. It was also seen as suspicious by the communists, who saw the courts in the context of class analysis as an extension of capitalist, bourgeois power. In the eyes of the pki, the legal system had to be revamped in order to express a clearly pro-proletariat and anti-bourgeoisie bias. This was somewhat similar to Sukarnoâs revolusi of the legal system, although he analysed it in the context of imperialism rather than class warfare. In any case, the legal system received little support from any part of the elite. In essence, it was the illiberal nature of Indonesiaâs elite that resulted in the creation of an illiberal state. Yet, there is no doubt that the role of the managers and their ideology was, in a way, very important, because they legitimized and cemented in place this illiberal state, which was to continue to exist for much of the twentieth century.
This state imploded spectacularly during the late 1990s, taking away many of the achievements that it had generated during the previous couple of decades. Indonesiaâs gdp shrank significantly, to levels similar to those of the early 1970s. Many of its industries and major companies effectively went bankrupt. Even worse, its collapse resulted in instances of violence and civil war across the archipelago. Yet, what arose from the ashes of the post-New Order collapse was a somewhat imperfect liberal order. The civil society that had previously been smothered burst forth in an explosion of expressions of political identities, parliamentary democracy was reintroduced, and the Indonesian state underwent a massive decentralization programme. The courts system was strengthened, and human rights and the rule of law became values that were sought after. In the early 2000s, there was a flowering of various identities that was made possible due to the absence of the state from all levels of society. The democratic state was messy and corrupt, and its economic growth rate was, on average, two percentage points lower than it had been during the New Order period; yet there was also the greatest-ever expansion of the Indonesian middle class, an explosion of creativity and identity, and the systematized, regular, and non-violent transfer of power through elections. It was and is, on the whole, a less violent and more stable society. Yet, there was also something of a duality between the ideologies that were steadfastly clung on to by many Indonesians and the institutional reality that was achieved after the New Order. The constitutional changes that brought about a liberal state in Indonesia between 1999 and 2002 were what Donald Horowitz called an âinside jobâ, in that they were crafted by politicians and experts within the regime and Indonesian society was not consulted.6 This resulted in the paradoxical creation of a liberal order that would be challenged by many groups within society as a result of its democratization. This can be seen most noticeably amongst the Islamist groups which have noted their dislike of liberalism and its institutions, including democracy.
It is difficult to weigh up the total costs and benefits of the managerial state and certainly this book has no capability, nor intention, of doing so. What we can understand from its rise was its historically contextual nature: the legitimacy given by the international Cold War context, alongside the institutional support from the West (and East). Another important aspect was the resources it required to achieve domestic control. This civil-military dual control must have been financially expensive, but it also accrued many expenses in other ways. Civil society represents a resource for creativity, the production of new ideas, and resilience. Taking that away has impoverished the cultural and intellectual life of the nation and may have made it less resilient to the upcoming changes. It may perhaps explain the explosive tendency of the New Order society to fall into riots and violence during its rule. If this is the case, perhaps a study of the post-New Order violence and whether the presence of democracy lessens this tendency is in order. The effects of these changes are not something that can be easily calculated. The New Order ended in a way similar to its rise: in a conflagration of economic collapse and widespread violence. The difficulty of maintaining this state is quite understandable. The inability of the New Order state to engineer a peaceful transfer of power was indicative of yet another aspect of the negative nature of this regime.
The massive costs entailed in ensuring such societal control mean that the possibility of creating another managerial state in the future must be rather limited. Technological development may reduce the cost of control in the future; yet, as we have seen recently, these same technologies also create new challenges for the state regarding the control of society. An example of this is the way in which the Internet afforded ordinary people the means to self-organize during the political movements of the early 2010s. The experiments of the twentieth century can also be read as an omen for the future. Liberal faith in democracy and the market place is currently under strain; another round of state-led managerialism could replace this, colouring the twenty-first century in a way similar to that of the twentieth century. In Indonesia, nostalgia for the New Order reared its head in the election campaigns of 2014 and 2019. What was remembered was the positive side of the New Order developmental state. It is important to be wary of the next get-rich-quick scheme that comes along. Indonesian civil society needs to be honest and come to terms with its liberal institutional form and the illiberal beliefs of many of its citizens and societal groups. This mismatch between liberal forms and illiberal values in some ways mirrors the mismatch that existed during the period of parliamentary democracy in the 1950s. Yet, the actions of the Konstituante, the body created to craft a democratic and liberal Indonesian constitution, were cut short by Sukarnoâs Guided Democracy. This was despite the fact that the body had almost finished creating Indonesiaâs democratic constitution. In the present, efforts have been made to trace non-Western forms of âliberal valuesâ as a way of provincializing Europe, as, for instance, exists in the ideas of Islam Nusantara7 and others. This research has been conducted so as to give legitimacy to the liberal form of the Indonesian state. Yet, one might fear that if the core values of Indonesia remain illiberal, then the existence of democracy will constitute a slippery slope towards illiberal forms and institutions in the future. As we have seen in the past, these forms usually result in the spread and consummation of violence and the continuing tragedy of the Indonesian people.
See James T. Siegel, A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
M. M. van Bruinessen, âIslamic State or State Islam? Fifty Years of StateâIslam Relations in Indonesiaâ, in Ingrid Wessel (ed.), Indonesien am Ende des 20 Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Abera-Verlag, 1996); Graeme MacRae, âIf Indonesia is Too Hard to Understand, Letâs Start with Baliâ, Journal of Indonesian Social Sciences and Humanities, 3 (2011), 11â36; Christian Chua, âDefining Indonesian Chineseness under the New Orderâ, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 34/4 (2004), 465â79.
Waldo, The Administrative State; Mark J. Gasiorowski, âDemocracy and Macroeconomic Performance in Underdeveloped Countries: An Empirical Analysisâ, Comparative Political Studies, 33/3 (2000), 319â49; Erik-Hans Klijn and Chris Skelcher, âDemocracy and Governance Networks: Compatible or Not?â, Public Administration, 85/3 (2007), 587â608, and others.
Friedrich August Hayek, The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom, Vol. iv (Chigaco: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Robert A. Lawson and Jeff R. Clark, âExamining the HayekâFriedman Hypothesis on Economic and Political Freedomâ, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 74/3 (2010), 230â9.
Lewis T. Preston, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, Vol. I (Washington DC: World Bank Publications, 1993).
Donald Horowitz, Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
A model of Islam based on its contextual development in the Indonesian archipelago. The movement supported a moderate form of Islam that is compatible to Indonesian cultural values.