By Gde Dwitya Arief Metera
Indonesia has been experiencing democratic regression in the last decade with the curtailment of freedom of expression and the shrinking of civic spaces. Along with this, there are visible signs of executive aggrandizement that have eroded democratic accountability. A major structural argument explaining the causes of this democratic regression highlights the role of authoritarian inclusion: authoritarian regime holdovers from the New Order period—former military officers, local bureaucrats, and business elites who owed their position to the authoritarian regime–were integrated into the new democratic political system after the 1999 regime transition.
Somehow, the old actors from the New Order authoritarian era managed to reinvent themselves as democratic actors despite their regressive illiberal interests. After 32 years of authoritarian New Order, this integration stabilized the transition toward contemporary democracy. But this integration of illiberal actors also paved the way toward regression instead of a more desirable consolidation of democracy.
This periodic change has been widely characterized as ‘revolving door’ because of its circulation of actors and ideologies between authoritarianism and democracy.
This short piece offers a necessary complement to the revolving door story above; whereby old authoritarian actors successfully reinvent themselves in a new democratic environment. It develops two interconnected claims. First, the elites comprising the authoritarian New Order are actually not uniformly predatory. There was also a modernist, developmentalist strand at the beginning of New Order’s inauguration composed by the technocrats and student activists. Second, these two modernist groups, nonetheless, found themselves marginalized from power ironically during the height of Suharto’s. New Order regime. Eventually, approaching the end of the authoritarian New Order in the early 1990s these modernizers – especially the student activists – were already in the opposition, demanding the toppling of the regime they helped establish.
In other words, the incursion of the predatory authoritarian elites into a new democratic era was facilitated by the prior marginalization of the regime’s modernizing wings.
The legacy of this marginalization is an important precondition of Indonesia’s contemporary democratic regression. The very actors who might have served as institutional ballast if they managed to acquire power were purged and sidelined decades before the democratic transition began.
Modernizers and the Making of the New Order
Student activists and technocrats were at the forefront of the emergence of the New Order. They provided support from within the civil society to the Army in its struggle, bringing down the Guided Democracy instituted by President Sukarno from 1959-1966. Their role was to provide legitimacy to the ascending New Order against the personalistic regime of President Sukarno, which failed the country’s economy. Students rallied on the streets demanding accountability of Sukarno’s regime while the economic technocrats helped the New Order to get the country out of the economic crises once Soekarno was ousted from power in 1967.
Before tracing the marginalization of this group, it is important to establish that both student activists and the economic technocrats were modernist in their ideological orientation as distinct to the patrimonial orientation of the Guided Democracy under Sukarno. Both student activists and technocrats subscribed to the New Order’s foundational aspiration: a “new” era against the irrationality of the Guided Democracy where politics was full of jargons and personalistic cult paired with mismanagement of the economy.
The foundational alignment among factions within the New Order was arguably built upon primarily modernity and modernization.
The military elites, especially the Diponegoro of Central Java clique where General Suharto belonged, likely did not fully subscribe to this aspiration. But they were aligned with the modernizers anyway due to common distrust against President Sukarno and the communists.
The technocrats’ modernism is legible in their records of policy recommendations. The economic stabilization of 1966-1968 restored chaos inherited from Sukarno days. Economists such as Widjojo Nitisastro and his colleagues managed to secure foreign aid to stabilize Indonesia’s economy, which was crippled by overprinting of money and the decrease in export commodity production that led to hyperinflation. Beyond their work in chaotic days of 1966, the technocrats demonstrated their commitment to the modernization of Indonesia’s economy through their programs such as the five-year development plan (Repelita), the Green Revolution that led to rice-sufficiency, as well as the primary education reform program.
The students’ modernism is legible less in their policy outlook than in their moral positions. Student activists collectively were a consistent anti-corruption force during the New Order. Student media such as Mahasiswa Indonesia developed a sustained critique of governance and public life such as corruption, extravagance, and misuse of authority. The students also consistently rallied on the streets to demand the New Order to honor its promise of economic and political modernization throughout the 1970s. These protests included criticizing the 1971 extravagant project by the wife of President Suharto to build Indonesia miniature park, the 1973-1974 protests on the excessive roles of the president’s private assistants in influencing economic and investment policies, as well as the 1978 rally criticizing the re-election of the president Suharto for the third time in 1977. The 1973-1974 protests specifically culminated in the infamous Malari riot of January 1974 that burned the capital of Jakarta.
Initially, this relationship between these modernizers and the military elites at the helm of the regime were cordial. But this was soon severely tested. As students began to criticize irregularities emerging during the New Order that deviated from their initial ideals, the regime began to clamp down on the criticism. The decade of the 1970s saw the reversal of fortunes of the student activists from critical regime partners to becoming outsiders in opposition. By 1978, students were fully repressed as the military and the regime froze student activities within campuses throughout Indonesia with the normalization of campus life policy whereby students were prohibited to form assembly.
Similarly, the technocrats found out that they were not consulted on decisions that had consequential impact on the state’s fiscal health such as excessive borrowing by state-owned enterprise Pertamina. The reckless borrowing by Pertamina later put the state in a debt reaching $10 billion. This sidelining of the economic technocrats was despite their entrenched position within technical ministries such as the national planning body of Bappenas.
Oil Boom and Failure to Establish Mass Base
Two important factors help account for the marginalization of the New Order’s authoritarian modernizers. The first is the sudden strengthening of the regime’s financial base as the oil boom unfolded across the 1970s. The oil price rose from $2,93 in April 1973 to $11,90 in April 1974. Alongside the rise of price, there was an increase of oil production from around 470,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 1966 to 1,4 million bpd in 1974. This oil bonanza strengthened the military regime.
As Jeffrey Winters has forcefully argued, the oil shock fundamentally altered the relationship between the regime and capital.
Flush with oil rents, the state’s structural dependence on private investment was substantially relaxed. It could afford to disregard capital’s central demand: the maintenance of a conducive investment climate.
This same logic extended to the regime’s relationship with its own technocrats. If the state no longer needed to court investment through sound economic policies, it no longer needed the technocrats whose authority derived precisely from their capacity to manage the state-capital nexus. In other words, the regime could now act as it pleased, simply because the oil windfall allowed it to.
The Pertamina crisis of 1975 illustrated this dynamic in the most dramatic way. Emboldened by the promise of revenue, the state oil company Pertamina embarked on a spree of unsecured foreign borrowing that left it with debts officially put at over $10 billion. Such recklessness was possible only because the windfall had, for a few years, suspended the financial discipline that had earlier given the technocrats their leverage and authority. The technocrats were largely not consulted about this borrowing, and the gravity of the borrowing by Pertamina was unclear initially before it was investigated.
It was only when the regime needed the help of technocrats to renegotiate the Pertamina debt with foreign lenders that they were summoned in 1975-1977 and notably given more roles in determining the national economic policies. Sadli, a prominent economist, captured the nature of this state-technocrats relationship astutely when he remarked that bad times begets good policies. The dire Pertamina crisis both confirmed and undermined the technocrats precarity in the current regime, enabling them to have temporary influence and revise the country’s economic track while also signaling their exclusion from the mainstream politics.
The oil bonanza that strengthened the military regime also emboldened them to punish student protests knowing that the cost was rather negligible given how weak the student activists were.
Conclusion
The modernizers within the authoritarian New Order were marginalized in the end since they had no independent power base to fall back on, such as a party or organized constituency. When the interests of the technocrats and student activists diverged from those of the military regime, for instance over corruption or sound economic management, they lacked power resources they could draw upon to push their own agenda forward. Their influence rested on a temporary alignment with the military elite against Sukarno in 1965-1966. Once Sukarno was no longer relevant as a threat, the alignment lapsed. Further, the revenue from the oil bonanza in 1973-1974 freed the authoritarian New Order from relying on economic advice and at the same time empowered them to crack down on student dissent.
This story has a direct bearing on the structural account of Indonesia’s democratic regression with which this piece began. That account explains democratic backsliding as a story of continuity: authoritarian elites surviving 1998 and reestablishing themselves within the new democratic context.
The marginalization of the New Order’s modernist strand, however, is a story of discontinuity and it happened much earlier than the breaking down of the New Order in the late 1990s.
By the time Suharto fell in 1998, the technocrats and student activists who might have anchored a more programmatic and accountable style of democratic politics, had no influence in shaping the future trajectory of the country politically.
Understanding Indonesia’s contemporary democratic regression, thus, requires looking further past 1998 to an earlier and quieter purge, one that had removed the New Order’s modernizing promise of 1966 and replaced it with more transitory ideology and opportunistic people.
It is to this historical legacy that the current ‘revolving door’ moment turns to.
Gde Dwitya Arief Metera is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
