Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Jeremy Shiffman, University of Michigan
Discussant: R. William Liddle, Ohio State University
The bulk of political science scholarship on New Order Indonesia has concerned elite politics. The focus has been on the behavior of President Soeharto, military leaders, the senior ministers, prominent capital-controllers and a handful of powerful religious figures.
Yet so much of political consequence—indeed the majority of political action—takes place not among elites but beneath the commanding heights: among provincial figures, bureaucrats, lesser military leaders, religious organizations, and ethnic groups. Because this sub-elite level of the political system has so rarely been a focus of scholarship, many features of the New Order political system remain poorly understood, including the impact of these actors on the elites themselves.
This panel seeks to redress this imbalance by focusing on actors beneath the commanding heights, rather than on Soeharto and his inner circle. It includes four papers covering different aspects of sub-elite politics in New Order Indonesia: religion, ethnicity, regional government, and the bureaucracy. The papers invite inquiry into the possible need to reconceptualize our understanding of the nature of the New Order political system, in light of information about these lower-level political actors, institutions and organizations.
Michael Malley, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Besides drawing power upward toward itself from society in general, Indonesia’s New Order regime has also drawn power inward from the regions. One of its chief legacies will be a heavily centralized state apparatus that has no parallel in the archipelago’s history. How durable will this legacy be? The argument of this paper is that the changes flowing from Indonesia’s economic restructuring since the mid-1980s are creating powerful centrifugal forces that will compel future governments to revise the structure of center-region relations imposed by the New Order. These forces are so strong that the New Order itself cannot resist them. Even as it has cracked down on pro-democracy groups, it has undertaken reforms in the past few years to decentralize governance. Though these reforms appear modest and purely administrative, they reflect underlying political pressures on the national government. On the basis of research in three Indonesian provinces, this paper examines the nature of these underlying tensions and assesses their likely impact on the country’s political structure.
Jacques Bertrand, The North-South Institute
How stable are ethnic and religious relations in Indonesia? This paper argues that there are important signs of rising tensions between ethnic and religious groups in the late Suharto era. Beyond the more obvious cases of East Timor and Irian Jaya, ethnic and religious conflicts have been on the rise across the archipelago, although they have been less intense than the former. Unity during the last three decades may have been falsely maintained by repressing political expression, centralizing political power and coopting regional elites. With the impending succession, the failings of the political system are finding expression in a renewed call to ethnic and religious identity. In the last few months, there have been anti-Chinese riots, burning of churches, as well as clashes between ethnic groups in Java and Kalimantan. In Aceh, the Free Aceh Movement has renewed its activities. Based on recent fieldwork in various areas of Indonesia, this paper will analyze the sources of these rising conflicts.
Suzaina Kadir, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper looks at the Islamic organization Nahdlatu Ulama (NU) in the New Order. It compares the NU at the national level with the organization in two key East Java areas where NU is dominant: Jombang and Probolinggo. The paper argues that the dynamics of NU-state interaction at the sub-national level are much more complex than those at the center. A lot more bargaining and negotiating occurs here irrespective of the center’s broad and often vague position regarding state directives. This analysis has as background the decision by the NU’s leaders to withdraw the organization from formal political activity. It emphasizes the need to view the NU not in monolithic terms, but as a multi-tiered organization whose behavior needs to be understood both at national and local levels.
Jeremy Shiffman, University of Michigan
This paper is a comparison of three Indonesian maternal and child health programs: family planning, immunization, and safe motherhood, the latter designed to reduce the number of maternal deaths during childbirth. Despite the fact that all three have received presidential priority and been targeted toward the same groups of people, the programs have had vastly different outcomes. The family planning program has contributed to a sustained decline in fertility, the immunization program stumbled then began to produce a rise in immunization rates, while the safe motherhood program has had little success in reducing maternal deaths.
The paper argues that variance in these programmatic outcomes cannot be explained by appeal solely to exogenous factors such as the programs’ socioeconomic and cultural environments, and funding levels. Of central importance have been the political strategies of the implementing agencies in charge of each of these programs. The BKKBN, the government agency responsible for the family planning program, has been a masterful orchestrator of the political system, generating resources and priority from the president, national women’s groups and other political and social actors. The safe motherhood program, by contrast, has suffered from the absence of coordinated bureaucratic leadership.
The paper has implications for our understanding of Indonesian bureaucratic politics. It highlights the substantial impact mid and high-level bureaucrats have on policy decisions and outcomes, and thereby challenges the idea that the only people who matter in the policy process are a handful of elites at the system’s commanding heights such as the president and his senior ministers.