Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms by Radhika Desai

Author:Radhika Desai [Desai, Radhika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138967588
Google: VeVhjwEACAAJ
Amazon: B00G24WJIY
Barnesnoble: B00G24WJIY
Goodreads: 19639848
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Cultural nationalism after the New Order

With the end of the New Order regime one might expect an end to its brand of (multi)cultural nationalism. However, things were not so simple. In 1998, just months after Soeharto was ousted from power, the Indonesian legislature passed a decree allowing social, political and cultural organisations to adhere to ideologies other than Pancasila as long as their ideologies did not contradict the tenets of Pancasila.54 While this move provided the legal basis for the emergence of Islamic political parties and allowed mass organisations to define themselves in terms of their religious, regional or ethnic identities, it also reinforced the ritual centrality of Pancasila in the national ideology. This opening has resulted in a mushrooming of political groupings and ideologies, ranging from the militant and sectarian to the peaceable and inclusive.

The political economy of the post-Soeharto era has also been complex. The combined effects of the Asian financial crisis and the end of the Soeharto regime effectively brought the machinery of pro yek-centred development to a standstill for several years. The whole machinery of developmentalism had depended on high rates of annual economic growth and international borrowing. The financial crisis and the ensuing period of economic stagnation meant that the government had few resources to keep the flows of proyek going. Even when they had resources, it was not always that easy to distribute them. The mushrooming of political parties and organisations meant that the whole clientalist system of defining development priorities and allocating projects had become much more fragmented and competitive. At least for a time, officials stopped talking about ‘pembangunan’ entirely.

At the same time the end of the Soeharto regime has not been accompanied by any fundamental changes in the structure of Indonesia's elite. Student activists’ efforts to use the financial crisis as an occasion to dislodge the politico-bureaucratic elite by pressuring the government to fight corruption have met with negligible success. Similarly, attempts by the IMF and other lenders to impose neoliberal reforms on the Indonesian economy have not yielded any fundamental changes in elite power (although they have helped to make it much more acceptable for politicians to publicly embrace liberal economic policies).55 The oligarchy has loosened up somewhat, since the most prominent oligarchs of the New Order have been pushed off centre stage, but the basic structure of the national elite has remained largely intact.56 What has changed is the relation of this elite to its less powerful counterparts in the regions. One of the centrepieces of governmental reforms has been a programme of decentralisation in which a good deal of administrative and budgetary authority is devolved onto district and municipal governments. As a result of this reform, local elites have gained a greater autonomy from Jakarta and have started to establish local versions of the alliances that underpin the authority of the politico-bureaucratic elite. The competitive nature of this process may partly explain the mushrooming of social and political organisations that define themselves in ethnic, religious or regional terms:

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