Suharto's Cold War by Mattias Fibiger;

Author:Mattias Fibiger;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Travails of Development

Suharto emerged from Indonesia’s July 1971 elections triumphant. His Golkar electoral machine controlled 336 of the 460 seats in parliament. Student groups, religious organizations, and political parties all appeared united behind the army and its program of modernization and development. So too did the international community. Western governments and international financial institutions funneled ever-larger sums of aid to the Suharto regime through the IGGI. The New Order was at the apex of its legitimacy both at home and abroad.

But Suharto did not intend to aggregate the interests and ideals of a capacious domestic coalition. To the contrary, he intended to marshal international resources to create a highly autonomous state capable of reshaping Indonesian society in accordance with his anticommunist ambitions. Rather than the state embodying its citizens, its citizens would embody the state. Suharto revealed the nature of political authority in the New Order shortly after the elections when he announced a reshuffling of his cabinet to include twelve PhDs, four military officers, and only three representatives of political parties.1 Elements of the New Order coalition recognized the increasingly exclusionary nature of the Suharto regime and mobilized to reorient the trajectory of Indonesian life. Suharto responded by cracking down against all manner of opposition—igniting a dialectic of repression and resistance.

A key lesson of the period since October 1, 1965, was that Suharto could rely on international resources to surmount domestic challenges. But Suharto soon confronted unprecedented threats to his ability to channel to the global Cold War to wage his own domestic and regional Cold Wars. Those threats emerged from processes endogenous to the global Cold War, including the rise of the human rights revolution, the end of the Vietnam War, and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, all of which impeded Suharto’s ability to mobilize international aid and investment. But they also emerged from the erosion of the Cold War itself. The advent of détente and triangular diplomacy meant the world was no longer divided along ideological lines. For Suharto, the geopolitical reconfigurations of the 1970s risked undermining the salience of Cold War imperatives in international politics. What emerged was a chaotic interregnum in which Suharto engaged in a series of desperate maneuvers to sustain his access to international capital and confront renascent domestic challenges.

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