POLITICAL CULTURE
Because of the general acceptance by the people, Indonesia's New
Order government usually gains at least passive approval of its actions
and style by what the ruling elite has characterized as the
"floating masses." This approval in the early 1990s was based
in part on an acknowledgment of the material benefits that flowed from
real economic growth. The approval was also partly based on the fact
that the government's acts and style fit into shared cultural patterns
of values and expectations about leadership. In a country as ethnically
diverse as Indonesia--from Melanesian tribe members of Irian Jaya to
Jakarta's Chinese Indonesian millionaires-
-and with its population differentially incorporated into the modern political economy, it was difficult to identify a political culture shared in common by all Indonesians. Nevertheless, there were major cultural forces at work in Indonesia that did affect the political judgments of large groups of Indonesians.
-and with its population differentially incorporated into the modern political economy, it was difficult to identify a political culture shared in common by all Indonesians. Nevertheless, there were major cultural forces at work in Indonesia that did affect the political judgments of large groups of Indonesians.
Traditional Political Culture
In the late twentieth century, there were as many traditional
political cultures in Indonesia as there were ethnic groups.
Nevertheless, the similarity to the Javanese kingship model of Suharto's
increasingly paternalistic rule reflects the Javanese cultural
underpinnings of the New Order. Although Indonesia was a cultural
mosaic, the Javanese, with more than 45 percent of the total population
in the 1990s, were by far the largest single ethnic group. Moreover,
they filled--to a degree beyond their population ratio--the most
important roles in government and ABRI. The officer corps in particular
was Javanized, partly as a result of Java's central role in the
development of modern Indonesia (Indonesia's five leading institutions
of higher education were located on Java, for example), but also because
ABRI seemed to regard the great predominance of Javanese in the officer
ranks as a matter of policy. The Javanese cultural predispositions
influenced, therefore, the way the government appealed to the population
and interactions within the New Order elite.
On Java power historically has been deployed through a patrimonial
bureaucratic state in which proximity to the ruler was the key to
command and rewards. This power can be described in terms of a
patron-client relation in which the patron is the bapak (father
or elder). The terms of deference and obedience to the ruler are
conceived in the Javanese gustikawula (lord-subject)
formulation, which describes man's relationship to God as well as the
subject's relationship to his ruler. The reciprocal trait for obedience
is benevolence. In other words, benefits flow from the center to the
obedient. By extension government's developmental activities are a boon
to the faithful. Bureaucratically Javanese culture is suffused with an
attitude of obedience--respect for seniors, conformity to hierarchical
authority, and avoidance of confrontation-- characteristics of the
preindependence priyayi class whose roots go back to the
traditional Javanese courts.
Javanism also has a mystical, magical dimension in its religiously
syncretic belief system, which integrated pre-Indian, Indian, and
Islamic beliefs. Its practices include animistic survivals, which invest
sacred heirlooms (pusaka) with animating spirits, and rites of
passage whose antecedents are pre-Islamic. Javanism also encompasses the
introspective ascetic practices of kebatinan (mysticism as
related to one's inner self), which seek to connect the microcosms of
the self to the macrocosms of the universe. This adaptive belief system
defines Suharto's underlying spiritual orientation. Furthermore, the
politics of Javanism have been defensive, seeking to preserve its
particular heterogenous practices from demands for Islamic orthodoxy.
Rather than Islamic political parties, the Javanese have often turned to
more secular parties: Sukarno's Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), the
PKI, and Golkar.
Islamic Political Culture
Of Indonesia's population, 87.1 percent identified themselves as
Muslim in 1980. This number was down from 95 percent in 1955. The
figures for 1985 and 1990 were not released by the government's Central
Bureau of Statistics (BPS), suggesting a further decline that would fuel
the fires of Muslim indignation over Christianization and secularization
under the New Order. Nevertheless, Indonesia was still the largest
Muslim nation in the world in the early 1990s, united with the universal
Islamic community (ummah) not only in the profession of faith
but also in adherence to Islamic law. The appeal of Islam was not weakened when it
was supplanted by modern secular nationalism as the basis for the
independent Indonesian state. In fact, given the prominence of Islamic
proselytization and reinvigoration, the people's desire to maintain
Islamic institutions and moral values arguably was at an all-time high
in Indonesia. There was, however, a separation between Islam as a
cultural value system and Islam as a political movement.
Islam in Indonesia is not monolithic. The majority of Indonesia's
nominal or statistical Muslims, abangan, are, to varying degrees of self-awareness, believers in kebatinan. Orthodox Islam is, in fact, a minority religion, and the term
often used to describe the orthodox believer is santri. A rough measurement of the appeal of orthodox Islam is
the size of the electorate supporting explicitly Muslim political
parties, which in the general elections of 1977 and 1982 approached 30
percent. In a pluralistic setting, such numbers might be expected to
represent political strength. This correlation would exist in Indonesia
if Indonesian Islam spoke with a single, unified voice. In the early
1990s it did not. The santri consisted of both traditionalists
and modernists, traditionalists seeking to defend a conservatively
devout way of life, protecting orthodoxy as much as possible from the
demands of the modern state, and modernists striving to adapt Indonesian
Islam to the requirements of the modern world.
The principal organization reflecting the traditionalist outlook was
Nahdatul Ulama (literally, "revival of the religious
teachers," but commonly referred to as the Muslim Scholars' League)
founded in 1926. Nahdatul Ulama had its roots in the traditional rural
Islamic schools (pesantren) of Central and East Java. Claiming
more than 30 million members, in 1992 Nahdatul Ulama was the largest
Muslim organization in Indonesia. Although its rural teachers and
adherents reflected its traditional orientation, it was led into the
1990s by Abdurrahman Wahid, grandson of Nahdatul Ulama's founder, a
"democrat" with a non-exclusive vision of Islam and the state.
Modernist, or reformist, Islam in Indonesia was best exemplified by the
Muhammadiyah (followers of Muhammad), founded in 1912 when the spirit of
the Muslim reform movement begun in Egypt in the early 1900s reached
Southeast Asia. In addition to modernizing Islam, the reformists sought
to purify (critics argue Arabize) Indonesian Islam.
Both santri streams found formal political expression in the
postindependence multiparty system. The Consultative Council of
Indonesian Muslims (Masyumi) was the main political vehicle for the
modernists. However, its activities were inhibited by the PRRI-Permesta
regional rebellions between 1957 and 1962 and the party was banned in
1959. Nahdatul Ulama competed in the politics of the 1950s, and seeking
to capitalize on Masyumi's banning, collaborated with Sukarno in the
hope of winning patronage and followers. Nahdatul Ulama also hoped to
stop the seemingly inexorable advance of the secular left under the
leadership of the PKI. Although organized Islamic political parties in
the New Order were prohibited from advancing an explicitly Islamic
message, traditional systems of communication within the community of
believers, including instruction in Islamic schools and mosque sermons,
passed judgments on politics and politicians.
Modern Political Culture
The major components of Indonesia's modern political culture were
derived from two central goals of the New Order government: stability
and development. If authority in the Suharto era was based on ABRI's
coercive support, the government's legitimacy rested on its success in
achieving sociopolitical stability and economic development. Indonesian
political culture in the early 1990s primarily reflected nontraditional,
nonethnic, and secular values. Urban centered, truly national in its
scope, and more materialistically focused, Indonesia's politics in the
1990s were influenced by both domestic and international developments.
Like Islam, Indonesia's modern political culture was not monolithic.
In the early 1990s, there was a variety of subcultures: bureaucratic,
military, intellectual, commercial, literary, and artistic, each with
its own criteria for judging politics, but all directed to the
successful operation of the modern political system. Perhaps the two
most important modern subcultures were the military and the
intellectuals. It was the military subculture that set the tone for the
first two decades of the Suharto government, both in terms of its ethos
and in the direct participation of military officers at all levels of
government and administration. Although increasingly professional in a
technical sense, ABRI never lost its conception of itself as the
embodiment of the national spirit, standing above the social, ethnic,
and religious divisions of the country as a unifying institution. Even
though factions existed within ABRI, it exemplified dwifungsi,
the special link between soldier and state. ABRI was not above politics,
but it was not part of the open political competition. The concerns of
academics, writers, and other intellectuals in the early 1990s were
different and they were more likely to be influenced by Western
political values. It was from these circles that the pressure for
democratization came. Their outlet was not political parties but
cause-oriented nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), workshops,
seminars, rallies, and, occasionally, demonstrations. The government
undertook a major effort to subsume all of Indonesia's political
cultures, with their different and often incompatible criteria for
legitimacy, into a national political culture, an Indonesian culture
based on the values set forth in the Pancasila. [DOWNLOAD]
Political Parties
The Multiparty System
Golkar
United Development Party (PPP)
Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI)
Elections
Political Dynamics
Openness
Islam
ABRI
Nongovernment Organizations (NGOs)
