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The rise of neo-Third Worldism?

the Indonesian trajectory and the
consolidation of illiberal democracy
Vedi R Hadiz
Published online: 27 May 2008.

To cite this article: Vedi R Hadiz (2004) The rise of neo-Third Worldism? the Indonesian
trajectory and the consolidation of illiberal democracy, Third World Quarterly, 25:1, 55-71, DOI:
10.1080/0143659042000185336

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 Third World Quarterly, Vol 25, No 1, pp 55–71, 2004

The rise of neo-Third Worldism?

The Indonesian trajectory and the
consolidation of illiberal democracy
V.R.HadizDepartment of SociologyNational University of Singapore11 Arts [email protected]

VEDI R HADIZ
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ABSTRACT This article attempts to achieve a number of things: first it links

understandings of the contest over democracy in Indonesia with more general
theoretical debates about democratisation in the Third World both during and
after the Cold War. It then demonstrates how these theoretical debates over the
past several decades have intertwined in some notable instances with ongoing
domestic political debates in Indonesia, in ways that may be unexpected. It also
suggests that the post-cold war world order based on the hegemony of the USA
weakens, rather than strengthens, the forces of democratic liberalism in Indone-
sian society—and reinforces the consolidation of an illiberal form of democracy.
Specifically, the article argues that the projection of US power in the post-11
September world is strengthening the impulse towards an emerging ‘neo-Third
Worldism’ in Indonesia and elsewhere. This recuperates the most conservative
elements of the original 1950s and 1960s Third Wordlism, but is devoid of its
earlier progressive and internationalist vision.

‘Democracy’ has had a precarious existence in most of the one-time Third

World. In large parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa, authoritarian regimes
held sway for much of the post-1945 period, and today, even after the ‘Third
Wave’ of democratisation that culminated with the end of the Cold War, there
remain powerful constraints on the advance of democracy.1 In Indonesia, for
example, the site of the Bandung Conference in 1955, the early postcolonial
period saw an experiment with liberal, parliamentary-style democracy that was
discontinued by Sukarno’s Guided Democracy (1959–66), and which paved the
way for the emergence of a highly centralised authoritarian–corporatist regime—
Suharto’s ‘New Order’. Since Suharto’s ouster in May 1998, Indonesia is now
commonly assumed to be either already a democracy or in a transition towards
democracy.2 Indeed, there have been momentous changes since the end of 32
years of iron-fisted rule by the predatory Suharto regime. The character and
significance of these changes have, however, been misinterpreted by most
analysts, and this has significance for broader understandings of democratisation
in the former Third World.
I wish to achieve several goals in this article. First, I want to link understand-

Vedi R Hadiz is in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, ASI 03–25, 11 Arts
Link, Singapore 11750. Email: [email protected].

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/04/010055-17  2004 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/0143659042000185336 55
 VEDI R HADIZ

ings of the contest over democracy in Indonesia—the world’s fourth most

populous nation—with more general theoretical debates about democratisation in
the ‘Third World’, debates that have undergone numerous permutations over the
past several decades. Second, I want to show how these theoretical debates on
democracy/democratisation and authoritarianism have intertwined in some nota-
ble instances with domestic political debates in Indonesia, and in ways that may
not be completely expected. Third, I would like to suggest that the contemporary
world order based on the hegemony of the USA weakens, rather than strength-
ens, the forces of democratic liberalism in Indonesian society. This directly
contradicts the stated altruistic aims of American empire to make the world
‘safe’ for democracy.3 The present US-led global order is characterised not only
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by unrivalled US economic, political and military power, but also by the

increasingly free use of force to mould the processes and contours of economic
globalisation to suit the needs, primarily, of US-based and transnational capital.4
Finally, I would like to suggest that the projection of US power in the post-11
September world will strengthen the impulse towards an emerging ‘neo-Third
Worldism’ in Indonesia and elsewhere. If the Third Worldism of Sukarno, Tito,
Nehru and the like—whatever its faults, internal contradictions and deeply
ambiguous relationship with democratic ideals—was driven by a vision of a
postcolonial future of egalitarianism and internationalism, contemporary neo-
Third Worldism is characterised by indigenism, reactionary populism and a
strong inclination towards cultural insularism. Although all these elements were
also strongly present in the original Third Worldism of the 1950s and 1960s,
they were balanced by a progressive vision of a future world order, born out of
concrete anti-imperialist struggles over several decades.
By contrast, today’s more inward-looking version of Third Worldism is the
knee-jerk reaction of ruling elites from Latin America to Southeast Asia to the
swagger of US empire. Thus, the nascent neo-Third Worldism of Southeast
Asian leaders like Mahathir Mohammad in Malaysia, Thaksin Shinawatra in
Thailand and Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, or that of the Islamic
fundamentalists in parts of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, merely
reasserts the most conservative elements of the old Third Worldism depleted of
its internationalist vision of the future. Indeed neo-Third Worldism has no
vision. It rests, instead, on nostalgia for a romanticised, indigenous, pre-capitalist
past—a sorry riposte to the triumphalism of unbridled US power, with which
most of the above states have little choice but to engage, notwithstanding any
apparent reluctance. This is how Third Worldism is in the process of being
resurrected: as a tragicomic caricature of its predecessor.
In many respects this is not surprising. By the 1970s Third Worldism had
already been drained of its revolutionary postcolonial ideals and rhetoric. In
many countries a new generation of leaders had emerged whose main project
was that of a centralised state developmentalism that found ready allies among
the major protagonists of the Cold War. Thus, Indonesia’s Suharto was eventu-
ally to lead the ‘Non-aligned Movement’ that had come out of the original Third
Worldism of the 1950s, although his regime was clearly allied to the USA, the
world power that had much to thank him for in his brutal and effective crushing
of Indonesian communism in the 1960s.
56
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

Some could still hope that a new, progressive and rejuvenated version of Third
Worldism might yet emanate from the civil societies of Asia, Africa and Latin
America. Indeed, some might take solace in the participation of Third World-
based organisations in such events as the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Or
they might take encouragement from the recent world-wide anti-war protests in
reaction to the US-led invasion of Iraq, many of which occurred outside of the
metropolitan capitalist nation-states. But there is at least an equal chance that the
civil society-based movements involved may instead be drawn into the conserva-
tive and reactionary agendas of ruling elites who may seek to bolster their
position by adopting, selectively and to varying degrees, anti-American or
anti-globalisation stances as they compete for support through the employment
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of neo-Third Worldist rhetoric. Such competing elites in Indonesia, for example,

have effectively manipulated nationalist (and religious) sentiment in relation to
the US ‘war on terror’ to legitimise their claims to power. In Malaysia the Third
World Network, which takes a vocal anti-globalisation stance, enjoys close
relations with the autocratic Mahathir government, despite the Penang-based
organisation’s previously critical view of the prime minister and his policies.
Thaksin, the Thai premier and telecom tycoon, had earlier gained much political
mileage by portraying himself as a populist who would not bend easily to the
neoliberal economic agenda; at least initially he had the support of NGOs and
grassroots movements in Thailand. The main casualties of developments such as
these are likely to be the ideals of social justice, democracy, equality and human
rights that might have underpinned any notion of a rejuvenated Third Worldism
premised on progressive civil society-based movements.
If Third Worldism was a product of nationalist, anti-colonial movements and
the Cold War, contemporary, emerging neo-Third Worldism is a product of a
post-cold war world centred on US hegemony, and in which no Second World
representing a socialist alternative exists any longer. While the relationship of
the old Third Worldism with democratic ideals was at best ambivalent—given
the experiences with Sukarno, Nasser, Tito and the like—the emergence of
neo-Third Worldism strongly suggests that economic globalisation under the
aegis of US hegemony can have highly illiberal political consequences. This is
not just because the American hegemon has resumed the cold war-era practice
of bolstering corrupt and ruthless regimes5 as long as they remain friendly to US
corporate interests. It is also because the neo-conservative ascendancy in the
USA6 essentially promotes an illiberal form of democracy that strives for the
establishment of state institutions in the ‘Third World’, able to protect inter-
national investors from social coalitions that pose a challenge to the power and
wealth inequalities produced by the free market.7

Theoretical perspectives: from modernisation to illiberal imperium

This section examines the intersection between theoretical explanations for
democratisation and/or authoritarianism in the Third World and domestic politi-
cal contests over democracy in Indonesia.8 Many aspects of the various theoreti-
cal explanations that have emerged over the years to explain authoritarianism
and democracy have been freely deployed in Indonesia by contending forces in
57
 VEDI R HADIZ

support of particular social and political agendas—perhaps most clearly during

the formative period of Suharto’s New Order. This period coincided with some
of the most intense years of the Cold War, at least in relation to Southeast Asia.
Classical modernisation theory—which is still influential in the social science
curricula of most major Indonesian universities—viewed the postcolonial, Third
World state as an essentially benign agent of development and modernisation.
That the postcolonial state would be conceived as the main agent of modernis-
ation and development was more or less ensured by the absence of solid
entrepreneurial classes in virtually all of early postcolonial Asia and Africa.
More specifically, however, early modernisation theorists envisaged a particu-
larly positive role for technocratic elites—especially those who had benefited
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from Western-style education and were immersed in ‘Western’, modern val-

ues—given the broader social and cultural conditions of the postcolonial era that
were characterised as being patrimonial or pre-modern. It was the technocratic
elite, more than any other historical agent—and in lieu of any ‘real’ middle or
capital-owning classes—that was envisaged as having a crucial role to play in
the growth of a modern ‘civic culture’, conducive to the nurturing of Western
liberal democratic norms.9 It is significant that these same elites were simul-
taneously imagined to be the main bastions against the spread of communism in
the Third World in the context of the Cold War.10
Thus it was US policy in Indonesia from as early as the 1950s to nurture and
sustain pro-American intellectuals, bureaucrats and military leaders through aid
and training programmes. The Ford Foundation, for example, helped to develop
the infrastructure for the training of ‘modernising’ Indonesian elites at US
universities such as MIT and Cornell. It was also instrumental in developing the
Economics Faculty of the University of Indonesia, which later provided the
Suharto bureaucracy and his various cabinets with a steady stream of individuals
with technocratic expertise.11 It was clearly assumed that these technocrats
would lead Indonesia to the world of democracy and free markets—an important
project given the context of the escalating Vietnam War. However, it was to be
convincingly shown, certainly in the case of Indonesia, that anti-communism and
democracy and free markets did not all go together: although Suharto remained
virulently anti-communist and stayed firmly committed to the US camp as far as
cold war politics were concerned, he rode roughshod over economic policy and
guided Indonesia towards an exceptionally predatory form of capitalism, under-
pinned in the 1970s and 1980s by windfall oil revenues, as well as crafting a
profoundly authoritarian political system. In the process, Western-trained tech-
nocrats were often marginalised, as they had no independent base of social
power. It must be understood that the projection of the image of technocratic
governance was only part and parcel of the regime’s strategy of containing
internal as well as external criticism of its essentially authoritarian and predatory
character. Of course, the case of Indonesia is in no way unique in this respect.
Not that US policy makers would necessarily have had serious objections:
US-based companies like the oil concern Caltex, and the mining giant Freeport
profited enormously from the situation.
It is notable that Indonesian state elites found the lexicon of modernisation
theory particularly attractive. The late General Ali Moertopo, once Suharto’s
58
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

closest aide and political henchman, borrowed freely from Rostowian ‘stages of
growth’ theory in his own ‘magnum opus’, grandiosely entitled in English Basic
Thoughts on the Acceleration and Modernisation of 25-Year Development.12
Marrying the developmentalist orientation of modernisation theory with his
strongly authoritarian–statist inclinations, Moertopo declared that:
As a developing country, Indonesia is still always confronted with the problem of
having to decide how to shape its future development. The appropriate policy is
what is generally called modernisation. In order to achieve our goals as efficiently
as possible, modernisation is nothing more than the process of using all available
material, ethical, scientific and technical means to organise, structure and implement
development based on one way of thinking.13
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On the other hand, US ‘Indonesianists’ like Karl Jackson were at the forefront
of studies that applied many of the assumptions of modernisation theory to the
Indonesian case.14 Within the framework of modernisation theory Indonesian
development problems were typically posed in terms of producing the values
conducive to modernisation. Not surprisingly, the ‘heroes’ of the Indonesian
development process have invariably been economic technocrats (and other
intellectuals) mostly schooled in the neoclassical tradition who struggled to
enforce ‘rational’ policy in the face of an intrusive patrimonial style of politics.15
But this suited Moertopo’s vision quite well, for these heroic nation-building
experts still required insulation from ‘self-interested’ societal pressure.
Over time, however, the technocrats came to be subjected to considerable
scrutiny. John MacDougall was only one academic who began to carefully
appraise the role of the technocrats in Suharto’s Indonesia by the 1970s.16 In a
controversial article David Ransom spoke of the existence of a ‘Berkeley
Mafia’—a reference to US-trained economists in the Suharto cabinets—who, he
suggested, played a comprador role by actively protecting the interests of their
US patrons.17 But, like the supporters of the technocrats, detractors such as
Ransom and others who would follow exaggerated their importance. The focus
on the technocrats steered some attention away from the fact that Suharto, his
family and cronies—the main elements of a burgeoning capitalist oligarchy that
had been incubated within the New Order—came to exercise increasingly direct,
instrumental control over state power and its institutions.18
In any case New Order figures like Moertopo arguably would have found
classical modernisation theory to be less attractive than the revisionism repre-
sented primarily in the work of the US political scientist, Samuel Huntington. By
the late 1960s Huntington’s work had already signalled a new emphasis in
modernisation theory that effectively defined the condition of modernity in terms
of the successful maintenance of political stability.19 According to Huntington—
the future proponent, paradoxically, of both a thesis on a global ‘third wave’ of
democratisation in the 1980s and of a ‘clash of civilisations’ (within which
democracy is essentially a Western cultural construct) in the 1990s20—state
‘modernity’ was measured on the basis of institutionalisation. Within the
conceptual scheme of this revisionist modernisation theory, the institutionalisa-
tion of the structures of political power was required to avert a descent into
chaos or anarchy.
59
 VEDI R HADIZ

Such ideas were clearly useful to the ideologues of authoritarian capitalist

regimes like the New Order,21 especially in terms of providing intellectual
justification for state policies that sternly domesticated political opposition in the
name of providing the stability required for economic growth. In other words,
the revisionist modernisation theory of Huntington fitted quite nicely with the
New Order’s oft-repeated claim that the institutional framework of the regime
was geared to ensuring the stability required for economic progress, and that
liberal democracy—with its potentially destabilising effect—was not in accord-
ance with economic development aims.
It would be misleading to suggest, however, that these variants of modernis-
ation theory went completely unchallenged in Indonesia, because a discourse on
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democracy and a more just development process did in fact emerge in the 1970s
and through to the 1990s. Theoretical explanations produced mainly in Western
academe have also fed into this alternative discourse in Indonesia. For example,
Indonesia, was scrutinised from a variety of neo-Marxist perspectives: Rex
Mortimer, an Australian radical scholar, was one of the earlier proponents of the
view that the Indonesian state was basically acting out a comprador role in
relation to international capital.22 In Mortimer’s view, the Indonesian state’s
main function was to establish the conditions for the transfer of economic
surplus to the metropolitan countries. Clearly such notions are rooted in the Latin
American-inspired dependency theory which was influential among radical
scholars of development in the 1960s and 1970s.
In Indonesia it was Sritua Arief and Adi Sasono who produced the most well
known dependency study, arguing that persistent poverty and ‘under-
development’ was rooted in the global unequal exchange mechanisms imposed
on Indonesia since its colonisation by the Dutch.23 Such prominent thinkers
on unequal development as Samir Amin, in turn, heavily influenced these
writers. Significantly, authors like Sritua Arief and Adi Sasono played an
important role in the emergence of Southeast Asia-based networks of NGO
activists and academics in the 1980s who advanced a Third Worldist-orientated
and dependency theory-influenced framework to understand the development of
capitalism in the region, as well as the salience of authoritarian regimes in many
countries.
But the successful excision of Marxism in general and ‘class conflict’ in
particular from Indonesian political and intellectual discourse by the New Order
showed that the Marxist-influenced critique of development policy in Indonesia
had no real social or political base. The Indonesian Communist Party—the
PKI—was decimated at the onset of the New Order in 1965–66. Arief and
Sasono, rather than representing what may have remained of a radical Left
ideological stream, actually came out of the Islamic-orientated petty-bourgeois
tradition in Indonesian social and political thinking. Its social base was that of
the long-declining group of indigenous, small merchants and traders who had a
history of enmity towards the ethnic Chinese and the foreign bourgeoisie. The
Third Worldism implied in dependency theory was attractive to them because
the ‘enemy’ was identified as being ‘foreign’ in one way or another, and thus
external to the Indonesian body politic proper. In other words, dependency
theory was useful for petty-bourgeois populists whose main grievance was the
60
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

lack of opportunities to benefit from the fruits of economic development, but

who were fearful of any left-wing revival in Indonesia. In fact the political
genealogy of Adi Sasono, in particular, is traceable to the Islamic youth and
student organisations that were so instrumental in the New Order’s violent
crushing of the Left, and in this sense he is fairly typical of the leaders of
mainstream contemporary organised Islam in Indonesia. It is perhaps not too
surprising that he eventually became a major New Order figure himself in the
1990s, once Suharto had opened the corridors of power to Muslim intellectuals
in an effort to widen his own base of support.24
In the meantime some liberal pluralists—emerging primarily from the urban
middle class and intelligentsia—who had supported the early New Order against
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the communists—came to be attracted to a brand of Marxism that was particu-

larly notable for its lack of class conflict. In articles influential among many
Indonesian liberal intellectuals in the 1980s, Hamza Alavi had argued that
postcolonial states enjoyed relative autonomy from social classes because of the
underdeveloped class structure that had been inherited. Postcolonial states,
according to Alavi, were ‘overdeveloped’ in relation to an underdeveloped class
structure.25 Showing the traces of a dependency perspective, the interests of
metropolitan capital remained more powerful in Alavi’s theoretical construct
because of the weakness and underdevelopment of its local counterpart. Thus,
while the postcolonial state had a dominant presence, it was structurally
beholden to the interests of international capital. Alavi’s work on Pakistan and
Bangladesh was adapted to the Indonesian case by the late Farchan Bulkin26—
and a host of Indonesian student and NGO activists—who argued that the
underdevelopment of the bourgeoisie and middle classes was the basis for state
dominance over civil society. This kind of state dominance, it was surmised, was
responsible for hindering the development of democracy.
Such intellectual developments were reflective of the new penchant among
liberals and pluralists in Indonesia to view the (authoritarian) state as the main
enemy. This was partly attributable to their declining influence within the
regime, and partly to the fact that any hope that the New Order would develop
into a democracy had been crushed by the mid-1970s when it forcefully put
down student demonstrations and gaoled leading liberal activists. Perhaps the
most identifiable representative of this sort of development was Arief Budiman,
a sociologist, political activist and public intellectual who had been an early
supporter of the New Order but who had turned to dependency theory and
neo-Marxism to criticise the regime. But again the emphasis on the state and, to
varying degrees, the role of metropolitan capital meant little acknowledgement
of internal class conflicts and dynamics, except to lament the absence of a
vigorous middle class. It also allowed the adoption of Marxist-inspired ideas by
individuals with political genealogies traceable to former opponents of the PKI,
with little acknowledgement of the political legacy of their long-vanquished
former enemies.
Other variants of state-centred approached to politics and society became
influential as well. For example, in the context of the deepening of authoritarian-
ism in Indonesia and elsewhere in the 1970s, scholars like Mochtar Mas’oed,27
as well as representatives of NGO and student movements, began to borrow freely
61
 VEDI R HADIZ

from the expanding literature on bureaucratic authoritarian regimes epitomised

by the work of the Latin American specialist Guillermo O’Donnell.28 More than
ever the rise of civil society—especially conceived as a middle class re-
surgence—was put forward in the Indonesian political discourse as the antithesis
to an overbearing and stifling state. It will be remembered that theorists like
Theda Skocpol, influenced both by the Marxian and Weberian traditions, were
also increasingly challenging Marxist theories of the state by the 1980s .29 This
kind of theoretical position, which brought ‘the state back in’ as a self-interested,
autonomous actor, had considerable appeal in Indonesia, where state power
appeared to be so pervasive. Although his framework was very different from
that of Skocpol (and her colleagues), Benedict Anderson emerged as the main
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proponent of the state-for-itself thesis for Indonesia. His argument was that the
ascendance of the New Order in 1966 represented the victory of the ‘state’—
which was traceable to the colonial period—over ‘society’.30
Meanwhile, by the 1980s Richard Robison, was the scholar who was most
closely identified with the sustained analysis of the state’s role in Indonesia’s
capitalist transformation. While agreeing with Anderson that the preservation of
their institutional base of power is important to the holders of state power,
Robison also pointed out that state power could only be understood in relation
to a wider system of class relationships.31 Borrowing from Marx, he later
suggested that ‘Bonapartism’ emerged in Indonesia insofar as a weak bour-
geoisie forfeited power in favour of an authoritarian state in order to contain
potential revolutionary impulses from below.32 In reality a vigorous urban
middle class and bourgeoisie was developing under the aegis of the New Order,
as suggested in Robison’s now classic work, Indonesia: The Rise of Capital. But,
unlike the imaginings of their ideological champions, especially within the
Indonesian middle class intelligentsia, these social forces were deeply conserva-
tive and inclined towards acceptance of the political status quo. Benefiting
materially from Indonesia’s economic growth under the New Order, they feared
instability and the threat to social order and property that might accompany
regime change. However, the broad issues addressed within this kind of
perspective were only taken up by a handful of Indonesian scholars.33
Indeed, the 1980s and 1990s mostly saw a slew of writings by Indonesian
intellectuals on the ‘naturally’ progressive nature of the middle class and/or
bourgeoisie. The economist Sjahrir, for example, argued that economic liberali-
sation and deregulation would strengthen the middle class, and therefore the
democratic impulse in Indonesian society, because the power of the state would
be compromised.34 Not surprisingly, this kind of development in Indonesia
coincided with the global resurgence of modernisation theory in the form of
neo-institutionalism and rational choice theory. Premised on the analytical tools
of neoclassical economics, such as ‘game theory’, neo-institutionalism and
rational choice have become increasingly pervasive across the various disciplines
of the social sciences.35 In the process, the old assumptions of modernisation
theory—earlier criticised by dependency theorists and neo-Marxists—are clearly
reproduced in Douglass North’s influential suggestion that culturally rooted
belief systems may undermine the solving of the increasingly complex problems
of development.36 Moreover, Sanjaya Lal’s assertion that a powerful state is
62
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

often required to constrain emerging competing interest groups is strongly

reminiscent of Huntington’s revisionism.37
Significantly, contemporary liberal theories of modernisation and development
regularly emphasise the need for technocratic ‘modern’ elites who are capable of
making rational choices. Crucially as well, the concept of democracy that is
advanced is implicitly one in which technocratic experts can preside over
policies in the ‘general interest’ without the intervention of social coalitions that
may pose a challenge to inequalities in power and wealth. Thus this is essentially
a form of democracy that incorporates strong regulatory and anti-liberal political
aspects,38 even as it notionally eschews state domination for fear of stifling
private entrepreneurship. This is precisely the view of democracy that is being
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professed by American empire, with its concern to mould political conditions

globally that would be conducive to free markets and international investment.
Civil society is, interestingly, invoked as well, but mainly insofar as the middle
class and the bourgeoisie are assumed to grow stronger with deeper capitalist
development and closer integration with global markets.39 But Rodan has argued
that it is a mistake to view civil society as a single, politically progressive and
homogeneous entity.40 Interestingly, Indonesian social scientists, increasingly
enamoured with the concept of civil society, tend to replicate the civil-society-
as-progressive middle class thesis.41
It is interesting to note in this connection that a prominent feature of the
literature on good governance, as produced by the World Bank and the US
Agency for International Development (USAID), is the notion that technocratic
expertise—rather than political contestation—is the key element in the success-
ful crafting of market-friendly and democratic political institutions. Implicitly,
societal pressure for a range of liberties and rights is potentially obtrusive to the
exercise of an insulated, objective technocratic rationality.42 These views are
reflected in the Indonesian domestic debates today—scholar and television
personality Rizal Mallarangeng, for example, is an outspoken champion in
Indonesia of the rationality of the market, safeguarded by the wisdom of liberal
technocracy.43
In this regard it is clear that the democracy being promoted in the US-
dominated post-cold war world has more in common with Huntington’s revision-
ism of the 1960s than the classical version of modernisation theory that
postulated a direct link between economic development and democracy. Further-
more, although neo-Third Worldism is a conservative populist reaction to US
hegemony, the illiberal kind of democracy promoted by a prodigious array of
intellectuals connected directly and indirectly to US power is not completely
disagreeable to aspiring neo-Third Worldists. Thaksin in Thailand, or Mahathir
in Malaysia, would be quite happy with a regulated democratic system in which
a fundamental challenge to the existing social order is not possible for the sake
of ensuring the social stability needed to ensure investment conditions. The
problem—and a source of tension with Washington—is that their efforts to
position themselves against domestic challenges to their authoritarian political
practices involves the selective adoption of anti-American and anti-globalisation
rhetoric. Mahathir, for example, bolstered his domestic popularity by his tren-
chant and repeated rejection of IMF policy advice at the height of the Asian
63
 VEDI R HADIZ

financial crisis (1997–98). Meanwhile, since the start of the US-led ‘war on
terror’, leaders like Mahathir and Megawati in Indonesia have needed to match
the populist appeal of various Islamic-based adversaries—whose social justice
rhetoric is sometimes virulently anti-American—while simultaneously ensuring
continued engagement with US-led global economic and security processes.

The rise, fall, and re-emergence of Indonesian democracy: a Third World

lesson?
Contrary to a great deal of contemporary analysis, Indonesia, at this juncture, is
no longer in a state of transition to a liberal form of democratic rule. Instead an
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illiberal form of democracy is already entrenched, grounded in the logic of

money politics and political violence, similar to post-Soviet Russia, Thailand or
the Philippines.44 Among its main beneficiaries have been the lower-level
apparatchik, political operators and entrepreneurs, as well as henchmen and
thugs of the old regime, who have now reinvented themselves as ‘democrats’
and ‘reformers’, nationally and locally. Many of these constitute predatory
interests, formerly nurtured by the authoritarian Suharto regime, which have now
realigned and reconstituted within a new political framework. While the institu-
tional trappings of democracy, the rise of parties and parliaments have served
them well, they have an interest in ensuring that the predatory power relations
that defined the New Order, based on the accumulation of private wealth through
the appropriation of public institutions and resources, remain intact. Lurking
ominously in the background is a widely feared military, which is still licking
its wounds after the advent of reformasi. At this juncture the Indonesia military
is bent on ensuring that its institutional and material interests, if not its outright
political and economic power and influence, are safeguarded within this newly
democratised terrain.
This dimension of the problem was lost on early observers of post-Suharto
Indonesia, who borrowed freely from the democratic transitions literature pion-
eered by O’Donnell, Schmitter and their colleagues, and which centres on elite
negotiations and pacts and the crafting of new political arrangements.45 In trying
to make sense of fast-occurring developments in Indonesia, such observers were
attracted to an overly linear conception of democratic change that is said to begin
from authoritarian decay, then proceed through the stages of ‘transition’,
‘consolidation’ and ‘maturation’.46 Some were also attracted to the idea that the
transition to democracy is primarily a question of crafting the right kinds of
institutions, those which, in World Bank parlance, can produce ‘good gover-
nance’. In this case ‘playing by the rules’ became exceedingly important,47
although it implied no real action to halt the reconstitution and domination of old
elites in new political vehicles. This was, in fact, the essential problem of the
transition in the late 1990s: that they were not brushed aside by reformasi meant
that New Order stalwarts and local operators have had ample time to hijack the
democratisation process in their own interests.
There are those within Indonesia—like a number of NGO and student ac-
tivists—who continue to hope that the ‘good things’ they associate with
democracy, like accountability, transparency, human rights and the like, will still
64
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

transpire in the near future. Certainly they will find solace in the reports of a
number of international development organisations, like USAID, which have
continued to suggest—with a certain naiveté—that what is taking place is
nothing less than a ‘transition to a prospering and democratic Indonesia’.48
Indeed, there is much in common between the neo-institutionalist literature,
which relies on technocratic expertise in the rational crafting of viable institu-
tions, and the ‘democratic transitions’ literature, which ultimately relies on the
right kind of pacts by the right kinds of elites making rational choices,49 and pays
little attention to the factor of concrete political and social struggles. But if hopes
that ‘all good things can go together’ should finally be dashed, it wouldn’t be the
first time that this has happened in the recent history of Indonesia .50 Following
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the attainment of formal independence from the Dutch in 1949, a parliamentary

democracy system was in place characterised by intense competition among a
range of parties. A milestone of the period were the 1955 elections—still
regarded as the fairest that Indonesia has ever held.51 But parliamentary democ-
racy’s hold was always tenuous and the seeds of Indonesia’s long descent into
authoritarianism were soon to be planted.
The turning point came as a response to regional separatist rebellions in the
late 1950s, after which Sukarno gave the central military command wide powers
and control over the administrative apparatus of the state. In 1957 the increas-
ingly powerful military also took over managerial control of newly nationalised
foreign companies that had originally been seized by militant labour unions,
especially those associated with the communists. Sukarno—who, like the mili-
tary, was relatively marginalised under the liberal democratic system—went on
to disband parliament altogether and to set up the system of ‘Guided Democ-
racy’. This gave the presidency wide-ranging powers and transformed parliament
into a body consisting of relatively pliant ‘functional group’ representatives.
Under Guided Democracy, Sukarno would be the ‘Great Leader’, who stood
above petty interests—and, indeed, was the very personification of the national
interest. But Sukarno was unwittingly paving the way for Suharto’s New Order.
Significantly, the PKI was the only party able to increase its power and
influence during Guided Democracy by supporting Sukarno’s simultaneously
nationalist and Third Worldist foreign policy agenda. Indeed, the PKI grew to be
the third largest communist party in the world.52 However, the military, with
increasing US support in the context of the Cold War, began to develop an
alliance with a range of anti-communist forces—including Islamic, right-wing,
socialist and Christian political parties. Its cause was helped by the fact that
Sukarno was beginning to alienate large sections of the propertied and urban
salaried classes, as his autarchic, anti-imperialist and Third Worldist economic
policies resulted in disaster. By 1965, for example, inflation stood at no less than
600%. These conditions allowed for a right-wing coup under the leadership of
General Suharto, accompanied by the massacre of hundreds of thousands of real
and imagined communists.53 Thus, in a relative blink of the eye, the PKI and its
mass organisations were completely eliminated from the scene. Suharto then
gradually usurped powers—sidelining Sukarno himself—and forged a far more
centralised state corporatist system than his charismatic predecessor was capable
of imagining or implementing. In the process he realigned Indonesia with the
65
 VEDI R HADIZ

world capitalist powers. It should be recalled at this time that Indonesian liberal
intellectuals, as well as Western governments and international organisations,
expected the New Order to be a democratic regime.54
But of course the New Order turned out to be ruthlessly authoritarian. Indeed,
Suharto’s legacy was to further marginalise parties and parliament in Indone-
sia—for example he fused all the Sukarno-era parties into just two entities and
privileged a single, state-controlled electoral vehicle, Golkar. He also institution-
alised a corporatist system of representation that basically pre-empted indepen-
dent civil society-based organisations. Workers, for example, were forced to
follow a single state-dominated labour organisation, as were the peasantry,
youth, women, and so on.55 Ideologically the idea of Pancasila democracy was
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advanced ever further—as an anti-liberal, anti-communist and uniquely Indone-

sian system suited to the nation’s culture and history.56
It was only in the wake of the Asian financial crisis that Suharto’s New Order
finally unravelled. That the New Order came tumbling down at this time
reflected the fact that the ruling coalition of interests cemented by Suharto—
based upon politico-business families and large corporate conglomerates emerg-
ing from the apparatus of the state itself—had earlier taken possession of the
state to an astonishingly instrumental degree. This was conducive to the creation
of an economic system that eventually became over-borrowed, over-invested and
unconstrained, and which finally collapsed as a result of a ‘fatal embrace’ with
the same global markets that had helped to nurture it.57 Nevertheless, as
mentioned earlier, this did not stop elements of the old ruling coalition—though
now highly decentralised and diffuse—from reconstituting and seeking to
appropriate Indonesia’s new institutions of market and political governance. This
is seen in the feverish competition in Indonesia today, nationally and locally, to
achieve predatory and instrumental control over state institutions, offices and
resources. But if predatory relations of power can survive the unravelling of an
authoritarian regime, what could break them apart? Is the answer ultimately to
surrender to the forces of the market and globalisation? If so, will economic
liberalisation lead to liberal democracy in the erstwhile Third World after all,
and as predicted by both the modernisation theorists of the early cold war-era
and the contemporary advocates of globalisation? This remains exceedingly
unlikely.

Indonesia, empire and terror

The development of Indonesia’s democracy is increasingly intertwined with such
phenomena as deepening economic globalisation, the US-led ‘war on terror’ and,
ultimately, the prowess of the US hegemon itself. Indeed, Indonesia is now more
structurally entangled than ever in both the global financial markets and the
brave new world of a resurgent US militarism and global security-state. Not
surprisingly, the proponents of US hegemony in the post-cold war era tend to
claim a connection between democracy and the free market.58 Indeed, democracy
and the free market are often presented as one package. But there is a paradox
in the conception of democracy. In their view, democracy is on the one hand
66
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

something that liberates the individual from the state but, on the other hand, an
arrangement of power within which the interests of private investors must be
safeguarded. The solution can only be to have states that will functionally secure
the inviolability and sanctity of property rights. In the case of Indonesia, this is
shown most clearly in the unease of Western governments and international
investors with the social instability that has ensued after the fall of Suharto. They
have been extremely worried by the emergence of a less predictable, even
volatile, set of political arrangements. The labour movement, for example, has
repeatedly been singled out as a threat to economic reform. More generally, IMF
officials in Indonesia expressed concern at the end of the 1990s that ‘too much’
democracy could be a potential threat to liberal economic reform.59
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Anxiety about instability in Indonesia was heightened dramatically in the

wake of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and then the
Bali bombings of 12 October 2002, after which it was alleged that a newly
discovered militant Islamic group—the Jemaah Islamiyah—was waging a covert
war against US interests in alliance with Osama bin Laden. Thus the order and
security aspect of the US agenda were henceforth to be more clearly expressed
than ever. Meanwhile, little is said in US policy-making circles today about the
role of American companies like Exxon and Freeport in bankrolling the free-
wheeling brutality of the Indonesian military in Aceh and Papua—sites of
important separatist movements.60 (In fact, these movements emerged as a direct
response to the brutality of the Suharto regime.61) The indifference in a
Washington preoccupied with order and security was apparent in the lack of
response to the assassination of a Papuan political leader and the fact that the
killing was publicly lauded by one of Indonesia’s top generals.62
The overwhelming concern with order and security, at the centre of the
emergent new US imperialism, has been expressed with particular forcefulness
by authors such as Sebastian Mallaby, a columnist for the Washington Post.
Writing in the influential journal, Foreign Affairs, he argued that the USA must
take on the role of an imperial power, however reluctantly, as the failure to do
so will result in world chaos and grave threats to the USA itself. According to
Mallaby, modern and civil institutions are never going to develop in a distress-
ingly high number of ‘failed states’—no matter how much foreign aid is poured
in—and as a result they are all potential sources of world disorder. He
emphasises that international institutions, such as the UN, have also failed and
it is now the duty and burden of the USA to make the world safe for
civilisation.63
In this context governments like those in Indonesia, China and elsewhere will
enjoy much latitude in defining domestic opponents as security threats and
dealing with them harshly. Following the example of recent US practice, the
Indonesian government intends to have the Acehnese separatist movement
internationally branded as a terrorist organisation.64 Significantly, the US govern-
ment (and military) itself has been accused of systematic mishandling and even
torture of suspected terrorists. Moreover, the invasion of Iraq would seem to
have taken away what little moral authority the USA had left in Indonesia to
preach the language of justice and human rights. This means that the sometimes
ultra-nationalistic rhetoric of Megawati, or the anti-liberal populism of her
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 VEDI R HADIZ

opponent, Islamic politician Amien Rais, do not seem out of place in the brave
new world being forged through US hegemony.
At the same time US military links with the Indonesian military have been
resumed—despite the latter’s long anti-democratic history and well earned
reputation for abuse of human rights—after previously being cut following
developments in formerly colonised East Timor. Significantly, the USA has
gifted the Indonesian military with financial assistance for counter-terrorism.65
Indeed, the Indonesian military has been praised by top US officials like Paul
Wolfowitz66—as well as by Australian and Singaporean ones—as the main
bulwark of stability in Indonesia, or essentially as the only institution that works
properly in the country. This represented a remarkable change in fortunes for an
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institution that only a few years ago was clearly on the defensive as the tide of
reformasi threatened to overwhelm it, if only for an instant. Ironically, some
observers have suggested that sections of the Indonesian military are in fact
working together with, and manipulating, militant Islamic groups in Indonesia in
order to raise their own domestic political bargaining position.67 In this situation
it is particularly odd that the Indonesian military should be considered a bastion
against political instability caused by Islamic militancy or international terror-
ism. Another (historical) irony is that it was the Indonesian military as well that
had benefited most from US policies during the cold war struggle against
communism.

Conclusion: the rise of neo-Third Worldism?

The situation is far from ideal. From Washington’s point of the view a more
predictable, technocratic Indonesian regime—certainly with the backing of a
strong military—would be more useful and dependable for US and transnational
corporate interests. In many ways, the illiberal democracy of Singapore—
‘rational’ and regularised, but efficiently brutal towards potential challenges
against capital—might be a more preferred model. But the choice is really only
between different types of illiberal democracy. This state of affairs is reflected
not only in US policy but also in the permutations in the theories of democracy
and democratisation discussed earlier. In effect, liberal democracy, as an institu-
tional mode of arranging and distributing power (and certainly anything to the
left of it), is today being attacked by both the illiberalism of nascent neo-Third
Worldism and by that of the new US imperialism, despite all the continued talk
about global democratisation.
Neo-Third Worldism may be on the rise in Indonesia and elsewhere, whether
expressed as a particularly virulent form of secular nationalism or, increasingly,
in a brand of populism infused with heavily moralistic, religious or anti-Western
overtones. This is clearly a reaction to US global hegemony. Yet beneath this
there is a strange process of mutual reinforcement taking place: the fledgling
neo-Third Worldists of Indonesia and many other countries need the spectre of
US domination to denigrate such notions as universal human rights as an
imperialist sham, while, conversely, the (no less moralistic) US hegemon
requires belligerent Third Wordlists to help justify its increasing militarism and
security-orientated stance. Thus, in this post-communist world, the real main
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 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

enemies of neo-Third Worldism and of US empire are strikingly similar: the

ideals of liberal and social democracies, and those of a world order based on
equality and peace.

Notes
1
SP Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman, OK: Oklahoma
University Press, 1991.
2
See, for example, RW Liddle, ‘Indonesia’s democratic transition: playing by the rules’, in A Reynolds
(ed), The Architecture of Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp 373–399; and D
Kingsbury & A Budiman (eds), Indonesia: the Uncertain Transition, Adelaide: Crawford House Publish-
ing, 2001.
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3
PJ Dobriansky, ‘Democracy promotion: explaining the Bush administration’s position’, Foreign Affairs,
82 (3), 2003.
4
There has been a number of recent publications on American empire. One of the best known is C Johnson,
Blowback: the Costs and Consequences of American Empire, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.
5
T Carothers, ‘Promoting democracy and fighting terror’, Foreign Affairs, 82 (1), 2003, pp 84–97.
6
Although neo-conservatives have played a key role in setting the current Bush presidency’s foreign policy
agenda, the idea of a democratic Pax Americana is usually viewed as a product of an alliance of
conservatives of various stripes. see, for example, R Bleecher, ‘Free people will set the course of history’,
Middle East Report Online, March 2003.
7
On this kind of democracy, see R Robison ‘What sort of democracy? Predatory and neoliberal agendas
in Indonesia’, in C Kinnvall K Jonsson (eds), Globalization and Democratization in Asia: the Construction
of Identity, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp 92–113.
8
For a good critical overview of the debates see MT Berger, ‘Old state and new empire in Indonesia:
debating the rise and decline of Suharto’s New Order’, Third World Quarterly, 18 (2), 1997, pp 321–361.
9
The classic work was G Almond & S Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in
Five Nations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963.
10
For example, see MT Berger, ‘Decolonization, modernization and nation-building: political development
theory and the appeal of communism in Southeast Asia, 1945–1975’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies,
34 (3), 2003, pp 421–428.
11
The details of this programme are elaborated in RW Dye, ‘The Jakarta Faculty of Economics’, Ford
Foundation Report, 1965.
12
The book was published in 1973 by the think-tank he created in Jakarta, the Centre for Strategic and
International Studies.
13
See A Moertopo, ‘Our national development strategy’, in I Chalmers & VR Hadiz, The Politics of
Economic Development in Indonesia: Contending Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1997. This piece is
taken from Chapter 4 of his ‘magnum opus’.
14
See, for example, K Jackson & L Pye (eds), Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1978.
15
See Sjahrir, ‘The struggle for deregulation in Indonesia’, reproduced in Chalmers & Hadiz, The Politics
of Economic Development in Indonesia, p 156.
16
See J MacDougall, ‘Technocrats as modernizers: the economists of Indonesia’s New Order’, PhD thesis,
University of Michigan, 1975.
17
D Ransom, ‘Ford country: building an elite for Indonesia’, in S Weissman (ed), The Trojan Horse: A
Radical Look at Foreign Aid, Paolo Alto, CA: Ramparts Press, 1975, pp 93–116. This is a revised version
of an article that originally appeared in Ramparts Magazine in 1970.
18
R Robison & VR Hadiz, Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets,
London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.
19
See, in particular, S Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1968. For the ‘democratic’ ideals of modernisation theory see G Almond & B Powell, Jr,
Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1966.
20
SP Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Norman, OK: Oklahoma
University Press, 1991; and Huntington, ‘The clash of civilisations’, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993,
pp 22–49.
21
See JM Boileau, Golkar: Functional Group Politics in Indonesia, Jakarta: Centre for Strategic and
International Studies, 1983, p 68.
22
See R Mortimer ‘Indonesia: growth or development’, in Mortimer, Stubborn Survivors, Clayton: Centre
of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1984.

69
 VEDI R HADIZ

23
S Arief & A Sasono, Indonesia: Ketergantungan dan Keterbelakangan, Jakarta: Lembaga Studi Pemban-
gunan, 1981.
24
See, for example, RW Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000.
25
See H Alavi, ‘The state in post-colonial societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh’, New Left Review, 74, 1972,
pp 59–81; and Alavi, ‘State and class under peripheral capitalism’, in H Alavi & T Shanin (eds),
Introduction to the Sociology of Developing Societies, London: Basingstoke, 1982.
26
See F Bulkin, ‘Golongan Menengah dan Negara’, Prisma, 2, 1984; and ‘Negara, Masyarakat dan
Ekonomi’, Prisma, 8, 1984.
27
M Mas’oed, Ekonomi dan Struktur Politik Orde Baru, 1966–71, Jakarta: LP3ES.
28
G O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics,
Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1973.
29
PB Evans, D Rueschemeyer & T Skocpol (eds), Bringing the State Back In, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985.
30
B Anderson, ‘Old state, new society: Indonesia’s New Order in comparative historical perspective’, in
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Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1990.
31
R Robison, Indonesia: the Rise of Capital, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986, pp 117–118.
32
R. Robison, ‘Indonesia: tensions in state and regime’, in K Hewison, R Robison & G Rodan (eds),
Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Capitalism’, St Leonards: Allen and
Unwin, 1993, p 41.
33
One example is D Dhakidae, ‘The state, the rise of capital and the fall of political journalism: political
economy of the Indonesian news industry’, PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1991.
34
Sjahrir, ‘Indonesian financial and trade deregulation: government policies and society responses’, paper
presented at a Workshop on Dynamics of Economic Policy Reform in Southeast Asia and Australia, Centre
for the Study of Australia–Asia Relations, Griffith University, Queensland, 7–9 October 1989.
35
See C Leys, The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996,
ch 4 for a survey. See also B Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social
Science at the Turn of the Millennium, London: Routledge, 2001; and J Harriss, Depoliticizing Devel-
opment: The World Bank and Social Capital, London: Anthem Press, 2002.
36
D North, ‘Economic performance through time’, American Economic Review, 84 (3), 1994, pp 359–368.
37
Discussed in H Shapiro & L Taylor, ‘The state and industrial strategy’, World Development, 18 (6), 1990,
pp 861–878.
38
K Jayasuriya, ‘Authoritarian liberalism, governance, and the emergence of the regulatory state in post-crisis
East Asia’, in R Robison, M Beeson, K Jayasuriya & H-R Kim (eds), Politics and Markets in the Wake
of the Asian Crisis, London: Routledge, 2000.
39
Robison, ‘What sort of democracy?’, pp 92–113.
40
G Rodan, ‘Theorising political opposition in East and Southeast Asia’, in Rodan (ed), Political Oppositions
in Industrialising Asia, London: Routledge, 1996.
41
Eg MAS Hikam, Demokrasi dan Civil Society, Jakarta: LP3ES, 1996.
42
See the World Bank’s simplistic treatment of civil society’s role in development in World Bank, Working
Together: The World Bank’s Partnership with Civil Society, Washington, DC: World Bank, 2000.
43
See his Mendobrak Sentralisme Ekonomi, Jakarta: Gramedia, 2002.
44
R Robison & VR Hadiz, Reorganising Power in the Age of Markets: Regime Change and the Ascendance
of Oligarchy in Indonesia, London: RoutledgeCurzon, forthcoming; VR Hadiz, ‘Reorganising political
power in Indonesia: a reconsideration of so-called “democratic transitions” ’, Pacific Review, 16 (4), 2003,
pp 591–611; and Hadiz, ‘Power and politics in North Sumatra: the uncompleted Reformasi’, in E Aspinall
& G Fealy (eds), Local Power and Politics in Indonesia: Democratisation and Decentralisation, Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003, pp 119–131.
45
G O’Donnell & PC Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain
Democracies, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
46
G Van Klinken , ‘How a democratic deal might be struck’, in A Budiman, B Hatley & D Kingsbury
(eds), Reformasi: Crisis and Change in Indonesia, Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, Monash University,
1999, pp 59–67.
47
RW Liddle, ‘Indonesia’s democratic transition: playing by the rules’, in A Reynolds (ed), The Architecture
of Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp 373–399.
48
US Agency for International Development, ‘Transition to a prospering and democratic Indonesia’, at
http://www.usaid.gov/id/docs-csp2k04.html.
49
L Rudebeck & O Tornquist, ‘Introduction’, in L Rudebeck, O Tornquist & V Rojas (eds), Democratisation
in the Third World: Concrete Cases in Comparative and Theoretical Perspective, Uppsala: Seminar for
Development Studies, Uppsala University, 1996, pp 3–4.
50
RW Liddle, ‘Can all good things go together? Democracy, growth, and unity in post-Soeharto Indonesia’,

70
 THE RISE OF NEO-THIRD WORLDISM?

in D Bourchier & J Legge (eds), Democracy in Indonesia: 1950s and 1990s, Clayton: Monash University
Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1994, pp 286–301.
51
Among the major ones were the secular nationalist Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), which was the
unofficial party of Sukarno and which was traditionally supported by the bureaucracy; the Masjumi, which
was a ‘modernist’ Islamic party with a support base lying in the small-town petty bourgeoisie; the
Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the ‘traditionalist’ Muslim party, which was both largely Java-based and predom-
inantly rural; and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which had survived periods of repression under
Dutch rule and then conflict with the Indonesian military. Another major party was the Indonesian Socialist
Party (PSI), which was the vehicle of the urban intelligentsia—and which appealed to Western traditions
of liberalism and social democracy. The 1955 general election resulted in roughly equal support for the
Masjumi, NU, PNI and PKI; however, the PSI was almost shut out.
52
R Mortimer, Indonesian Communism Under Sukarno: Ideology and Politics, 1959–1965, Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1974.
53
WF Wertheim, ‘Whose plot? New light on the 1965 events’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, IX (2), 1979,
pp 197–215; and R Cribb (ed), The Indonesian Killings of 1965–66: Studies from Java and Bali, Monash
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Papers on Asia no 21, Melbourne, Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 1990.
54
For the views of Indonesian liberal pluralists at the time, see D Bourchier & VR Hadiz (eds), Indonesian
Politics and Society: A Reader, London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, ch 2.
55
VR Hadiz, Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia, London: Routledge, 1997.
56
See D Bourchier & VR Hadiz, ‘Introduction’, in Bourchier Hadiz, Indonesian Politics and Society,
pp 1–24.
57
R Robison & VR Hadiz, ‘Oligarchy and capitalism: the case of Indonesia’, in L Tomba (ed), East Asian
Capitalism: Conflicts, Growth, and Crisis, Milan: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2002, pp 37–74.
58
Eg Paul Wolfowitz interview by Tony Snow, Fox News Sunday, 6 April 2003. Transcribed in Defense
Link, US Department of Defense, at http://dod.gov/news/Apr2003/t04072003 t0406dsdfns.html. See also
‘Remarks by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz before the Turkish Economic and Social Studies
Foundation, Conrad Hotel, Istanbul, Turkey, July 14, 2002’, at http://www.kurdistan.org/Current-Updates/
remarksbydeputysecretary.html.
59
D Murphy, ‘The mod squad’, Far Eastern Economic Review, 19 August, 1999, pp 10–11.
60
K Harry, ‘Small budget does not justify TNI mercenary activities’, Jakarta Post, 18 March 2003.
61
E Aspinall & MT Berger, ‘The break-up of Indonesia? Nationalisms after decolonisation and the limits
of the nation-state in post-cold war Southeast Asia’, Third World Quarterly, 22 (6), 2001, pp 1003–1024.
62
‘Jenderal Ryamizard: Pembunuh Theys Hiyo Eluay Adalah Pahlawan’, Tempo Interaktif, 23 April 2003.
63
S Mallaby, ‘The reluctant imperialist: terrorism, failed states, and the case for American empire’, Foreign
Affairs, 81 (2), 2002, pp 2–7. Meanwhile, Max Boot, an editor of the Wall Street Journal, has produced
a book-length study of US involvement in ‘small wars’ in previous centuries, concluding that the
contemporary USA should embrace the small wars of the 21st century in an effort to expand ‘the empire
of liberty’. M Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, New York:
Basic Books, 2002. In a similar vein, Niall Ferguson has asked rhetorically whether ‘the leaders of the
one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place have the guts to do it?’, concluding
that ‘we shall soon see’. N Ferguson, ‘Clashing civilizations or mad mullahs: the United States between
informal and formal empire’, in S Talbott & N Chanda (eds), The Age of Terror: America and the World
After September 11, Oxford: Perseus Press, 2001, p 141. See also N Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and
Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, New York: Basic Books, 2003.
64
Jakarta Post, 3 June 2003.
65
T Carothers, ‘Promoting democracy and fighting terror’, Foreign Affairs, 82 (1), 2003, pp 84–97.
66
Agence France Press, 16 October 2002.
67
‘Who’s driving Islamic militant groups’, Laksamana.net, 24 May 2002.

71