Page 31 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

16 Chapter 1

But even as the prodemocracy movement railed against him, reformers realized
that a true break with the past would require not only his removal but also the more
daunting task of dismantling his entrenched New Order regime. Further complicat-
ing the challenge, the authoritarian controls that defined the New Order were not a
simple manifestation of one ruler’s managerial style. Their roots, institutional and
ideological, reached back to the origins of the Indonesian republic and were part of
a complex structure that had evolved from Dutch rule through the Sukarno era into
Suharto’s New Order. Fully assembled by the late 1980s, this structure rested on a
foundation of both colonial law and Indonesian political theory inspired by a corporat-
ist, or “integralist,” vision of the relationship between the state and society. It formed
an institutional base through multiple bureaucracies overseeing a maze of regula-
tions, licensing, and tightening controls over ownership.
For reformers, the system underlying Indonesia’s authoritarianism was thus elab-
orate and deeply rooted, requiring bureaucratic change as well as transformation of
a larger political culture. Exploring this layered historical legacy, dating back to the
country’s first constitutional debates, reveals the weight of the past that confronted
the media during the democratic transition over forty years later.

Origins of Authoritarian Controls
The ideological foundations of these corporatist political principles can be traced
to counter-Enlightenment concepts fi rst articulated by German philosophers in the
early nineteenth century. Their embrace by Dutch colonial scholars of the early twen-

tieth century, in turn, strongly influenced the thinking of the Indonesian nationalists
who framed the country’s 1945 constitution.
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On the eve of independence, the sense among Indonesia’s young leaders emerg-
ing from centuries of colonial rule was that Western liberalism and its accompanying
materialism tended to produce greed and exploitation, and they sought an alternative
model for their new nation. Their democracy would be based not on an adversarial
process, but on governance through consensus and cooperation.
During Indonesia’s constitutional debates, Raden Supomo, a former colonial
judge, laid out a frame for this form of governance, calling it “integralism” and invok-
ing the philosophies of Benedict de Spinoza and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As
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scholars of this period have noted, Supomo’s integralism was a form of corporatism—
a statist ideology casting society and government as an integrated whole, whether a
living organism or a vast family governed by a father figure who embodies the spirit of
the people and therefore can divine their greater interests. In Indonesia, the ideology
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would incorporate all citizens on the principle of jus soli (right of the soil) and cast
the national community as both a body bounded by geography and a vast, harmonious
family (a construction dubbed kekeluargaan , or “family-ism”).
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Most importantly, in Supomo’s words, an integralist state is one “that is united
with the whole of the people, transcending all groups in all sectors.” Such a state
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does not stand outside the people but is the people, led by a head of state who is
also one with the people and therefore attuned to their aspirations. In short, unlike
Western democracies, filled with discord and self-interest, Supomo’s vision was of a
unitary state governed through consensual deliberation free of political conflict. Offer-
ing evidence that Indonesia could establish such a democracy, fellow framer Muham-
mad Yamin invoked a golden era of village-centered collectivism traced back to the
Majapahit era. Sukarno’s model of decision-making—inclusive mutual consultation