Page 50 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Delegitimating Authoritarianism 35

constitutional debates. Simanjuntak observed that from the mid-1970s, integralism
had enjoyed a state-sponsored renaissance under Suharto but refuted its legitimacy
as a founding doctrine, noting that the term did not appear in the 1945 constitution.
The framers, he argued, in rejecting monarchy and hereditary rule, had also rejected
key integralist assumptions, particularly the principle that sovereignty belonged to the
state and not the people. Given this historical reality, he asked why integralism had
regained status as a founding philosophy under Suharto.
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The question was rhetorical and necessarily academic. But with the New Order at
the peak of its authoritarian power, Simanjuntak’s thesis posed a profoundly subver-
sive challenge. Primarily, it questioned the foundations of the doctrine legitimating
New Order controls. In teasing out integralism’s Hegelian antecedents, Simanjuntak
produced a trenchant critique of its antidemocratic tenets and normative authority,
warning that Suharto’s adherence to Supomo’s original vision would “carry serious
consequences” for democracy and the people’s sovereignty by fostering “totalitarian-
ism and authoritarianism.” Perhaps most damningly, Simanjuntak noted both Supo-
4
mo’s and Sukarno’s 1945 laudatory references to the Third Reich and imperial Japan
as models for emulation, documenting fascist principles’ influence on integralism’s
conception.
Though the treatise gained only limited circulation, intellectuals took up its
tenets as they started engaging the constitutional questions it raised in open debate.
In 1989, the year Simanjuntak submitted his thesis, the news media, most notably
the magazines Forum Keadilan and Majalah Persahi , began airing these critical views.
In November, the daily Kompas convened a three-day seminar on the critique, giving
Simanjuntak the opportunity to attack regime-sponsored academics who had given
integralism constitutional legitimacy. In August 1990, Forum Keadilan followed up
with a twenty-one-page spread highly critical of the ideology, quoting numerous pub-
lic intellectuals. Among these was Goenawan Mohamad, editor in chief of the news
magazine Tempo . Mohamad shared the growing skepticism over Supomo’s under-
standing of Indonesia’s history, casting doubt on the latter’s assertions of immutable

cultural foundations for integralist governance. A month later, Tempo gave Simanjun-
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tak another platform to attack the regime’s repression of rights and enjoin the people
to “clobber” any government attempt to “block, hamper, or impede the channels of
free expression.”
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Seizing the momentum, some forty prominent public figures, including Simanjun-
tak and Abdurrahman Wahid, the leader of the Muslim association Nahdlatul Ulama,
united around this emerging critique and convened the new Democratic Forum in
1991. The regime responded by breaking up their meetings with force, rejecting, as
Robert Hefner put it, the need “for a pro-democracy organization in a country that
had already achieved a ‘Pancasila Democracy.’” Officials then intensified Pancasila
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indoctrination programs, inserting integralist doctrine in textbooks for Pancasila and
Citizenship Education and expunging references to human rights from tertiary school
curricula.
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Sidelines: Subtle Subversion
Despite this crackdown on debate over the nature (and future) of Indonesian
democracy, the media continued pushing the boundaries of political opening, and
critiques of integralism took diverse forms. One was Mohamad’s widely read weekly
column in Tempo , Catatan Pinggir (Sidelines), which challenged, albeit obliquely, the