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Indonesia 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.
Data as of November 1992
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