1 Two Decades of Ideological

TWO DECADES OF IDEOLOGICAL CONTESTATION IN INDONESIA: FROM DEMOCRATIC COSMOPOLITANISM TO RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM David M. Bourchier Asian Studies, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia Correspondence Address: Asian Studies (M259), University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. Email: [email protected] Orcid ID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3648-955X Published in Journal of Contemporary Asia 8 April 2019 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2019.1590620 Abstract: This article surveys ideological developments in Indonesia over the past two decades, tracing a shift in the ideological centre of gravity from the embrace of democratic norms in immediate post Soeharto period towards a conservative and inward-looking religious nationalism. Several reasons are identified for this shift, including the failure of reformers to adequately deal with the legacy of Soeharto’s Pancasila indoctrination project and the success of conservative New Order elites in regaining control of the democratic process after 2001. Attention is given to the concessions made to Islamist interests under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, which gave conservative Islam an unprecedented level of power and legitimacy. Of special importance here was the Constitutional Court’s validation of the blasphemy law, helping transform Indonesia into an overtly religious state and pave the way for greater state involvement in enforcing moral norms based both on Islamic values and a conservative reading of indigenous culture. The article also highlights the success of Prabowo Subianto’s populist authoritarian movement in linking with sectarian groups, prompting President Joko Widodo to adopt an increasingly authoritarian and xenophobic agenda, leaving little space for the public defence of secular law, pluralism, democracy and human rights. Key words: ideology; Indonesia; democratic cosmopolitanism; religious nationalism; Islamism; Pancasila One of the striking images of the late 2016 rallies against Jakarta governor Basuki “Ahok” Purnama was an Indonesian flag the length of a football pitch being carried over the heads of a massive demonstration by hard-line Muslim leaders and their followers in central Jakarta. It was remarkable because the “Red and White” of the flag has long been the symbol of the secular or anti-Islamist nationalists in Indonesia. Its embrace by Islamists illustrates an important development in the ideological landscape in Indonesia over the past two decades, namely the convergence of religious and nationalist conservatisms to produce a new brand of religious nationalism. This stream of political thinking is at once nativist, religious and 1 nationalist. It views the Indonesian nation as having been born in opposition to secular- liberalism and regards the state as having a unique historical obligation to protect and enforce religious values. While far from hegemonic, religious nationalism has come increasingly to occupy the centre ground in Indonesian politics. To examine how this happened, this article focuses on ideology in the years since the fall of President Soeharto. If we equate ideology with legitimating propaganda promoted by state agencies – as studies of ideology in Indonesia have tended to do – we can certainly say that it became less pronounced than it was during the Soeharto era of 1966-1998 (see, for instance, Morfit 1981; Hadiz 2004; McGregor 2007; Bourchier 2015). One of the first acts of the Habibie government following the fall of Soeharto in 1998 was to dismantle the indoctrination programme that had been such a pervasive feature of Soeharto’s “New Order.” While post Soeharto cabinets have all had their slogans and programmes, they have not given priority to enforcing ideological conformity. The study of ideology in non-authoritarian systems requires a wider lens, one that analyses competition over “the control of political language and policy” (Freeden 2010, 480) and “battles over the articulation of rival decontestations of central political concepts” (Maynard 2013, 302).1 If we define ideology in this broader sense as a battleground of ideas about democracy, culture, law and religion then it is clear that ideology remains a crucial part of political contestation. The most frequent and hotly contested disputes, especially in the past decade, have been over the question of the proper relationship between the state and Islam, namely the extent to which the state should be responsible for upholding Islamic values.2 But it is important to recognise other ideological fault lines that intersect with this debate. One is the argument between those seeking to preserve the democratic gains of reformasi and those who favour a return to New Order style rule, or, put differently, democracy versus authoritarianism. Another is cosmopolitanism versus nativism, the argument between those 2 who appeal to putative universal principles such as human rights versus those who argue that law and politics should rather be informed by “traditional cultural values” such as harmony, mutual assistance (gotong royong) and communal deliberation (musyawarah). Debate over these issues was especially visible during the 2014 presidential election between supporters of Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi) and Soeharto’s former son-in-law Prabowo Subianto. This article uses these concepts to sketch the major ideological developments in the post-Soeharto era. Because the production and consumption of ideology was such a feature of the Soeharto period this article begins with a brief examination of how the New Order regime deployed the state ideology of Pancasila or the “Five Principles”.3 Pancasila should be understood as the frame within which debates over ideology take place in Indonesia; all ideological battles are in a sense battles over the interpretation of Pancasila (see Gellert 2015, 374). Using a mainly historical structure, the article then examines the reaction to aspects of New Order ideology before going on to map ideological continuities and innovations against the changing political circumstances of the democratic period. While ideology is never an easy thing to pin down, it will be argued that political battles of the past two decades have shifted the ideological centre of gravity from the democratic cosmopolitanism of the Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid period – defined here as an orientation to liberal democratic norms and universal principles of human rights – towards a more intolerant, conservative brand of religious nationalism. While religious nationalism took shape during the presidency of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, it has gathered momentum in recent years thanks to the alliance between Prabowo’s populist authoritarian movement and the resurgent sectarianism led by Islamist groups. SOEHARTO’S “PANCASILA DEMOCRACY” 3 While Soeharto claimed to disavow politics in favour of developmentalism, he devoted enormous resources to promoting and enforcing ideological conformity. His regime represented itself from the start as the champion of Pancasila, the state ideology articulated by Sukarno during the constitutional debates of June 1945. This was no easy task because it involved prising Pancasila from its author and convincing the public that Sukarno had betrayed Pancasila. The ideologues of the early New Order period did this by archaising Pancasila, by redefining it as the original cultural essence of the Indonesian people, innocent of the Western ideologies, including communism, that Sukarno had allowed to “pollute” Indonesian politics. Soeharto (2003, 104-109), like Sukarno, claimed that Pancasila had been “excavated” from indigenous tradition but while Sukarno’s image of traditional culture was dynamic and egalitarian, Soeharto’s was hierarchical, harmonious and orderly. As argued elsewhere, the New Order regime’s depiction of traditional culture as static and harmonious had been favoured since the 1930s by a conservative aristocratic stream of nationalism with an interest in maintaining social stability (Bourchier 2015). It took root in Indonesia thanks to the influence of lawyers educated at the Leiden School of Law who embraced not only a romanticised view of Indonesian village life but also the assumption, which goes back to the ideas of the jurist von Savigny, that a nation’s legal order is legitimate only to the extent that it reflects that nation’s indigenous spirit, its Volksgeist. By successfully linking Pancasila with this conservative vision of Indonesia’s culture and at the same time elevating Pancasila to semi-sacred status in both the ideological and legal realms, the New Order forged a powerful weapon with which to authenticate its rule and silence its critics. Representing itself as the saviour and guardian of Pancasila enabled the regime, with the assistance of its substantial security and intelligence apparatus, to accuse its leftist and liberal critics of being anti-Pancasila and thereby un-Indonesian. Demands for human rights and democracy could be dismissed on the grounds that while these notions may 4 be appropriate for individualistic cultures they had no place in Indonesia’s “Pancasila Democracy” because Indonesian society was, in its essence, communalistic, harmonious and consensus seeking. Soeharto’s regime invested heavily in Pancasila education, especially after 1978, eventually extending it to all sectors of society through the so-called P4 programme (Guide to the Realisation and Implementation of Pancasila). In the early 1980s Soeharto introduced a law requiring all social and

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