Military politics, Islam, and the state in Indonesia by M Mietzner

MARCUS MIETZNER

Military politics, Islam, and the state in Indonesia: from turbulent transition to democratic consolidation

Singapore: ISEAS, 2009

382 pp. ISBN 978-981-230-787-3

pb S$49.90/US$39.90

Reviewed by John Sidel, LSE

Over the course of the past ten years, Indonesia, the fourth most populous – and largest majority-Muslim – country in the world, has undergone a definitive transition from centralised authoritarian rule to decentralised democracy. The same period has seen the declining threat of separatist, communal, and religious violence, as well as a commensurate diminution of state violence by the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI). These shifts over the past decade arguably represent major developments in the regional context of Southeast Asia, if not the broader geo-political order. After all, alternative scenarios – military coups, large-scale communal violence, Islamist takeover – were envisaged by various observers as plausible outcomes quite different from the stable, almost placid, pattern of formal democratic politics and élite continuity seen in Indonesia today. Yet few scholars have treated these transformations as puzzles to be solved or as questions to be debated. Scholarship on Indonesia has instead overwhelmingly focused on the new task of describing and explaining the new patterns of politics observable across the diverse, sprawling Indonesian archipelago under conditions of a consolidated, if not yet fully crystallised, system of decentralised democratic politics.

Marcus Mietzner’s new book, Military politics, Islam, and the state in Indonesia: from turbulent transition to democratic consolidation, rises to this challenge with a highly detailed and well documented account of the past decade of Indonesian politics. Mietzner is amply qualified for the task, given the ten years he spent living in Jakarta as a PhD student, consultant, and analyst of Indonesian politics and society. Over the years, he developed a reputation among academic Indonesia specialists for his unsurpassed access to leading politicians, Islamic intellectuals, and military officers in Jakarta, and for his unrivalled knowledge of the political establishment. Thus his new book offers a rich account of the key years of recent Indonesian history based on diverse sources, ranging from interviews to personal memoirs, newspaper reports, and government documents.  By bringing his account up to the present, moreover, Mietzner incorporates the first term of current president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono into the narrative of Indonesian democratisation. His book surpasses previous narrative accounts in terms of breadth of coverage and historical depth, richness of documentation and empirical detail.

In analytical terms, Mietzner’s book bears the hallmarks of an insider/expert account. His familiarity with key players and embeddedness within the corridors of political power in Jakarta allow him to see how personalities and contingencies affected the ebb and flow of recent Indonesian history, while rendering him sceptical of more structuralist accounts stressing social forces and institutional interests and constraints. Mietzner throws cold water on Robert Hefner’s account of an ascendant ‘civil Islam’ as the motor of Indonesian democratisation, and he cursorily dismisses the institutional and generational approach to Indonesian military politics put forth by Cornell University scholars like Ben Anderson and Douglas Kammen. Here it is worth highlighting that Mietzner is not only sceptical of the explanatory power of arguments based on the logic of institutional interests – he is pessimistic as to the extent of institutionalisation of power in Indonesia, and concerned as to the country’s future in the absence of firmly rooted and developed institutions of democratic governance and civilian control over the coercive apparatuses of the state.

Mietzner’s view of current president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is similarly critical. He shows how Yudhoyono’s avowed professionalism and political disinterestedness in the key years of transition from authoritarian rule masked ambition and efforts to position himself to maximum personal advantage. He also notes the extent of Yudhoyono’s personalisation of appointments within the uppermost echelons of the military hierarchy, with military academy classmates and cronies, close friends and family members installed in key positions, in a pattern more closely resembling the Suharto era than the administrations of Yudhoyono’s more recent (and more democratically elected) predecessors in the presidency. Crucially, Mietzner debunks notions of Yudhoyono as an active proponent of reform. Indeed, he shows how Yudhoyono has dithered and at times actively obstructed efforts to promote reform of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI). Mietzner’s account is a refreshing counterpoint to the adulatory depictions of Yudhoyono in the media, and to the largely uncritical coverage found in the academic literature as well.

Beyond the descriptive strengths of Mietzner’s account, what of its analytical approach? Throughout the book, Mietzner depicts leading military officers as ambitious opportunists, while simultaneously deriding civilian politicians and Muslim leaders for both their fractiousness and their tendency to draw the military into politics. But beyond this story of diverse personalities and personal interests, a broader and more comparative perspective on democratisation suggests an underlying logic to the pattern of recent Indonesian history. With the shift from authoritarian rule to electoral democracy, after all, the twin notions of ‘civil society’ and ‘the state’, each with their own idealised, imagined autonomy from personal and factional interest, invariably fade and blur. At the same time, the rise of electoral politics sees ‘civic leaders’ and ‘professional officers’ morph into ‘politicians’ whose individual identities and self-interestedness can no longer be disavowed. Thus Mietzner’s tale of disillusionment is a familiar one to scholars of democratisation in other parts of the world.

Indeed, if one looks elsewhere in Southeast Asia, there are striking similarities between the trajectories of early post-authoritarian politics in Indonesia to date and those observed in Thailand and the Philippines in earlier decades. Two-term Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, after all, is not the first retired Army general to entrench himself as national executive and to enjoy a reputation as an honest broker, a protector of democracy, and a proponent of reform. Former Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces General Prem Tinsulanonda’s stint as Prime Minister in Thailand in 1980-88 and Former Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Fidel V. Ramos’s term as President of the Philippines in 1992-1998 come to mind as well.

Seen in this light, Mietzner’s scathing account of the limitations of reform under Yudhoyono comes as a timely rejoinder to the prevailing celebrations of Yudhoyono’s re-election earlier this year to a second presidential term (2009-2014). For if the post-Prem and post-Ramos trajectories of politics in Thailand and the Philippines are any guide, then the Yudhoyono interregnum is likely to be followed by a period of renewed political turmoil in Indonesia, in which the issues and problems only superficially finessed by the current president but substantively left to fester will resurface, with a vengeance, in the years ahead. It is to be hoped that veteran Indonesia-watcher Marcus Mietzner, now based at the Australian National University in Canberra, will continue to track developments in Jakarta and elsewhere across the Indonesian archipelago, and to contribute his deep knowledge of the country and ample analytical skills to the task of chronicling its ongoing struggle for meaningful democracy.