Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia (review)

Book Reviews181 Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia. Edited by Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandai. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 247pp. This is a very thoughtful collection of essays that seeks to capture what the Asian financial crisis of 1997-99 did to the old and new social and political forces found in two neighbouring countries, Indonesia and Malaysia. These neighbours have not often been directly compared with each other in the past and, even though the period under study is short, both have yielded fascinating stories. The stress here is on stories because the six authors have deliberately avoided doing what many social scientists tend to do, that is, to concentrate on formal institutions and structures and the powerful elites that manipulate them, or to draw conclusions from empirical data that have been selected with certain theoretical models in mind. The authors offer instead their reinterpretations of concepts like authoritarianism and democracy, and use thick description to raise interesting questions about the various manifestations of the concepts in two different parts of Southeast Asia. In an important introductory essay, the editors throw doubt on recent debates that have polarized the two concepts and concentrated on how and when democracy would displace authoritarianism. They show that, at least for Indonesia and Malaysia, especially in the contexts of Prime Minister Mahathir's sacking ofhis heir apparent, Anwar Ibrahim, and the fall ofPresident Soeharto, two themes that loom large throughout the volume, a wide range of people responded in greatly varied ways. Their actions reveal many layers of "oppositional politics" and suggest that, when authoritarianism is challenged today, many kinds of players come on the stage. These do not necessarily represent democratic progress, no more than what those in power or with influence do in response should be classed as typically authoritarian. The six essays seek out different sets of actors. The first three provide an interesting overlap between the middle classes and the working classes. Ariel Heryanto begins with the most prominent, the new middle classes in Indonesia and Malaysia. The two countries have produced different kinds of intellectuals and professionals because their postcolonial experiences are totally unlike. He gives examples from the behaviour of academics in two universities, the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur and the Satya Wichana Christian University in Salatiga, after they had experienced decades of authoritarian rule. In addition, he also uses the example of media professionals who belong to a similar middle class and seem divided in comparable ways in their attitudes towards authoritarianism. Philip Kelly offers two layers of 182Book Reviews comparison: on the one hand, middle class initiatives in building civil society as contrasted with working class indifference; on the other, an early urban environment like the island of Penang and a newly opened up industrial zone like the island ofBatam. That they should both be so different is not surprising, but the details of the constraints on civil society even in an old trading hub like Georgetown are fascinating. Batam is too young a development to provide conclusive evidence about how the working class might grow, but the third essay by Vedi Hadiz clearly shows how the working classes have been tamed by decades ofanti-communist and anti-socialist policies in both countries. His focus on the missed opportunities for labour organizations after 1997 makes the story even more poignant, but there is no mistaking the success of the fragmentation policies of authoritarian governments. This has made it difficult to see how labour can in future bargain for better terms as globalization bites deeper into the two economies. The next two essays come at oppositional positions from different starting points but converge on the activism ofwomen as they recognize the maleness of recent authoritarian trends. Norani Othman relates Islamization to democracy but her essay makes clear that the test ofthat connection would have to be found in how Islam deals with the place of women and non-Muslims. But her sense of history leads her away from confrontational approaches to the need for the judicial use of tradition itself to underline the democratic elements in the origins of Islam. Melani Budianta tackles the realities of the Indonesian...