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This whole continent [Asia] is like … Disneyland without the safety precautions. (Neal Stephenson 1999, p. 349) Our study of Indonesia – ‘our’ being Australian, but also other non-Indonesian , scholars of Indonesia – is tied up with a series of presuppositions about the New Order. Journalism and ‘pop’ academia latches too easily onto complex and sometimes problematic theories and produces simplistic understandings of politics. I argue that the New Order was an ostensibly capitalist but in fact Stalinist state, although it did not fit the latter bill well either. It was a product of Cold War anti-communist hysteria, which was why it was defended beyond its use-by date by everyone from Ronald Reagan to Paul Keating. A lack of historical understanding about the aberrant nature of the New Order has produced a nostalgia for authoritarianism that has gripped critics of the Wahid regime, both within and outside Indonesia. Abdurrahman Wahid, the fourth president, is seen not only as too casual in style for the men in suits from the IMF, but as ‘feeble’.1 This chapter seeks to disrupt the view that ‘the state’ is the problem in Indonesia, and in so doing challenge more general views about the New Order. WHAT WAS THE NEW ORDER AND WHAT DID IT DO? What was the ‘New Order’, the government headed by General Haji Muhammad Soeharto between Sukarno’s surrender of power – Supersemar – in 1966 and Soeharto’s resignation in 1998? Most media and many academic commentators have written of this period as a monolithic one (Pemberton 1994). Some of the early descriptions of the New Order suggest that it had similarities with the New Order in 1998. Most notably, an essay by Lance Castles 6 THE NEW ORDER: KEEPING UP APPEARANCES Adrian Vickers 72 AA/Part2 23/3/01 6:25 PM Page 72 (1974) describes the corruption, conspicuous consumption and arbitrary use of power of the regime in the early 1970s. The many commentators who kept telling us that the fundamentals of the Indonesian economy were sound up to May 1998, and that Soeharto started off well but went wrong in his later years, would do well to read his observations, coming as they did before the Pertamina scandal. Nevertheless, the continuities in the regime should not blind us to the massive shifts that occurred between 1966 and 1998. The New Order period is best seen as consisting of at least three related stages. The first was the ‘honeymoon’ period, as Umar Kayam has called it, of 1967–74. This was a period of relative openness, in that there was freedom of the press, and the military did not dominate all aspects of government but was part of an anti-communist alliance with students, Islamic groups and a range of political leaders from the Sukarno period. Soeharto ruled as part of a triumvirate with the left-wing (Tan Malaka-ist) Adam Malik and Hamengkubuwono IX, a Sukarnoist liberal. This period ended with the Malari events, which not only signalled the suppression of the students but served to cover Soeharto’s suppression of potential rivals in the military. Through the triumph of Ali Moertopo and those around him in the aftermath of Malari, a stream of political developments led from there to the invasion of East Timor.2 The second, ‘Stalinist’, period from 1974 to 1988/89 was one in which the totalitarian aspirations of the New Order came to the fore. Campuses were ‘normalised’; military and bureaucratic structures were tightened so that Soeharto ’s challengers were marginalised; and the ideological campaigns more usual in socialist states, notably P4/Pancasila indoctrination, were inaugurated . David Bourchier (1996a and in this volume) has produced the best descriptions of the ideology of this period. At the end of the 1980s international pressures led to deregulation and the pretence of ‘openness’, which made some of the contradictions of the regime more apparent. This third period might be considered as the long goodbye of a leader surrounded by yes-men, living out fantasies of consumption coupled with immoral displays of power. This was not so much a ‘liberal’ period of deregulation as a period of unrestrained plundering of the economy. The New Order has been analysed in two contradictory ways: by focusing either solely on ‘the state’ (a triumph of ‘state’ over ‘society’) or entirely on Soeharto. In the post-1998 literature it has been convenient to blame everything on this one man, the supreme dalang (shadow puppeteer). For those who were part of the New...

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