The Origins of Indonesian Populism: Public Debate in Java, March–June 1945

In the mid-1990s I met an old man in Surakarta, a lawyer named Soewidji. He gave me a booklet he had written in the last months of the Japanese regime. He told me the police (!) had asked him to submit to Jakarta his thoughts on Indonesia’s future as a nation. In it he offered a revision of the state ideology Panca Dharma that, he claimed, looked much like Sukarno’s later Pancasila. He sent in his submission, keeping a copy that he later self-published.¹ Pursuing this lead I discovered the traces of a major state-sponsored initiative between March and June of 1945 to get Indonesians talking about the kind of independence they wanted. Provincial town-hall meetings were held all over Java. More submissions were sent to Jakarta. Many were published in the Indonesian-language press. One participant later collected 111 clippings in a small book.² The real number is higher—I found a few more myself. Clearly the discussions were meant to feed in to the elite meetings held in Jakarta commencing late May 1945 that eventually produced the constitution under which Indonesia still operates.

Two things surprised me when I first dived into this discussion. One was that it had been so broadly based. It extended far beyond a small hand-picked circle. Another was that so few of the submissions seemed to favor a thoroughly democratic future. A few urged that Indonesia should become a democracy, with institutional checks and balances and a pluralist political party system. But the great majority showed no interest in institutions. Some wrote of shedding blood for the fatherland; others of a Super Leader, of the state as a great family, and of village solidarity. We would today call their tone populist. Many of their themes continued to resonate throughout the revolution that was shortly to follow, and into independence.

Both the endurance of these themes, and the suggestion that they appeared to enjoy considerable legitimacy right from the beginning, raised questions in my mind about the roots of Indonesian democracy. The question has bothered others who have written about popular mobilization in this formative period. Ben Anderson found the moment between November 1944 and July 1946 emancipatory, “as if for one brief moment the societies of Southeast Asia could begin to shape their own futures without dictation from outside.”³ David Bourchier, on the contrary, highlighted the failure to include the term “rights” in the constitution that emerged out of this period. The idea of rights had been pushed out in the preceding debate among elite Indonesian delegates by the combined ideological forces of conservative organicism (associated with law professor Supomo) and egalitarian collectivism (Sukarno).⁴

The present paper examines this remarkable public debate of early 1945 through the lens of recent thinking about populism. The late wartime discussion, long overshadowed by the revolution that followed it, turns out to have heightened relevance to our attempts to understand Indonesian democracy today. The paper introduces two new claims to the scholarly debate about this period. The first is that this was a populist moment, not a liberal, cosmopolitan one. The choice before the political public in Java in the first half of 1945 was not between liberal democracy and some form of authoritarianism. It was between different forms of populism. The second claim is that progress on assessing the democratic potential of those forms of populism is possible. The key step is to replace the usual ideological definition of populism with a strategic one. Populism is here seen as a technique for mobilizing people in order to build a new power base. The same technique, and often the same ideological content, can be deployed either for mobilization from the top down, or from the bottom up. It is these rival mobilizational programs that produced different kinds of populism.

What is populism?

In 2017, the Cambridge Dictionary made “populism” its word of the year.⁵ Today the term is associated with the rise of the far right. It is seen as a harbinger of fascism...