Table Of ContentSHDWCASE
snug
The Illusion of Indonesia's
'Accelerated Modernisation'
edited by REX MORTIMER
(cid:127)
ANGU5 AND ROBERTSON PUBLISHERS
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The Contributors I.973
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Contents
Introduction vii
PART 1
DEVELO PMENT THEORY IN PERSPECTIVE
,C}zajltet I : 'Fee Definition of Development
~
Geoffrey R. B. Currey 1
of
C'/zapier 2: The Integration Model Development." A Critique
Alan Smith 27
2
PART
THE NATURE OF THE INDONESIAN EXPERIMENT
..-Chapter 8'.° Indonesia : Growth or Development? 51
»
Rex Mortimer
,Chapter 4 : Indonesia Alodewzisatiorzr Ideology and Practice
Ken Ward 67
Chapter 5: The Indonesian Army: 'Stabilizer and Dynamiter'
Peter Brinton 83
PART 3
SOCIAL SGIENCE AND DEVELOPMENT
.;,Chapter 6: From Ball to Arndt: 756 Liberal Impasse in
Australian Scholarship on Southeast Asia
Rex Mortimer 101
Index 159
Biographical Note on Contributors 164,
.I
Introduction
Over the past five years, the image of Indonesia in the Western
world has been transformed. With the toppling of Sukarno, the
bloody destruction of the Communist Party, and the in-
auguration of a regime under General Suharto proclaiming its
dedication to political moderation and economic rationality,
the picture that most Australians, along with other Westerners,
have of Indonesia is that of a country making rapid and success-
ful strides towards economic development and democracy under
the guidance of military and civilian leaders devoted to the arts
of peace, national prosperity and responsible government. The
recovery of the Indonesian economy especially has been hailed
as little short of miraculous.
In Australia these perceptions of Indonesia, long fostered
by the conservative governments of Holt, Gorton and
McMahon, have apparently been taken over by the Labor
Government which took office in December 1972. The new
Prime Minister (Mr Whitlam) very quickly declared close
relations with Indonesia to be the cornerstone of his foreign
policy, for reasons that have not been spelled out in clear terms.
The Labor Government has already discovered that it has major
disagreements with Suharto's Indonesia on the place that China
and North Vietnam should have in the reworking of relation-
ships in East Asia. But it apparently continues to see the
Suharto Government as one capable of promoting political
stability, social calm and economic progress, and thereby con~
tributing to Australia's security and prop erity. It is clear,
indeed, that the Australian Government intends to expand
economic and military aid to Indonesia, and encourage private
investment in that country, in the evident belief that by so
doing it is serving the interests both of Indonesians and Aus-
tralians.
This book examines critically the assumption behind
Australia's foreign policy that Indonesia is developing favour-
ably with the assistance of Western, including Australian,
Introduction | vii
governmental and private finance. Its concern is not with
foreign policy as such, although it follows from our analysis
that that policy needs to be scrutinised carefully and its
premises questioned. Our purpose is rather to challenge the
notion that Australians, and others who share their views, can
sit back and bask in the changes now taking place in Indonesia
in the confident expectation that they bode well both for
Indonesians and ourselves. -Ehecause such attitudes have been
encouraged by economists and other *social scientists, it is a
challenge to the theoretical framework of their approach and
the conclusions they have drawn from a study of Indonesian
affairs over the last new years.
Prejudice and wishful thinking have all too frequently re-
placed sober analysis in Australian judgments upon events in
Asia, and the price paid has been iiE t: especially for those
Asians who have been victims of the panic, outrage and
violence that have accompanied the venting of our prejudice
or the puncturing of our illusions. It is not beyond the realms
of possibility that the sowing of illusions about Indonesia today
might prompt another outburst oil 'betrayed' expectations
tomorrow.
"
Beyond that, however, there is the wider problem of how we
see development taking place in the large number of poor
countries close to our shores, and how we intervene in their
affairs in the name of aiding their development. Like many
others, we have observed, most of us as Indonesianists and all
of us as people for whom the travails of the Third Vllorld have
a special place in our thinking and feeling, that the plans and
programs devised by Western governments and agencies for the
purported development of the so-called 'underdeveloped'
countries have persistently resulted overall in the steady
enlargement of the gap in wealth and lifestyle between the rich
and poor nations. Even where these programs have brought
some gains in economic growth to their rerribients, they have
invariably spawned greater inequalities of living standards
among the people of those countries, together with the social
and political problems that great inequality promotes.
YVe believe there are very good reasons for concluding that
we are witnessing another experiment of this kind in Indonesia
at the present time, and that the bland optimism about
viii | Showcase Szalfe
Indonesia's future is badly misplaced. In deflating the myths of
Indonesian development, therefore, we seek to bring home to
Australians and others that the policies being pursued there in
the name of development, in which we are heavily involved
through our government and company investors, are calculated
neither to improve the lot of the Indonesian people nor to
promote the kind of stability and progress which presumably
lie at the heart of" Mr Whitlam's foreign policy.
Like Mr Whitlam, we have considered Indonesia important
enough to merit special attention, in our case as an exemplar of
the misconceptions about development in the Third \'Vorld.
Not that we believe that Indonesia represents either a particular
hope or a particular threat so jar as Australia's interests are
concerned. But Indonesia is our nearest neighbor, and a
country of 120 million people whose fate must have some
bearing upon our own. In addition, it is widely cited as the
latest example of an c economic miracle' wrought by Western
aid and advice. (Some of the earlier examples, such as Pakistan
and, more recently, Thailand have rather fallen by the way-
side.) For all these reasons, it represents a case of special interest
for Australians in examining the merits and deheiencies of the
Western-promoted path of development for poor countries.
As is the case with all countries termed 'tlnderdevelopcd',
Indonesia is beset with grave problems of mass poverty, un-
employment, and economic dependence. Orthodox economic
theory has prescribed as a remedy for these ills large injections
of foreign aid and investment, and the pursuit by the domestic
government of 'pragnlatic' policies favouring foreign investors,
ind ustrialisation and large scale technological restructuring.
In recent years, in response to the failure of such policies to
bring about any redistribution of wealth in favour of the poor
countries at the expense of the rich ones, the theory of economic
growth has come under attack from a number of directions,
and the nature of these revisions is considered in the chapters
that follow. The central fallacy of conventional views of
development, we argue, lies in their assumption that processes
which are assumed to have worked in the affluent countries in
the past will do the same job in the poor countries today.
Behind this pivotal assumption, with its doubtful rendering of
Vifestern experience, lie others-that concentrating on eco-
Introduction I ix
nomi growth rates is the key to development; that social and
political structures, and their cultural underpinnings, respond
to rather than interact in a complex way with economic move-
ments, that the relations between rich and poor nations can be
regulated to their mutual advantage.
The result, however, is not a program that proceeds from an
inherent economic logic and lacks social or _political implica-
tions, as the planners too often take for granted.
. . .
contrary, what is substituted for a penetrating consid elation of
the ecology of development for country concerned is
.
framework built consciously Op unconsciously
national characteristics at relevant times of the economically
advanced countries where the planning is done.
Not surprisingly, the outcome not uncommonly reinforces
the dependence of the weak upon the strong, and promotes a
coalescence of interests between Vlfestern agencies, official and
private, and those elite groups in the so-called underdeveloped
country which already occupy positions of wealth and power
and are able to augment these still further by sharing in the
spinout from foreign penetration. .
Those for whom the benefits of development are ostensibly
destined-the great mass of people who are peasants, workers,
tradesmen and petty traders--not only have no so in the was'
in which the process is directed, but all too often are the
victims rather than the beneficiaries of the measures taken in
their name.
Our submission, then, is that the whole issue of develop-
ment-what it means and how it might be attained--has to be
rethought in the light of many experiences, including the pre-
dominantly negative experience of l/Vestern-devised programs,
on the one hand, and the all too frequently ignored experiences
of countries such as China which have adopted altogether
different goals and methods for the transformation of their
societies, on the other. The critiques of development theory
which have come from a variety of sources need to be drawn
upon to stimulate this rethinking, but what is required above
all is a more comprehensive study of development experience
and a more imaginative and human understanding of what
values ought to be aspired to by any state which claims to be
developing.
I
X Showcase State
The essays making up this volume, with the exception of the
last, were originally delivered at lectures and seminars organised
by the Monash University Association of Students. The authors
were all known to each other and had exchanged opinions to
varying degrees in the past. Nevertheless, the papers were
prepared independently, and it came as a considerable surprise
to us to find that our contributions shared a close identity of
viewpoint and Iitted together naturally to form some kind of a
pattern encompassing the most significant features of con-
temporary Indonesian society and politics as we appreciate
them. It was from this realisation that the idea of the book
emerged, and, while all the papers have been considerably
rewritten for publication, the analytic frameworks are very
much as they were delivered.
In the first part of the book, the general concept of develop-
ment as it is generally understood, and as it is being applied in
Indonesia, is discussed and criticised. Both in their own right,
and as contributions in an area where the general literature
from a radical standpoint is deficient in Australia, we believe
they form a crucial introduction to the more particular case
analyses that follow.
The second part contains an examination of the economic,
social and political policies of the present Indonesian regime,
in which we seek to show that, taken together, they form a web
the overall effect of which is to perpetuate dependency and
intensify underemployment, inequality, injustice and oppres-
sion. The nature of the Indonesian elite, and especially its
military component, is given particular attention, for the reason
that we consider it to be impossible to estimate the trend of
events in Indonesia without taking into account the dis-
positions and perceived interests of those who wield power.
The third part turns the spotlight on ourselves, or rather upon
the social scientists upon whom we rely to probe beneath the
surface of events and reveal basic tendencies with which to
order and refine our opinions. In this essay I argue that Aus-
tralian researchers on Southeast Asia, and especially Indonesia,
have long worked with an ideological concept of the world and
social processes which, however it may have been used in the
past to contribute to a better understanding of the societies and
cultures surrounding us, always embodied beliefs which today
Introduction | xi
