4 - A Game of Inches

Summary

The long process of constitutional change that began in 1999 may have been fraught with the danger of breakdown. Yet it had discernible benefits as well as costs.

On the one hand, there were repeated opportunities to revisit previous decisions. Ordinarily, midcourse correction, a standard feature of engineering solutions to redress system failures, should they occur, is very difficult to build into political institutions, because interests so quickly congeal around whatever arrangements are adopted. In this case, however, many solutions were rethought along the way; and, as I have noted earlier, several important preferences of major actors were turned around completely. In this long process, several untenable arrangements were altered. Moreover, the consensual character of the changes meant that no one who was on the inside – and that includes the armed forces – could easily turn against the constitution later. This was a substantial advantage. If everyone had not been brought along, the new constitution might well have been vulnerable to an appeal to a cynical public that it was a put-up job designed to perpetuate the preexisting elite in new constitutional clothing. This is another way in which Indonesian decision makers traded off the benefits of a quick constitutional reconstruction to gain the benefits of peace and, ultimately, the consent of the public.