Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T00:42:03.829Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Communist Phoenix and the Indonesian Garuda: Reflections on Cyclical History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Ann Ruth Willner
Get access

Extract

At Least one element of consistency has continued to characterize the course of political events in Indonesia—its capacity to confound the expectations and defy the predictions of most Western observers and scholars. The fate of the Communist movement provides the most recent example. Donald Hindley concluded, in his 1964 study of the policies and development of the Indonesian Communist party since national independence, that a “Communist rebellion is out of the question in the foreseeable future” (p. 301). Guy Pauker's analyses in 1964 and early 1965 of political developments stressed the probability that Indonesia would imminently become a Communist state, either by acclamation or in default of opposing forces.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , April 1967 , pp. 500 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1967

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Pauker, Guy J., Communist Prospects in Indonesia, The RAND Corporation, R-4135-PR (November 1964Google Scholar); and “Indonesia in 1964: Toward a ‘People's Democracy’?” Asian Survey, v (February 1965), 88–97.Google Scholar

2 See , Soedjatmoko, “The Indonesian Historian and His Time,” in , Soedjatmoko, ed., An Introduction to Indonesian Historiography (Ithaca 1965), 409–12.Google Scholar

3 The term “game” here does not imply a reference to the theory of games, although some similarities might be inferred.

4 This characteristic may well be less specifically Indonesian than it is typical of changing societies in which emerging cleavages threaten previous bases of unity and impede the establishment of a new unity on a basis other than consciousness of community or ethnic group or nationalist opposition to colonialism.

5 Vlekke, Bernard H. M., Nusantara (The Hague 1959), 47–51Google Scholar.

6 For details of the parliamentary period, see Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca 1962).Google Scholar

7 In Power and International Relations (New York 1962Google Scholar), Inis Claude provides a most illuminating analysis of the balance-of-power concept and its uses.

8 See Kaplan, Morton A., System and Process in International Politics (New York9X957)> 22–36+22–36>Google Scholar. Of the rules of the system elucidated by Kaplan, those that most closely approximate my perceptions of the Indonesian system are these: “1. Act to increase capabilities but negotiate rather than fight. .. . 4. Act to oppose any coalition or single actor which tends to assume a position of predominance with respect to the rest of the system. . . . 6. Permit defeated or constrained actors to re-enter the system as acceptable role partners or act to bring some previously inessential actor within the essential actor classification” (p. 23).

10 Thus, in the early 1950's, parties intent upon dissolving coalition cabinets frequently acted to precipitate a first move by their opponents. Between 1956 and 1958, the central government negotiated at length with the regional dissident councils; it was only when the councils found it necessary to move from tacit defiance to open rebellion that they provided the pretext for strong retaliatory action.

11 For details, see Kahin, George McT, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca 1952), 256–303.Google Scholar

12 See Kahin. It might be noted that the Communist version of this government action calls it deliberate provocation.

13 One of the interesting debates of recent years has revolved around the question of whether Sukarno was “domesticating” the PKI or vice versa. See, for example, , Hindley, “President Sukarno and the Communists: The Politics of Domestication,” American Political Science Review, LVI (December 1962), 915Google Scholar–26; , Pauker, Communist Prospects; van der Kroef, J. M., The Communist Party of Indonesia (Vancouver 1965), 296Google Scholar.

14 See van der Kroef, J. M., “Indonesian Communism's ‘Revolutionary Gymnastics,'” Asian Survey, v (May 1965), 218Google Scholar–22.

15 The permeability of the respective intelligence curtains might be indicated by the fact that the chief of army intelligence was a close relative of a member of the PKI politburo.

16 For a highly plausible reconstruction of many of the details and some interesting hypotheses, see Dommen, Arthur J., “The Attempted Coup in Indonesia,” China Quarterly, No. 25 (January-March 1966), 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar–70; Daniel Lev gives a brief summary, reserving judgment on the extent of PKI participation, in “Indonesia 1965: The Year of the Coup,” Asian Survey, vi (February 1966), 103Google Scholar–10.

17 For a relevant discussion of provocation through reciprocal fear of surprise attack, see Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 207–29.Google Scholar

18 One might just as easily argue, by the same method of projecting one's normative biases, that millions of Indonesians who chafed under the strains of Guided Democracy did not forget that the PKI was its earliest and in some ways its most enthusiastic proponent, when Sukarno first broached his proposal.

19 For example, of two villages with similar socioeconomic structures, each composed mainly of landed farming families, the members of one were almost to a man members of the Orthodox Islamic party and those of the other almost completely PKI. The head of the first village was the adopted son of a noted Islamic teacher; the head of the second, who was one of the wealthiest men of the district, had been converted to communism in the course of his travels as a merchant.

20 See Pauker, Guy J., “The Role of the Military in Indonesia,” in Johnson, J. J., ed., The Military in the Underdeveloped Areas (Princeton 1962), 185–230Google Scholar; and Lev, Daniel S., “The Political Role of the Army in Indonesia,” Pacific Affairs, xxxvi (Winter 1964–65), 349Google Scholar–64.