Indonesian Political Thinking 1945-1965 0801405319

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1945 1965

Edi t edby Her ber t hFei t h and Lanc eCas t l e

Indonesian Political Thinking 1945-196$

INDONESIAN POLITICAL THINKING i94^-!96^ Edited by HERBERT FEITH and LANCE CASTLES

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA

AND

LONDON

This volume was prepared under the auspices of the Asian Literature Program of The Asia Society, New York.

Copyright © 1970 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 1970

Standard Book Number 8014-0531-9 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 69-18357 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE COLONIAL PRESS INC.

Preface The writing of outsiders

about contemporary Indonesia often

prompts the response: “Yes, but what do Indonesians themselves say?” The objection may be dismissed as naive if the implication is that a single Indonesian view must exist and be somehow the right one. But it is worth taking very seriously if the intended message is that, in the name of academic detachment, “interior” views of political affairs are often taken too lightly, for it is clear that no “exterior” or detached view of a country’s political affairs can be satisfactory unless it is based on a great deal of understanding of the “interior” views of the people concerned, actors and audience alike. The aim of this book is to provide such interior views through a series of vignettes. We would like to show how the flow of events in the first twenty years of Indonesian independence was perceived by those most concerned to explain it, to show how particular contro¬ versies looked to those involved in them, and to describe the clusters of ideological orientation in which the different patterns of percep¬ tion were to be found. In order to make this volume useful as a documentary record, we have sought to represent the most influential political thinking of the twenty-year period it covers; but we have also tried wherever pos¬ sible to select political thinking that is impressive for its quality. Hence there is great variety here. Our material comes from dailies and weeklies, party monthlies and cultural quarterlies, from speeches, lectures, books, pamphlets, and orders of the day. The range is from reflective essays bearing the marks of Fromm or Shils to impassioned manifestoes of rebels writing from mountain hideouts. It was not easy to combine the two principles of selection. Much of the intellectually powerful political writing of the period had very little influence. Conversely, some of the period’s most influential ideas were never presented except in the most hackneyed and sloganistic

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vi

Preface

forms. We were often able to find extracts which struck us as both intellectually impressive and representative of the views of wider groups, but this was not possible in all cases. Thus, some selections have little value other than that of representing a widely held view of a particular problem, whereas others are of intrinsic quality but low on the count of representativeness. The fact that we have generally been able to find pieces which satisfy us as regards both quality and representativeness is partly a reflection of our own notions of what constitutes quality in political thinking. For us the quality of a set of political ideas is determined in good part by its vividness in a particular cultural context, that is, its capacity to speak meaningfully and evocatively to particular com¬ munities and provide their members with clearly comprehensible maps of their political environment. Vividness in this sense is not our only criterion of quality, but it is an important one, alongside such others as scope, penetration, self-consistency, and subtlety. As we see it, it would be quite inappropriate to judge an Indonesian political thinker—or a political thinker, in this sense of the word, any¬ where—by the standards appropriate to the world of scholarship. An Indonesian physicist or biologist should properly be judged by the standards of the international scholarly community and tested for such qualities as originality and analytical power. The same can be said for an Indonesian economist and, indeed, for an Indonesian political scientist, inasmuch as he is writing for an international audience of scholars and is seeking to be detached in relation to value conflicts in his own country. But an Indonesian political thinker, whose work is addressed to fellow members of his own society and whose concern is to set and clarify goals as much as to explain what is happening, must be viewed against measuring sticks of a different kind. One must in¬ deed ask, How broad, clear, and penetrating is his grasp of the polit¬ ical world about him?”; but one must also ask, “How true is he to the traditions to which he appeals?” and “Do his words have the power to convince and inspire the audience to which they are addressed?” * * °Ur PersPective here, one of looking to the creative aspects of ideological thinking, is partly derived from, and beautifully elaborated in, two very different but equaJty outstanding essays: Clifford Geertz’s “Ideology as a Cultural System,” m David E. Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963) mv ? Tt Aw*S°n,’S