Tulisan ini mendeteksi sampai di mana studi demokrasi di Indonesia telah berkembang. Berupa tinjauan pustaka terhadap kajian-kajian yang menjadi arus utama studi demokrasi selama satu dekade pasca Reformasi (1998-2009). Terdapat kelebihan dan keterbatasan dari masing-masing perspektif. Penulis kemudian mengusulkan perlunya digunakan pendekatan Demokrasi Radikal (nama lain dari Analisis Wacana atau Analisis Hegemoni). Bisa dikatakan bahwa konsekuensi dari penggunaan perspektif-perspektif arus utama tersebut adalah kajian demokrasi sekadar bersifat deskriptif, dikendalikan dalil-dalil liberalisme politik dan institusionalisme, yang terbukti tak mampu memperlihatkan fakta dan peluang politik counter-hegemoni terhadap konsolidasi oligarki nasional-lokal dalam dekade berikutnya (2019-2024).
Paradoks Demokrasi Indonesia Menubuh pada Transformasi Politik Jokowi, sebagai penanda kosong, yang diperebutkan oleh dua kecenderungan permanen oligarki nasional, yaitu kecenderungan otoritarian menyalahgunakan kekuasaan dan kecenderungan totalitarian menyederhanakan rakyat yang plural ke dalam tokoh yang singular, (Sumber Foto: Majalahteras.com)
Democracy Paradox: Liberalist & Communitarian politics in Indonesia
Objective of this essay is somewhat modest as it examines how democracy, as political discourse, generates multiplicities of response in Indonesia since 1998. Democracy penetrates our political terrain, at the center and peripheries, in many forms of democratic articulation, from four constitutional amendments that rehabilitate our trias-politico’ check & balances between Legislative, Judicative and executive branch, Local Autonomy, Decentralization, up to empowering people’s political participation in direct general election for presidency, representative members, governor, District head, and down to direct electing head of village.
All these formal, constitution-drawn articulations in the first place imply that democracy has become the working rules, principles and institutions of our actual politics. Speaking in the language of discourse analysis, it has reached a predicate of being ‘Master Signifier’, through which we articulate our diverse demands for better society, more democratic ways of doing politics.
However, almost one decade of its introduction reveals its own discontents that more and more scholars and lay people come to doubt its efficacies and promises. They belong to skeptic camp that draws their dissatisfaction upon behavioralist and elitist notion of power-relations and power struggles as taking place in Jakarta, provincial and district capitals as well. For this camp, democracy seems to fail as, for instance, corruption practice grows in number and at various levels of government, parliament, national commissions and so forth.
Other prominent issues are violence that occurs with the greater space of democratic articulation of interests among social and cultural groups, and also burgeoning critique of political incompetence of the members of representative board to address crucial demands from various deprived groups in society. The most contemporary phenomena that incites a shifting from mere skepticism to cynicism are those related to general election April 2009, mostly revolving around too large number of political parties, issues of incompetent candidates, money politics, ethnicism, territorialism, and the ensuing primacy of popularity of metropolitan candidates at the expense of adequacy and capacity to ‘stand for’ and ‘to act for’ the constituent’s demands and interests. This all is a bulk of ‘problems’ which is perceived as human, elitist tempting fallacy of power struggle that only benefits the rich and the popular in whose interests democracy is ‘hijacked’ and personalized.
Against this contemporary backdrop, this essay presents a larger picture, as alternative reading, through which democracy is seen as discourse among other actual discourses that inhabit our political terrain. It seeks to delineate that the so called ‘problems’ of the existing democracy are located in the problematic of the confluence between democracy as discursive framework with other actual political practices. Democracy is not the only game in town.
There are other games, structured in social relations that, within the democratic framework, contribute to translating democracy into variants of politics, identity and subject position in certain localities. Throughout this paper, it will notice how the introduction of democratic framework as mentioned earlier facilitates the production of both liberalist and communitarian politics, which respectively brings about its own defects, or ‘problems’ that so far confuses the skeptic mind. Such understanding implicates upon the ways democratization should be thought and carried out in multiple possibility of agents, channels and contexts.
Consequently, as I strongly argue, the politicizing of democracy needs to go beyond mere either liberalist or communitarian politics, or beyond both articulations. Drawn upon Laclau’s conception of hegemony[1985], it becomes more and more evident that the ‘problems’ is not a technical problems, like the incompatibility of institutional design and the readiness or maturity of our politicians and larger sections of our population, nor the weakness of legal frameworks, but a political problematic of the articulatory confluence between democracy and actual political practices which are mutually interpenetrating in their struggles for redefining interests, identity and subject position. To back up this argument, Beetham’s emphasis [2007] on the fruitful tension, historically inherent in democracy discourse, between liberals and democrats is very instructive to capture the problematic from within the historical course of democracy itself.
Contending Perspectives: From Clientelism, Changing Continuity, Uncompleted Reformasi, to Democracy without Democrats
Let us start our discussion by reading ‘democratization’ through a number of highly appreciated reading or studies carried out by a number of scholars, or groups of scholarly activists that have defined the nature and characteristics of Indonesian democratization processes in the last ten years. In many occasions, we find out quite similar assumption about ‘what democracy is’ and ‘how it proceeds’ in this country. It is also evident that the ‘collapse’ of New Order in 1998 is taken as historical moment from which democratization began and stretched to the present. With this in mind, more and more studies on national and local politics deploy transitory modality of current democratic practices and institutions, with an underlying but never explicitly stated trajectory of this process. With a statement like ‘our political condition is in democratic transition framework’ means in first place that democratization is a project, however unfinished it may be in the contingent course of our political history.
Insofar as temporalization of democracy guides the ways we capture its emergence and development, there raises strong propensity to put time as matrix, like template for a book, through which its ‘fully materialized moment’ is conditioned at certain point in the temporal continuum. When our assessment of the present democratic practices reveals ‘incompatibility’ between those practices and standards of democracy auditing, we tend to generalize actual political practices as belong to the opposite of democracy, be it clientelistic or populist practices. Nordholt [2004], for instance, examines how the introduction of democratic framework, including local autonomy and decentralization, does not imply a shift from authoritarian to democratic rule, or from strong state to strong civil society.
As Norholt focuses on decentralization after 1998 onwards, his conclusive analysis offers us a set of propositions revealing the problems or trends that contradict the possibility of democratization as supposed to take place together with the practices of local autonomy and decentralization. He proposes different way of seeing the ‘problems’ like corruption and clientelism as result from the institutionalized practices inherited from the colonial past into the postcolonial New Order period. His ‘changing continuity’ argument poses a call for rethinking analytical categories in order to comprehend the current ‘dismal’ conditions of democratization. What are his basic assumptions about democracy and actual political practices? Is changing continuity a set of ‘new’ analytical categories as he proclaims?
It is fairly obvious that his conceptualization treats democracy as non-discursive framework, in the sense that as democratic framework it is non-political, while clientelism and populism are both actual practices in response to, or in making use of procedural/delegative aspects of democracy. We need to doubt to what extent political ordering of the Soeharto’s New Order and Soekarno’s Guided Democracy do not confine into democracy, and to what extent the introduction of delegative/representative democracy in post-New Order does not result from democratic struggles of Indonesian people against oligarchic power as political antagonism.
Our point is that democracy is discursive framework that, contingent upon context it inhabits, influences actual political practices and be influenced by the latter as well. Consequently, clientelistic and populist practice that taking place on daily politics are two models of political ordering that spring from their confluence with democratic framework—they are not taking place completely outside the confluence. ‘Developmentalism’ of the New Order, for quick instance, could no longer thought as product of mere power paradigm in the primacy of economy [economic growth, political stability], but as historical manifestation of the confluence of multiple discourses including democracy [freedom of expression, political freedom] that marked the early years of the New Order.
In regard to ‘changing continuity’ perspective, we are informed with a kind of historical fatalism, where ‘long established practices’ are causes, or responsible for the defects of democratization while democracy itself is not contaminated in its interpenetration with this practices. How if we take different view, that is, the emergence of this practices is made possible or reproduced in the failure of politicizing democracy in social terrains, concrete spaces where ‘community’ and ‘identity’ are reproduced by such practices on day-to-day basis.
Another worth debating is Nordolt’s exaggerating skepticism when he warns those who are optimistic with decentralization by thinking it synonymous with democracy. We agree with his warning but we find there is no fundamental distinction between both, insofar as democracy also concerns the ways the state manage power exercise in decentralized ways and opens greater spaces of possibility for large section of the local population to take part in local decision making process. In our understanding, the existence of patrimonial state at both the ‘center’ and ‘peripheries’ is not taking place outside democratic framework so far introduced. It is also the case that the increasing insertion of ethnicism and territorialism in local politics is made possible by democratic framework as articulatory device for constructing ‘political community’ and ‘political identity’, let alone interests and demands.
Quite similar reading of ‘changing continuities’ is abundantly found in Robinson & Hadiz’s oligarchy studies of post-New Order politics [2006]. This quite generalized study starts with a provoking thesis that the New Order’s elites remain in the places of power either at the center or the peripheries after the collapse of Suharto’s ‘imperial’ state in 1998. Hadiz [2003] also makes a strong case, by taking quick assessment of North Sumatra, where local politics remains under the control of local bureaucrats who in the previous regime located in the lower layers of patronage networks. In both writings we find out that the authors put in doubt ‘transition’ paradigm which stresses the shift from authoritarian regime to more democratic one.
For them there is call for new labeling independently of transition-consolidating and deepening trajectory of democratization. They argue that political struggle for power in Reformasi period facilitates the reemergence, reconfiguration and reconsolidation of old caste of elites, who make use of democratic institutions and frameworks to prolong their privileges in more dispersed and decentralized ways in province and district capitals across the country. In short, new framework, old players, diverse center of primitive accumulation and symbolic power, or in Hadiz’s words, ‘uncompleted reformasi’.
From different direction Sidel [2004] introduces the notion of ‘Bossism’ as central category in his assessment on emergence of ‘local strongmen’ in many province and district capitals. Like Hadiz, local strongmen spring from the existence of local mafias, network and clans who struggle for political power by making use of democratic framework such as election for governor and district head. But this time they are not centralized in one family or clan, but diffused and in conflict with each other. Most of them, and the most powerful, are local bureaucrats who have long established relations with local aristocracy and religious factions in each locality. One of his main findings is that arena for political competition becomes more and more dynamic and exposed to shifting over time because no local strongmen can completely master the arena since there are growingly diverse groups of patrons who are in the ways to disparate dynasties.
Sidel’s conclusive reading seems to share a lot with stories of communal violence retold by Klinken [2007]. In Klinken’s assessment, the influx of symbolic and political forces into political arena has shifted the local dynamics of contention into more uncontrollable and violent. By taking Poso, Ambon, North Maluku, Central Kalimantan, and West Kalimantan as paradigmatic cases, we are presented with ‘social movement theory’s reading of decentralization and its unintended consequences in Indonesia. Decentralization offers diverse spaces of identity formation, mobilization of actors, polarization and political articulation that contribute in many ways to the escalation of contentious but violent politics. One of his main arguments is that decentralization as part of democratic framework plays decisive in de-structuring old political structure in the regions, and facilitating different processes of political articulation among local forces, which have already been fragmented and contentious.
In contrast to the more scientific reading of the dilemma between democracy and local politics as mentioned above, studies, carried out by Demos with Olle Tornquist as its leading figure, are more political in the sense that its research aims at criticizing the existing conditions of local politics and proposing options through which the dilemma can be directed to the ‘meaningful democracy’. In his assessment [2007], democratic framework so far introduced results in ‘democratic deficit’ largely because of a number of problems as follow: pseudo-representation, colonization of the instruments of democracy by dominant elites, and the condition of the floating and marginalized democrats.
The first two problems are similar with the findings of Sidel’s Bossism, Hadiz’s oligarchic elite, and Nordholt’s changing continuities, while the third problem indicates a step forward leading to a call for political blocks which are strategically crucial in promoting and hegemonizing political field. It works with a recognition that however reversal the dilemma has been, we are left with challenges to transform the existing conditions insofar as the democratization is not closed project, but still offers spaces for democratic intervention and maneuver by groups of democrats in various democratic movements in strong linkage with pro-democrats in various levels of state institutions, including members of parliaments. Here we find out a ‘social democratic’ tendency in re-streamlining democratic forces that goes beyond class struggle project and other modes of collective articulation of popular vision and popular ‘antagonism’ as well.
What we find interesting in Demos’s political project is a social democracy formula ‘liberal in form, socialist in content’. This formula points to the acceptance of democratic framework including rigors in the distinction between state and civil society, while at the same time making use of the liberal right and institutions to endorse hegemonic struggle for popular representation and control over public matters. However, if we are drawn closer to this option, there lies a denial of the concrete tension between liberty and equality, between the abundant availability of ‘liberal’ articulations through which individuals and groups of individuals channel their separate demands, and the existing impossibility of instituting ‘popular demands and vision’ insofar popular is understood as politically constructed identity which has transformed social difference into one hegemonic equivalence.
In our understanding, Indonesian experience with democracy nowadays seems to reveal one central characteristic, that the core problem may not reside in the ‘lack’ or the ‘abundance’ of political articulations, or equality of opportunity but in the relative lack of equal capabilities among diverse sections of citizens to converse such opportunities [political rights, access to parliament, and so forth] into collective demands and collective imaginary in each locality.
This is the point we will discuss in next session, but we should add to this reviewing that if it is true that the fate of the existing democratization is almost entirely shaped by the immense power of the elites, or influenced by the interest of the small sections of the privileged population, it is also possible to understand this fact not solely in the problematic of rational choice and political morality but the dilemma inherent in the confluence between actual political practices and democratic framework introduced in the years after 1998. Demos has moved forward in streamlining the centrality of agency in resolving this dilemma, but there remains essentialist assumption about democracy as ‘non-discursive’ framework and also about agency as fixed and selected like its notion of ‘democrat’, ‘pro-democrat’ and ‘non democrat’. Insofar as Demos’ democratization project does not exclude these assumptions from its political perspective, it might be difficult to streamlining diverse demands [which is not popular but liberal or communitarian] into popular demands, let alone the possibility of ‘popular’ representation.
To summarize this session, let us be reminded that the surplus of discontents as we found in several readings of democratization above does not necessarily mean the sole objective conditions of the current democratization, insofar as we make careful distinction between discontents in practice and discontents in theorizing democracy at work. That is the very reason why we need to problematize the ‘problems’ they have studied and contest their ‘options’ in the light of different approach and findings. Every time a research on democratization starts with an understanding of democracy as ‘non discursive’, such study will end up with informing us what is democratic and nondemocratic practices, who are the good guys and bad guys, like detective stories where through intricate nexus of efforts the criminal is found, the truth revealed, and the victims satisfied.
In contrast, if we take democracy as discursive framework, democracy goes beyond mere instruments and institutions, it also covers its own social mutation and political contingency through which neither ‘elite’ nor ‘demos’ can completely master this discourse. Moreover, we can no longer deny the fact that both elite and demos [their identity, political subjectivity and interests] are actively constituted through democracy at work as it interpenetrates with other actual discourses diverse groups cohabit on day-today basis and in certain localities. We strongly argue that democratization must be thought of as intensive program rather that extensive and linear project as favored by transition paradigm including its successor like consolidating and deepening democracy.
Liberalist and Communitarian Politics: Problem or Challenge?
We have discussed that there is a fundamental difference in understanding democracy as discursive and non-discursive. Our point in this session is stricter and more derivative, that is, a call for treating democracy in ways that it interpenetrates with other actual discourses in day-to-day politics. This requires the working of recognition that it is political, and must be thought as political agenda for democratizing our ways of doing politics. It is at this point that we find out a tension between its actual function as conditioning politics of recognition and politics of redistribution. And we strongly argue that efforts at integrating these two articulatory dimensions of democratic politics remain absent almost one decade after 1998.
Before discussing the discursive process of democratization in Indonesia in last ten years, it is worth inserting one central aspect of democracy, that is, the tension between both streams seems to have been immanent in the historical nature of democracy itself. Democracy has been defined and given contents by both liberalism and socialism since the great phase of ‘democratic revolution’ in Europe in Eighteenth and Nineteenth century [Laclau & Mouffe, 1985: 152-159]. Democracy means first of all the construction of ‘people’ which is articulated through political struggles to change unjust and unequal power-relation in social and economic relations.
In this sense, democratic politics means transformation of social conditions and enlightening popular consciousness as routes to replace subordination with equality and authority with legitimacy. The greatest task of the democrats during this revolutionary phase is how to unite the multiplicities of identity and interest of social groups in western societies against manifest antagonism like monarchy and deeply rooted feudalism. In the words of Laclau and Mouffe, ‘the decisive mutation in the political imaginary of Western societies took place two hundred years ago and can be defined in these terms: the logic of equivalence was transformed into the fundamental instrument of production of the social’. In other words, Europeans’ first experience with democracy began with struggles for defining what people is and how their multiple interests could be articulated in ways that they felt united and led to the idea and practice of institutionalizing what is called common good, without denying such multiplicities. Multiplicities were articulated while common good and collective imaginary were actively searched, defined and transformed in the course of decades after the revolution.
It is from this point of view that we might be able to better capture the dynamic of democracy in the early to the end of twentieth century when capitalism together with liberalism and socialism sought to redefine and rearticulate democracy in political terrains where state became target of occupation by these two streams of democratic heritage. Liberalism with its politics of recognition [individual liberty, self-interest, freedom of expression, limited state, separation of power] and socialism [collective interests, state’s all-embracing role, economic equality] are historically integral part of democratic revolution; they are not two distinct historical manifestations. Both streams chose their own language of articulating their difference like liberal democracy in the former and social democracy in the latter.
Beetham [2007: 33-8], in his assessment of liberal democracy, makes clear that this political tradition has its own paradoxes when compared to another intrinsic values of democracy. The strong assertion of individual rights and the strengthening of institutions protecting this type of rights is sometimes, as historical records are evident, at odd with the call for popular will, collective good and other discourses which protect larger section of population from excessively penetrating impacts of capitalisms. This historical tension can also be seen in what Bhikhu Pare [2008: 41-3] formulates as the conflict between two types of politics, politics of recognition and politics of redistribution that marks the debate on democracy in recent decades at national and global scale. All these authors are highly aware that the tension is not outside the democracy as metanarrative; they are only different articulations of democracy that must be made complementary as suggested by Parekh. This becomes the actual challenge that contemporary democrats have to deal with, namely, to create chains of equivalence out of chain of difference in order to hegemonise the complementarity of two sides of the same coin, as suggested by Laclau.
Drawn upon that historical background, we are drawn closer to engage conceptually and practically with the current dynamic of democratic discourses at home, Different from logic of thinking and method of assessing democracy as studied by a number of authors in the previous session, we need to locate democratic discourse in its specific context of interplay with other actual discourses/practices that cohabit certain political terrain, be it national or localities. As we already know that democracy is multiple in definition and forms of practices, while remains present with its principles [political equality & popular control of public matters], there must also prevail debates concerning to what extent our democratic frameworks so far introduced satisfy not only individual freedom of political expression but also reaches or deals with the construction of people, of unified multiplicity, in each political terrain. We can extend the range of our question to stimulate debate on how is it politically possible to guarantee the fulfillment of justice [redistribution] through the politics of recognitions as this framework we are employing today.
It does not need all-catching research to state that what we witness in the last ten years is the fact that political struggles for redistribution [public matters, economic justice] is facilitated or articulated through practices of liberal democratic instruments and institutions. The creation of new provinces and districts is believed to spring from ‘popular’ will that inhabits the region. It is also the case with direct election of district head and representative members, where it is believed that the elected are those capable of representing the will and the interest of the constituents. This is all the promise that one can make in name of democracy and its procedures, but our concrete challenge is to ensure that democratic jargons abundant in representative democracy can be actively articulated in decision making process when the elected occupies the places of power.
Politics of recognition without an assertion of redistribution and social justice tends to guide political community into social fragmentation and cleavages of cultural essentialism. Those who celebrate liberalist notion of politics seem to be optimistic that the current liberalist articulations of interest and identity set limits to the state overarching control of private sphere and civil society. Their contention is that the more non state actors occupy places of political authority, the more articulatory and more capable popular will to guide and ensure the fulfillment of economic and social justice, which in New Order defined and articulated by the state. However this view seems to be suspended insofar as the results are not as they are dreamed of, particularly because non state actors themselves do not necessarily mean democratic actors or those who are basically ready and capable of representing popular multiple interests, let alone common goods. What we are witnessing reveals the underlying, sometime manifest, phenomena of representing sectarian interests be it entirely territorial, ethnic, religious and other political schisms.
In our assessment, this fallacy starts since the outset from our ways of conceptualizing civil society as something already there outside state arena, or from the fixed separation between state and non-state sphere, actors and practices. This is the fallacy among ‘pro-democrats’ and ‘liberalists’ that Demos seeks to overcome by introducing the call for political blocks among civil society elements. However, we need to add into this effort that the notion of civil society, as it emerges from liberalist tradition, may not exist at all, and requires political project to make it existent and politically powerful before the state.
Our contemporary experience with democracy has not advanced into democratization of social relation, but remains in struggle for capturing the state. In the language of discourse analysis, our politicians and their clients/constituents are celebrating politics of recognition which is marked by differences, of making themselves different from other groups in terms of symbolic and descriptive representation. This is quite in contrast with substantial representation that favored by socialist tradition where the construction of ‘people’, group and society does belong to the unification of basic interests like peasant association, labor movement, others related to fulfillment of basic needs and collective actualization of self and identity.
This drives us to consider that our celebration of the notion of civil society that marks the discussions, seminars, and publications cannot be detached first of all from our common belief that state, as it inherits New Order’s totalitarian characteristics, is the available institutionalized antagonism that must be fought against. This is to say that civil society is political language we utilize to reform the state, not to reform social relations in social terrain which is also unequal and unjust. As concept civil society is ambiguous because our social terrains are marked by the interplay of forces and demands most of which are not democratic. Market penetration in the constitution of our society is indubitable, where media industry becomes the most apparent apparatus of the neoliberal hegemony, but we falsely perceive of it as reflection of free and unlimited exercise and articulator of civil demands.
It becomes more understandable to witness how the word ‘people’ is excessively employed by the media apparatus and technology of power to indicate nothing but its own population of clients, to employ their miserable conditions as victims of state’s policies and ignorance. Our point is that the burgeoning capture of the state by ‘civil society’ movements leaves social terrain as an open space where powerful non state actors seek to define its boundaries and define what people is or should be. In other words, liberalism in political terrain goes together with liberalism in social terrain, articulating what they think of as ‘popular demands’, while the unfortunate poor are made voiceless in their own standing.
The surplus of political and civil liberty does not necessarily mean the functionality of equal capability among social categories of citizens to actively participate in democratic politics. This is what is taking place today in our country. The surplus remains in stage of disclosing equality of political opportunities, not that of political capabilities which require a set of characteristics like access to instruments and institutions of democracy, well informed awareness and knowledge on the their functions/procedures and density of associational life. Centrality of capabilities becomes more evident when considering the relatively failure of formal representations, and to complement the former with informal but effective chains of representations independently of political parties and elitist incorporation of popular demands.
The lack of capabilities sets limits to the meaningful exercise of political liberty, and tends to confine the citizen into the category of masses to which certain elites seek to mobilize for their political benefits, position and status. This is prone, as it has been evident, to consolidate political interests and identity around charismatic leaders, ethnicity, religion, and territory rather than around their basic needs as citizens living together in certain regions. In so doing, the surplus of political liberty proves to have facilitated the proliferation of identity politics, to be recognized as different, as an entity that should be given special treatment from the state and from the others.
This assessment, in other words, wants to argue that the current democratization revolves around two forms of politicizing liberty: liberalist and communitarian. It is liberalist insofar as our politicizing of democracy does not go beyond individual liberty, while communitarian as long as it does not go beyond symbolic and descriptive representation and articulation when both deal with democratic instruments and institutions. The concrete conflict of identity and interest between those who advocate civil liberty in the name of human rights and those who defend religious dogmatism in terms of tradition tells us this paradox of freedom in the context of democratic spaces where the state is no longer powerful enough to intervene into the social terrain.
In our understanding, this conflict emerges from the relatively absence of political capabilities from both sides to come together as ‘people’, as unified multiplicities, as historical actors whose biggest task lies in defending their common interests against common antagonism like neo-liberalism. In contrast to current classification that the former belongs to democratic movement while later to non-democratic one, we need to situate their political confrontation as manifestation of confluence between democratic framework and actual practices of tradition in public spaces where no group could completely master and define, but must negotiate and cooperate.
What we call ‘fundamentalist’ group does not come from nowhere, its presence, its development, and its circulation in public spaces are made possible by the presence of democratic framework, civil rights and constituted as discourse within metanarrative of democracy itself. As evident in other newly democratizing countries in Africa and Eastern Europe in the last two decades, the introduction of democratic framework has gone together with the presence of liberalist and communitarian movement which both claim to be the true successors, interpreters and actors of democracy. We can include many other stories of conflict between social-cultural groups in the last ten years, which many of them are violent and mutually hostile, which reveal the underlying problematic of democracy at work in Indonesia.
Is the tension unresolved problem or should be thought of as challenge for the ongoing democratization? Insofar as we understand this tension resulting from the nature of democracy as discursive rather than non-discursive, we will treat this tension as challenge for genuine democrats whose double task is first to deconstruct the current ‘democratic’ practices and second, to reconstruct what Laclau calls chains of equivalence where all groups are unified in certain political blocks with their particular antagonism to be fought against in both social and political terrain.
What our democratization needs today and in future is neither liberalist nor communitarian movements, but democratic movement insofar as we understand democratic movement as institutionalizing attempts at constructing popular demands in terms of basic human needs and collective identity, or better say, in terms of common goods and collective imaginary. It is a movement capable of creating chains of multiplicities while respecting differences, the one that sees political conflict not as hindrance to public consensus but as productive basis upon which resolution can be achieved and changeable contingent upon the needs of citizens specific in time and place.
(Frans Djalong. Power, Conflict & Democracy, PCD Project, 2009)
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