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There is no Indonesia Model for the Arab Spring

Yes, Muslim-majority Indonesia has made a successful transition to democracy. But no, that doesn’t make it an example for the Arab Spring.

BY TOM PEPINSKY | FEBRUARY 27, 2013

Many analysts of the Arab Spring have observed that the recent democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia echo what happened in Indonesia, another Muslim-majority country, in the late 1990s. These observers cite Indonesia's transition as a model or template for the countries of the Arab Spring. But the similarities between the three countries are deceptive.

Beginning with Suharto's resignation in May 1998 and ending with multiparty parliamentary elections held in June 1999, Indonesia -- like Egypt and Tunisia -- witnessed the dismantling of many of the institutional and political legacies of decades of authoritarian rule. As in Egypt and Tunisia, Indonesia's authoritarian New Order had also previously clamped down on Islamist opposition groups. When the New Order collapsed, Indonesia's Islamists were among the first to articulate a new vision for what Indonesian politics should become. Yet Indonesian Islamists have failed to capture either the mobilizational energy or the electoral following that Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood have enjoyed overwhelmingly in North Africa. Whereas the first democratic elections in Egypt and Tunisia brought Islamists to office, Indonesia has had three democratic elections since 1999, and Islamists have failed to make an electoral breakthrough in any of them.

The different trajectories of political Islam in post-authoritarian Indonesia, Egypt, and Tunisia show why there can't be an "Indonesian model" of democratic transitions in Muslim-majority countries. To be sure, new Muslim democracies in Egypt and Tunisia face similar challenges as Indonesia did when it emerged from authoritarianism. These include histories of rigged elections and managed oppositions, delicate relations with Western allies, large and visible non-Muslim minority populations (in Egypt), weak rule of law coupled with large and inefficient state bureaucracies, activist militaries with histories of political action, and many others.

But one major difference between Indonesia and its North African counterparts exists. Whatever the excesses of the brutal and corrupt New Order regime, Suharto presided over remarkable increases in the material well-being of the Indonesian people. By contrast, Ben Ali and Mubarak oversaw developmental debacles in Tunisia and Egypt: economic stagnation, ineffective development policymaking, and state decay. In such environments, Islamists thrive because their ideas resonate with a natural constituency of disenfranchised, disempowered, and frustrated citizens who expect more from their governments.

This is not a new argument. Three decades ago, Philip Khoury identified the "crisis of the secular state" as the root cause of what he termed "Islamic revivalism" in the Arab Middle East. The crisis of the secular state was fundamentally about the inability of nationalist and socialist governments in places like Egypt and Tunisia to deliver the development, material prosperity, and economic performance which they, as modernizing states, had implicitly promised their citizens. Islamic revivalism was a spiritual, social, and eventually political response to "state exhaustion." Islamist political thought contained both an explanation for the failure of secular development models (for they ignored or even betrayed classical religious principles) and a template for future political action. In various ways, Islamists around the world today use this vision for Islam as a political tool to promise a better life.

The key point is that these movements resonate most among communities for whom the secular state has failed: lower-middle classes, university graduates without jobs, new migrants from the countryside to the cities, and others. The electoral success of Islamists in post-authoritarian Egypt and Tunisia simply reflects the failure of these regimes to make people better off than they were before.

Islam and politics in post-authoritarian Indonesia is different because authoritarian Indonesia was different. If Egypt and Tunisia are case studies in state exhaustion and developmental stagnation, New Order Indonesia is a case study in economic transformation and social development. Under Suharto, female literacy rates skyrocketed and birth rates plummeted. Public debt remained chronically high in Egypt and Tunisia, whereas it was manageable in New Order Indonesia. But the Arab regimes' unemployment crises had perhaps the most devastating effects on the daily lives of ordinary citizens. Adult unemployment rates never exceeded 40 percent in Indonesia, even during the depths of the Asian Financial Crisis that ultimately drove Suharto from power. In Egypt and Tunisia, adult unemployment rates have exceeded 55 percent for more than two decades.

 

Thomas Pepinsky is Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University, Associate Director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and President of the American Institute for Indonesian Studies. He is the author of Economic Crises and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes: Indonesia and Malaysia in Comparative Perspective, co-author of the award-winning article "Testing Islam's Political Advantage: Evidence from Indonesia," and has published widely on comparative politics, international political economy, and Southeast Asian affairs. He also blogs at Indolaysia.