Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Three Highlights from Recently Declassified Materials on Soeharto’s Last Year

    The Indonesia Documentation Project yesterday released a wealth of recently declassified documents on Soeharto’s last year in office and the collapse of the New Order regime. As always, these documents are a treasure trove of information, but this release is of particular interest to me because they cover the Asian Financial Crisis, economic reform, the fall of Soeharto, and key personalities in Indonesian politics today like Prabowo Subianto.

    Here are my three top highlights.

    Prabowo on Politics, and the Military, and Soeharto

    This document contains a report of a meeting between Assistant Secretary of State Stanley Roth and Prabowo Subianto, who was then Soeharto’s son-in-law and a rising power in the Indonesian military. He recently ran for president, coming in second, and will run again in 2019. At this meeting, Roth and Prabowo discussed the future of Indonesian politics and the military’s role in it, and Prabowo took it upon himself to represent a moderate reformist position.

    Prabowo’s generation of ABRI [Indonesian armed forces] leaders want to follow the examples of South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. “I hate politics. I want the military out of politics,” he said.

    I leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide what is the most ridiculous thing in that passage. But it is important because it establishes how Prabowo was maneuvering himself to succeed Soeharto. Here is a summary of Prabowo on Soeharto from the same meeting:

    Soeharto’s background was as a soldier. He had no foreign training and little formal education, but he is extremely intelligent and has a photographic memory. However, the president does not always understand world concerns and pressures. From Prabowo’s perspective, it would be better of Soeharto stepped down in March 1998.

    In the event, Prabowo got closer to Soeharto after March 1998, when he was appointed to head of the Army’s strategic reserve command. Right after Soeharto resigned, Prabowo was removed. As I’ve argued elsewhere, using Prabowo as an example, mixing family and politics can be quite dangerous because it insulates leaders from information that they might need about their popularity and the effectiveness in office. Here’s a summary of Prabowo again:

    Below the surface, there are already intrigues underway by people who know they are not strong enough to challenge the president directly.

    Indeed.

    Also fascinating is how Prabowo invokes the contemporaneous example of the breakup of Yugoslavia as a possible future for Indonesia. The idea is to paint the country as vulnerable, and in need of some sort of stabilizing force to accompany the transition. We often forget that many very reasonable people worried at the time that Indonesia would split apart in the event of a transition.

    CLINTON AND SOEHARTO TALK ECONOMIC REFORM

    This document details a phone call between Soeharto and President Bill Clinton, on January 9, 1998, during which they talked about economic reform during the Asian Financial Crisis as well as the challenges the Soeharto faced in implementing these reforms. Clinton represents an orthodox view that holds that the only way to fight massive currency depreciation is to keep interest rates high. He also emphasizes how important signaling is—implementing tough but unpopular reforms can communicate that the Indonesian government is serious about reform (as I’ve observed elsewhere, Soeharto’s government did implement those reforms that were unpopular with most Indonesians, he just didn’t implement those that put him at risk of alienating key supporters or his rotten children).

    But that is not the interesting bit in this document. Much more interesting is how much of Soeharto’s commentary remains censored. I don’t know why this would be, but I am incredibly intrigued by what he could have been saying. We can infer from President Clinton’s responses that Soeharto is talking about speculators and about trying to raise private funds from local sources. This would be at the exact same time that Indonesia launched the “Love the Rupiah movement” and also just a couple days before we started hearing reports about “rats” who were betraying the Indonesian economy. Perhaps it is customary for declassified reports to not include the remarks of foreign leaders. Or maybe he was talking about the Riady family! Any rate, there is plenty of fodder here for a creative conspiracy theorist.

    CLINTON AND SOEHARTO TALK CURRENCY BOARDS

    This document details another phone call, this time on February 13. Here, the two presidents discuss the idea of a currency board as a way to address the continued deterioration of the rupiah. This conversation comes right after the dramatic spike in the IDR/USD exchange rate in late January 1998.

    The currency board idea was very controversial at the time, and was ultimately never implemented because it would have meant sacrificing all monetary policy autonomy at a time that the government desperately wanted some tool to expand the economy. But President Clinton didn’t focus on that, rather he focused on the problem of defending the country’s shaky reserve position. This quote is particularly pithy:

    If the rupiah falls, you will lose your reserves. And if the currency board is caught short and falls, you will lose the reserves as well, just quicker.

    It’s not clear to me whether this comment made much of a difference in Soeharto’s thinking, but what follows from President Clinton is quite direct:

    I want to go back to the G-7 and the IMF and talk to them about alternatives. I want this to work out and am worried the currency board will be an open target. I am worried about collapse.

    What does Clinton mean with “this”? Indonesian economic reform, probably. What does he mean with “collapse”? Probably not the exchange rate. And also, probably, not the New Order regime. I think this has to be read as a statement about the collapse of Indonesia itself, and I suspect that Soeharto heard it that way. He responds

    Thank you for your pledge. We need to make a decision soon as the people are demanding that their President do something to fix the situation and save the country.

    Save the country, not just save the exchange rate. At about this time, in a parallel development, the “Love the Rupiah” movement was being rebranded the “Love Indonesia” movement, a delicious instance of international political economy synecdoche.

    There is lots of other interesting information in yesterday’s release, including real-time reactions to the deteriorating situation of May 1998 and some fascinating (if oddly superficial and late-to-the-game) research on the political, economic, and social positions of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese minority. We owe the Indonesia Documentation Project a debt a gratitude for this outstanding archival research.

  • Illiberal Politics and the Inclusive Political Science Classroom

    Seth Masket* published an interesting piece yesterday entitled “The Crisis of Political Science Education.” Its core argument is that teachers of American politics face a new challenge under the Trump administration because partisans may hold views that are simply incompatible with maintaining an inclusive environment for all students.

    If a student says that he thinks taxes should be reduced and that anti-poverty programs tend to only worsen the problems they seek to fix, that would unquestionably be permissible partisan dialogue in the classroom, even if it provoked controversy. If that student then said that Mexican immigrants are corrupting white American culture and that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” as a Republican member of Congress said last year—is that a hateful attack or a partisan talking point? If we call it out, are we defending classroom inclusivity or are we attacking a student for his partisan beliefs?

    Masket holds that it was not always so—that diversity of viewpoints and experience was compatible with respectful cross-partisan debate—but that President Trump’s first two years in office have made this much more difficult. I’d emphasize that as I read him, Masket’s point is not that teachers of American politics never had to address challenges to inclusivity in the classroom, but rather that it was possible simultaneously to respect partisan differences and to foster an inclusive class environment. Inclusivity was not an essentially partisan problem.

    My reactions to his piece are two. First, the title worries me: think it is actually the best time ever to study political science; we should be calling this not a crisis but an opportunity!** But less self-centeredly, the piece led me to reflect on the ways in which we encounter these problems in teaching other kinds of political science.

    The specific example that comes to mind is the topic of Asian values, held by many to be a key organizing principle for understanding politics in Asia. What happens when you encounter a student who believes that one of his or her classmates is simply incapable of participating in democratic political life, simply because of that classmate’s cultural heritage or national background?

    One might confront this argument with various forms of empirical evidence—and one should. But what happens when the offending student can look to a head of state like Lee Kuan Yew who also holds such views, and who publicly champions them?*** Here, we encounter the same dilemma that Masket identifies. If we defend a student who holds the sincere belief that Asians cannot be democratic citizens, are we thereby excluding those classmates (those who are physically present, and in a more general sense) from full participation in the class? If, by contrast, we call out such a view, are we then adopting a political position by necessity? Lee Kuan Yew certainly would have thought so.

    As I write this, from Singapore, I am reminded of the alternative models of teaching that exist in universities around the world, which are deliberately designed not to encourage debate but rather to discourage it—in certain circumstances—in the interest of maintaining some sort of social order.

    In the liberal model of education, by contrast, we have to grapple with the possibility that some topics of discussion are inevitably partisan, and that that partisanship reflect more than just a sincere disagreement over political values. Acknowledging this can be liberating: it allows us to present arguments that, for example, the Asian values thesis is a discursive project designed to project a vision of society onto society itself, and that proponents of the Asian values thesis are happy exploit credulous academics for their own purposes.

    The broader point is that it has probably been always true that sincere debate over partisan ideas existed in tension with full inclusivity in the classroom. Perhaps what Masket identifies is the realization that American politics classroom discussions have for too long taken for granted the liberal democratic character of American politics. Where we do not take that for granted, the tensions that Masket identifies are all too familiar.

    NOTES

    * If you read this and are on Twitter, and somehow don’t know follow him, you should know that Seth has one of the world’s best Twitter presences, starting with the single best Twitter handle of all time.

    ** With due apologies to the motivational speaking industry.

    *** Or if your politics follows someone like Benny Aquino, who is on the record as having said much the same thing.