Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy.

• Author: Vatikiotis, Michael

Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy. By Jamie S. Davidson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Softcover: 77pp.

Indonesia is a relatively modern nation, established by proclamation in August 1945. What is easily forgotten is that the 1945 Constitution established the country as "a state based on the rule of law" to be governed by a president and vice president "elected as a pair by the people directly". Article 7 states that they can serve a five-year term and be re-elected for another five-year term only.

For the first 20 years of its existence, Indonesia was mostly governed this way--although the country's first president, Sukarno, progressively clipped the wings of the country's democracy, styling it as a "guided democracy" and allowing gradual military interference. The last truly democratic elections were held in 1955. The slide towards authoritarian, undemocratic rule proceeded apace in 1965 after a thinly-veiled army-led putsch that left a little-known army general by the name of Suharto in charge. Thirty-two years later, Suharto was toppled after a messy mixture of riots and protests, which then gave way to another 20 years of democracy, which is the subject of Jamie Davidson's compact, readable monograph.

The study of the last 20 years of Indonesia's democracy, often neglects to reflect on the first 20 years from 1945-65: elected governments came and went; parliament was fractious and clashing ideological beliefs seeped into the mass of society, often generating violent conflict. The core of Davidson's argument--a process of reform, that leads first to innovation, then stagnation, followed by polarization--could be seen as something of a mirror image, though the circumstances are much changed.

Davidson's categorization of the modern period is useful, and stands up to scrutiny. There has been much academic handwringing about democratic transition in Southeast Asia that pulls on conceptual frameworks and comparative contexts. The organization of this brief monograph along a temporal trajectory helps the reader understand the dynamics of transition more clearly.

At the outset, a period of innovation accompanied the unlikely succession of Suharto's technology minister, the German-trained B.J. Habibie, as the country's first reform era president. Davidson points to the remarkable decentralization initiated by Habibie, which although initially destabilizing and stoking fears of state-disintegration, eventually created a...