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Sulfikar Amir (2013), The Technological State in Indonesia: The Co-constitution
of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics. London and New York: Routledge.
xviii, 190 pp. Hardcover.
DOI: 10.1177/0971721813489463
All new states require new modes of legitimation. Although successful anti-colonial
struggles often led to a high degree of popular support for new leaders, personal
prestige did not translate into automatic support for the new state. Early postcolonial political crises were often related to the need to create new bases of regime
legitimacy while damping down widespread expectations of rapid and progressive
change. The first generation of postcolonial leadership, often educated abroad and
almost always in a foreign language, came to believe avidly in the Enlightenment
ideal of a social order governed by science and rationality. Hence, the obsession
with and reification of, technology, an obsession that would unite secular modernisers, religious figures and political dissidents. The internalisation of ‘machines as
the measure of man’ led directly to the identification of postcolonial sovereignty
with new, high, complex and large technological systems. To understand why so
many new states spent scarce resources on new capitals, huge dams, great bridges,
advanced military equipment and, in the Indonesian case, a modern aircraft industry, requires appreciating the extent of real and imagined links between modern
technology and postcolonial state legitimacy, a story that is explored with verve
and insight in this new book.
Amir’s story begins with the first major change in Indonesian leadership, the
replacement of the increasingly wobbly Sukarno regime with the US-approved
general, Suharto, in 1965. The New Order, as Suharto’s regime called itself, would
last until 1998, when it would come crashing down in a fall so rapid few could have
imagined it at the time. This was a regime that was born and ended in violence; in
between, Indonesia had growth rates that led it from a poor, largely rural, developing country to the verge of joining the most exclusive ambush of all, the Asian
Tigers. The credit for this extreme growth path is usually given to one of the key
protagonists of this story, the ‘Berkeley’ mob of free market-leaning economists who
restored Indonesia’s finances and promoted foreign investment (and debt) as a way
to prosperity. Amir’s most significant contribution is to highlight the importance of
another group of technocrats who became central to the New Order, the engineers,
led by the German-trained aeronautical engineer, B. J. Habibie. Habibie’s Indonesian
story begins with his intimate links to the authoritarian military dictator, Suharto.
His public career would end as the unelected president who helped establish new
foundations for a liberal electoral democracy and allowed the referendum that led
East Timor to become independent. In between, he would both represent and lead
an effort to chart a path of technological self-reliance (‘mandiri’) for Indonesia
which would include, as mentioned, creating an aircraft industry.
Amir summarises the New Order as ‘a technocratic state propped up by military power’ (p. 30). Military power was never going to be enough to sustain the
New Order: it desperately needed other sources of legitimacy. Economic stability
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and growth was one side of the regime’s efforts to legitimise their coup, the other
side was the creation of indigenous technology systems that would epitomise and
embody the new Indonesia. Amir tells this story as a struggle between competing
technocratic visions. The first is the economists’ vision that combines a neo-liberal
(as we would call it today) state with a developmental state, open to foreign investment, the benefits of which would trickle down to alleviate poverty. Habibie’s
engineers sought to build a state ‘spurred by a technological imagination [reflecting]
narratives of a postcolonial modernity’ (p. 37). Both were visions deeply shaped
by contemporaneous ideas of modernisation: However, the engineers believed that
the wide-scale introduction of modern technology would have effects far beyond
political economy. In their view, there was also no time to lose in helping shape
the modern Indonesian self through the social encounter with modern technology.
Habibie would go on to dominate technological decision making during much of
the New Order, thanks to his close ties to Suharto; the economists would have their
revenge by shutting down the state aircraft company, IPTN, as soon as they were
returned to power after the financial crisis.
Different chapters of the book address these issues at multiple levels of analysis.
There is the personal saga of Suharto and Habibie, which has more than a hint of a
complex psychological relationship: Amir implies that Suharto becomes a surrogate
father for Habibie. At a more material level, the personal and financial support of
Ibnu Sutowo, head of Pertamina, the cash-rich Indonesian petroleum company,
was clearly vital in both getting Habibie back to Indonesia from Germany as well
as providing funds for his projects to get off the ground. At other times, Suharto
would illicitly transfer funds from other state budgets to Habibie’s pet projects,
leading to resentments across the armed forces, civilian bureaucracy and civil
society. Notwithstanding this widespread hostility, the engineers would take over
and consolidate key state agencies, leading eventually to dominate the country’s
‘strategic industries’, both civilian and military, through the holding company BPIS.
In 1990, this would mean direct decision-making power over 43,000 workers and
assets of US$16 billion and indirect control over most of the state’s technological
resources (p. 89).
The high point of the study is the account of how these maneuvers come together
to shape the formation of the Indonesian aircraft industry. Aviation has a particular
resonance in any state-centered geopolitical imaginary of Indonesia, as it appears
to offer the most efficient and modern means of integrating this widely dispersed
archipelago. Habibie was a successful aeronautical engineer, reaching the level of
vice president in the German aircraft manufacturer Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm,
hence, starting an indigenous aircraft industry was high on his list of priorities. Quite
independently of him, however, a fledgling aircraft design and development group
had already taken shape in the Air Force by the late 1950s. The key figures in this
group, Nurtanio and Wiweko, started by making gliders and later produced a local
variant of the Piper Cub; 1976 marked ‘a new era for the modern aviation industry’
(p. 101) with the creation of the state corporation IPTN. IPTN was, in effect, as
the bureaucratic resolution of Habibie’s struggle with the Air Force to determine
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who would define the meanings and scope of Indonesia’s aircraft industry and
by extension, the national geo-body. The technical capacity and facilities that had
been painstakingly developed within the Air Force would be merged with Habibie’s
ambitious vision of an aviation industry that fulfilled far more extensive social and
political expectations, made possible also by unfettered access to state resources.
Amir spends some time describing the reverse engineering strategy adopted by
the aviation industry to deepen local technological capacities. Building products
on licence from foreign manufacturers was to lead to mastery of the relevant
technology. Gradually, new products would be developed based on this older
technology, as well as quality upgrades, effectively transforming it. The final step
was building capacity in basic research permitting the development of entirely
new and indigenous products. The aviation company IPTN first collaborated with
the Spanish aviation company CASA to build the CN-235, a 35-seater propeller
plane. In the process, IPTN learnt the rules of the international aviation business
in the hard way. CASA-manufactured aircraft would be certified airworthy by
the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), but not the identical craft produced in
Indonesia by IPTN. Without FAA clearance, there was little hope of international
sales and revenues. IPTN’s next step was to build the N-250, a 50-seater turboprop using the latest fly-by-wire avionics, a plane that would enable Indonesia to
compete in the international aviation market. Amir offers a stimulating discussion
of the symbolic politics of the N-250’s first public rollout, which can be read as a
metonym for the technological state. He reports that even adamant critics of the
regime were ‘awed and astonished’ (112) by the sophistication of the technological
state’s prized artifact and came to temper their views of the New Order. What no
one realised at this moment of national jubilation was that this symbolic success
was an augury of the imminent collapse of the New Order state. With the Asian
Financial Crisis and the return of the economists to center stage, both the N-250
and Suharto would soon fall from power.
Amir’s book offers a new lens to understand New Order Indonesia through his
focus on the career and achievements of B. J. Habibie, one of the New Order’s most
enigmatic and powerful figures. As with any such approach, questions are raised
just as others are answered. Amir does a fine job of integrating techno-politics
into standard accounts of the Indonesian state, making a strong case for the New
Order as much more than just a military regime, but also a ‘technological state’.
What remains less clear is the appropriate starting point for the ideological meeting of technology and legitimacy in postcolonial Indonesia. Should it be identified
primarily with the New Order or can be traced back to Sukarno’s founding regime
as some evidence suggests? Amir’s study makes it clear however that it was only
under the New Order that the means to carry out a state technological vision became
possible, thanks to the Suharto–Habibie alliance. Also intriguing are Habibie’s
connections to the Muslim intellectual community and his leadership of ICMI,
a base of support in the transition from the New Order to a post-Suharto world.
The empirical detail demanded of a single country study often obscures striking
similarities with other examples of technological nationalism. India, Pakistan,
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Korea, Brazil and Argentina—all offer parallels to this story of a charismatic
technocrat aligned with a powerful leader, a state-within-the-state, insulated
from civil society, sometimes producing successful new technologies, but always
leading to the internalisation of the idea of technological achievement as a measure
of national development. The end of the technological state particularly bears
resemblance to the fate of similar state-sponsored technology companies under
Brazil’s military dictatorship. Engesa, the producer of light tanks and armored cars,
collapsed after the onset of civilian rule in Brazil in 1985, but Embraer, the aircraft
manufacturer, has managed to do what Habibie set out to achieve, namely, becoming
a commercially viable international leader in the manufacture of small and medium
distance aircraft. Why one succeeded and the other failed is, Amir reminds us, not
only about technological mastery but also domestic politics, corporate management,
national ideologies, international markets and timing.
What does this account tell us about the remarkable and sudden collapse of the
New Order? While a number of factors clearly mattered, especially growing social
unrest that found a focal point around excessive corruption within the state apparatus
and among Suharto’s cronies, Amir endorses the conventional wisdom in attribu­
ting the major cause of the collapse to the financial meltdown of the late 1990s.
This leads to mixed conclusions. On the one hand, this argument has the effect of
downscaling the importance given to national-technological achievements: seen
in retrospect, they can burnish state legitimacy in good times but are not important
enough to halt its decline. On the other, while the very emphasis on technocracy
clearly comes at the cost of putting state resources in the service of social needs,
post-reform Indonesia has not turned its back on the technological-ideological
underpinnings of the New Order. Technological nationalism has deeper roots than
a regime committed to technological achievements. Amir’s careful account adds
new insights to our understanding of the relation between technology and politics
and its ability to establish powerful associations between the local, the national
and the modern.
National University of Singapore, Singapore
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Itty Abraham