SUHARTO’S COLD WAR: Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the World | By Mattias Fibiger

It is a pillar of any standard account of Cold War Southeast Asia that the ascent of Major General Suharto following the left-wing inspired coup of September 30, 1965 marked a turning point in the politics of postcolonial Indonesia. Following the abortive coup, Suharto took control of the army and embarked on a “creeping coup” that sidelined President Sukarno, while a gruesome politicide of suspected communists unfolded under the army’s leadership in the background. This turn of events triggered dramatic closures: it ended an era of polarized but vibrant political contestation internally and drew curtains on an era of high-profile diplomacy where President Sukarno trekked the diplomatic circuits of the Cold War as a leading player of Afro-Asianism and non-alignment. Over the next three decades of the New Order regime, Indonesia, it seemed, had taken an insular turn: it had walked off the stage of world diplomacy while state managers focused on constructing and then maintaining a hybrid authoritarian regime at home.

Matthias Fibiger’s book masterfully upends this somewhat inward-looking understanding of the origins of the New Order state and its seemingly diffident international orientation. Fibiger’s core move is to foreground international politics, and specifically, the Global Cold War in the construction and ambitions of Suharto’s New Order regime. Drawing on a range of Indonesian, Southeast Asian, and Western archives, he shows how Suharto reached out to financiers of the capitalist world to appeal for foreign aid, debt relief, and private investment from the very first years of his still inchoate regime. While it took some convincing, Suharto’s appeals succeeded and “Cold War capital” emerged as a significant component of the Indonesian government’s revenues, totaling between 20 percent to 30 percent for most of the New Order.

With the Global Cold War and Cold War capital as the centrepiece of his framework, Fibiger advances three arguments straddling domestic, regional, and international levels. He argues that at the domestic level, Cold War capital freed Suharto from the constraints of bargaining with a broad social coalition of counterrevolutionary forces that included factions of the army, political parties, student groups, and religious organizations. These groups shared a mortal fear of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and disliked Sukarno, but they subscribed to diverse political visions of the coming counterrevolutionary future. A military dominated New Order authoritarianism was not something all foresaw nor agreed upon. After a period of accommodation under precarious economic circumstances, the steady flow of Cold War capital allowed Suharto to sideline defiant social groups and initiate his preferred projects of social engineering. At the regional level, Suharto embarked a project of spreading his model of counterrevolution to the rest of Southeast Asia. This regional dimension is an especially original aspect of Fibiger’s thesis: he argues that the New Order’s state managers sought to actively proselytize anti-communist neighbours, especially as they confronted political crises following experiments with pluralistic political projects. We learn of the striking parallels between the New Order’s ideological rendering of Pancasila with Malaysia’s post-1969, post-martial law national doctrine of Rukun Negara; Ferdinand Marcos’ use of the New Order lexicon (“New Society”) and institutional features (like dwifungsi) as he crafted his more sultanistic authoritarian regime after declaring martial law in 1972; and the military equipment and advisors Suharto sent to Cambodia’s Lon Nol to support the embattled Khmer Republic against the Khmer Rouge. While these efforts at proselytization had uneven results, the most successful instrument of Suharto’s regional counterrevolution was a diplomatic one: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Created under Indonesian leadership, ASEAN scaled up the New Order’s doctrine of Ketahanan Nasional (or “national resilience,” a doctrine combining authoritarian developmentalism with depoliticizing social and cultural cohesion) with its discourse on “regional resilience.” At the global level, Fibiger argues Suharto’s Indonesia offers yet another instance of how the Cold War was not merely a top-down geopolitical project launched from major power metropoles but was also invited, appropriated, and leveraged by postcolonial elites who “braided into” (12) the Cold War their local struggles for power and advantage.

Suharto’s Cold War impresses with its gripping retelling of New Order Indonesia and by making targeted contributions to major debates in a range of fields. To the rich historical and area studies scholarship on Indonesia, it shines light on the crucial international/Cold War imperatives and coordinates that shaped the form of the New Order state. To comparative politics, it offers an appetizing contrast to often methodologically nationalist accounts of authoritarian state building in the postcolonial world, exemplified in a Southeast Asian context by Dan Slater’s classic Ordering Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). In contrast to Slater’s internalist account of how class-based and communal contentious politics drove conservative elites to seek “protection pacts” from authoritarian strongmen, Fibiger supplies an international account of how conservative domestic elites enlisted international financiers in forging such protection pacts. Finally, the book is a major statement in the international relations (IR) of Southeast Asia where it historically excavates the role of ASEAN as an instrument of counterrevolution and authoritarian consolidation. Suharto’s Cold War is the most recent in a line of new scholarship on Southeast Asia’s international politics that hails not from the disciplinary corridors of IR but from international history and comparative politics (Natasha Hamilton-Hart, Hard Interests, Soft Illusions, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012; Wen-Qing Ngoei, Arc of Containment, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019; and Taomo Zhou, Migration in the Time of Revolution.Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019 being exemplary recent contributions).

Suharto’s Cold War would have benefited from addressing two concerns. First, given that Suharto emerges in this account as a remarkably astute actor with the vision and political consciousness to wage anti-communism at home and abroad, one is left wondering where and how he acquired this consciousness? The question arises from an unavoidable contrast with Sukarno, who was more cosmopolitan, elite, and expansive, and who actively drew on his international visits as pedagogical experiences as he refined his konsepsi for power. Second, is there an analytic distinction worth making between Suharto the strongman’s Cold War and the New Order regime’s Cold War, where a range of counterrevolutionary actors contributed their creativity for the regime’s cause? Fibiger’s fine-grained narrative recognizes the multiplicity of New Order architects and players: from Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX and Adam Malik (who with Suharto formed a triumvirate), and the economists of the Berkeley Mafia, to the Head of Bappenas Widjojo Nitisastro, and the SESKOAD commander General Suwarto, not to mention political fixers like Ali Murtopo with his shadowy Opsus intelligence network and “political technocrats” at CSIS. But while his account recognizes the imprint of these players, the prose sometimes slips into a personal register with Suharto as a grand architect even as Suharto’s own voice seems to slowly fade from the archive. Notwithstanding these minor points, Suharto’s Cold War is a major achievement and promises to be a key reference in years to come for the study of Indonesia, the Global Cold War, Third World counterrevolution, and the IR of Southeast Asia.

Deepak Nair

The Australian National University, Canberra