Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 - Softcover

Simpson, Bradley R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804771820 ISBN 13: 9780804771825

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Offering the first comprehensive history of U.S relations with Indonesia during the 1960s, Economists with Guns explores one of the central dynamics of international politics during the Cold War: the emergence and U.S. embrace of authoritarian regimes pledged to programs of military-led development. Drawing on newly declassified archival material, Simpson examines how Americans and Indonesians imagined the country's development in the 1950s and why they abandoned their democratic hopes in the 1960s in favor of Suharto's military regime. Far from viewing development as a path to democracy, this book highlights the evolving commitment of Americans and Indonesians to authoritarianism in the 1960s on.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bradley R. Simpson is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is also the director of a National Security Archive project to declassify U.S. documents concerning Indonesia and East Timor during the reign of General Suharto (1965-1998).

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Economists with Guns

Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968

By Bradley R. Simpson

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-7182-5

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
CHAPTER 1 - Imagining Indonesian Development, 
CHAPTER 2 - The Kennedy Administration Confronts Indonesia, 
CHAPTER 3 - Developing a Counterinsurgency State, 
CHAPTER 4 - The Road from Stabilization to Konfrontasi, 
CHAPTER 5 - From High Hopes to Low Profile, 
CHAPTER 6 - Indonesia's Year of Living Dangerously, 
CHAPTER 7 - The September 30th Movement and the Destruction of the PKI, 
CHAPTER 8 - Economists with Guns, 
Conclusion, 
Abbreviations, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Imagining Indonesian Development

The only prophet without a significant Indonesian following is probably Adam Smith.

— Max Millikan

The collapse of Japanese and European colonialism and the rise of revolutionary nationalist movements in East and Southeast Asia in the 1940s was a signal event of twentieth-century international history. The post — World War II attempt by a generation of U.S. and European policymakers to direct the inevitable process of decolonization along lines compatible with Western interests and the efforts of indigenous forces to assert their own visions of self-determination helps to explain much of the Cold War in Asia, which produced two devastating wars in Korea and Indochina and myriad instances of covert intervention. The historical trajectory of Indonesia, then the world's fifth most populous nation and its largest Muslim state, would be decisively shaped by these efforts. Since the surrender of Japanese forces in August 1945, which ended World War II, U.S. policy toward the former Netherlands East Indies has lagged consistently behind the aspirations of its nationalist leaders to sever the economic, political, and cultural sinews of European colonialism. Concerned more with the implications of rapid decolonization of Asian empires for Europe and Japan than with the demands for independence of anticolonial leaders, the Truman administration initially acquiesced to Dutch efforts to reestablish control over their former colonial empire, expressing the same ambivalence about the fitness of Indonesians for self-government that it did for Vietnam. For three years the United States publicly professed neutrality in Indonesia's independence struggle while The Hague used lend-lease equipment and funds freed up by U.S. Marshall Plan aid to repress Indonesia's republican forces. Not until the fall of 1948 did Washington decisively back Indonesian independence by threatening to withhold military and economic aid after the Netherlands unilaterally violated a U.S.-brokered settlement. Not only did Dutch military actions threaten the Truman administration's European priorities, but U.S. officials also feared that the anticolonial struggle might unleash more radical and less easily controlled forces, such as the "emergence of a Pan-Asian bloc, which ... may follow an independent path." Equally important, the young republican government demonstrated its anti- Communist bona fides to the Truman administration by bloodily crushing a PKI uprising in September 1948 in the East Java city of Madiun. While White House officials congratulated themselves for their newfound devotion to Indonesian independence, many Indonesian nationalist leaders remained profoundly suspicious of both U.S. and Soviet intentions. Washington's near simultaneous decision to back the French effort at colonial reconquest in Indochina and continued British control over Malaya — both also challenged by radical independence movements — underscored the fragile nature of Washington's support for Asian self-government, as Indonesia's new leaders readily recognized.

In the wake of Indonesia's independence in 1949, U.S. officials and social scientists identified the Southeast Asian nation as a linchpin in Washington's strategy of regional economic integration and as a line of containment against the expansion of Soviet and later Chinese power. Washington hoped that its support for Indonesian independence and the provision of a modest program of economic and technical assistance beginning in 1950 would help foster the emergence of a representative, capitalist, and pro-Western government. The vast majority of Indonesians, however, associated Western-style democracy and capitalism with colonialism and sought a collectivist, social democratic (or even socialist), and indigenously rooted path to political and economic development. Sukarno's articulation of the famous five principles known as the Pancasila — national unity, social justice, belief in God, humanitarianism, and democracy — was an imprecise attempt at formulating a distinctly Indonesian vision of democracy through consensus, as opposed to the "free fight" democracy of a competitive parliamentary system. Mohammed Hatta, Indonesia's first vice president and its foremost advocate of a decentralized Indonesian state and a democratic, participatory government, likewise firmly rejected Western-style democracy (even as he battled against Sukarno to rescue the parliamentary system), arguing in 1956 that "political democracy alone cannot bring about equality and fraternity. Political democracy must go hand in hand with economic democracy," a "social democracy covering all phases of life." Throughout the mid-1950s both visions reflected a fragile optimism both within and outside Indonesia over the prospects for democratic development, even if they profoundly differed over the meaning of democracy.

The rising strength of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in the years after independence, however, tempered such hopes, as did Indonesia's firm commitment to neutralism and national development along lines that clashed repeatedly with U.S. goals in the region. Growing U.S. frustration with Indonesia mirrored its concerns during the decade over the rise of indigenous radicalism, neutralism, and nationalism throughout the so-called third world. By the mid-1950s U.S. support for and optimism about the prospects for democracy in Indonesia proved to be highly contingent. As in countless other nations, Washington began encouraging, alongside technical and agricultural assistance, military aid programs that prioritized stability over democracy and envisioned U.S.- trained military establishments as vanguards of modernization. Indonesia's abandonment of parliamentary democracy and the outbreak of a U.S.- backed civil war during the late 1950s marked a turning point toward the Indonesian and American embrace of an authoritarian regime as the appropriate vehicle for modernizing the world's fifth largest nation. When the Kennedy administration arrived in Washington in 1961, visions of military modernization framed the boundaries of American and Indonesian thinking about possible paths to the country's future.

Imagining Indonesian Development

Indonesia's postindependence hopes for political and economic development flowed directly from its experience under Dutch colonial rule and the near insuperable challenge of creating an integrated nation out of a far-flung, multiethnic archipelago poorly prepared by its former colonial power for independence. The bewildering complexity of Indonesian politics in the decade after independence, with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804771820
• ISBN 13: 9780804771825
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 367
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland