By Editorial Board,
ANU
28
September 2020
A protester gestures as mobile brigade (Brimob) police officers stand guard at a barricade during a protest in Jakarta, Indonesia, 22 May 2019 (Photo: Reuters/Willy Kurniawan).
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At a time
when the forces of populist nativism are on the rise in established
democracies, many liberals in the West are being forced to reconsider questions
that have been marginal since the days when fascist and communist movements
were last a part of political life.
At what point do liberal norms become a liability for democracy when they are abused by demagogues to undermine the tolerance and social cohesion that underpins it? At what point should a democratic state curtail the political freedoms of those who use those freedoms to oppose the democratic compact itself?
In most
Western countries these considerations may still be academic, though perhaps
becoming rather more real. Germany is known for its highly formalised system
for proscribing organisations deemed opponents of its democratic order. In the
United States, some progressives fret about the latitude its constitutional
protections of freedom of speech and association give to a growing right-wing
extremist movement. Some warn that the Australian government’s efforts to
thwart the local influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the name of
safeguarding democracy is damaging intellectual freedom and civil liberties.
But in
Indonesia, Asia’s second-largest democracy and the Islamic world’s largest,
these dilemmas are all the more acute. In this week’s lead article, Greg Fealy
highlights the unintended consequences of a crackdown on political Islam, which
he argues ‘erodes human rights, undermines democratic values and could well
lead to a radical backlash against what is seen as growing state antipathy
towards Islam’.
Fealy’s
warning is a reality check for national and multilateral donors who have poured
millions of dollars into initiatives to strengthen moderate Islamic networks
and counter violent extremism. Some of them would argue that the exhaustion of
the state’s tolerance for Islamist movements is a welcome development, given
the persistent spectre of violent Islamic extremism in Indonesia.
This would
be a questionable interpretation, though. The threat which modern Islamist
movements pose to Indonesia’s political stability, and their relationship with
violent jihadism, has probably been overstated. In any case, Indonesia’s
challenges are merely more acute versions of those which are putting strain
upon democratic systems the world over, and aren’t necessarily unique to a
Muslim-majority society.
The
intensifying beef between Indonesia’s secular nationalists and religious
conservatives is just one manifestation of a worldwide problem of political
polarisation that political scientists say is a key ingredient in weakening
democracy from the inside.
The hazards
of polarisation are similar, regardless of the national context or the axes of
ideological competition. When political tribes begin to see others not merely
as electoral or intellectual competitors, but rather existential threats to
themselves or the nation, it becomes much easier to rationalise cutting corners
on key democratic norms in order to defeat them.
As Fealy
writes of Indonesia, the government of President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and its
allies in civil society have raised the stakes in just this manner, coming to
see Islamism as ‘posing an existential threat to Indonesia and its tradition of
constitutional religious neutrality and social inclusiveness’.
But when
laws are changed (or ignored) to become a cudgel with which to beat political
opponents, everybody loses. Legislation the Jokowi government passes to ban the
Islamist groups, for instance, could readily be used by a future administration
to arbitrarily repress left-wing or liberal political civil society. A future
government more sympathetic to Islamic conservatives might reverse the Jokowi
administration’s marginalisation of Islamists within the state, further
politicising the bureaucracy in the opposite direction. These are the dangers
of setting the sorts of precedents the Jokowi government is presently setting.
The obvious
circuit breaker in this process of polarisation, repression and backlash is to
reinvigorate traditions of dialogue and compromise across ideological lines.
Islamist movements have always been a feature of Indonesian politics and always
will be. Secularists must find a way of opposing their agenda that doesn’t lead
to knee-jerk (and counter-productive) attempts at de-legitimising them and
their sympathisers.
Where
politicians fail, civil society has to take the lead, making the case that the
same laws that protect the political rights of religious minorities also, for
better or worse, protect the political liberties of Islamists. This is easier
said than done when voters increasingly get their political news from social
media, gravitating to information which confirms their worldview and reinforces
narratives of victimisation — further justifying the use of hard-knuckle
tactics on the other side.
Still, few
societies can draw from such a deep well of social and political tolerance than
Indonesia’s. To spend time there is to be struck by the resilient spirit of
compromise and cooperation that permeates civic life, without which the country
would not have emerged as the democratic behemoth it did after the fall of the
Suharto’s New Order. Citizens of the West’s beleaguered liberal democracies
might look to Asia not only to witness the hazards of political polarisation
but also for clues as to how to remedy it.
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The EAF Editorial Board is located in the
Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The
Australian National University.
Original Headline: In Indonesia, democracy
means loving thine enemy
Source: The East Asia Forum
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/indonesian-democracy-political-islam/d/122967
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