By the tip of 1991, the Soviet Union had disintegrated into 15 independent states, rigorously demarcating the boundaries of the 15 ethnic republics that constituted its administrative framework. Although the country was home to over 100 ethnic groups, it was divided into 15 ethnic republics and was ultimately divided along these lines.
Indonesia is definitely rather more diverse. According to the 2010 census by the Indonesian Central Statistics Agency (BPS), the country has over 1,300 ethnic groups and roughly 700 regional languages spread over hundreds of islands.
When the 1998 Asian financial crisis toppled the Soeharto regime, many observers predicted that Indonesia would develop into the “next Yugoslavia.” This prediction never got here true. According to historians and political scientists who compared each cases, the cause was not a mere coincidence, but a fundamental difference in the best way the 2 states were built.
Ethnic republics that never existed in Indonesia
The first difference concerned the structure of the state. The Soviet Union was a federation of republics founded on ethnic lines, and its structure even gave them the appropriate to secede.
Article 72 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution expressly guaranteed each republic the appropriate to go away the Union. In his study published within the journal, political scientist Henry Hale Policy prospectsargues that these ethnic republics became ready-made models of nation states once central power was weakened.
The existence of a single dominant core republic, Russia, further intensified this dynamic, creating competing claims to sovereignty. In her book Subversive institutionsValerie Bunce concludes that the ethnic federalism of the Soviet Union, which seemed stable under one-party rule, became a mechanism of disintegration once the political system was relaxed.
Indonesia, nonetheless, has never had such a structure. It is a unitary state, and its provinces were never intended to be a political homeland for individual ethnic groups with a constitutional right to secede.
Historian Robert Cribb, writing in Australian Journal of International Affairsargues that without ethnically defined territorial units and with the appropriate to secede, Indonesia lacked the institutional divisions that ultimately led to the collapse of each the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.
Neutral national language
The second factor was language. Indonesia’s largest ethnic group is the Javanese, numbering over 95 million people, and yet the country has adopted Indonesian as its national language. Rooted within the Malay language, it was a trade language somewhat than the language of the dominant ethnic group.
According to Benedict Anderson in his book Imagined communitiesthe alternative of a comparatively neutral language enabled people from lots of of various backgrounds to assume themselves as members of 1 nation without feeling dominated by one particular ethnic group.
This contrast was visible within the Soviet Union, where Russian, the language of the dominant nationality, occupied a privileged position and infrequently caused resentment among the many non-Russian republics.
A nation invented before the creation of the state
The third factor is historical. Indonesia’s national identity was formulated before the formation of the state itself. On October 28, 1928, the Youth Oath declared one homeland, one nation and one language, almost 20 years before the declaration of independence in 1945.
This foundation was later reinforced by Pancasila’s state ideology and national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (“Unity in Diversity”), as historian MC Ricklefs explains in his book History of recent Indonesia.
This commitment to a unitary state was put to the test soon after independence. When the Netherlands transferred sovereignty in 1949, Indonesia briefly became a federal state often known as the Republic of the United States of Indonesia.
The federal system lasted lower than a 12 months. By 1950, almost all the component states had dissolved and rejoined the unitary republic, largely because federalism was widely seen as a legacy of the Dutch “divide and rule” colonial strategy.
Another response to separatism
The final factor concerns Indonesia’s response to separatist pressure after 1998. Instead of further centralization of power, the federal government implemented far-reaching decentralization and granted special autonomy to regions experiencing probably the most intense unrest.
Under the 1999 decentralization laws, governing power was transferred to lots of of regencies and municipalities, somewhat than to ethnically defined territorial units.
In Aceh, a virtually 30-year conflict that killed roughly 170,000 people ended on August 15, 2005, with the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding granting the province special autonomy, as documented by organizations equivalent to the United States Institute of Peace and the Council on Foreign Relations. Since 2001, Papua has also had special autonomous status.
Signing in Foreign AffairsDonald Emmerson argues that this mixture of coercion and compromise has enabled Indonesia to administer regional conflicts without undermining the integrity of the state.
However, Indonesia’s survival doesn’t mean that it has freed itself from territorial fragmentation. East Timor broke away after a referendum in 1999 and gained full independence in 2002, while tensions in Papua remain unresolved.
Unlike the Soviet Union, which collapsed along the institutionalized borders of its ethnic republics, Indonesia faced similar separatist pressures with out a political framework able to channeling them into the creation of multiple latest states.
