ABSTRACT
While the demise of state socialism has been heralded as a triumph for capitalist democracy (and even as the ‘end of history’), there are a growing number of observers who see the collapse of Soviet imperium as a warning to the world. Certainly the resonance between the ethnonationalist resurgence in the former Soviet Union and trends in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia have been noted by many commentators. For example, a ‘Voice of America’ (VOA) report on the final day of the APEC meeting in Bogor, Indonesia, in mid-November 1994, clearly reflected the tendency to look to the struggles in the one-time Soviet empire as reminders of the continued potency of ethnic and religious loyalties around the globe. The VOA noted that Soeharto’s New Order (a ‘less than perfect democracy’) boasted ‘one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the world’ and this had not only ‘lifted millions out of poverty and greatly increased health and literacy’, but had ‘also helped to bind together’ the ethnically diverse country of more than 180 million people. The VOA report quoted Robert Hefner who argued that, unlike the former USSR, Indonesia had ‘the solid foundation for a national culture’. He conceded that ‘there are regional tensions, but Indonesia has achieved a shared national language, which virtually the entire young generation of Indonesians speak’. On the question of Islam (90 per cent of Indonesians are nominal Muslims) the VOA report cited Benedict Anderson who noted that there was a ‘possibility not so much of ethnic conflict but of conflict between committed Muslims and everybody else’. However, Hefner argued that in Indonesia, the ‘most prominent’ Muslims and the ‘most prominent’ Islamic movements ‘are remarkable for the verve with which they declare their allegiance to principles of democracy, human rights and religious tolerance and pluralism’. The report concluded with the anticipation by Hefner that as long
as economic growth continued tolerance and social stability would predominate.1
