ABSTRACT
No idea, or ideal, has united political elites in Indonesia like that of the co-operative society: an economic institution in which the users of its services are also its owners (members), uniting to pool their resources and skills in pursuit of common goals. Before independence, credit and retail co-operatives were actively promoted for decades by the Netherlands Indies government via its Department of Agriculture and its Popular Credit Service, yet also embraced by all of the important Indonesian nationalist organisations, from Budi Utomo through Sarekat Islam to the Partai Nasional Indonesia (Djojohadikoesoemo 1941). Not for nothing did J.H. Boeke (1884-1956), adviser to or coordinator of the Credit Service from 1914 to 1929 and also perhaps the most internationally influential of all Dutch Indonesia scholars, describe the co-operative movement as ‘the area in which the government in its highest aspirations can work together with the nationalist movement in its most constructive activity’ (Boeke 1929: 167). Today the name most closely associated with the co-operative movement in Indonesia is of course that of Bapak Koperasi (‘Father of the Cooperatives’) Mohammad Hatta (1902-80), the country’s first vice-president and the principal author of Article 33 of the 1945 constitution, according to which ‘the economy shall be organised as a co-operative endeavour based on the principle of family life’.
