Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

234 MANAGING POLITICS AND ISLAM IN INDONESIAcapture (especially from NU) when relations between Suharto and Muslimpolitical interests largely were antagonistic. For those interests that had beencaptured in a variety of arrangements, corporatism mostly served to shut them outof power-sharing arrangements. However, this situation changed in the late1980s, with a rapprochement occurring between Suharto and Muslim leaders.There was a discernible shift in state corporatist strategy in general from anexclusionary one to one that appeared, on the surface at least, to be partiallyinclusionary. An indication of this shift was that Suharto widened the scope ofincorporation as he sought to co-opt strategic middle-strata elite (especiallyMuslims) into existing power arrangements behind his presidency. To this end,Golkar underwent a number of civilianisation and recruitment campaigns, andICMI was established as a new vehicle of Muslim support.In large numbers, Muslim leaders embraced ICMI as a sign of improvingrelations between Suharto and Islam. However, as Suharto expandedincorporation of new groups and extended state jurisdiction over Muslimcommunity organisation, he tried to maintain exclusionary corporatist barriers topeople’s participation in the political system. Muslim leaders discovered thattheir incorporation did not translate into commensurate political goods. AlthoughICMI leaders did gain some representation in the MPR and DPR, most of itsmembers were effectively denied meaningful participation in the political systemand were not rewarded with strategic positions in government. Nevertheless,ICMI members felt that, through incorporation, they had achieved substantialprogress—in terms of less military supervision of Muslim organisationalactivities, more freedom to organise and publicise Islamic ideas, and greateraccess to patronage and decision-makers.NU was divided in its responses to corporatist capture. On the one hand,several NU leaders and components of the organisation were drawn into statestructures, through Golkar, PPP, MUI, ICMI and other entities. On the other, theNU chairman represented orientations which resisted corporatist capture andstrove for NU’s political independence from the state.A central concern of the book was whether Suharto’s corporatist strategiesworked successfully as a mechanism for obstructing the growth of associationalpluralism. From the 1970s until the mid-1980s, it appears that strategies ofcorporatist exclusion did indeed inhibit associational pluralism. The enforcementin 1985 of Pancasila as the sole ideological foundation of organisationalexistence was the pinnacle of these efforts backed by arrests of extremists.However, after 1988, the partial shift to inclusionary strategy had the effect of repoliticisinggroup interests after two decades of de-politicisation and corporatistexclusion. State capture of Muslim interests contributed to the organisation andcounter-organisation of competing group interests and to a concomitant increasein associational pluralism.Before elaborating this conclusion, however, there are a number of politicaland economic contexts which have to be considered in assessing the role ofcorporatism in facilitating societal pluralism in the post-1988 period. The