|
...the autobiography nevertheless sold 5,000 copies in less than week, making it the best selling book ever written by an Indonesian politician. It is possible that the short but controversial account included in the book about how Prabowo Subianto, then head of Army Strategic Command (Kostrad), subtly attempted to overthrow Habibie (1) may have boosted its popularity. But how the book became so popular is due less to the result of the controversy than to the fact that Habibie remains popular among many Indonesians, particularly Muslims. Some even think that Habibie, now running the non-profit Habibie Center, did a much better job running the country than his democratically elected successors. Whatever the case may be, Habibie did play a pivotal role in moving Indonesia towards democracy after Suharto's fall.
This article offers a new interpretation of Habibie and examines how he came to dominate the technocratic politics of the New Order, particularly during the 1990s. The structure of New Order authoritarianism upon which Habibie built his whole bureaucratic career allowed him to benefit from certain peculiar relations of power. This article seeks to unpack these power relations and to identify the sources of Habibie's power. This is important because the whole modality of building high technology that notoriously characterized Habibie's development strategy for decades was produced and mobilized within these power relations. More interestingly, understanding Habibie is an entry point to comprehending the nature of power under the New Order regime, and sheds light on how different forms of power operate and are transacted between leading elite groups. This article thus delves into the conjunction of authoritarian politics, modern knowledge, and the obsession with modernity that resulted in a network of power between a political leader, a technocratic figure, and a religiously labeled group. It is intended to complement studies on Indonesia's New Order that put so much emphasis on Suharto (for example, see Liddle 1985 and Vatikiotis 1993) and understates the influence of satellite figures such as Habibie.
It may be true, as many observers say, that Habibie profited largely from the centrality of power that Suharto possessed for over three decades. However, this view fails to capture the significance of Habibie's scientific background, and how this provided him with his own form of power. To grasp this, the present analysis draws on the concept of symbolic power offered by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1991). Contending Marx's materialist view of power, Bourdieu emphasizes the notion that cultural capital functions as a valued resource through the production of symbolic power. Cultural capital encompasses a wide variety of resources including verbal facility, cultural awareness, aesthetic preferences, schooling system, and educational credentials. Studying intellectual groups as the dominating class in modern societies, Bourdieu explains that an effective medium for domination comes into being, which exercises symbolic power "only through the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they themselves exercise it" (Bourdieu 1991, p. 164). The political implication of symbolic systems emanates from its capacity to gain legitimacy for the dominant class by encouraging the dominated to accept the hierarchy of social distinctions that maintain the domination (Swartz 1997).
This concept of symbolic power allows us to see the operation of cultural capital in a political structure that revolved around patrimonialism (Crouch 1979) but was hinged to a technocracy (Amir 2004). Ample analyses on the New Order have uncovered the regime's power structure and shown it to be underpinned by coercive forces and physical violence (for recent examples, see Anderson et al. 2001 and Heryanto 2005). This article seeks to go in a different direction to show how symbolic forms become the principal mode of domination, and to focus on educational and scientific credentials as cultural capital. An array of empirical data drawn from material such as biography, books, mass publication, and personal interviews are studied.
Cultivating the Capital
B.J. Habibie (nicknamed Rudy) was born on 25 June 1936 in Parepare in South Sulawesi. Together with seven brothers and sisters, he spent his childhood there before the family moved to Makassar. When he was thirteen, his father suddenly passed away, and he was sent by his mother to continue his education in Bandung, West Java.
After finishing high school, Habibie attended the prestigious Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). In 1955, he set off for Germany to study aeronautical engineering at Technische Hochschule Aachen on the recommendation of Muhammad Yamin, a nationalist figure who was then Minister of Education. Five years later, Habibie obtained an undergraduate degree and then pursued his doctorate at the same university. In 1965, he successfully defended his doctoral thesis on orthotropic collar flanges. With his degree in hand, Habibie joined Hamburger Flugzeugbau (HFB) and was assigned design projects dealing with Fokker's F-28 and Dornier's DO-31. A large portion of his work was thus on basic research on aircraft construction. As such, Habibie spent most of the time in the research laboratory struggling with mathematical formulas, some articles about which he published in respected journals in the field. As recounted in Habibie's biography, one of these formulas known among his colleagues as the Habibie Factor became a standard for aircraft design in North Atlantic Treaty Organization projects (Makka 1996, p. 87).
The merging of HFB with Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm (MBB) Gmbh in 1968 pushed Habibie to a higher position. Now he was responsible for planning and supervising a major manufacturing plant for MBB, which was then participating in the Airbus A-300B programme. While working on this prestigious project, Habibie developed a formula to predict crack propagation behavior in aircraft structure at the atomic level, an achievement that earned Habibie the nickname of "Mr. Crack". This breakthrough turned out to save both time and in aircraft designing. Given this success, Habibie was named vice president and director for technology application in 1974, the highest position granted a foreigner in the history of MBB. Habibie held this position until Suharto appointed him State Minister for Research and Technology in 1978.
Habibie was directly experiencing the post-war rebuilding of Germany, and what he understood to be the important processes involved would through him come to have an impact on Indonesian modernization. When he arrived in Aachen in 1955, Germany was going through its economic miracle (wirtschafiswunder), a profound change that saw German industrial capability revive itself to new heights after World War II. Through economic reforms and full financial backing from the European Recovery Program, more commonly known as the Marshall Plan, West Germany's market-based economy expanded quickly. This resurgence affected how Habibie perceived economic development and its social effects. Coming from an undeveloped society, Habibie was highly impressed by the social and cultural transformations taking place in Germany. He came to believe that the German experience provided a way for Indonesia to achieve modernity and usher in prosperity...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
More articles from SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
The inculturation of a transnational Islamic missionary movement: Tabl..., April 01, 2007
Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity, and Identity in a Malaysian Chi..., April 01, 2007
Transnational Migration and Work in Asia.(Book review), April 01, 2007
Juggling Money: Financial Self-help Organizations and Social Security ..., April 01, 2007
The Life of a Balinese Temple: Artistry, Imagination and History in a ..., April 01, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.
Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication
name or publication date.
About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company
analysis or best practices in managing your organization,
Goliath can help you meet your business needs.
Our extensive business information databases empower business
professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible,
authoritative information they need to support their business
goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting,
company research or defining management best practices -
Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.
|
