A Burkean Moment: General Ali Moertopo and Conservative Modernisation in Indonesia

Speaker: Iqra Anugrah (Leiden University)

Abstract

Globally, right-wing forces, personalities, and thoughts have been gaining ground and winning political victories. At the core of this phenomenon is the conservative philosophy: an elitist, pragmatic, yet cross-class idea-cum-movement in defence of tradition, ordered polity, and gradual progress. A curious, somewhat understudied figure in this political camp is General Ali Moertopo (1924-1984), a military strategist and an eclectic thinker who participated in the founding and consolidation of Indonesia’s New Order authoritarian-developmentalist regime (1966-1998).

Aided by his intellectual and military collaborators, General Moertopo co-founded the regime’s unofficial think-tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), published treatises on Indonesian politics, engineered Indonesia into a corporatist society conducive for capitalist development, and launched special intelligence operations in defense of the regime’s interest. The result was a huge success for the regime and its supporters. Part-thinker, part-operative, part-statebuilder, the freewheeling general embodied the regime’s varied approaches to enforce its modernising mission.

Going beyond popular, moralistic accounts of Ali Moertopo as a Machiavellian intelligence czar, I explore the unity of logic behind Moertopo’s thoughts and actions. Further, I analyse the corpus of knowledge behind Murtopo’s trajectory. To do so, I examine the oeuvre of Moertopo and his circle against the backdrop of post-war Anglo-American conservatism. In particular, I trace strange parallels and divergences between Ali Moertopo and two major inspirations of Anglo-American conservatism: Edmund Burke’s philosophy and Cold War social science.

My tentative investigation suggests that Ali Moertopo’s formulation of conservative modernisation echoes a vision of politics of fear and deference for tradition popular in Anglo-American conservative thinking. What makes Moertopo distinctive, however, is his insistence on the role of an enlightened technocracy with steroid in bringing about orderly yet accelerated modernisation. This paradox, however, should not blind us from a common aspiration shared by Western and vernacular conservatism: a bourgeois attempt, out of fear of mass democratic mobilisation and demands, to safeguard capitalist modernisation, social stability, and traditionalist order. The epoch of Ali Moertopo, ultimately, is a Burkean moment. 

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Speaker biography

Iqra Anugrah is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University and a Research Associate at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES) in Jakarta. His current project formulates a political theory of conservatism in modern Indonesia, 1945-2020.

His works on Indonesian development and politics have been published in PS: Political Science and Politics, Cornell University Press, and Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia.

• Chair: Prof Michael Charney (SOAS)
• Organisers: SOAS Centre of South East Asian Studies
• Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk