Making Indonesia: Essays on Modern Indonesia in Honor of George McT. Kahin. Edited by Daniel S. Lev and Ruth McVey. Studies on Southeast Asia; no. 20. Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University: Ithaca, 1996. 201 pp. Reviewer: James Hagen, Pennsylvania State University (hagen@pop.psu.edu).

Nine eminent political scientists and historians have presented essays here to honor George Kahin, the founder of Cornell's Southeast Program. They honor Kahin by addressing a topic central to his writings--the sources and sustaining forces of modern Indonesia--and by pursuing in their respective studies the myriad ways the state has been shaped. As a scholar and educator (several contributors have been students or colleagues of his), Kahin encouraged creative, inter-disciplinary approaches. Appropriately, the essays collected here cover a diverse range of subjects that are nicely framed and historically situated in McVey's introduction.

One important feature of Indonesian modernity--and one central to scholarship--concerns the conditions and possibilities of mass political mobilization. Anderson's essay explores how the nation was first imagined at the beginning of the century. Specifically, he proposes that the growth of multilingualism effectively "de-sacralized" the traditional (and monolingual) Javanese universe; and he makes the point, by showing how, that newspapers spoke to their audiences. To the extent the newspapers spoke for them is another matter. Both Harvey's and McVey's contributions explore this side of nationalism's imaginings, i.e., the process of making the nation a salient idea in people's lives. Harvey examines the organizational capacity and orientation of the Vietnamese and Indonesian leadership at the time of their respective independence struggles. She finds that the relative distance of political elites from the lives of ordinary people in Indonesia contributed to greater post-independence political instability there. Pursuing this idea, McVey explains how, after independence, the state, in particular the PKI (the Indonesian Communist Party), exploited this gap by adopting a deliberate strategy of direct mobilization. Ironically, PKI members were to be the principle victims of a different, violent mass mobilization campaign orchestrated by political enemies on the right. McVey raises the intriguing possibility that the killings after the coup of 1965 may have escalated the way they did, in part, because of the inability or reticence of the PKI leadership to challenge accusations of their involvement in it. In Bali, however, as Robinson's essay shows, probably little would have changed. Nearly two months after the massacre had started on Java, it spread there--a fact he cites as evidence of concerted military involvement. Robinson argues that Balinese participation in the frenzy was likely reluctant at first and that scale of the massacre cannot be explained, as it has been by others, in purely local, cultural terms.

A second dimension to modernity is place, more specifically, the movement across space that makes a nation, for instance, a place. Three of the essays address such movement in the biographies of persons who were or would soon become key political leaders. Mrazek describes Sjahrir's exile in Boven Digoel, New Guinea, in the 1930s. The capture and exile of government leaders (Hatta, Sjahrir, etc.) to the island of Bangka in 1948 is described in Heidhues's study as perhaps the critical juncture that precipitated the end of Dutch colonial rule the following year. Shiraishi's essay, on a more recent figure, charts B.J. Habibie's unlikely political ascendancy--written before his last two government jobs--from an engineering career in Germany.

A third theme central to understanding modernity concerns the tension surrounding central authority and the delegation of power. Here, essays by Lev on the status of Indonesia's legal professionals and on the rule of law more generally, and by Bunnell on the NGO movement address the obstacles to, and the development of, civil society in Indonesia. They document how making civil society has been countenanced and condemned at different times by various segments of Indonesia's ruling elite.

There is much to recommend about this volume; my only complaint is that it lacks an index. To be sure, the text would be a useful addition to a course on or about modern Indonesia; and the essays serve as nice introductions to the scholars' other, longer publications. Despite the editors' modest theoretical ambitions, I also think the book makes an important contribution to the subject of modernity. The promise of modernity and the fear of being left behind have lent urgency to the work of building the nation. At various times, that urgency has demanded the stoking of nationalist, sometimes revolutionary, and more primordial sentiments by factions competing to realize a particular vision of state and society. Such contradictions arising from modernity may have permitted some leaders to rationalize a need for the murder of hundreds of thousands civilians after the 1965 coup and to see the necessity, more recently, of depoliticising the masses in order that the masses be developed. At its apex, when these essays were written, the image the New Order presented reveals a state not so much charting its own course as sprawling in response, as Lev contends, to its own hodgepodge of vaguely conceived bureaucratic aims.