Diffusing democracy? People power in Indonesia and the Philippines

Abstract

This article critically examines the concept that democracy is spread from country to country via the diffusion of democratic ideas. Comparisons between the Philippine democracy transition of 1986 and the 1998 Indonesian movement against President Suharto reveal that, whatever Indonesian activists or authorities thought about Philippine analogs, important structural and historical differences, particularly in the two states' relationships to society and in the patterns of repression and resistance that these relationships generated produced vastly different transitions from authoritarian rule. The article compares the two democracy movements to demonstrate that different patterns of struggle in the two cases reflect distinct histories more than common models of struggle or transition. To test the possibility that Philippine models did inform Indonesian protest or the broader Indonesian transition, the fate of several styles of collective action that Indonesian activists seem directly to have lifted from Philippine precedents are considered. In examining these specific examples of diffused lessons of democracy struggle, it is argued that Indonesia and the Philippines so fundamentally differed from one another that parallels between them are misleading for both practical and interpretive purposes, and that lessons from the Philippines quite often failed in ways that precisely suggest deeper structural differences between the two democracy struggles. The work concludes by urging a greater attention to state and social structures, as well as country-specific legacies of political contention, in interpretations of transitions to democracy.