Liminal Liberalism? Ivan Kats, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Obor Foundation in Cold War Indonesia

Abstract

The story of the Obor Foundation is important for several reasons. Firstly, it covers the contribution of an up-till-now largely overlooked Western philanthropic enterprise to promote a cohesive national cultural identity for Indonesia in the wake of the fall of Sukarno. Secondly, Obor was an attempt to move beyond previous Cold War efforts to spread liberal ideas globally, most notably by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. To overcome critiques of top-down Westernization and neocolonialism, Obor sought to establish local control over the publishing process in a reciprocal arrangement of shared responsibility. Thirdly, it was symbolic of the move of the Ford Foundation, which had invested a great deal in the modernisation (i.e. Westernization) of Indonesian education, towards introducing a greater level of autonomy in their operations from the late 1960s onwards, expressing a general confidence in (and sufficient monitoring of) Western-trained and/or -oriented local leadership.