Asian Angle | How spirit of Indonesia and Malaysia’s Reformasi lives on in Southeast Asia’s democratisation story

Reformasi is testimony to the mutual influences stemming from Malaysia and Indonesia’s heritage of a common language and cultural affinities

The movement formed part of the ‘Third Wave Democratisation’ that swept Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, heralding changes in civil society

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Supporters of Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia ousted deputy prime minister, hold “Reformasi” posters during a rally in August 1999 in Kuala Lumpur. File photo: AP

Published: 3:00pm, 26 May 2023Updated: 10:07am, 27 May 2023

Reformasi lives on, a quarter of a century later. Whether consciously or subconsciously, the spirit of the reformist movement that began in Indonesia in the 1990s forms part of Southeast Asia’s democratisation story.

While Southeast Asian societies differ in many ways, Reformasi – a Malay and Indonesian word meaning reform or reformation – is testimony to the mutual influences stemming from Malaysia and Indonesia’s heritage of a common language and cultural affinities.

After World War II, Southeast Asian states went through a difficult process of decolonisation from the 1940s to 1960s.

At the height of the Cold War, including the Vietnam war era in the 1960s and 1970s, human rights abuses were rampant in several authoritarian Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia under military strongman Suharto, the Philippines under dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and the various iterations of military rule in Thailand. In East Asia, South Korea and Taiwan were both governed by military rulers.

Malaysia had been ruled by the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) since its independence in 1957. The party became more authoritarian during and after the emergency-era National Security Council rule led by then deputy prime minister Tun Abdul Razak Hussein in the aftermath of the May 13, 1969 riots.

From the mid-1960s, some of these states were plugged into the US-led global manufacturing production and gradually became richer, earning their authoritarian rulers what some scholars called “[economic] performance legitimacy”.

US President Jimmy Carter’s short reign between 1977 and 1981 introduced human rights into the superpower’s foreign policy with far-reaching consequences. By the early 1980s, human rights abuses among US allies no longer sat well with the domestic audience in the US and Europe.

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.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}Asian Angle | How spirit of Indonesia and Malaysia’s Reformasi lives on in Southeast Asia’s democratisation story

Asian Angle | How spirit of Indonesia and Malaysia’s Reformasi lives on in Southeast Asia’s democratisation story