Democratic Ideals and Political Disappointment

A few days after Hatta formally resigned as the Vice-President, the Gadjah Mada University conferred on him the honorary doctoral degree. His acceptance speech was, as Kahin rightly stated, “one of the clearest recent expositions of salient aspects of his political and socioeconomic thinking”. The speech, however, could also be taken as a thesis that continued to haunt Sukarno until the end of the Guided Democracy. Reading Sukarno's speeches one can easily get the impression that Sukarno found it very difficult to extricate himself from the intellectual “ghost” of Hatta's acceptance speech, and of course, that of his other speeches and writings. In spite of the failure of some political parties, most notably the Masyumi and the PSI (but not the PKI and the PNI) and local military commanders to secure the re-entry of Hatta into the national government, Sukarno could not disengage himself from Hatta's counter discourses in his political speeches. It may well be that this was Sukarno's strength as an ideologue — he needed a counterpart or, in the case of Hatta, an opponent, to formulate his ideas.

In his acceptance speech, entitled Past and Future,, Hatta briefly described the growth of national consciousness and ideals. As usual, he also touched on the cooperative as the proper economic foundation, and the educational roles of the political parties. He stressed the importance of decentralization and local autonomy, which, according to him, should reside at the kabupaten/ district level. He criticized the behaviour of the leaders of the political parties. In his opinion, their political behaviour was endangering the survival of the democratic system itself. Actually, several issues he raised in the speech had already become common knowledge, since Hatta had been talking about the ideas for some years. He touched on “the old feudal states, ruled by autocratic kings” and on the “village democratic system”. However ideal the “village democracy”, with its gotong royong (mutualhelp) spirit and its emphasis on unanimous decision might be, Hatta, who continued to adhere to the notion of “collective democratic system”, said it was impossible to apply it without proper adjustments in the modern nation-state. “In this matter,” he stated, “whether one likes it or not, one has to accept the system of Western democracy whereby decisions are taken by a majority of votes”.