Normative Pluralism in Indonesia: Regions, Religions, and Ethnicities

A number of prominent political theorists recently have tried to expand the reach of their approaches beyond Western liberalism and beyond Western democracies by critically examining notions of justice, multiculturalism, and what Parekh (2000) calls 'moral monism.' In his late writings, John Rawls (Rawls 1999) asked, albeit in a footnote, whether Islamic norms could enter into political debates about justice (he said they would have to be translated into universalistic norms). Parekh (2000) has presented a normative framework for immigration situations (such as in Britain) that would not pretend that Western liberal ideas of autonomy were universal. In Chapter 2, Kym-licka asks whether Western trends toward recognition of minorities have found or will find a purchase in Asian societies; he suggests that they have only to a limited degree. These studies start from a Western liberal framework, asking whether it is suitable for other societies. I would like to proceed the other way around. After noting Kymlicka's observations on Asian societies, I explore claims and practices regarding normative and legal pluralism that have emerged in Indonesia. I find debates and conflicts over the very units for thinking about pluralism and that, specifically, using the broadly analytic categories of political theory such as 'minority', 'culture', and 'people' to characterize the positions taken in Indo-nesia would highlight, and thus favor, one set of political positions over others. I then ask if this case might not allow us to reexamine the language we use for describing cases in Europe and North America. Kymlicka points out that western countries have moved towards policies of 'multination federalism', in which minorities are granted a degree of self-governance in defined territories, as well as increasing degrees of 'multicul-turalism' towards immigrants, in the form of rights to preserve their language and culture. The concept of multination federalism covers a wide range of arrangements, from devolution of legislative powers, as in Scotland and Catalonia, to the formal recognition of indigenous peoples' rights in Australia and the Americas. Even France, stated by Kymlicka as the major exception to this trend, continues to recognize the special status of a number of regions,