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(2015) Mental maps in the era of détente and the end of the Cold War 1968–91, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Soeharto1 ruled Indonesia for 32 years (1966–98), remaining in power longer than any other major Third World leader apart from Kim Il Sung, Fidel Castro, Muamar Gaddafi and Lee Kuan Yew: during this time, no fewer than seven US presidents occupied the White House. A man of resourcefulness and guile, an enigma even to his closest associates, addicted to farming and golf and deep-sea fishing, he was one of the most complex and important Third World leaders of the post-Second World War era. Soeharto was cut from very different cloth, emotionally and ideologically, from an earlier generation of charismatic postcolonial figures such as Sukarno, who had been Indonesia's president since the proclamation of independence in 1945, Ho Chi Minh, Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser, men who were in varying degrees on the left of the political spectrum. Yet he achieved far more for his nation in material terms that any of those men. His successful combination of authoritarian rule and firm economic management, backed fortuitously by a resources boom and a quadrupling in the price of oil, gave Indonesia, a mendicant among nations when he came to power, a foothold in the global economy. It was an approach followed by a number of other conservative — albeit highly dissimilar — Third World leaders, including Lee in Singapore, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Park Chung Hee in South Korea. It was an approach followed by Deng Xiaoping, once the antithesis of a conservative, as he steered China towards a booming market economy.
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Full citation:
Jenkins, D. (2015)., President Soeharto, in S. Casey & J. Wright (eds.), Mental maps in the era of détente and the end of the Cold War 1968–91, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 114-136.
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