The Complexity of the Law in Indonesia

Indonesian Law
The Indonesian legal system is complex because it is a confluence of three distinct systems: Adat law, Dutch colonial law and national law co-exist in modern Indonesia. For example, commercial law is grounded upon the Commercial Code 1847 (Kitab UndangUndangHukum Dagang or Wetboek van Koophandel), a relic of the colonial period.  Adat law is less conspicuous. However, some adat principles such as ‘consensus through decision making’ (musyawarah untuk mufakat) appear in modern Indonesian legislation (Tabalujan).

Yet if we go beyond such retrospective descriptions to consider functional categories, a convenient point of departure is the contrast between present-day Indonesian law and what can be reconstructed of law on Java in, say, the late seventeenth century. Again history raises its face in the question of terminology. What does one call the period preceding the relatively short colonial era without implying an inevitable period of European dominance? It is probably termed the same as the first year of the 30-Years War.

Colonial Change
This brings us to the second set of contrasts; namely, external v internal. Externally motivated change came about through the activities of Dutch colonialism. To do it justice a thumbnail sketch of the development of Indonesian law under European tutelage is necessary, if for no other reasons than to emphasis the enormous changes taking place.

Indonesian Law under colonial influence
Without going into the details of Indonesia’s colonial history – which is taught at Lund University within the author’s course on Southeast Asian History 800 AD to the present – one can identify two phases in the exercise of European/Dutch authority. Crucial to the division is the means through which changes were brought about. Roughly corresponding to the period of the Dutch East India Company (1604-1799) and that of the Netherlands East Indies (1816-1942), their methods were respectively ccash and ccoercion.

Cash = Dutch East India Company
During the eighteenth century the Company created a new economic system, one based on agriculture production of tropical goods for export to the European markets. The goods consisted mostly of non-native crops as indigo, coffee, etc introduced specifically for the profitable export market. To make the system possible certain inflexible demands were made on the local socioeconomic system. Undisturbed access to land and labor was indispensable for the commercial entrepreneur, the Dutch East India Company. As both were alien to Java, new relations had to be created, such as land ‘ownership’, stable concentrations of population, and motivation for the latter to work the former in order to bring profits to the Company’s owners (Hoadley 1994b and 1994a). Changes did not stop there. For the new socioeconomic order to function profitably, the law had to be adjusted. Such alterations were subsequently institutionalized through the introduction of statute law with assistance of ‘tame’ local potentates. ‘Tame’ is perhaps too strong a word as it implies a moral judgement. What is meant here are that a number of local potentates came to see their own interests served better by the new Dutch-created economic system than the one they had heretofore represented. They simply ‘went modern’. In doing so they set their own resources in terms of control of manpower behind that of the Dutch Company, thus making the new system feasible. For this they were richly rewarded in terms of status, position, and materials goods unimaginable under traditional conditions. Those who did not adapt to the new system went under, thereby disappearing from the power structure (Hoadley 2004, forthcoming).

In terms of the law, this meant that the intent of the law bearers from time immortal, as found in the Laws of Java legal tradition, gave way to Javo-Dutchstatute law. In West Java examples of the latter abound as the Undang Nitih Cirebon of 1723, the Layang Ubaya Cirebon of 1691, and the Surat Undangundang Cirebon of 1721 (Hoadley and Hooker, 1980, pp. 258-69). For the former the Mataram Empire divided by the Treaty of Gianti in 1755, the whole genre of the angger-angger can be seen as Javo-Dutch creations. All had more in common with Dutch East India Company statute law than the preceding Laws of Java.

Refer to http://www4.lu.se/images/Syd_och_sydostasienstudier/working_papers/mason.pdf