India and the island world of Southeast Asia were in close cultural andcommercial contact for many centuries before both came under the influence, and ultimately the domination, of the European colonial powers. In spite ofthe fact that the Indian subcontinent and the Indonesian archipelago were the chief colonial possessions of two of the most advanced and wealthiest countries in West Europe, both emerged into independence in the aftermath of the second world war as extremely poor, technologically backward countries.But in both countries an indigenous political leadership had assumed power, which was determined to accelerate the pace of economic progress, and achieve a high level of development, in the shortest possible time. It is thus interesting to make a pairwise comparison of these two countries, both in respect of the colonial legacy they inherited, and in respect of their post-independence economic policy-making, in order to indicate the specific contributions of two different colonial systems to subsequent economic policy efforts and achievements. We begin with a brief discussion of the economic legacy bequeathed by the two colonial powers to independent India and Indonesia.

A systematic comparison of the development of modern bureaucracies in India and Indonesia during the colonial era has never been made. No equivalent of the excellent work done by J.S. Furnivall on the colonial administration in Burma and Java is available. Yet, much of what he said is useful for the subject of this paper and we shall therefore lean heavily on him. It would be an overstatementto say that Indians before the Second World War felt interested in the events and developments in Indonesia. In the other direction that interest surely existed. We need only to recall the deep impact the Indian nationalist movement made upon such Indonesian nationalists as Sukarno.‘The example of Asian nationalism to which Indonesians referred most often was the Indian one.’ This applies for instance to the Congress non-cooperation campaign in the early 1920s. Indonesian nationalists could since then be classified as cooperators and non-cooperators, although for them the principal criterion was not the wish to boycott Dutch schools, goods and government officials(such a boycott actually never occurred in colonial Indonesia)but the refusal to participate in representative councils such as the Volksraad(i.e. People's Council).

It was a reluctant Dutch government, representing an equally reluctant Dutch population, that had to recognize the independent Republic of Indonesia in 1949. The so-called decolonization process had been a traumatic experience for all parties concerned. The academic community in the Netherlands was no exception to this rule, and Dutch ‘Indonesian studies’ went into a long hibernation. This applies particularly to the study of the welfare services, an aspect of Dutch colonial rule that had been the pride and glory of civil servants and scholars alike (many of them former civil servants).

When we intone the words ‘Unity in Diversity’, we know we are faced with a problem. At best these words express an aspiration rather than a reality — otherwise it would hardly be worthwhile to utter them. But most of all they seem to be an incantation meant to exorcize the threat of both disruptive diversity and oppressive unity. It is, in other words, a mantra that owes its expressiveness to the neatly concise formulation of an unresolved paradox. It is concerned with the cosmogonic conundrum of the One-and-the-Many that has exercised the mythopoeic imagination of the Vedic seers and their likes as well as the rational mind of present-day physicists. Our mantra, then, evokes the riddle of the cosmic order which must encompass its opposite, disorder, so as to be truly universal. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should encounter the same paradox on the more mundane level of the political order. The manyfold diversities undermine the integrity of the whole. Unity, in its turn, threatens to extinguish diversity and to replace it with deadening sameness. Between them, unity and diversity provide for an unpredictable dynamic, and it is a fitting tribute to the dangers involved that our mantra has been enshrined in its Indonesian form in the Republic's armorial motto: Bhinneka Tunggal Ika.