88 ever, that there is also a structural element which makes for this distinction be- tween the New and colonial orders, The Indies bureaucracy was, after all, effec- tively the employee of the Netherlands, and woe betide the official who did not deal promptly with Dutch business interests or failed to administer to Dutch satisfaction. ‘The Indonesian bureaucracy, however, serves itself: It is (with its military compo- nent) both the dominant element in the ruling class and the agent of the ruling class; and there is no effective institution outside it. The result is what Fred Riggs has called a "bureaucratic polity." When an agrarian society evolves--cither from its own traditions or a colonial experience-- an elite which is almost wholly employed in or dependent on the bureaucracy, a business class that is weak (and most likely alien), and a passive peasantry, it is likely to assume this state. The bureaucracy modernizes enough to rout any tradi- tional rivals and secure a firm grip on the state. It then, however, ceases to move in a modernizing direction. It has no need to do so, for there is no effective pres- sure on it: parties are weak or proscribed, or simply reflections of itself; economic interests are foreign or dependent on bureaucratic favor; and the main indigenous social element outside itself is a disorganized and powerless peasantry. Moreover, because it is the locus of power and of wealth (through its control of licenses and permissions, secured by a carefully nurtured statism), it becomes the arena for all meaningful political action. Real politics takes place not in parliament or whatever organs may exist outside the bureaucracy, but in the government apparatus itself. Lines of power and patronage in the administration do not follow the formal chain of command but a very different pattern: The powerful patron will have clients in several ministries or armed units; his true strength as an official will depend on his personal connections and the access his position provides to wealth. A business- man wishing to obtain favorable consideration will not necessarily seek the formally appropriate official, but the most powerful bureaucrat he thinks he can retain as his champion. Because the bureaucracy is the arena for politics, it cannot func- tion effectively as an executive arm; it cannot be battlefield, commander, and sol- dier all at once. Because positions and criteria for advancement are not what they formally scom, an official's real status depends not on his formal title but on secur- ing wealth, clients, and favor; and (quite aside from display requirements in a changing and increasingly materialistic society) this means utilizing the economic possibilities of one's position to the full. Hence the "commercialization of office” that is now a chronic Indonesian theme of complaint. Because the bureaucracy can- not administer effectively, its social role becomes largely parasitic and its member: if ever they entered with the idea of achieving anything, soon slip into the prevail- ing inertia, The bureaucracy thus becomes alienated functionally from the popula- tion at large, in addition to the distance created by differences in wealth, power, and cultural westernization. Much attention has been paid to the origins of the bureaucratic polity in pre- modern patrimonialism and prebendary systems, viewing its emergence in posteolo- nial regimes as the result of a breakdown in the process of modernization and a return to more indigenous values. It has been commonly imagined as something of a culturally comfortable pit, from which the fallen society finds it almost impossible to escape, for its sole traction, the bureaucratic elite, has neither the reason nor the strength to get moving. There is certainly something to this, but one should bear in mind that in our day societies rarely remain the same, and that therefore the bureaucratic elite may be neither as all-powerful nor as incapable in the future as it is in the present. Riggs, for example, developed his theories largely from observation of Thailand in the 1950s and early 1960s. That country, having under- gone neither the political nor the economic disruptions of colonialism, had had a particularly smooth transition between traditional and modern bureaucratic state. ‘There was very little visible in terms of institutions, social forces, or ideology