On Monday nearly half a million East Timorese have the chance to vote away the Indonesian state. Officials in Jakarta are trusting East Timor is a special case and that the idea won't spread. But the very fact of the ballot reflects huge changes in the influence of the state around this vast archipelago.

Bishop Belo first proposed a UN-sponsored referendum in 1989, but he abandoned it after many young people were tortured for supporting it. Ten years later the view that states can't just do anything they like without asking permission has won out. Today the UN is in Dili acting out its belief that the people of this little territory have certain rights over against colonial powers.

Under Suharto's New Order, the state appeared to enjoy complete freedom to impose its will on society. Within years of the 1975 invasion of East Timor, journalists began to describe guerrilla resistance as mere 'rag-tag rebel bands'. In July 1990 the army launched what it called 'shock therapy' in Aceh to terrorise the population into withdrawing support for the Free Aceh Movement. A hundred or more Muslims were gunned down in Jakarta's own harbour area on 12 September 1984. Popular opposition figures disappeared into gaol. Golkar increased its lead in election after election, culminating in a massive 74% in 1997.

In every case, protest had no noticeable effect. Suharto was the master puppeteer. Meticulous scholars called his regime 'bureaucratic-authoritarian'. Less fussy ones called it dictatorial.

But brutality by itself never makes for effective government. It took a long time, but state-orchestrated violence has failed in East Timor, the one place in Indonesia where the use of force has been overwhelming and sustained. This must be deeply disturbing for all who believe that force is the bottom line.

Armed forces commander General Wiranto seems to know this. In August last year he apologised to the Acehnese for human rights abuses committed by his troops over the years. Two weeks ago he promised to pull the military out of the special riot control operation in Aceh, leaving it to the police. Of course this is not the last word. He also threatened Aceh with martial law, and is creating a more effective military command structure there. But Wiranto has to negotiate in a way that the armed forces commander in 1990 did not need to.

Even within the state, political contest is becoming more open. The June elections produced provincial governments often dominated by different parties to those in the national government. Aceh's provincial parliament for example will be controlled by the Isamic PPP, which came a poor third at the national level. Jakarta will have to do more talking with the regions than it has been accustomed to.

As one corruption scandal after another came to light last year we learned another thing about the Indonesian state. Government leaders who depend on under-the-table payments produce bad policy, because they look to the wrong constituency. The economic crisis has left them with less cash in hand and thus even more ineffective. The picture does not improve as we go down the hierarchy and out into the regions. One clear illustration: the government just cannot control the plantation companies responsible for the massive bushfires now flaring up again in Kalimantan.

The state, in other words, looks like a crippled giant.

Perhaps the impression of a homogeneous and all-powerful state directed from a single point in Jakarta was never wholly accurate. The American scholar Joel Migdal says we must imagine relations between the state and society in Third World countries not as static but as an on-going contest in numerous arenas at different levels.

In England, the idea that the modern state is wholly sovereign over the lives of its citizens was established once the strong Tudors emerged victorious from the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. In the Third World, the 'Wars of the Roses' only began with the colonial wars of the late nineteenth century. They took on a more civil character with the nation-building efforts after independence. They have still not run their course.

Now that Suharto is gone, and with him both a vibrant economy and the ideological remnants of the Cold War, Migdal's image of a contest between the state and social forces seems more appropriate than ever.

On the symbolic level too, today's political leaders face more contestation. The economic crisis has quite taken the shine off the developmentalist promise that a little belt-tightening now will bring in the golden age tomorrow. Under Suharto, every man, woman and child learned vaguely religious values of submission in compulsory Pancasila ideology classes. But the entire Pancasila indoctrination bureaucracy was dismantled last year. Even Megawati, biggest vote getter in the June election, will not have it easy. She would like to reignite the fires of nationalism for which she admires her father, but Muslims inspired by a less secular vision are already challenging her.

All this does not mean Indonesia is about to fly apart, as some darkly predict. It does mean that tomorrow's state leaders will have to strike new deals with many social forces across a wide range of issues. Just as in post-Soviet Russia it will no longer do for us not to know where Chechnya and Dagestan are, so we will have to become familiar with Ambon and Kalimantan, Aceh and Irian Jaya, on the map of Indonesia. And we might have to give East Timor a different colour altogether. In post-Suharto Indonesia, the local becomes more and more important.

[This appeared in The Age (Melbourne), 28 August 1999]

Gerry van Klinken, editor, 'Inside Indonesia' magazine.