Nationalist rhetoric and technological development: The Indonesian aircraft industry in the New Order regime

This paper discusses the impact of the combination of nationalist rhetoric and technological development in a Third World country. Using the Indonesian aircraft industry during the New Order regime as its focus, this paper considers the ways in which nationalism becomes an impetus for technology development. It also provides a vignette of how nationalist rhetoric shapes the symbolic and physical construction of technology. Technological nationalism is a form of ideology that functions at three levels: integration, legitimation, and distortion. The author argues that while the social and cultural effects of technological nationalism encourage greater integration of society, they also spawn far-reaching implications by giving technological elites tremendous power to determine technological choices.