Indonesia Foreign Relations - ASEAN
Indonesia was a founding member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and although the organization was not established as a defense alliance, there is a history of military cooperation between Indonesia and its ASEAN partners. Since its founding on August 8, 1967, ASEAN has been a major focus of Indonesia’s regional international relations, and Jakarta is the site of ASEAN’s general secretariat. Founding members Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand helped construct a regional multinational framework to facilitate economic cooperation, diminish intra-ASEAN conflict, and formulate ASEAN positions regarding potential external threats. Brunei joined in 1984, and ASEAN further expanded in the late 1990s with the accession of Vietnam (1995), Laos and Burma (1997), and Cambodia (1999). In 2009 the organization was considering Timor-Leste’s application for membership.
These countries were not always so cooperative with one another. In 1963 the Philippines and Indonesia both tried to prevent or delay the formation of the Federation of Malaysia, the Philippines because it had its own claim to Sabah (formerly North Borneo) and Indonesia because it suspected a British imperialist plot. Indonesia soon turned to political and military confrontation, an attempt to undermine the new state of Malaysia. Sukarno’s radical anti-Western rhetoric, combined with the growing strength of the PKI, marked Indonesia as a disturber of the regional international order rather than a cooperative, peaceful contributor to it.
By 1967 Indonesia’s disruptive stance had changed. ASEAN provided a framework for the termination of the Confrontation, allowing Indonesia to rejoin the regional community of nations in a nonthreatening setting. Furthermore, the five founding members of ASEAN now shared common policies of domestic anticommunism. The ASEAN process of decision making by consensus allowed Indonesia to dictate the pace of change within the organization. Some observers asserted that ASEAN moved only at the pace of its slowest member, which often was Indonesia. With ASEAN increasingly seen as a symbol of regional peace and stability, its strength became an end in itself in Indonesian foreign policy. Suharto became ASEAN’s elder statesman by the time of ASEAN’s Fourth Summit, held in Singapore January 27–29, 1992. He was the only head of government at ASEAN’s 1967 establishment to attend the ASEAN First Summit, held in Bali, February 23–24, 1976, who was still head of government in the early 1990s. In the meantime, Indonesia had played a key role in resolving the Cambodian conflict, setting the stage for ASEAN’s expansion to encompass nearly all of the region by the end of the millennium.
Indonesia, ASEAN, and the Cambodian Conflict
The official ASEAN response, formulated by Indonesia, to Vietnam’s December 1978 invasion of Cambodia, was to deplore the invasion and call for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Cambodia. Indonesia and other ASEAN members immediately placed the issue on the agenda of the UN Security Council. However, deep differences soon arose between Indonesia and Thailand. Although compelled to make a show of solidarity with Thailand by its interest in sustaining ASEAN, Indonesia began to see the prolongation of the war in Cambodia, the “bleeding Vietnam white” strategy, as not being in its or the region’s interests. Although never retreating from ASEAN’s central demands of Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia and Khmer self-determination, Indonesia actively sought to engage the Khmers and Vietnamese and their external sponsors in a search of a settlement that would recognize legitimate interests on all sides. Indonesia opened what came to be called “dual-track” diplomacy, in which it pursued bilateral political communication with Vietnam while maintaining its commitment to the ASEAN formula. By 1986 ASEAN had accepted Indonesia as its official “interlocutor” with Vietnam. From 1982 to the signing of the Final Act of the Paris International Conference on Cambodia on October 23, 1991, Indonesian diplomacy played a central role in peace negotiations that led to the deployment of forces of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
Indonesia’s sense of achievement and pride in its role in bringing peace to Indochina was reflected in three events. On November 12, 1990, Suharto arrived in Hanoi for the first meeting between an ASEAN head of government and a Vietnamese counterpart since Premier Pham Van Dong visited Thailand’s Prime Minister Kriangsak Chomanan in 1977. On March 15, 1992, Japan’s Akashi Yasushi, the UN undersecretary general for disarmament and newly appointed head of UNTAC, arrived in Phnom Penh to be greeted by a color guard of Indonesian troops who were part of the first full battalion-sized contingent of UNTAC peacekeepers dispatched to Cambodia. At the peak deployment of foreign peacekeeping forces in late 1992, Indonesia had the largest force in Cambodia with nearly 2,000 military and police personnel, representing 10 percent of the total.
Finally, in mid-1991, fresh from diplomatic success in helping to end the Cambodian civil war, Indonesia took the initiative in seeking to open multilateral negotiations on competitive South China Sea claims, especially those claims involving jurisdictional disputes over the Spratly Islands. Indonesia’s gradually assertive role in the Cambodian peace effort demonstrated that Jakarta was not entirely willing to place its commitment to ASEAN solidarity above its own national interests. According to leading Indonesian academic Dewi Fortuna Anwar, the “challenge for Indonesian foreign policy in the future is how to maintain a balance between an ASEAN policy which requires goodwill and trust of the other members, and satisfying some of the internationalist aspirations of a growing number of the Indonesian political elite.”
Reorienting ASEAN in a Post–Cold War Context
The resolution of the Cambodian conflict, combined with the dramatically altered balance of power in the region, raised the question of what new political cement might hold ASEAN together in the post–Cold War environment throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Competitive claims by the nations involved in the jurisdictional competition in the South China Sea had the potential for conflict but did not pose a direct threat to ASEAN’s collective security interest, as had the Vietnamese invasion and occupation of Cambodia (see Relations with East Asia, this ch.). The answer has come in the nature of the post–Cold War environment itself: global unipolarity combined with regional multipolarity. The end of the global bipolarity of the Cold War has resulted in the hegemony of the United States and ended the ability of Southeast Asian states to play off one superpower against the other. Regional solidarity has come to be seen as the appropriate response to counterbalance a global hegemon. The importance of regional solidarity has been enhanced by the political, military, and economic rise since the 1980s of China and more recently of India, joining longtime powers Russia, Japan, and Australia in increasing Asia’s geostrategic complexity. Indonesia has decided that only as part of a regional bloc can it (and Southeast Asia as a whole) fend for itself in this increasingly competitive environment.
Indonesia has been solidly supportive of ASEAN’s response, which has been first to expand to encompass nearly all of Southeast Asia (in the 1990s) and then to deepen both its internal cooperation as well as its relationships with regional and global powers (in the twenty-first century). To facilitate internal cooperation, the member states in 2003 streamlined the organization’s various efforts into three pillars: the ASEAN Security Community, building on the 1971 Zone of Peace, Freedom, and Neutrality (ZOPFAN), the 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia (TAC), and the 1997 Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone; the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint; and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. This legal and institutional framework was further strengthened with the adoption of the ASEAN Charter, which came into force on December 15, 2008.
External relationships include: since 1987 allowing non-Southeast Asian states to accede to the TAC (those that have done so include Australia, Britain, China, France, India, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Republic of Korea (South Korea), Sri Lanka, Timor-Leste, and the United States); establishing the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in 1994; and inaugurating ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan, and South Korea) in 1999.
Indonesia’s support for the internal and external expansion of ASEAN’s reach represented an important shift in its strategic thinking; in ASEAN’s first three decades, Indonesia was reluctant to cede any significant authority to the supranational organization or to tie other powers too closely to it; for example, Indonesia had previously resisted the urging of some ASEAN members that the organization formally adopt a more explicit common political-security identity. Indonesia successfully opposed Singapore’s proposal at the ASEAN Fourth Summit in 1992 that would have invited the UN Security Council’s five permanent members to accede to the TAC. In part, Indonesian ambivalence about an ASEAN security role, together with its reluctance to mesh its economy with an ASEAN regional economy, had arisen from Indonesia’s desire to keep its options open as it pursued its interests, not just as an ASEAN member, but as an increasingly important Asia–Pacific regional power.
The economic and political turmoil generated by the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis sidetracked Indonesia’s efforts to enhance its status as an important middle power for about a decade. In the aftermath of that crisis, as well as in the context of post–Cold War global and regional power structures, Indonesia has concluded that its own political and economic security interests are best served by strengthening ASEAN. To avoid a repeat of the financial crisis, within the organization Indonesia has supported the Roadmap for Financial and Monetary Integration of ASEAN (a part of the ASEAN Economic Community), and externally the ASEAN Plus Three forum has launched the Chiang Mai Initiative to address regional financial stability.
Indonesia’s fundamental interests have not changed substantially, and Indonesian nationalism retains a xenophobic streak. One of the country’s most consistent foreign-policy goals has been to reduce regional dependence on external military powers. It has also worked assiduously to dampen or end regional conflicts that often have created openings for greater external meddling in the region’s affairs. What has changed is Indonesia’s perception of the most effective means to serve these interests. As a valuable instrument for wielding noncoercive regional influence and gaining attention in the wider international arena, ASEAN has become one of the platforms from which Indonesia can enhance its profile as a middle power with international aspirations.
ASEAN countries pledge their support for the security of each of the other ASEAN nations but stop short of discussing formation of a military alliance. The Indonesian government stresses that defense cooperation among ASEAN nations is a function of each nation’s right to protect itself and that bilateral cooperation will not lead to any bilateral or ASEAN-wide defense pact. Indonesia plays a leading role in the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), a non-treaty security umbrella organization that includes nations and organizations as members—including the United States, China, the EU, and Russia—that are not ASEAN states.
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