Hello, welcome to visit Shanghai Forum
Founder of Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia;
Former Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, Indonesia;
Former Ambassador of Indonesia to the United States
Thank you for inviting me to the 17th Shanghai Forum. We are here to discuss what is Asia’s response to the multi crisis that is happening in the world now. Obviously, what we see is divided and dangerous where there is high strategic competition, economic stress, political division. At the society level, there is a feeling of insecurity in some nations of the world. So how do we deal with this? How does Asia deal with this? I’ll make a couple of points.
One is we in the Southeast Asia have been here before, and it was a lot worse in the 60s and 70s. Southeast Asia was not positive. Southeast Asia was very much divided. There was the Vietnam war, and there was war in Cambodia. And in the 60s, there was controversy between Indonesia and Malaysia and Indonesia and Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines had a serious problem over Sabah, and I could go on and on. It was definitely a region of division, a region of conflict and a region where trust was very low. That’s what we had in Southeast Asia.
But if you look at where we are now is really remarkable. The division is gone. The ASEAN-5 or 6 has now become ASEAN-10. And Timor-Leste has been agreed, in principle, to join, so it will be as ASEAN-11. There is no war in Southeast Asia, except we have still some conflicts within Myanmar. There is high degree of the economic cooperation among ASEAN countries. Trust is very high, and ASEAN is a peaceful region that is driving what is called the ASEAN centrality. There is an ASEAN Charter that provides a legal identity for ASEAN, and also provides norms and rules on how to behave in our region.
But in short, Southeast Asia has been transformed in the last two decades by the experience of ASEAN, and also by the improvement or transformation of bilateral relations among Southeast Asian countries. Indonesia and Timor-Leste had very difficult relations after the breakup, but now, relations between Indonesia and Timor-Leste are among the best bilateral relations in Southeast Asia. My point is that the world can learn from how Southeast Asia is doing. It just took a belief in region, a belief in the power of diplomacy and thinking outside the box. And I don’t know if that is what is lacking to the global level. But in Southeast Asia, we definitely did that and it worked well for us.
The second thing that I want to note is on how Asia is responding is through something when I would call non-alignment 2.0. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the non-aligned movement is going to rise up and be like it was in the 1960s. In fact, non-aligned movement now is not in a good shape. It doesn’t have much energy. It doesn’t have much initiative now. I think the last chairmanship of Venezuela has been extended for another year, because Uganda is having problem getting ready for the chairmanship. So non-alignment 2.0 means that a lot of countries, especially Indonesia, are valuing and reinforcing its sense of strategic autonomy. Non-aligned movement in 1960s is about identity, is about creating a third world identity and creating a voice, finding a place in international relations. But non-alignment 2.0 is about countries really preserving its strategic autonomy and trying to find a versatile role in a diplomatic landscape that has many connections. This is what Indonesia is trying to do: finding connections with other like-minded countries that are also valuing the non-aligned position. I travelled in four Asian countries recently, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and India. They all spoke that despite the divisions of the world and despite the strong relationship that they have with one of the major powers, the most important thing for us is to keep our non-alignment. Countries want to keep and strengthen their strategic autonomy, make options, and become versatile in creating their own diplomatic space in the region and toward the world. I think ASEAN is the perfect place for this. ASEAN is the regional expression of non-alignment, because a lot of ASEAN countries say we want to be masters of our own region, Southeast Asia. We don’t want Southeast Asia to be controlled and driven by foreign powers, by outside powers, like it was in the past. And we want to be closer to one another, and we want to play a central role, a central driving role for ASEAN as a society in a wider region.
The third point is about dialogue. I know every speaker here has reinforced the need for dialogue. But my concern is that the space for dialogue globally is shrinking. This is in line with the geopolitical rivalries and political rivalries that are rising. So, positions of countries and governments are hardening. They have made up their mind about the other side, which means when they talk, they don’t listen. They have made their foregone conclusion that we think you are that, we think you are this, and whatever you say doesn’t change our mind. That sentiment is growing, even among the academic community. I call this intellectual intolerance. Usually academics are the ones that are most open to dialogue and different viewpoints. We embrace it. We love it. But there’s this growing intellectual intolerance where “hey, we know what those guys are gonna say anyways”, “we don’t want to be sitting on the same panel with them” and so on. And I think this is very unhealthy. My group Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia has experimented with the new initiative called Global Town Hall, which means we try to connect several societies, East, West, North, South, which comprising of universities, think tanks and NGOs. We try to engage them in an open and inclusive dialogue on many issues. Early in November, we did a 15-hour-long marathon discussions involving Asian, African, South American, European, and North American participants. It went quite well. But clearly, the people that we spoke to, for example, the people from Nigeria, Pacific islands and some Latin American countries, told us that, “hey, you know, this is very useful, but no one ever asked us to be part of any global conversations.” It’s very interesting that there is an ocean of civil societies that have remained untouched, feel left out of global conversations and don’t connect with one another. And I would say if any recommendation I can give is that do harness the space for the civil societies dialogue of east, west, north and south space, because the world is not just about Davos. These people feel that, “hey, we watched Davos on YouTube, but we don’t feel like that we belong there.” So, there is a white space to be harnessed in terms of civil society dialogue.
The fourth point is that confidence-building measures is really missing a lot these days. When I was in government, when I was at the foreign ministry, and when I was just joining foreign ministry in the 80s, there’s a lot of talk on confidence-building measures. Despite the conflict and the low trust, confidence-building measures was involved, was fashionable. Think tank talks about it every day. And the problem that I see now is that hardly anyone talks about confidence-building measures anymore. People are busy doing confidence building or coalition building within their own sphere, without much really reaching to the other side. And I think this is an area that we can do better in our regional area.
In the year 2001 during 9·11, American nationals definitely connected the efforts to fight terrorism. I remember on 9·11 I was in the U.S. and after 9·11, I drove a car from Washington DC to New York. Every house I passed and every car had an American flag. Clearly that’s part of American nationalism. But what I’m worried now is that there are signs that American Nationalism is connected to China bashing. It has become such a political football on both sides and the political aisle to the extent that if anyone wants to try something new, constructive and positive about China, it will be seen as political weakness. My worry is also in the present atmosphere of how I can see China if there’s an opening, a smart opportunity to improve relations, to ease the tension. But that road is not taken, because it will look unpopular to the domestic audience. It will look weak, which means that strategic options and policy options for China is no longer made on a rational basis, but on a totally political basis. That’s the challenge for America, in my view, that how do you reform this China-bashing attitude. Keep in mind Indonesia was a lot harder on China. When I was the diplomat, if I was speaking to a Chinese diplomat before the normalization of relations, I would be fired. That’s how bad it was in Indonesia towards China. And this was in the 70s. But now China is a strategic partner, is one of our closest partners. President Joko and President Xin Jinping have very close relations. There are also relations across the broad government-to-government, business-to-business and so on.
So, these things can be overcome. But on China’s side, I also want to alert you that my group, FPCI, did a survey on ASEAN’s attitude towards China. What we found was interesting and you need to know this. What we found from our survey of all ASEAN countries – we had almost 2,000 respondents – is that they are very comfortable with the trust economically. There was high degree of economic trust towards China. It was about 60%. But when we asked about trust on security, the number went down very low at about 12.8%. There is a lot of homework on the part of China to improve this. How do you make it so that the same economic trust towards China from ASEAN people – I’m talking about people and not the government – can also happen on the political and security side. So that’s another point on confidence-building measures.
The next point is also on democracy versus autocracies that has been framed in some western pundits. If I go to seminars in the United States and Europe, there are quite a few academics or pundits or even policy makers that say, the world is but fight between democracies and autocracies. And I want to say that in Southeast Asia, we don’t say “I’m better and you’re not” and so on. That’s really not helpful. When we look at our relations with other countries, we don’t start with judgments, we start with will, with noninterference, and so on. But this is particularly true in Southeast Asia, because southeast Asia has many political systems. Indonesia is a strong democracy, and we have the social systems in Vietnam and Laos. We have monarchy in Brunei and we have other political systems. But the secret sauce of ASEAN is that we don’t frame ASEAN and Southeast Asia as a contest between democracies and non-democracies, autocracies. There is acceptance of political diversity. That is just part of our pragmatic way of thinking. And we think Southeast Asia should be united on the basis of geography, not on the basis of political system.
Lastly is on cooperation. Everyone in this panel talks about the need for cooperation. But it’s very hard. The world is very divided at the G20. They don’t even want to shake hands. They only want to take pictures together. So I think the appetite for cooperation is much less today, and it’s an a la carte cooperation. You choose who you cooperate with. You choose who you’re comfortable with. I think this is an important task for us to overcome because cooperation and trust come in the same package. The more you cooperate, the more trust will rise. The more you cooperate, the less conflict will blossom. There’s an inverse relationship between cooperation and conflict. Less cooperation means more conflict, and more cooperation means less conflict. The Challenge is, again, it is very difficult. During the pandemic, you would expect that the United States and China would work together. But apparently, the United States and China work separately to address the pandemic. A friend of mine said probably the only way that the world would be united is aliens from planet Mars will invade the world, and then all the world will come unite and fight the aliens. But to be honest, I’m not so sure.
After the pandemic, it shows that we are like to work together in different silos. We really need to do better. I would love to see United States and China engaging in one meaningful project of cooperation in Southeast Asia. It’s not there. There isn’t one. There isn’t one problem around the world, but especially for Southeast Asia. I would like to see one. If we see that, the political, diplomatic and strategic impact on our region will be enormous, in my view. So I’ll stop there. Those are some thoughts on how ASEAN and Asia can and should respond to the multitude of problems that we are facing globally and also regional. Thank you very much.
(This article is edited based on the recording and has not been reviewed by the speaker.)
