Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 52, Number 2, 2006, pp. 261-271.

Indonesia and the West: an Ambivalent,

Misunderstood Engagement
R.E. ELSON
History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland
The relationship between Indonesia and the West has always been deeply ambivalent. On the
one hand, Indonesia, since it began its search for modernity a century or so ago, has always felt
a deep attraction for things Western, which promised technological mastery and economic
success which might overcome the humiliation of colonial subjection. On the other hand,
Indonesians were wary that any engagement that ran too deep and uncritically might prejudice
their own specific sense of identity. That ambivalence was deepened and consolidated by
Indonesias own failure to develop and deepen the legitimacy, both domestic and international,
of the state that its leaders had created as the vehicle of becoming modern. As a result,
Indonesias engagement with the West remained uncertain in style and often characterised by
the unhelpful stridency that issues from insecurity.

Indonesia troubles the West. It is big, strategically important, and potentially highly
influential in world affairs. Its success as a nation is crucial to the stability of Southeast
Asia. Its behaviour, then, is important to the West. When Indonesia ignores or rejects
Western advice on how to behave, the West is puzzled that its efforts at helpful
intervention and assistance are rebuffed or apparently misunderstood. The Wests
perplexity, I will argue, is a result of its failure to comprehend the long and complex
history of Indonesias continuing self-creation, and especially the central role in that
chequered process played by Indonesias engagement with the West.
A recent example of such dissonance came in the wake of the Bali bombings of late
2002. While Western attention, especially in Australia, was focussed on the miserable
fate of young white tourists killed or injured whilst enjoying cheap beer and romance
in the paradise of Bali, some Indonesians used the occasion to highlight the
undesirable effects of unrestrained (and almost exclusively Westernised) international
tourism in Bali. Some noted that the kind of behaviour characteristically indulged in by
young Western tourists in Bali (drinking, promiscuity, gambling, drugs, topless
sunbathing and so on) was an affront to Indonesias dignity and sense of morals. Others
pointed to the baleful effects of places like Kuta on the integrity of Balinese culture,
and pointed to the need to reshape tourism policies to preserve that culture.1 More
generally on the Indonesian side, there was stubborn resistance to the Western
accusation that Indonesia had been less than energetic in pursuing the terrorists who
had perpetrated the enormity of Bali and in closing down the network which had

I am grateful to John Butcher, Rene Worringer, Clive Moore, and C.K. Lai for their comments on
an earlier version of this article.
1
See, for example, the comments of Professor Luh Ketut Suryani quoted in Eric Ellis, Its an end to
foreign evils: Bali academic, The Australian, 22 October 2002.
The Author.
Journal Compilation 2006 Department of History, School of Political Science and International
Studies, The University of Queensland and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

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R.E. Elson

sponsored them.2 And, as always, Indonesia remained as sensitive as ever to Western

demands that it improve its human rights record.3
Yet it would be wrong to think that resistance to and resentment of Western desires
are the dominant motifs of Indonesias attitude towards the West. There is amongst
many Indonesians a deep attraction to the globalising content of Westernism. Many
love the allure and liberation of the ideas of the West, as well as its command of the
skills of technology and, of course, the material benefits which access to the West can
bring. Many deeply admire the political, economic and cultural success of the countries
of the West and long for something similar for their own country. I want in this article
to explore and explain this tension in Indonesia between the repugnance and the allure
of the West. It has been a key feature of at least the last century of Indonesias modern
history, and promises to remain so for the foreseeable future.
The Search for the Modern
At the heart of Indonesias felt attraction for things Western has been the sense that the
West provides the avenue, the direction, to becoming modern. This shrieking for the
modern first became evident in what was to become Indonesia in the first decade of the
twentieth century. Both its stridency, and the consequent tense ambivalence about the
West, resulted from two related aspects of Indonesias experience of colonialism. The
first was the extreme lateness of Indonesias introduction to modernity. The Dutch
were determined to keep the Netherlands Indies traditional as a means of keeping it
stable and under their control, which meant that very few Indonesians received any
kind of Western (Dutch-language) education until the twentieth century, much less the
chance to pursue their studies in Western countries.4 There were no vernacular
newspapers in the Netherlands Indies until the publication of Bromartani in 1855, and
the appearance of indigenous-owned and edited newspapers had to await the first
decade of the twentieth century.5 The result of this policy of educational containment
was a sharply divided society (by race and hierarchy) in which the potentially
liberating forces of Western capitalism were deliberately prevented from working their
emancipatory magic on Indonesians themselves. Thus there emerged Furnivalls
plural society, as well as Boekes concept of economic dualism (or, as Roger Knight
has put it so nicely when referring to the technological dualism characteristic of the
colonial sugar industry in Java, the notion of placing a First World factory in a Third
World field).6

Marty Natalegawa, interviewed in Ross Coulthart, The bombing of Bali,

<http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/transcript_1167.asp>.
3
Tiarma Siboro, Indonesia tells U.S. senators to mind own business, Jakarta Post, 5 July 2004,
<http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailheadlines.asp?fileid=20040705.A06&irec=5>.
4
Raden Ajeng Kartini put it best: knowledge of Dutch language is the key which can unlock the
treasure houses of Western civilization and knowledge (Kartini, Give the Javanese education!, in
Joost Cot, trans, Letters from Kartini: an Indonesian feminist 1900-1914 (Clayton, 1992), pp. 53435). See also Ahmat B. Adam, The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian
Consciousness (1855-1913) (Ithaca, 1995), p. 87.
5
Adam, The Vernacular Press, pp. 16-17, 102-11; Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular
Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926 (Ithaca, 1990), p. 33. The paper lasted only until 1856.
6
Furnivalls concept of plural society referred to the racially segmented nature of colonial societies
like the Netherlands Indies and Burma, where races existed side by side but lived separate
existences. Boekes notion of economic dualism referred to the existence of allegedly separate and
self-contained Eastern and Western economies in the Netherlands Indies.

Indonesia and the West

263

So late to modernity, Indonesians suddenly introduced to this new world were

humiliated by the cascading consciousness of their backwardness (a feeling routinely
reinforced by the Dutch).7 Yet their humiliation simply reinforced their fascination
with Western (Dutch) modernity (including the apparently masterly ease with which
the Dutch conquered and controlled them), and their determination to make up the
difference as soon as possible. Thus the concept, first popularised by Abdul Rivai and
R.M. Tirtoadhisuryo, that Indonesia had been asleep, and desperately needed to
awaken to the new world of the modern. Modernity, however, had a specific meaning
for Indonesians (just as it had for the Dutch) at this pregnant time: essentially, it was
defined in technological and economic, rather than political terms.
The second (and later) aspect added the politics. Once the liberal capitalism
practised by the Dutch had moved into high gear in the late nineteenth century, its
ultimate effect was to create a roughly united, relatively economically integrated, and
efficiently managed Netherlands East Indies (with, a Dutch scholar-official boasted, a
completely equipped and modern apparatus of state)8 where there had previously just
been an archipelago of vaguely-defined polities. Thereafter, the dominant strand of
Indonesian thinking about modernity moved very rapidly to a comprehension that the
only appropriate vehicle to achieve the modernity they so prized was an independent
Indonesian nation-state embracing the whole of the Dutch-ruled archipelago. Indeed,
one of the most astonishing things about the way in which nationalism expressed itself
in Indonesia in the early twentieth century was the speed with which the idea of a
politically-unified and indigenously-ruled Indonesia took root, with almost no
contestation. Both the form (nation-state) and the substance (Indonesia) were
unabashed borrowings from modernity.9
Emerging Contradictions I: Limiting the Modern
These developments raised important questions and tensions. One was the issue of the
extent and depth of the modernity to be pursued. There were those who argued that
Indonesians could progress [maju] only by becoming more like the Dutch; to make
progress, to be progressive, to be modern, meant unambiguous emulation of the West.
Such Westernised thinking was not especially common, however, and tended to be
espoused by alienated and highly Westernised intellectuals like Syahrir, who penned
these lines in 1935:
Here there has been no spiritual or cultural life, and no intellectual progress for centuries [].
What can a puppet or other simple and mystical symbols offer us in a broad and intellectual sense?
[] Our inclination is no longer towards the mystical, but towards reality, clarity and objectivity.
In substance, we can never accept the essential difference between the East and the West, because
for our spiritual needs we are in general dependent on the West, not only scientifically but
10
culturally.

The native is a poor and cruel coachman, a slovenly worker, a stubborn, backward farmer, a lazy
supervisor, an indifferent subordinate, a hard master. He is superstitious, unreliable, unfair, stupid,
careless, childish, despotic, slavish (K. Wybrands, in Nieuws van den Dag van Nederlandsch-Indi,
29 November 1912, quoted in A. Muhlenfeld, De Inlandsche pers, Hindia Poetra 1 (1916), p. 10n).
8
A.D.A. de Kat Angelino, Colonial Policy, trans G.J. Renier (Chicago, 1931), Vol. 2, pp. 56-57.
9
See, in this context, Benedict Andersons discussion of the modular character of nation-ness
(Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), pp.
13-14).
10
Quoted in Harry J. Benda and John A. Larkin, eds, The World of Southeast Asia (New York, 1967),
p. 195.

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R.E. Elson

Most Indonesian thinkers and leaders, however, were troubled that too hasty or
complete a transformation in the direction of modernity would have highly damaging
consequences for their own sense of self. At bottom, at least at this stage of nationalist
construction, the problem was that there was no clear, concise and enduring sense of
the identity of the entity that they sought to modernise. This continuing tension was
reflected in the history of the nationalist movement in various ways. For example, the
earliest examples of modern/Western thinking were usually couched in defensive
modalities or in ways that sought to keep intact an existing, essentialised and narrow
cultural sense of self.11 Budi Utomo (1908) was an organisation that wanted to
modernise the Javanese aristocracy so that it could be more truly Javanese. Sarekat
Islam (1911) was in some sense a reaction to developing Chinese nationalism in the
Indies and in part originally sought to defend Muslim trading interests.
Muhammadiyah (1912), an early modernist Islamic organisation, attempted to purify
Indonesian Islam from the accretions of tradition and integrate Western technological
thinking into Muslim belief, but also to defend Islam from the threat of Christian
proselytisation. Early manifestations of Communism were characterised by the ease
with which Communist orthodoxy was subjugated to local cultural and social
imperatives. Even with the emergence of secular nationalist thinking in the mid 1920s,
there was always a concern that what was truly Indonesian (notwithstanding deep
uncertainty about what Indonesia represented) could not be foregone, and frenzied
efforts to combine the best of both indigenous and Western worlds, best exemplified by
Sukarnos attempts to synthesise nationalism, Islam and Marxism, and his reengineering of Marxist social categories into Marhaenism, an ideology which sought
vague social improvement for the Indonesian peasantry. Perhaps most telling of all was
the attraction many Indonesians felt in the 1930s to Japanese fascism. Japan, after all,
had demonstrated that it could emulate the West in technological and managerial skill
without loss of its Japaneseness and without succumbing to what many thought to be
the failed and fading ideals of Western democracy.12
In matters political and social, Indonesians tended to be conservative and reluctant
to depart from (often invented) traditional modalities of thinking. Indonesian
political leaders were particularly averse to Western models which they thought
might damage the fabric of the society they sought to build and which (closer to the
bone) might also undercut their own hierarchically-derived social and political
authority. Thus, the Javanese nationalist and aristocrat R.M.S. Suriokusumo remarked
in 1920:
Democracy has invented a system in which equal rights are granted to everyone: the wise man and
the idiot, the man who does intellectual work and the laborer, the man of high moral status and the
debauched. It wants to give effect to equal rights and to throw them as a sheet over all places of
unequal height [...]. Anyone who distributes equal rights to people of unequal development, who
11

A notable exception to this generalisation is provided by the thinking of the Eurasian E.F.E.
Douwes Dekker, and two lively, activist Western-educated Javanese aristocrats, Dr Cipto
Mangunkusumo and Suwardi Suryaningrat. See especially R.M. Soewardi Soerjaningrat, Als ik eens
Nederlander was [], in E.F.E. Douwes Dekker, Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, and R.M. Soewardi
Soerjaningrat, Onze verbanning: publicatie der officiele bescheiden, toegelicht met verslagen en
commentaren, betrekking hebbende op de gouvernements-besluiten van den 18en Augustus 1913, nos.
1a en 2a, regelende de toepassing van artikel 47 R.R. (Schiedam, 1913), p. 68.
12
Susan Abeyasekere, One Hand Clapping: Indonesian Nationalists and the Dutch, 1939-1942
(Clayton: Monash Papers on Southeast Asia No. 5, 1976), pp. 19-20. On Sutomos 1936 visit, see
Imam Soepardi, Ketika almarhoem Dr. Soetomo di Nippon, Asia Raya 1 Tahoen Nomor Peringatan
[1943], n.p.

Indonesia and the West

265

believes that the word of the unenlightened villager is of the same value as that of the Wise man, is
neither sensible nor just [...]. Statecraft should be based on this principle. Wise men should be at
13
the head of the State and should be chosen by the Wise and not by the people.

In the same conservative vein, the modernist Muslim Fachruddin al-Kahiri argued in
1933 that:
So long as the Muslims of Indonesia consider Indonesian freedom as more important than the
freedom of all Muslims, consider politics as more important than worship [] exchange
obedience to the kijai [religious teacher] for obedience to the leader [] consider emotions more
important than examination of substance, [] and consider the enemies endangering Indonesian
freedom more important than the enemies who endanger Islam [] so long will Indonesian
14
freedom remain only a phrase on the lips.

Indeed, notwithstanding the assertion of Indonesian students in Holland in 1923 that

the future of the people of Indonesia is exclusively and only situated in the
establishment of a form of government which is responsible in the true sense of the
word to the People itself,15 the only significant attention paid to democratic ideas by
Indonesian nationalist leaders emerged right at the end of the colonial period. Then,
cooperating nationalists tried unsuccessfully to pressure the Dutch into developing a
representative parliament in the colony as a means of purchasing their support; the ploy
was primarily a means of seeking power, not a manifestation of devotion to democratic
ideals as such.16
These kinds of ambivalent sentiment towards the West and its intellectual legacies
were only reinforced by Indonesians experience of the brutal and politically divisive
Japanese occupation (1942-45), which strengthened the existing culture of blame and
recrimination against the West. Dutch imperialism, united with British and American
imperialism, wrote the nationalist and writer Sanusi Pan, has messed up our culture.
Allied imperialism was like a buffalo breaking into a garden, destroying pots, flowers,
plants, property, dirtying the ponds, looking for food and drink and stripping the place
of everything.17 Such an outlook was consolidated by the subsequent struggle to assert
their national freedom in the face of persistent Dutch efforts (with American support)18
to retain sovereignty over their erstwhile colony, and involved a broader loss of faith in
the capacity and will of the international community to come to the aid of the country,
something which magnified the sense that self-reliance was indispensable. Nor were
Indonesians helped by the sudden and unprepared nature of their coming to
independence (We werent ready for independence. We didnt have the slightest clue
what to do),19 again a function of Dutch colonial failure. When independence was
finally proclaimed in 1945, it was conveniently configured as the precondition for
building Indonesia, the architecture of which remained uncertain; only then shall we
13

Quoted in Herbert Feith and Lance Castles, eds, Indonesian Political Thinking 1945-1965 (Ithaca,
1970), pp. 184, 187.
14
Quoted in Howard M. Federspiel, Persatuan Islam: Islamic Reform in Twentieth Century Indonesia
(Ithaca, 1970), p. 87.
15
Statement of principles of the Indonesische Vereeniging, Hindia Poetra 1 (1923), p. 17.
16
Abeyasekere, One Hand Clapping, pp. 27, 55; Susan Abeyasekere, Partai Indonesia Raya, 193642: a study in cooperative nationalism, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (1972), p. 273n.
17
Sanoesi Pan, Mengembalikan keboedajaan Timoer, Djawa Baroe, No. 12, 15 June 2603 [1943],
p. 9.
18
George McT. Kahin, Southeast Asia: a Testament (London, 2003), pp. 31-32, 40, 53.
19
Soedarpo Sastrosatomo, quoted in John McBeth, Why did we fail?, Far Eastern Economic
Review, 1 August 2002, p. 46.

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R.E. Elson

be free to build a society of Indonesia Merdeka [Free Indonesia] which is self-reliant,

strong and healthy, enduring and age-long.20
Sukarno, combining with characteristic dexterity variants of Western thinking and
more home-grown social concerns, embellished the theme of suspicion of Western
political solutions. He remarked in 1945 that:
We have seen that in European states there are representative bodies, there is parliamentary
democracy; but is it not precisely in Europe that the people are at the mercy of the capitalists? In
America there is a representative body of the people, but are not people in America at the mercy of
the capitalists? Are not people at the mercy of the capitalists throughout the whole Western
world?21

At the same time, he remarked that:

If we are looking for democracy, it must not be Western democracy, but permusyawaratan [the
process of consultation seeking unanimous agreement] which brings life, that is politico-economic
22
democracy which is capable of bringing social prosperity.

Hatta, his longtime Vice-President, although himself a convinced social democrat,

could equally argue in 1956 that:
Sovereignty of the people in Indonesia had to be rooted in its own society, which is collectivist in
character. Whatever its other sources, Indonesian democracy should also evolve from indigenous
Indonesian democracy. Moreover, the national spirit which had developed as a natural reaction to
Western imperialism and capitalism intensified the desire to look in our own society for
foundations on which to build a national state.23

When the chaos of Sukarnos declining years, noteworthy for their aggressive
condemnation of Western political action and thought, was replaced by the
authoritarian regimentation of Suhartos New Order, suspicion about Western political
thinking remained strong, notwithstanding Suhartos political alignment with the West.
Western-style liberal democracy, Suharto claimed, had failed because of its foreignness, because of its insensitivity to the soul of Indonesia. Equally, Western concepts
of class struggle were foreign; the Indonesian people do not know about class, and the
struggle of the Indonesian working group is not a class struggle.24 What Indonesia
needed was a democracy rooted in Indonesias own experience. Thus, remarked
Suharto in 1966:
Indonesia is not contented with Western democracy and other foreign democracies, with a liberal
or totalitarian economy. [Those things based on liberalism or materialism] dont bring satisfaction
25
to the spirit of the Indonesian nation.

What he proposed was an integralist or organicist approach to governance that

emphasised the capacity of the leader to divine the true instincts and real interests of
the people. More important, it put common interests above individualism (the New
Order is an order of Pancasila Democracy which puts the peoples interest first and not

20

Sukarno, Lahirnja Pantja Sila, in Anon., Pantjasila: the basis of the state of the Republic of
Indonesia (Jakarta: National Committee for Commemoration of The Birth of Pantja Sila 1 June 1945
- 1 June 1964, 1964?), p. 19.
21
Quoted in Feith and Castles, eds, Indonesian political thinking 1945-1965, p. 46.
22
Quoted in ibid., p. 47.
23
Quoted in ibid., pp. 35-36.
24
Quoted in Kompas, 2 May 1966.
25
Quoted in Kompas, 5 April 1966.

Indonesia and the West

267

group or private interests).26 Opposition in itself was seen to be disruptive and

unhelpful. Thus, noted Suharto:
In Pancasila democracy there is no place for a Western style opposition. In the realm of Pancasila
democracy we recognise musyawarah [deliberation] to reach the mufakat [consensus] of the
people [...].We do not recognise opposition as in the West. Here we do not recognise opposition
27
based on conflict, opposition which is just trying to be different.

But if Western forms of democracy did not appeal, Western technological supremacy
was often and easily invoked in the name of development (development will not fail,
and will not be allowed to fail).28 Thus, Suharto allowed his technocrats to install a
neo-liberal economic regime, and he spent vast resources on his countrys Green
Revolution.
Even with Suhartos fall, demands for reformasi total along Western-style
democratic lines were soon subdued by the clamour of nationalist excitation, expressed
in such things as outrage over the loss of East Timor and the groundswell of
opposition to the inflexible dictates of the IMF, both seen as impugning the integrity
and sovereignty of the nation. At the same time, gathering Islamic sentiment
(effectively marginalised from politics for much of the twentieth century as being
disruptive and uncompromising) began to express itself more fulsomely in politics,
whether in moderate and sometimes liberal forms of intellectual discourse or in the
more dramatic excesses of militant Islamism. Neither nationalist nor Islamic discourses
found much to be praised in Western modes of politics.
Emerging Contradictions II: Having Ones State and Doubting It
I have argued that, in the earlier stages of the national project, ambivalence about
engaging the West flowed essentially from uncertainties about national identity and
the extent to which an uncompromised engagement with an untrustworthy West might
undercut, even vitiate, that identity. The second source of contradictions for
Indonesians was the size and form of the state that nationalists first imagined and then
decided to create, and its consequent lack of legitimacy. As I noted above, partly
because of a slowly emerging sense of the commonality of the peoples of the
archipelago,29 (something strengthened by the shared experiences of the multitudes of
Indonesians travelling to Mekka)30 and perhaps, too, because of the realisation that
26

Speech on 3 April 1967; see G. Dwipayana and Nazaruddin Sjamsuddin, eds, Jejak langkah Pak
Harto 1 Oktober 1965-27 Maret 1968 (Jakarta, 1991), p. 171.
27
Soeharto, Pikiran, ucapan dan tindakan saya: otobiografi seperti dipaparkan kepada G.
Dwipayana dan Ramadhan K.H. (Jakarta, 1989), p. 346.
28
Quoted in Kompas, 5 March 1969.
29
Adam, The vernacular press, p. 102n; Harry A. Poeze, Inleiding, in Harry A. Poeze, ed.,
Politiek-politioneele Overzichten van Nederlandsche-Indi, vol. I, The Hague, 1982), p. xxvi. Even
the American traveller Eliza Scidmore could speak of all Indonesians as they are, under the rule of
the one governor-general of Netherlands India, representing the little queen at The Hague (Eliza
Ruhamah Scidmore, Java, the garden of the East (New York, 1907), p. 76). Growing selfreflectiveness was manifested in and multiplied by the popularity amongst the turn-of-the-century
Indonesian elite of new journals such as Bintang Hindia which showed its readers both the world
outside the Indies and the commonalities within the various parts now conceived as component
parts of the Indies itself, and which created and popularised the startlingly novel concept of an
Indies people (bangsa Hindia, anak Hindia).
30
C. Snouck Hurgronje wrote that: On the sea-voyage, and still more in Mekka Jwah pilgrims
come together from the most remote parts of the Archipelago: their exchange of ideas acquires a
deeper significance because their country-folk, settled in Mekka, give them a certain definite lead. In

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R.E. Elson

their social and ethnic division had contributed mightily to their conquest by the Dutch
in the first place, there was never much consideration given by nationalists to any
territorial format apart from one encompassing the whole of the territory of the
Netherlands East Indies. The provocative question put by the Javanese nationalist
Suriokusumo why have the Philippines or the inhabitants of the Melaka peninsula
not been invited to attach themselves to the Indies or Native people31 made no
sense to, nor aroused serious enthusiasm among, most Indonesians interested in
politics.
But given the great geographical expanse of the Republic of Indonesia, its
extraordinary ethnic and linguistic variety, the vastly different levels of education and
political experience of the people inhabiting it, and the diversity of political ideas and
ideologies coursing through it, the leaders of the new Indonesian state faced deep,
continuing difficulties in securing its legitimation as the single vehicle for nationalist
sentiment in the archipelago. The idea remained as thin as it had in 1918 when Cipto
Mangunkusumo had remarked that what we mean by the Indies nation has still to be
formed, that is to say, it does not yet exist. The first spade has just been put into the
ground, the seed has still to be sown.32 The poor traction the idea enjoyed in the 1920s
was seized upon by opponents: one Dutch correspondent, speaking of Indonesian
students in Holland, wrote sarcastically of his sincere hope that their letters [sent
home to the Indies], glittering with the ever imperishable name Indonesia, always
arrive in good time at the correct address.33
While there had developed a vague consensus that Whoever is a citizen of the
Indonesian state is also an Indonesian,34 the imagined nation-states sole basis of
legitimation lay not in any shared conviction about what in particular the Indonesian
state might represent, nor what its uniquely identifying features might be, but rather in
a rough consensus on a number of vaguely specified political assertions: that Islamic
ideas (suspected by nationalist thinkers to have been a factor in Indonesias pre-modern
downfall) should not be decisive in the form of the state, that ethnicity as a category
was to be ignored (broad racial similarity was superficially attractive as a unifying
force, but ultimately fragmenting of the given of Indies political unity), and that ideas
of social progress were not to be pressed.
Such thinking was, then, an avoidance mechanism, with little by way of positive
moral or purposive content. Sukarno later remarked that when we felt the necessity to
federate our islands in one comprehensive manner, we fastened on this name
[Indonesia] and loaded it with political connotations until it, too, became a spearhead

a very mixed Jwah society, one Javanese settled in Mekka will enquire of the Achhnese present, as
to the progress of events in their home [...] (C. Snouck Hurgronje, Mekka in the latter part of the
19th century: daily life, customs and learning of the Moslems of the East-Indian-archipelago, trans.
J.H. Monahan (Leiden, 1931), p. 244). For a more elaborate discussion of this often unrecognised
phenomenon, see Michael Francis Laffan, Islamic nationhood and colonial Indonesia: the umma
below the winds (London, 2003).
31
R.M.S. Soeriokoesoemo, Javaansch nationalisme, in R.M.S. Soeriokoesoemo, A. Muhlenfeld,
Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, and J.B. Wens, Javaansche of Indisch nationalisme? Pro en contra
(Semarang, 1918), p. 4.
32
Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, Een slotwoord, in Soeriokoesoemo, Muhlenfeld, Tjipto
Mangoenkoesoemo, and Wens, Javaansche of Indisch nationalisme, p. 60.
33
Letter of H.Z. Zegers de Beijl, Hindia Poetra 2 (1920), p. 180.
34
Surya Ningrat, Van de Indonesiche redactietafel, Hindia Poetra, Congresnummer, 29 August
1918, pp. 2-3.

Indonesia and the West

269

of national identity.35 The problem was, of course, that different loadings meant
different things to different people, with the result that the Indonesian state came to be
defined in terms of what it was not, rather than what it was. While it came to occupy
the territory of the old Netherlands East Indies, it was not the Netherlands East Indies.
While it was predominantly Muslim, it was not an Islamic state. While it encompassed
many ethnic groups and cultures, it did not (at least in theory) seek to identify with or
privilege any one of them. While it embraced the hope of freedom, no one could
satisfactorily define freedoms meaning, nor its implications. Sukarno remarked that
following our declaration that everybody was free we had difficulty making the
Marhaens pay passage in the tram cars. Why?, theyd cry with a hurt and bewildered
look. Were free, arent we?.36 Indonesias very name was a strange invention, a
combination of two Greek words, first thought up in combination by an Englishman in
Singapore in 1850, who immediately abandoned the name as too general.37
Indonesias heartland was always Java and parts of Sumatra, particularly West
Sumatra.38 Indeed, the whole was not created ex nihilo; rather, from the outset it was a
Java-centred state to which things were added from the inside out.39 The deep,
horizontal comradeship40 of Indonesia that early Indonesian nationalists had
imagined was not necessarily imagined in similar terms by other inhabitants of the
Netherlands East Indies.41 One scholar of a key area of eastern Indonesia remarked of
the 1930s that if there was a dominant political ideology amongst the Ambonese it
remained a devotion to the House of Orange.42 At the time independence was
proclaimed, few people in Sumatra thought themselves emotionally or politically more
strongly attached to their putative fellow-countrymen in Java or Sulawesi, much less
New Guinea, than they did to their linguistically, culturally and historically proximate
fellows on the Malay peninsula, just across the Melaka Straits. Thereafter, there were
serious conflicts about just what ideological content that state should have, with both
Communist and Islamist claims to exclusivist supremacy finding violent expression in
the late 1940s. During the revolution, centrifugal tendencies, frequently encouraged by
the Dutch, were in evidence. Despite the fact that a general sympathy for the Republic
had emerged across the greater part of the archipelago, a lack of uniformity of
understanding about what the Republic represented, as well as an unevenness of
35

Sukarno, An Autobiography (Indianapolis, 1965), p. 63.

Ibid., p. 243.
37
George Samuel Windsor Earl coined the term Indu-nesians, in his effort to find an ethnographic
name to describe that branch of the Polynesian race inhabiting the Indian Archipelago or the
brown races of the Indian Archipelago (On the leading characteristics of the Papuan, Australian,
and Malayu-Polynesian nations, Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, Vol. 4 (1850),
p. 71n).
38
An early indication of the pattern was the fact that whilst one-third of the local Sarekat Islam
branches represented at the 1916 congress in Bandung came from outside Java, most of those were
from Sumatra (A.P.E. Korver, Sarekat Islam 1912-1916: opkomst, bloei en structuur van Indonesis
eerste massabeweging (Amsterdam, 1982), p. 184).
39
See Howard Dick, State, Nation-State and National Economy, in Howard Dick, Vincent J.H.
Houben, J. Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie, The Emergence of a National Economy: an
Economic History of Indonesia, 1800-2000 (Sydney, 2002), p. 18.
40
Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 16.
41
See, for example, G.J. Resink, Indonesias History between the Myths: Essays in Legal History and
Historical Theory (The Hague, 1968), p. 21.
42
Richard Chauvel, Nationalists, Soldiers and Separatists: the Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to
Revolt, 1880-1950 (Leiden, 1990), p. 169.
36

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R.E. Elson

attachment to the idea of Indonesia itself, was evident, partly a result of Dutch policies
which had segmented large parts of the archipelago including nationalist-minded
inhabitants from direct contact with the leadership of the Indonesian Republic
centred in Java and Sumatra. Thus, remarked a Federal newspaper in 1948, we have
protested for the thousandth time that the Republic has no right to speak in the name of
the whole of Indonesia.43 It was a flaky conception of the state, with little intellectual
depth and sophistication. Accordingly, it tended to make demands and hold out hopes
which could never be satisfied, and its simple and undifferentiated nature gave it little
subtlety and resilience, and little capacity to afford meaningful compromise.
The new state, indeed, was formally granted its independence by the Dutch in
December 1949 as the Republic of the United States of Indonesia, of which the
Republic of Indonesia, the Indonesia dreamed by earlier nationalists, was just one of
sixteen states in a federation. Within the first year of its existence in this form, the new
state was threatened by a secessionist movement in eastern Indonesia which did not
recognise the hegemony of the Republic over the archipelago. Legitimacy did not
improve; by the early 1950s, the military leader Abdul Haris Nasution claimed that a
general disappointment prevails in all groups and on all levels. The belief and respect
in the country decreases more and more. The country, especially the leaders of the
country, are in a moral crisis.44 Indonesias political history since that time has been
punctuated by efforts either to recast the basis of the authority of the state, or to
reconfigure the state in fundamentally new ways. What this problem means, of course,
if that the nation-state of Indonesian in its current configuration has never enjoyed
unalloyed legitimacy, has never had a sense that it is comfortable and unchallenged in
its own identity. Geertz puts it nicely:
[through the 1950s] the peristiwas [affairs] kept coming, and so did the evasions, the jugglery, and
the postponed resolutions. It was as though the country was caught between grandiloquence and
45
equivocation, stranded between speech styles without a predictable system of civic discourse.

As time went on, the mood endured: In Bung Karnos time, remarked the celebrated
essayist Goenawan Mohamad, Indonesia was still felt as an aim, a reason to fight, a
cause. Now we dont seem to be like that and we feel that we have lost
something.46
Under such circumstances of uncertain identity and vigorously asserted but
shallowly grounded legitimacy, Indonesias outlook towards the West has been, some
exceptions to one side, suspicious and threatened, and characterised by an easily
outraged sense of national sovereignty. The dominant sense is that Western
interventions are somehow part of an agenda that seeks to unravel or somehow
damage Indonesias sovereignty and sense of national identity. Thus, Western lecturing
on the need to advance human rights in Indonesia is dismissed as a big scam that
seems destined to last as long as nations compete for economic advantage through

43

Mestika, 3 August 1948, as reported in Rapportage Indonesi 1945-1950, no. 71, Nationaal
Archief, The Hague.
44
Abdul Haris Nasution, Fundamentals of guerrilla warfare (2nd ed., Jakarta, 1970 [1953]), pp. 7172.
45
Clifford Geertz, Soekarno daze, Latitudes, 8 (2001), p. 15.
46
Goenawan Mohamad, Sidelines: Writings from Tempo, trans. Jennifer Lindsay (South Melbourne,
1994). p. 195.

Indonesia and the West

271

political subterfuge on behalf of noble ideals.47 When the chairman of

Muhammadiyah, Ahmad Syafii Maarif, reportedly refused to believe that Abu Bakar
Baasyir might be involved in the Bali bombings and other terrorist activity, he
remarked that Baasyirs arrest indicated that the nation no longer respected its own
sovereignty.48
What might we conclude about the ambivalent engagement of Indonesia with the
West? On the one hand, it is fair to say that Indonesia is and has been, at least from the
late colonial period, unusually open to the introduction, if not the acceptance, of
intellectual ideas from the West, and especially welcoming of technological
improvements which have their origins in the West. At the same time, however, there
has been a characteristic suspicion that the essence of what it is to be Indonesian, and
the essence of the Indonesian nation-state, will be lost unless there is constant,
suspicious vigilance against the excesses of the West and the globalising forces it
champions. Fundamentally, this tension was grounded first in an enduring uncertainty
by Indonesians about the nature of the national self and, second, in the pervading
fear of their leaders that the nations weakly founded legitimacy would easily be
undone unless the West and its impact could be kept on a tight rein.
Every nation state defends its sovereignty vigorously and assertively. Mahathirs
Malaysia, for example, made its regular (obligatory?) caning of Westernising impulses
a proud, distinguishing mark of its national badging. Equally, Howards Australia has
invoked the talisman of border protection to defend itself from unwanted intruders
from difficult places. But such responses differ greatly in style from that which has
characterised Indonesian engagements with the West over the last century. The
Indonesian response to the West has been suspicious and easily provoked; it stems, in
the last resort, not from the kind of windy triumphalism of a Mahathir or the calibrated
political rationality of a Howard, but from Indonesias deep and unresolved
uncertainties about its own identity and legitimacy, and bears a nervous and irrational
stridency that does itself no service. The development of a more relaxed, rational selfconfidence and sense of national legitimacy is a difficult task. At bottom it rests upon
the painful and protracted process of building strong, transparent and responsive
institutions which have earned, and consequently enjoy, the support of the nations
people. In Indonesia, there is still a long way to travel on the road from ambivalence to
equanimity, although recently that journey has, again, begun. Western governments
would to well to develop their appreciation of that fact, and the reasons why, again, it is
so.

47
Juwono Sudarsono, The diplomatic scam called human rights, in David Bourchier and Vedi R.
Hafiz, eds, Indonesian Politics and Society: a Reader (London, 2003), p. 248.
48
Muhammadiyah chairman disbelieves Baasyir mastermind of bombings, The Jakarta Post, 29
October 2002,
<http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp?fileid=20021028214037&irec=1>.