Indonesia among the Powers: Will ASEAN Still Matter to Indonesia?

Recently, within Indonesia’s strategic circles there has emerged a growing perception—and with it, a sense of frustration—over the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), long a cornerstone of Indonesia’s foreign policy, as an impediment to Indonesia’s evolution from a regional power to becoming a major player in global affairs. With episodes such as the border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand, which erupted in violence in 2011, and ASEAN’s first-ever failure to produce a joint communiqué at its annual ministerial meeting in Phnom Penh in July 2012, denting ASEAN’s internal cohesion and hampering the organization’s efforts to become a ‘political-security community’ by 2015,5 Indonesia has worked valiantly, if at times in vain, to mediate between the offending parties and salvage the reputation of ASEAN. Yet such experiences have led some Indonesians to question the viability of their country’s longstanding regional policy, not least when it appears as if Jakarta’s position as the de facto leader of ASEAN is no longer accepted, in practice at least, by all of the organization’s member-states. Moreover, that all this has occurred even as Indonesia is being courted by and included among the world’s most economically and diplomatically influential powers has only exacerbated Indonesia’s sense that its fellow ASEAN states neither acknowledge its regional leadership nor appreciate its contributions to regional conflict management sufficiently.