Indonesia’s South China Sea Diplomacy: A Foreign Policy Illiberal Turn?

ABSTRACT

Key areas of Indonesian foreign policy have remained largely autonomous of the political struggles associated with democratisation and a subsequent illiberal turn, even as they have changed the way foreign policy is formulated. Indonesia’s South China Sea diplomacy has been one such area of autonomy. Although the issue has gained great public salience, as the most prominent foreign policy challenge for the current Joko Widodo administration, the government has maintained a striking continuity in its approach dating to the authoritarian Suharto era. Such continuity persists because the strategic challenge facing Indonesia has endured: throughout Indonesia’s modern history, the government has sought to assert the nation’s rights to territory and resources against more powerful states. The government’s current policy settings have also preserved a status quo that serves a range of Indonesian interests sufficiently well to prevent the emergence of a coherent coalition of interests to push for a new approach, in what is a technical policy area dominated by foreign ministry experts. As such, although the Joko Widodo administration has exhibited greater overt nationalism in its handling of the issue, Indonesia’s broader illiberal turn has not been transformative of the government’s diplomacy.

KEY WORDS:

• Indonesia
• South China Sea
• foreign policy
• illiberalism
• democratisation

Acknowledgments

I thank my fellow special edition editors, Rachael Diprose and Vedi Hadiz, for their feedback on this article, along with Diane Zhang, the three anonymous journal reviewers and Kevin Hewison. Thank you also to all of my interviewees and interlocutors for sharing their insights.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a full list of parties to the convention, see United Nations Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea (2018).

2. Butcher and Elson (2017), for example, observe that Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore’s attempts to formulate terms of access for warships to the Malacca Straits took place in the context of a reality that none of these nations could hope to deny access to the navies of the USA or USSR.

3. China is conspicuous by its absence from Butcher and Elson’s (2017) account of the UNCLOS negotiations. Still yet to undergo its economic transformation and having only joined the United Nations in 1971, Wang (2016) writes that China approached negotiations from a counter-hegemonic, Third World solidarity standpoint. The Chinese government was soon to decide that the treaty did not serve its various maritime interests.

4. One exception to this pattern was China’s submission of a protest note to the United Nations in May 2009 in response to a continental shelf submission by Malaysia and Vietnam. Through this protest, China officially submitted its nine-dash line map (Arsana and Schofield 2012; Parameswaran 2016, 328). The Indonesian government made a counter-submission the following year.

5. Other senior current and retired officers also made similar statements after two incidents in 2010 in which a Chinese patrol vessel intervened to prevent the seizure of Chinese fishing boats (Arsana and Schofield 2012, 70).

Additional information

Funding

This article was completed with the support of a University of Melbourne Early Career Researcher Grant number 501995.