National Identity and Public Support for Economic Globalisation in Indonesia

Abstract

Nationalism and foreign economic policy have long been intertwined in Indonesia. This article aims to advance our understanding of Indonesian ‘economic nationalism’ by focusing on how national identity shapes the policy preferences of ordinary citizens. Following comparative research on nationalism, this study distinguishes between ethnic and civic conceptions of national identity, and hypothesises that they affect support for international trade and foreign investment in different ways. An original survey finds that both conceptions are prevalent among the Indonesian public, are politically mobilised and indeed affect attitudes towards economic globalisation. While ethnic nationalists are less supportive of international trade and foreign investment, civic nationalists are more likely to consider policy on either area as crucial for Indonesia’s economic development. These results suggest that the relationship between nationalism and economic policy in Indonesia is more complex than research often assumes.

Nasionalisme dan kebijakan ekonomi luar negeri Indonesia telah lama saling terkait. Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menambah wawasan pembaca mengenai konsep ‘nasionalisme ekonomi’ Indonesia dengan berfokus pada bagaimana identitas nasional telah membentuk preferensi kebijakan warga negara umumnya. Mengikuti penelitian komparatif mengenai nasionalisme, tulisan ini membedakan antara pemikiran etnis dan sipil dari identitas nasional dan berhipotesis bahwa keduanya mempengaruhi dukungan terhadap perdagangan internasional dan penanaman modal dengan cara yang berbeda. Survei primer kami menunjukkan bahwa kedua pemikiran ini cukup mengakar di masyarakat Indonesia, dimobilisasi secara politis, dan mempengaruhi perilaku terhadap globalisasi ekonomi. Sementara nasionalis berbasis etnis kurang mendukung perdagangan internasional dan investasi asing, nasionalis sipil lebih mungkin menerima kebijakan di area tersebut sebagai hal yang dibutuhkan pembangunan ekonomi Indonesia. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa hubungan antara nasionalisme dan kebijakan ekonomi di Indonesia lebih kompleks daripada yang diasumsikan oleh penelitian pada umumnya.

Keywords:

• nationalism
• national identity
• polarisation
• trade
• foreign investment
• Indonesia

JEL classifications:

• D72
• F10
• F21
• F52

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is grateful to the Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University for funding the data collection for this article, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

1 In their study of the European context of multilevel governance, Clift and Woll (2013) prefer the term ‘economic patriotism’, since it allows the possibility of subnational and supranational territorial boundaries.

2 See also Shulman’s (2002) article on variation in national identity conceptions across countries and regions.

3 As studies of national identity constitute a highly developed field of inquiry in social science, scholars have proposed alternative conceptualisations of national identity. Some have treated concepts such as national attachment, national pride and critical and uncritical patriotism as analytically distinct. Since this article’s interest is primarily in the implications of national identity for policy preferences, it adopts a simplified typology that does not differentiate the various affective aspects of national identity. While this may seem an oversimplification, these concepts are closely related theoretically and are hard to disentangle empirically.

4 A local contractor helped recruit the respondents online. The contractor provided the respondents, who came from urban and rural regions of Indonesia, incentives to participate in the survey, such as shopping vouchers, or credit for telephone services or internet data.

5 The sample included 597 females, 441 respondents with elementary or middle school education and 385 respondents aged 45 or older.

6 The question about being a pribumi was added in reference to the Indonesian political and economic context (Siddique and Suryadinata 1981). Responses to this were expected to correlate strongly with responses regarding ethnic conceptions of national identity, as the term pribumi is typically used to distinguish between Indonesians of Chinese descent and those of other ethnicities.

7 The computational approach to identifying such underlying factors proceeds sequentially and is based on an analysis of a correlation matrix of all individual variables. The analysis starts by identifying a single factor and measuring its empirical association with each variable. If substantial unexplained variation remains after extracting this factor, additional factors are extracted sequentially until the amount of unexplained variation is negligible.

8 Factors were extracted using principal component analysis (Jolliffe 2002), as in Jones and Smith’s (2001) cross-national study of national identity and Pepinsky, Liddle and Mujani’s (2018) study of religious piety in Indonesia. We therefore relied on a well-tested method with a wide range of empirical applications, including the analysis of Indonesian public opinion and the study of national identity.

9 Factor analysis is inductive and relies heavily on the researcher’s expertise and insight. In this case, existing research on the structure of national identity serves as a reliable and widely accepted guide for interpretation.

10 For example, a strong association (or ‘loading’) between one of the extracted factors and the variable ‘to be a pribumi’ would evidence that the factor captures the ethnic conception of national identity.

11 After factor rotation (a procedure that improves the interpretability of the extracted factors), these two factors alone make up 70% of the variation in the nine variables.

12 The variable that correlates most strongly with ‘to be Muslim’ is ‘to be a pribumi’, with a correlation coefficient of 0.593, followed by ‘to have Indonesian ancestry’ (0.501). By contrast, the correlation with the variable ‘to respect Indonesian institutions and laws’ is much weaker (0.101).

13 These figures were weighted based on the structure of the Indonesian population in terms of the age, gender, education, region (urban/rural) and religion of people.

14 The results reported in this section are robust to a wide range of model specifications— for example, to the exclusion of the various socio-demographic and attitudinal covariates reported in the following tables. For estimation results of alternative model specifications, see online appendix tables 1–6. The appendix also includes the results of a further robustness check (table 7), in which the full list of variables on ‘conception of national identity’ is included in the model instead of the two extracted factors. It shows that results are not contingent on the specific method chosen to perform factor analysis. See the appendix here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00074918.2020.1747594.

15 These predicted probabilities of support for FDI are calculated by using the 25th and 75th percentiles of the ethnic identity score (low and high scores, respectively).