Australian Journal of Politics and History (2006) 52 (2): 261-271. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00418.

Indonesia and the West: An Ambivalent,

Misunderstood Engagement

R.E. ELSON
History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland

Abstract
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 Indonesia’s 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, Indonesia’s 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 West’s perplexity, I will argue, is a result of its failure to comprehend the long
and complex history of Indonesia’s continuing self-creation, and especially the central role in that
chequered process played by Indonesia’s 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 Indonesia’s
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 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 Indonesia’s 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 Indonesia’s modern history, and promises
to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Australian Journal of Politics and History (2006) 52 (2): 261-271. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00418.x

The Search for the Modern

At the heart of Indonesia’s 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 Indonesia’s
experience of colonialism. The first was the extreme lateness of Indonesia’s 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 Furnivall’s “plural society”, as
well as Boeke’s 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
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 culturally.10

Most Indonesian thinkers and leaders, however, were troubled that too hasty or complete a
Australian Journal of Politics and History (2006) 52 (2): 261-271. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00418.x

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 Sukarno’s attempts to synthesise nationalism, Islam and Marxism, and
his re-engineering 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 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 the head of the State and should be chosen by the Wise and not by the people.13
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 freedom remain only a phrase on the lips.14

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 Pane, “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
Australian Journal of Politics and History (2006) 52 (2): 261-271. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00418.x

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 weren’t ready for independence. We didn’t
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 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
21
capitalists throughout the whole Western world?
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 democracy which is
22
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
23
intensified the desire to look in our own society for foundations on which to build a national state.

When the chaos of Sukarno’s declining years, noteworthy for their aggressive condemnation of
Western political action and thought, was replaced by the authoritarian regimentation of
Suharto’s New Order, suspicion about Western political thinking remained strong,
notwithstanding Suharto’s 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 Indonesia’s 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] don’t bring satisfaction to the spirit
25
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 people’s interest first and not 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 based on conflict, opposition which is just trying to
be different.27
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 country’s Green Revolution.
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Even with Suharto’s 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 One’s 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 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 people”31 ─ 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-state’s 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
Indonesia’s 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 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
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with or privilege any one of them. While it embraced the hope of freedom, no one could
satisfactorily define freedom’s 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?’, they’d cry with a hurt and bewildered look. ‘We’re free, aren’t we?’”.36
Indonesia’s 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
“Indonesia’s” 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 comradeship”40 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 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 Indonesia’s
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 equivocation, stranded between
speech styles without a predictable system of civic discourse.45
As time went on, the mood endured: “In Bung Karno’s time”, remarked the celebrated essayist
Goenawan Mohamad, “Indonesia was still felt as an aim, a reason to fight, a cause. Now we don’t
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, Indonesia’s 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 Indonesia’s sovereignty and sense of national identity. Thus, Western lecturing on
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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 political subterfuge on behalf of noble
ideals”.47 When the chairman of Muhammadiyah, Ahmad Syafi’i Ma’arif, reportedly refused to
believe that Abu Bakar Ba’asyir might be involved in the Bali bombings and other terrorist activity,
he remarked that Ba’asyir’s 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 nation’s 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. Mahathir’s Malaysia, for
example, made its regular (obligatory?) caning of Westernising impulses a proud, distinguishing
mark of its national badging. Equally, Howard’s 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 Indonesia’s 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 self-confidence 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 nation’s 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.

Notes

1 See, for example, the comments of Professor Luh Ketut Suryani quoted in Eric Ellis, “It’s an end to
foreign evils: Bali academic”, The Australian, 22 October 2002.
2 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 Cot6,
trans, Letters from Kartini: an Indonesian feminist 1900-1914 (Clayton, 1992), pp. 534-35). 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 Furnivall’s 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.
Boeke’s notion of economic dualism referred to the existence of allegedly separate and self-contained
“Eastern” and “Western” economies in the Netherlands Indies.
7 “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-Indie, 29
November 1912, quoted in A. Muhlenfeld, “De Inlandsche pers”, Hindia Poetra 1 (1916), p. 10n).
Australian Journal of Politics and History (2006) 52 (2): 261-271. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00418.x

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 Anderson’s 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.
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 oficieele 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 Sutomo’s 1936 visit, see Imam
Soepardi, “Ketika almarhoem Dr. Soetomo di Nippon”, Asia Raya 1 Tahoen Nomor Peringatan [1943], n.p.
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, 1936-42: a
study in cooperative nationalism”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 3, 2 (1972), p. 273n.
17 Sanoesi Pan6, “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.
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.
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-Indie, 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 self-reflectiveness 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 Jawah 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 a very
mixed Jawah society, one Javanese settled in Mekka will enquire of the Ach6hnese 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
Australian Journal of Politics and History (2006) 52 (2): 261-271. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.00418.x

(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.
35 Sukarno, An Autobiography (Indianapolis, 1965), p. 63.
36 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 Indonesie’s 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, Indonesia’s 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.
43 Mestika, 3 August 1948, as reported in Rapportage Indonesia 1945-1950, no. 71, Nationaal Archief,
The Hague.
44 Abdul Haris Nasution, Fundamentals of guerrilla warfare (2nd ed., Jakarta, 1970 [1953]), pp. 71-72.
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.
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 Ba’asyir mastermind of bombings”, The Jakarta Post, 29
October 2002,
<http:/www.thejakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp?fileid=20021028214037&irec=1>.