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Editorial: The ASEAN cage

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono enthusiastically opened the 44th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in Bali on Tuesday, while Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa went all out in ensuring that the regional bloc will make major achievements during Indonesia’s one-year chairmanship

The Jakarta Post
Wed, July 20, 2011

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Editorial: The ASEAN cage

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resident Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono enthusiastically opened the 44th ASEAN Foreign Ministers Meeting in Bali on Tuesday, while Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa went all out in ensuring that the regional bloc will make major achievements during Indonesia’s one-year chairmanship. But now let us question ourselves: Did we really get much from our leading role in ASEAN, or did we sacrifice too much for the sake of the organization’s unity?

Perhaps many of us do not realize that our country now belongs to the world’s 20 largest economies club, the G20. We should not miss the benefits we can get from our membership in this prestigious club, although perhaps we cannot be as dominant there as we are now in ASEAN.

For 44 years since its establishment in 1967, as the largest member, Indonesia has played an active and prominent role in developing the organization, and until now we remain committed to make ASEAN the corner stone of our foreign diplomacy.

Since our nation transformed itself into a full-pledged democracy after the fall of Soeharto in May 1998, we have taken on a new role as the promoter of democracy among our neighbors. Of all of the 10 ASEAN members only Indonesia and the Philippines have been able to continuously stick to the principles of full democracy.

We have already had four presidents in the last 13 years and all of them boasted in the beginning of their tenures that Indonesia was too important and too big to concentrate only on this region. This nation, they said, deserved a much more important role on the world stage and therefore it should review its dominant role in this region.

But even under the current government, the government is very reluctant to leave a very pleasant comfort zone: It is more interested in becoming a “small king” in a “little kingdom” rather than a “nobody” in the “global empire”.

Please do not misunderstand that as we intend to belittle the importance of ASEAN. The regional grouping remains strategic for Indonesia by all means, and we should not leave our neighbors just because we have more attractive partners outside there. What we mean is that our neighbors must also understand that there is time for us to tell that enough is enough and unless they are also willing to equally sacrifice their national interests to achieve much bigger goal of ASEAN.

Some ASEAN members repeatedly boasted that the organization means everything to them, but open free trade agreements with major industrial countries without considering its negative impacts on others.

It is very understandable that the government launched intensive public campaigns to convince the public about the strategic values of Indonesia as the chair of ASEAN. The campaigns are so aggressive that some people may misunderstand that the chairmanship is just a matter of routine scheduling among all members.

The 10 foreign ministers will gather in Bali for five days until Saturday where they will discuss routine subjects like traditional security and political matters, and assess the latest situation in Myanmar and the territorial disputes between Thailand and Cambodia. They will also receive foreign ministers of their dialogue partners, including from the US, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.

ASEAN is very important for Indonesia, but Indonesia is too big and too important to be too dependent on the trade bloc only. The question is when can we finally make decisive policies to put ourselves in a much larger position that we actually deserve?

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