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Indonesia between middle power and BRICS membership
With the relative absence of concrete technicalities, a decision to join BRICS will be more of a symbolic move.
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President Joko “Jokowi“ Widodo (center) and Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Panjaitan join the BRICS summit on Aug. 24, 2023, in Johannesburg, South Africa. (The Jakarta Post/Presidential Palace)
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo attended the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) Summit in Johannesburg last week, days after he delivered a compelling state of the nation address. Although Indonesia has yet to become a member of BRICS, growing discourse about Indonesia’s intention to join the bloc may contradict the country’s middle power aspirations.
A week before departing for Africa, President Jokowi mentioned that Indonesia is a “middle power” with certain improvements in measures of comprehensive power. The concept was mentioned to corroborate his claim that Indonesia has earned “international trust”, which is a modality that can be used to achieve the Golden Indonesia 2045 Vision.
Relationships between trust and middle power status are important. As an academic concept, middle power emerged as a term to describe the status of countries with moderate capabilities in defining the global system. While great power has certain abilities to make or disrupt the global order and countries with less power have little significant impact, middle powers are states with the potential resources to impact the system, albeit with a more concerted effort.
However, scholars cannot agree on a standard to categorize states based on their power, especially since power itself is an elusive concept that is difficult to measure. Regardless, officials and policymakers still use terms such as middle power, which prompts analysts to turn to interpretive approaches to make sense of such concepts.
A country becomes a middle power when it displays itself as one and is socially acknowledged as such. Middle power status can only be what global actors make of it. Because of many subjective benchmarks, defining a country as a middle power is context specific, which speaks volumes about the prevailing norms and values under which a country is recognized as a middle power.
Countries like Australia, Canada and South Korea have earned their status as middle powers not only because of their economic size and geopolitical importance, but also because of their agency in setting up agendas within existing institutional frameworks, such as by forming coalitions in trade negotiations, promoting environmental agendas or developing human security ideas.
Those agendas are placed within existing multilateral institutions such as the United Nations or Bretton Woods Institutions, which are mainly post-World War II and championed by the US. Therefore, there are some logical continuities between the existence of the liberal international order led by the US and both the normative and ideational contexts where countries emerge as middle powers.
