The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsA century of Indonesia’s national imagination
A century after the First Youth Congress imagined Indonesia into existence, a new generation must break constitutional taboos to ensure that our union is sustained by genuine justice rather than centralized decree.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Three disabled members of the flag-hoisting squad salute on Aug. 17, 2025, during the 80th Independence Day celebrations in Gorontalo, capital of its namesake province on the Minahasa Peninsula in northern Sulawesi. (Antara/Adiwinata Solihin)
A
century ago from April 30 to May 2, young people representing disparate regional organizations gathered in Batavia (now Jakarta) for the First Youth Congress. Indonesia was not yet an independent state. The conception of a unified nation had to be forged against entrenched local identities and Dutch colonial hegemony. Yet these delegates envisioned a cohesive political community transcending ethnicity, language and ancestral origin.
Two years later at the Second Youth Congress on Oct. 27-28, 1928, that burgeoning vision crystallized into the Sumpah Pemuda (Youth Pledge): one motherland, one nation and one language. This pledge was far more than an identity manifesto; it established a political pact to build a collective destiny. Indonesia existed as an imagined nation well before achieving sovereign statehood.
A century later, the essential question is no longer simply whether those early anticolonial aspirations were realized. Rather, it is whether the contemporary Indonesian state provides its citizens with sufficient, enduring reasons to believe in that shared covenant.
In his seminal formulation of imagined communities, Benedict Anderson observes that a nation is conceived by individuals who will never meet most of their compatriots yet maintain an unshakeable conviction of collective belonging.
“Imagined” does not denote fictitious. National imagination enables millions of different citizens to perceive a shared fate. Yet an imagined community cannot endure on heritage, civic rituals and patriotic rhetoric alone.
Belonging must deliver material dignity, equal opportunity and tangible hope. When legal justice appears uneven, economic progress remains heavily centralized and local natural resources enrich distant elites without benefiting native populations, national solidarity encounters an existential challenge transcending identity politics.
Here, the fundamental political contract between citizens and the state becomes paramount. This compact represents more than a static, constitutional text. It embodies the legitimate expectation that authority will safeguard individual liberty, ensure impartial justice, guarantee fundamental human rights and govern public wealth for the common good. When systemic practice routinely betrays these expectations, it erodes not merely faith in incumbent administrations but also foundational belief in the integrity of the republic.
