Time For Indonesia to Act Its Age

With US hegemony crumbling, the Global South needs to reassert itself

With all the talk of the Global South, of efforts to expand the so-called BRICS group, of finding ways to end the privilege and power of the US dollar, scant mention is being made of the 70^th anniversary of where this all began in 1955: Bandung. It was here that a gathering of freedom fighters and post-colonial giants -- India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah, China’s Zhou Enlai, and more were hosted by Indonesia’s Sukarno, then at the height of his prestige.

Held while decolonization was still a work in progress, especially in Africa, it was a landmark in Afro-Asian solidarity as newly independent nations sought to avoid becoming entangled in the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. Bandung was to lead the Non-aligned Movement whose purpose was to stay out of these quarrels and hold its first formal meeting in Yugoslavia in 1961.

The Non-aligned Movement still exists, now with 120 members, although readers may be forgiven for having not noticed its last full meeting, in Uganda in January 2024. But Bandung still sends echoes through diplomatic halls so it is curious that Indonesia’s new president, Prabowo Subianto, has not used it as a platform for raising Indonesia’s profile in the world as merited by the country’s size, its mostly democratic system, steady economic growth, leadership of ASEAN and tradition of non-alignment. This may be surprising and contrary to many expectations, given the expended money and political capital with dubious moves at home.

For sure, Indonesia has joined the BRICS group, for what that’s worth, and is a member of the G20. One has a summit in Brazil and the other in South Africa this year, but in neither city is Indonesia nor Prabowo himself likely to stand out, certainly compared with Brazil’s Lula or South Africa seeing itself as the voice of a whole continent. Both groups have combinations of memberships which assure they produce nothing of value.

Yet a Bandung II could have a message to today’s world which would transcend US-China, Europe-Russia divides, and the Trumpian trade war. A Bandung II could bring together than large but mostly silent non-powers, excluding India, China and Russia, but including Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico, Egypt and maybe two more, who have a huge stake in global stability but lack a voice other than through such confused assemblages as BRICS and G20.

Indonesia, indeed ASEAN as a whole, has a lesson in how not to seek to use force to change old imperial boundaries – in the current case where Russia seeks to further expand borders it created itself with Ukraine, and US President Donald Trump claiming Canada and Greenland.

Then there is the broader message that the Global South as represented by Indonesia generally accepts the capitalist economic system and global trading arrangements which by and large have added to most countries’ prosperity over the past 70 years. However, while much injustice and dire poverty remain, the global gaps have mostly narrowed dramatically over that period.

The US, contrary to Trump’s assertions, has not been a loser but had until now mostly oiled the wheels of the system. Prabowo needs to say that loud and clear, that the inheritors of 1955 know they mostly escaped colonialism, mostly prospered as independent states, mostly appreciated US (and now Chinese) aid and capital, believed in the independence and value of bodies such as the World Trade Organization, the Asian Development Bank, etc.

The future role of the US dollar depends more on US actions than the BRICS statement. The damage Trump is doing to his standing will do few any good. The future should, with common sense, lie in accepting that the dollar’s central role can and should remain for long, even as other currencies and payments systems develop. Non-alignment now means not fighting the system but enabling gradual adjustment on the basis of economic, not political, drivers.

Perhaps Prabowo could even use the potential influence of the world’s most populous but also secular Muslim country to bring much of the Global South together to end the horrors of Gaza and the colonization of the West Bank in a way that quarrelling and unstable Arab regimes and selfish petro-states never can.

In 1955, Bandung demanded that Israel return to the borders of the UN partition plan for Palestine. Seventy years later, with about three million settlers, a third from the former Soviet Union, Gaza is a ruin, the West Bank has been partly seized, and four million Palestinian Semites live under the Israeli yoke thanks to an unholy alliance of Trumpist Christians and Zionist extremists. They have been able to treat decisions by the vast majority of UN members with derision, as evidenced by General Assembly votes and US vetoes of Security Council resolutions, while the rest of the west wrings its hands and does nothing.

Closer to home, Prabowo needs to take his own country’s history by the scruff of the neck and teach it, to China in particular but to its neighbors and to a west which has scant clue to its two millennia of engagement with the world between China and the east coast of Africa. Sukarno may have been a mercurial and sometimes divisive leader, but at Bandung in 1955, Indonesia stood up. There is no reason to cheer the collapse with the US, nor reason to rush into anyone else’s arms. But there is reason for Indonesia now to stand up and present itself as a moderate middle power which can speak sense to power.