Establishment of ASEAN As a Process of Reassurance by Indonesia

Establishment of ASEAN as a Process of Reassurance by Indonesia

Nobuhiro IHARA

Introduction

Due to its large population, tremendous amount of resources, territorial size and enormous domestic market, Indonesia has been regarded as a potential great power in Southeast Asia. Sukarno’s Confrontation policy towards Malaysia, which continued until the mid-1960s, clearly showed that this ‘potential major power’ could be a serious threat to regional peace and stability. Many scholars devoted to study of the formation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) such as Michael Leifer, Roger Irvine, Charles Morrison and Astri Suhrke argue that regional countries that held these concerns about Indonesia even after the downfall of Sukarno’s administration tried to draw the potential threat into intra-regional relations in a friendly and constructive manner.[1]

In reality, however, since Indonesia took the initiative in the process of establishing ASEAN, its participation in regional cooperation was simply not welcomed. The Indonesian government, especially its army, believed that Indonesia had a natural right to play a leadership role in regional affairs due to its potential power,[2] and regarded the regional cooperative body as one of the vehicles for the expansion of Indonesian influence.[3] Other regional countries, especially Malaysia, had vague but realistic concerns that Indonesiawould play a dominant role in regional cooperation and, in the longer term, utilise the forthcoming regional organisation as a diplomatic tool to gain regional hegemony.[4] Although some researchers, namely Michael Leifer, Ann Marie Murphy and Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl, point out that the mistrust associated with Indonesia stemmed from its asymmetric power structure,[5] few of them mention how the mistrust affected the process of establishing the ASEAN.

For example, Indonesia inserted a sentence into the Declaration of the South East Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SEAARC), which subsequently became the ASEAN Declaration, proclaiming that all foreign bases were temporary in nature. This sentence met opposition from all prospective members of ASEAN, as according to the aforementioned research, these countries had allied with the US or the UK and relied on these external countries for their defence. However, it was not well known that prospective members were also opposed to the reference because of concerns about Indonesia as a potential long term threat. Since Malaysia was concerned that the unstable Indonesian government would possibly revive its radical and exclusive diplomacy, they needed to retain long-term deterrence towards Indonesia.[6] If the foreign bases were to be withdrawn, this would not only increase the military burden for the regional countries, but also allow Indonesia to play a bigger military role that could have resulted in Indonesia justifying its enhanced military capability. Although the references to foreign bases were kept in the ASEAN Declaration, the military presence of external countries in the region was maintained after ASEAN’s establishment. While this paradox can be explained in terms of Indonesia’s potential threat, previous scholars have not examined it in detail. Some scholars emphasised the effect of a good neighbour policy referred to in the ASEAN Declaration in the ASEAN member countries’ mitigation of mistrust toward Indonesia.[7] However, the ASEAN states did not reach an agreement on a concrete project for cooperation when the association was established and could not force the members to uphold the good neighbourhood policy due to the association’s institutionally loose structure. Accordingly, Indonesia’s good neighbour policy did not guarantee the absence of threat to the members’ security and thus cannot clarify why and how ASEAN could mitigate the mistrust towards Indonesia experienced by the other members.

Inter-state trust plays a significant role when states decide whether to join international cooperation because there is uncertainty as to the motivation and preference of the other states that join the cooperation: these states might have concealed certain motives to exploit other states through the cooperation. This study defines trust as the expectation that other states will behave in a reciprocal manner, rather than attempting to exploit the other states. Mistrust is defined as the expectation that other states will behave in an exploitative manner, rather than act reciprocally towards others in a cooperative way.[8] If a particular state wants to achieve international cooperation, but mistrust is present amongst the others, it must send costly signals to reassure the other states of its intention to cooperate.[9] A state can enhance trust among others by paying a price that would cause any attempt at exploitation to be unprofitable. In other words, the trustworthiness of a state often depends on how costly the signal itself is. Since signals that require larger costs vary from state to state, whether a state is trustworthy is evaluated by the state’s capability, available options and its consequences.[10] Trust will more likely be enhanced if cooperation promotes the participants’ contact and makes communication easy, which results in decreasing uncertainty about the other state’s intentions.[11]

The dominant power in a unipolar system generally prefers to act unilaterally. However, if the dominant power itself forms an institution in which its unilateral act is constrained, it can reassure smaller powers.[12] Due to the necessity to reach a consensus between two or more member countries, multilateral procedures of decision making are costly for the largest power. Meanwhile, it will convince smaller powers that “their preferences matter, and that they are not simply being coerced or directed to follow the dictates of the dominant power.”[13] Moreover, smaller powers will increase the incentive to join the institution if all states under the institution, including the dominant power, are constrained in terms of their use of power, which would inflame tensions among other states, blocs and specific people inside and outside the region.[14] Another component of state reassurance includes keeping the dominant state’s military power lower than that of other states. This is reassuring for smaller powers because the deterrence toward the dominant power would be maintained. Since it reduces smaller powers’ military vulnerability at the expense of that of the larger powers, the cost of this way of reassurance was too high for states that harboured exploitative intentions.[15]

From these perspectives, this paper hypothesizes that Indonesia mitigated other ASEAN members’ mistrust by building institutions that would constrain Indonesia’s unilateral action on its own initiative. The following empirical segment is divided into four sections. After examining how and why the contents of the Declaration were adopted by Indonesia and Thailand in the first section, the second section will illustrate how Malaysia’s mistrust of Indonesia was revealed in the form of its opposition to the Declaration. These two sections show the desired style of regional cooperation among future members of the ASEAN and the tasks of reassurance Indonesia and Thailand faced to form the association. The following two sections then demonstrate why and how the mistrust of Indonesia was mitigated. More concretely, the third section analyses the negotiation process of forming the ASEAN from the beginning of 1967, and the fourth section summarises the discussion in the establishment meeting that the ASEAN held in August, 1967.

In regard to historical sources, in addition to newspapers from Southeast Asia, journals, ASEAN’s formal documents and published secondary sources, this study uses recently released diplomatic documents from Australia, the UK and the US. These countries have had active interests and direct involvement in ASEAN’s regions as allies, former suzerain countries and neighbour countries of several of the ASEAN members. These sources include records of personal interviews with political elites from countries both included in, and external to, Southeast Asia. There is a lack of historical sources relating to ASEAN, due partly to the fact that most of the governments in Southeast Asia have not yet publicly released their diplomatic documents. The records of interviews are useful for examining not only the process of forming the ASEAN that have not been clarified in previous studies, but also the mistrust toward Indonesia among leaders in other ASEAN countries since the foreign policy of many ASEAN states in this period tended to be affected by the views of a few elite personnel.

The Draft of the SEAARC Declaration

By May 1966, Adam Malik, foreign minister of Indonesia, Abdul Razak, deputy prime minister of Malaysia and Thanat Khoman, foreign minister of Thailand, had agreed on the need for closer regional cooperation during the reconciliation process that ended Confrontation.[16] The members of the Association of South-East Asia (ASA), a regional consultative organisation of Malaya, the Philippines and Thailand, hoped that two non-aligned countries in the region, namely Indonesia and Singapore, would join the association to mitigate the stigma that ASA was pro-Western and anti-communist. However, Indonesia did not wish to lose face by joining an association that Indonesia had criticised for its ‘links with SEATO and the US defence system’.[17] Moreover, Indonesia preferred to be a founding member of a new organisation, rather than a second-class citizen in ASA as a result of joining later.[18] Therefore, the leaders mentioned above initiated a mutual visit to discuss what organisational framework they would adopt for the proposed regional cooperation from August 1966 through to the end of December.

In this process of the revival of MAPHILINDO (Malaya, the Philippines and Indonesia), a proposed non-political confederation of Malaya, the Philippines and Indonesia, with a greater spread, was also discussed. This proposal was temporarily supported by the Philippines and Indonesia, which shared deep hostility towards the Chinese government. However, the idea of MAPHILINDO was based on the concept of Malay unity and thus its membership excluded Singapore and Thailand. Concerns were also expressed regarding the likely tensions among the millions of Chinese in the region caused by the Malay-centred characteristics of MAPHILINDO.[19] Moreover, MAPHILINDO was not acceptable for Malaysia since it was proposed by Indonesia and the Philippines as a means to curb the establishment of Malaysia, including Sabah. In fact, Tunku Abdul Rahman, prime minister of Malaysia, agreed that the inclusion of Sabah in Malaysia would not prejudice the Philippines’ claim to Sabah when the formation of MAPHILINDO was decided.[20] From the standpoint of negating Sukarno’s foreign policy, Indonesia also rejected MAPHILINDO, which was an abortive attempt and therefore was seen as a failure.

Hence a combination of the ‘economic and cultural aspects of ASA’ and ‘the political purposes of MAPHILINDO’ was envisaged for the formation of a new regional organisation. The SEAARC Declaration was drafted based on this idea when two senior Foreign Ministry officials from Indonesia, Anwar Sani and Abu Bakar Lubis, were dispatched to Thailand at the end of 1966. The draft apparently incorporated some phrases from the Manila Declaration that established MAPHILINDO. Since Thailand was not a member of MAPHILINDO, a strong impression of Indonesia’s commitment to the draft remained.[21] The reference to the temporary nature of foreign bases in the Thai draft was inserted according to a requirement by the Indonesian Army.The Army believed that the military presence of foreign countries in the region could be used ‘as a tool for intervention and invasion’ and therefore could undermine ‘the solution of Asian problems by Asian nations in the Asian Way’.[22] In addition, many Indonesian army officials tended to see the forthcoming regional organisation as, in the long run, a tool to reduce and eventually take over the security role of the outside powers in the region.[23] If it was realized, Indonesia was likely to make a greater contribution to regional defence as a “leader” in the region, and eventually this would lead to the army claiming a greater military budget.

In contrast with the Indonesian army’s position, the Foreign Ministry of Indonesia informally admitted the advantage of the military presence of external powers such as the US and UK in maintaining a power balance in Southeast Asia.[24] In fact, Southeast Asian countries did not have sufficient military capability to defend themselves in the event of the security threat posed by China without military assistance from external powers. Moreover, due to the diversity in their military capabilities, politics, economics and history, Southeast Asian countries were not certain to cooperate with the united direction even in the defence and security fields. Especially for the civilian leaders of Indonesia including Malik and Sani, increasing the military budget was “unrealistic and undesirable” since Indonesia had been preoccupied with its domestic development and economic rehabilitation.[25] However, given the Indonesian army’s unquestionable power, Malik could not oppose the insertion of the reference.[26] By pre-empting the Indonesian Army, therefore, Malik attempted to keep regional cooperation within the hands of the Foreign Ministry.[27]

Accordingly, Malik had no intention of interfering in the military arrangements between external powers and some regional countries. The commitment in drafting the SEAARC Declaration by Thailand, which was an ally of the US and a member of SEATO, was also regarded as counter-evidence of concerns that the new organisation would replace or eliminate the existing security or military arrangements.[28] In fact, Thanat, a well-known anti-communist and strong believer in regional cooperation, had characterised such a regional body as supplemental to SEATO and the alliance with the US.[29]

Response from Malaysia

As argued in the Introduction, whether other states are trustworthy can depend upon the states’ capability, available options and its consequences. In this sense, the domestic situation in Indonesia was reassuring for many member countries of ASEAN. Since Indonesia’s radical anti-colonialism was mitigated by the downfall of Sukarno, they did not regard Indonesia as a direct threat to their security. In addition, Indonesia and other future members of ASEAN shared the perception that the threat to their security was internal and non-military rather than an external military one. The Suharto government was concerned about the Indonesian population’s support of the pro-Sukarno groups and subversive activities caused by dissatisfaction stemming from the depressed economy and the serious poverty. This basic assumption about the domestic-rooted threat to their security had been shared in existing regional organisations, such as ASA. Accordingly, the objective of the new organisation to contain subversion and insurgencies through regional cooperation in economic, social, technical and cultural fields was acceptable to the ASA countries. The regional countries especially feared the unstable Indonesian government reviving its radical foreign policy. They therefore had strong incentives to stabilize the Indonesian government through the rehabilitation of its economy.[30] Moreover, Indonesia’s good neighbourhood diplomacy through regional cooperation was aimed mainly at restoring and enhancing Indonesia’s international credibility in order to garner significant and urgent foreign assistance from other countries within and without the region.[31] Therefore, Indonesia was not likely to exploit other countries in fear of ruining their international credibility.

Malaysia nevertheless maintained concerns over Indonesia’s ambition to expand its military influence through regional cooperation. Rahman sent a letter to Thanat on 3 January 1967 in reply to a proposed draft of the SEAARC Declaration sent to the Malaysian government at the end of 1966. Rahman admitted the desirability of regional cooperation and bringing Indonesia back to the ‘mainstream of Southeast Asia’ in the letter. However, he argued that it was incorrect ‘timing’ to embark on a new regional organisation given the domestic instability in Indonesia that existed at that time.[32]Malaysia believed that the SEAARC would allow Indonesia to structurally gain regional hegemony with ease, since the SEAARC Declaration referred to the withdrawal of military presence by external powers. They anticipated that if they allowed Indonesia’s initiative, Indonesia would take the leading or dominant roles in regional cooperation at least in the long term.[33] The memories of Indonesia’s Confrontation policy that ended less than four months earlier and the reluctance of Indonesia to give recognition to Malaysia also raised concerns about the future of Indonesia’s uncertain political trends. Indonesia’s diplomatic shift to a hostile foreign policy after rising to dominant status in the region was still a realistic expectation for Malaysia.

Further, Malaysia doubted that the US would fully back the formation of SEAARC. The Malaysians were concerned that the US was attempting to establish a defence organisation that could be an alternative to its military presence after its withdrawal from Southeast Asia, and to draw regional countries into the Vietnam War.[34] It would not only impose on regional countries a greater military burden, but would also increase the necessity of a new security arrangement in which Indonesia played a larger role.[35] The SEAARC Declaration limited the scope of cooperation in economic, technical and cultural fields. It also stated that the organisation would not associate itself with any outside power or power bloc and would not be directed against any country.[36] However, since the Declaration had referred to security from subversion, SEAARC was regarded as expressing antagonism towards the expansionism of communist China, at least indirectly.[37]This concern was heightened by a proposal for a joint defence organisation advocated by Lieutenant-General M. Panggabean, Indonesian Deputy Army Chief. This organisation was proposed right before the SEAARC Declaration was drafted at the end of 1966, and received support from some members of the Indonesian military. Lieutenant-General A. J. Mokoginta, the military commander of Sumatra, also advocated the need for regional arrangements for defence between Southeast Asian states that could be extended to an alliance in the face of a threat from communist invasion. Malaysia’s suspicion over the US’s backing and the anti-communist characteristics of the new organisation was also due to the proposed SEAARC Declaration being drafted and sent to Malaysia by Thailand, an anti-communist ally of the US. For the same reason, the Philippines’ attempt to take the initiative of forming a new regional organisation also raised Malaysia’s concern.[38]