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Australia and Indonesia: Beyond stability, towards order
Scott Burchill and Damien Kingsbury
Although Indonesia is Australia's largest and most important neighbour, the relationship between the two profoundly different societies has been punctuated by bouts of high tension, suspicion and mutual mistrust. In the late 1940s the Chifley Government was openly supportive of the emerging nationalist elite in Jakarta, to the point that Indonesia's foreign minister Subandrio later described Australia as the 'mid-wife' at the birth of the Indonesian republic. However, despite Australia's diplomatic support for the de-colonisation of the Dutch East Indies after the Second World War, Canberra and Jakarta have experienced a troubled diplomatic relationship virtually since Indonesia's independence.
Attempts to resolve enduring problems and recast the bilateral relationship in a more positive light have been a recurring theme in Australian diplomatic and academic circles since the 1950s. And yet despite considerable effort on both sides, remarkably little progress has been made in constructing a long term engagement which satisfies the expectations and aspirations of both peoples.
This paper seeks to identify the structural faults in the architecture of the relationship and explore both the opportunities and limits of future cooperation. It will be argued that before a more mutually satisfactory and successful relationship can be built, new foundations of understanding will need to be laid. This presupposes a recognition of earlier faults which have periodically led to diplomatic cracks in the relationship and prevented enduring levels of civility from developing. From an Australian perspective, this paper assesses the prospects of co-existence between two independent political communities, one an advanced industrial liberal democracy, the other a developing non-liberal society.
The remainder of this 14-page article includes the following subheadings:
- Poor investment
- Misreadings
- Past mistakes
- A way forward: rational order rather than 'stability'
- Tolerating difference
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