Much has been written of late on the growing relationship between Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), particularly its economic aspects. Over the past five years, the UAE has emerged as the largest Gulf-state investor in Indonesia, with bilateral trade projected to grow from the US$4 billion in 2021 to US$10 billion by 2030. Some US$44.6 billion in future Emirati investment has been promised, including joint development of major infrastructure, energy and IT projects.

Less attention has been paid to the burgeoning religious relations between the two nations, especially a professed shared commitment to combatting radicalisation, promoting Islamic moderation and deepening inter-faith understanding. Such commentary as has appeared in media and scholarly outlets has generally been favourable, frequently citing the complementarity of Indonesia’s rich tradition of religious tolerance with the Emirates’ well-funded international programs on peace and cross-faith dialogue.

Little critical scrutiny has been given to the details of religious relations between Indonesia and the UAE. Behind the carefully crafted statements and stage-managed events lie a tangle of domestic political and strategic interests, not all of which are shared, and nor are they necessarily likely to result in greater religious moderation in either country, let alone globally.

Here I argue that Indonesia–Emirates religious diplomacy has multiple drivers, not all of which accord with liberal notions of moderation. Moderation is commonly defined as the avoidance of extremes and display of self-restraint and reasonableness. A key difficulty here is that this is a relational definition, in that moderation is defined vis-à-vis behaviour or views that are deemed excessive. Deciding what is excessive or unreasonable is often highly subjective. Is the propagation of puritanical religious views extreme or pious, for example? Are calls for major changes to a political system dangerously excessive or legitimate comment?

Certain aspects of the moderation agenda put forward by Indonesia and the UAE do enjoin religious openness and exchange, while contesting faith-based militancy. But other aspects point to fundamentally immoderate intentions, particularly related to the suppression of domestic political dissent. Indeed, one aim of the diplomacy of moderation is to legitimise autocratic state actions that curtail the rights of civil society groups in both countries.

The growth in bilateral religious diplomacy

In the increasingly warm personal relationship that has grown between Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) and UAE President Muhammad bin Zayed al-Nahyan (commonly shortened to MBZ), religion comes second only to economic matters as a feature of their public utterances and policy initiatives.

When the two leaders meet, they regularly praise their respective nations’ efforts to combat radicalism and to strengthen religious moderation. During his 2021 visit to Abu Dhabi, Jokowi said: “I see that religious moderation and diversity in the UAE are widely respected. And that is the area of cooperation we would like to explore more because we both share the closeness in the vision and character of moderate Islam that propagates tolerance.”

This has been accompanied with bilateral agreements and cooperation to promote counter-radicalisation efforts and advocacy of religious tolerance. In 2020, the two governments signed a memorandum of understanding, the paramount point of which was to “promote concepts of religious moderation, values of tolerance and raising public awareness of the risks of extremism.” Particular reference was made by Indonesian officials to wasatiyyah, an Arabic term meaning “centre” or “middle”, but which is also often used to denote moderation.

Over the past three years, more than 200 Indonesian imams have been sent to UAE to take up interim roles in major mosques and to “study how Islam in UAE is fully tolerant and contributes to creating peace in society”. Indonesian politicians and Islamic scholars have also participated regularly in international religious conferences run by the Emiratis and a number of eminent Indonesian academics have been appointed to the advisory boards of UAE Islamic institutions.

Commanding the most headlines has been UAE’s “mosque diplomacy”. Recently, construction was completed on a lavish US$20 million replica of Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Surakarta, Jokowi’s home city. MBZ and Jokowi officially opened the mosque in November 2022, prior to the G20 summit in Bali, to which Jokowi had invited MBZ to be a guest of honour. The mosque has been described by local officials as a “pioneer of religious moderation” which helps “address the contemporary society’s vulnerability to fragmentation”. The UAE is also currently erecting a large mosque in Jokowi’s honour in Abu Dhabi.

At first sight, there appears to be much to applaud in these closer religious ties between Indonesia and UAE. Indonesia has not previously had strong relations with any of the Gulf states, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, and even these have often been strained due to maltreatment of Indonesian domestic workers and accusations that Saudi religious influence fuels intolerance and jihadist violence in Indonesia. The UAE’s ambitious international religious moderation program brings the prospect of raising Indonesia’s profile and clout as a source of innovative thinking on religious reform.

Indonesia’s Islamic soft power

Jokowi has always had a supremely pragmatic approach to foreign affairs, viewing diplomacy as being primarily about generating economic opportunities for Indonesia, whether it be attracting foreign capital and technology or selling Indonesian goods and services abroad.. But religion—and especially religious moderation—has been a major secondary factor in his international interactions. In fact, it has become a key form of Indonesian “soft power” that he has consistently championed during his presidency.

Over the past half century, Indonesia has enjoyed a reputation abroad as a tolerant and harmonious Muslim-majority nation. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington DC, and the ensuing “Global War on Terror”, Indonesia attracted Western attention as one of the few Muslim-majority democratic nations in the world that proudly proclaimed its moderation, and was thus feted as an example from which other Muslim countries should learn.

Jokowi’s predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesia’s most diplomatically adept president, traded heavily on this moderate image and strode the world extolling his nation’s religious virtues. Major Indonesian Islamic organisations also sought to benefit by seeking funding from foreign donors for their “moderate” educational and outreach programs, including scholarships, money for schools and development of anti-radicalisation projects.

Soon after becoming president in 2014, Jokowi took up the Islamic moderation theme in a more specific way than Yudhoyono. He adopted the Islam Nusantara (Archipelagic Islam) concept formulated by Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation. The concept’s essence was that Indonesian Islam had unique and commendable characteristics because it married local culture with Islamic legal and theological traditions. NU intended the concept to challenge what it saw as a growing “Arabisation” of Indonesian Islam driven by the belief that Middle Eastern Islam was superior to, or more pure than, indigenous variants. Jokowi gave prominence to Islam Nusantara in numerous speeches abroad for several years (albeit without mentioning Arabisation) and he also instructed his foreign ministry to incorporate Islam Nusantara into its official messaging.

This had both political and diplomatic motivations. NU is Jokowi’s chief base of support among Muslim voters, a majority of whom voted for his opponent, Prabowo Subianto in the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections. Without NU’s backing, Jokowi would likely have lost both races.

A grateful Jokowi was happy to expound NU’s Islam Nusantara and raise the organisation’s profile globally. NU had long felt that it had far less international attention than it deserved, given its size and the quality of its Islamic scholarship, and therefore welcomed having its ideas presented abroad. Jokowi probably also felt that Indonesia’s religious moderation was a natural diplomatic selling point among Western leaders preoccupied with the threat of Islamic militancy.

After several years, Jokowi shifted the focus of his moderation messaging as the limitations of Islam Nusantara became apparent. Most Indonesian Islamic organisations were cool on the concept, seeing it as too NU-centric and not representative of their own religious views and practices. Moreover, doubts arose about the applicability of Islam Nusantara to other Muslim societies.

In 2018 Jokowi signalled a change of tack by appointing Din Syamsuddin, the former chairman of Muhammadiyah, NU’s great rival, to a new position of Special Presidential Envoy for Interfaith Dialogue and Cooperation. A conference of international scholars was organised in Indonesia in the middle of that year, which endorsed “Islam Wasatiyyah” as a pivotal concept for promoting peace and tolerance. The term wasatiyyah had the advantage of already being in common international usage and acceptable to a wide range of Muslim states and movements. Thereafter, Jokowi and his officials made frequent reference to Islam Wasatiyyah, thereby allowing Indonesia to more easily align with international Islamic discourses.

The election of Yahya Cholil Staquf as NU chairman in late 2021 has seen Jokowi again show strong favour to NU as a source of religious diplomacy. Yahya, who has long been close to Jokowi and is a member of the president’s advisory council, had been diligently pursuing building international networks over several years, using various concepts, the most recent of which is called Humanitarian Islam.

The most controversial part of the Humanitarian Islam concept is its call for thorough-going reform of Islamic jurisprudence as a means of delegitimatising radical interpretations and creating more tolerant and irenic understandings. Yahya persuaded Jokowi to support a new religious dialogue initiative known as the Religious Forum 20 (R20) in the run up to the G20 summit in Bali in November 2022, of which Indonesia was the chair. Generous funding for the event was secured from Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League.

This decision was controversial as the R20 displaced the long-established US-based Interfaith Forum 20 (IF20) which had preceded annual G20 meetings since 2014. Opinion is divided within officialdom and civil society regarding the outcome of the R20, and there is now intense competition between R20 and IF20 to organise the 2023 pre-G20 religious forum in New Delhi. Jokowi has sought to strengthen the R20’s bid by making NU the permanent organiser. If the R20 is unsuccessful, it would be a blow to Indonesia’s efforts to place itself at the centre of global religious diplomacy.

The UAE’s moderate makeover

The Emirates, like Indonesia, regards the economic aspect of the bilateral relationship as the most important, but in its case, the nexus between religious and economic issues is far more tightly interwoven than is the case for Indonesia. The UAE is pursuing a policy of economic transformation in order to create a thriving, sustainable post-fossil fuel-based economy. This not only involves diversifying UAE’s predominantly oil-based economy by attracting and developing a wide range of new industries—such as IT, clean energy technology, financial services and defence manufacturing—but also creating a cosmopolitan and multi-cultural society which is enticing for expatriates who will bring the necessary expertise to enable sweeping economic restructuring.

The UAE has pursued a “Look East” policy for the past decade, placing greater focus on Asia. Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia and with prospects of becoming one of the world’s top five economies in the next decade or two, presents an attractive option to the Emirates.

Religion is a key part of the Emirates’ makeover. MBZ, the main architect of this this process, is determined to replace the his country’s image as a traditional, rather puritanical Islamic society with one that is open, pluralistic and welcoming of different faiths and cultures. An ambitious program has been implemented over the past 15 years to achieve this, placing particular emphasis on interfaith outreach and Islamic moderation. The UAE has opened diplomatic relations with Israel as part of the 2020 Abraham Accords and is now constructing a massive multi-billion-dollar Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi which will feature a Catholic church, a synagogue and a mosque—all on an opulent scale. It describes the project as a manifestation of “Common Humanity”. The Emirates is also building large Hindu and Sikh temples and has funded a succession of international interfaith conferences and initiatives.

Establishing itself as a credible voice for moderation has been more challenging for the Emirates as it lacks home-grown ulema (Islamic scholars) and institutions of high standing in the Muslim world. As a result, it has had to recruit reputable ulema from abroad and form new organisations capable of raising UAE’s religious profile. Its chief recruits have been Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah, a Mauritanian scholar; his student Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, a prominent US-based scholar; and Sheikh al-Habib Ali al-Jifri, a Yemeni Sufi (mystical) scholar.

New institutions followed soon after. In 2013 the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies (FPPMS) was founded, headed by bin Bayyah, with the aim of building international networks and producing Islamic scholarship supportive of moderation. Bin Bayyah has published extensively and travelled the world propounding his views on religion and peace as well as correct political behaviour for Muslims. The following year, the Muslim Council of Elders was set up, with the stated objective of “extinguishing” sectarian and jihadist “fires” in the region and promoting humanitarian values. Ali al-Jifri’s main vehicle was the Tabah Foundation, which challenges what it sees as “fundamentalist” thought using Sufi ideals. The UAE also founded Hedayah, an international body to counter violent extremism, and created a Ministry of Tolerance in 2016.

UAE religious engagement with Indonesia is part of this effort to rebrand the Emirates; Indonesia’s reputation as a stronghold of religious tolerance makes it a useful partner. In effect, the Emirates is hoping that closer and more high-profile relations with Indonesia and other religiously diverse and tolerant nations will reflect positively upon it, helping it to appear more like its international partners.

Indonesia and the UAE also have similarities in their legal and devotional practices that make international partnerships easier. The Emirates is often incorrectly seen as sharing the strict Wahhabist doctrine of its neighbour, Saudi Arabia—but it in fact adheres to the mainstream Sunni law schools and has strong Sufi traditions, as does Indonesia. UAE religious institutions such as the Muslim Council of Elders and the Tabah Foundation directly contest Wahhabist doctrine, as also does NU in Indonesia, and they deploy the term Ahlul Sunnah wal Jamaah (“followers of the tradition of Prophet Muhammad and the community”—in effect, mainstream Sunni Islam) in seeking to exclude Wahhabists and other perceived fundamentalist groups.

Indonesian Islamic scholars with expertise in traditional jurisprudence thus have much in common with their Emirati counterparts. Several senior Indonesian Islamic scholars, such as Professor Quraish Shihab, hold advisory board positions in Emirati Islamic organisations. In 2022, FPPMS bestowed on Jokowi the Hassan bin Ali International Peace Prize for his G20 leadership and also invited Indonesia’s vice president to be a keynote speaker at their annual Peace Forum. For its part, Indonesia ensured that Abdallah bin Bayyah spoke at the R20 conference in Bali and at other interfaith events.

Less moderate than it seems?

To what degree is the Indonesian and Emirati rhetoric of tolerance and moderation genuine?  At one level, both nations have a strong interest in enjoining moderation.  Indonesia has grappled with a serious terrorism problem since the early 2000s, and, although attacks have been rare in recent years, much is due to successful police counter-terrorism operations rather than ebbing terrorist recruitment. The UAE’s terrorism threat is less severe but nonetheless present.

Whether the kinds of “civilisational” discourses favoured by the two governments will have any effect on extreme radicalisation is questionable, given that militant Muslims usually reject the authority of mainstream or official ulema. Undoubtedly, also, both Indonesia and the Emirates aspire in a broad sense to have harmonious, plural and tolerant societies, and are bent on inculcating these values in their communities. Their espousal of religious moderation thus has some substance.

But at another level, Indonesia and UAE are using “moderation” in an instrumental and selective way for domestic political purposes. Both the MBZ and Jokowi governments have repressed local Islamist movements, often using methods that breach civil liberties.  The UAE aggressively targets Islamists, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and its sympathisers, which it sees as one of the major sources of opposition to the monarchy. Amnesty International says there are currently at least 32 political prisoners in jail and in recent years almost 100 Muslim intellectuals and activists from the Brotherhood-linked al-Islah Islamist group have been tried and jailed under a vaguely worded but draconian counter-terrorism law. Moreover, the UAE uses state-employed ulema, such as Bin Bayyah and Hamza Yusuf, to argue for political quietism and obedience to the ruler, thus seeking to cast dissent as sinful.

The Jokowi government has also quashed Islamist activism that it deems a political threat, albeit somewhat less harshly. It banned Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia in 2017 and the Islamic Defenders Front in 2020—movements which had tens of thousands of members—on grounds including involvement in terrorism and sedition that many observers believe to be unsubstantiated. Numerous Islamist leaders have either been charged and convicted of questionable offences or forced from public view on threat of investigation into alleged criminal behaviour. Both governments behave immoderately when it comes to suppressing opposition but use their religious diplomacy of moderation to deflect attention from their autocratic tendencies. Most of their fellow world leaders are happy to ignore or play down such excesses.

It is also the case that, despite their apparent warm relations, the UAE and Indonesia sometimes pursue contrary agendas. A recent case is the R20 conference in Bali, largely funded by the Emirates’ rival, Saudi Arabia. Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah’s Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies (FPPMS) pointedly hosted the US-based IF20 as part of its annual Peace Forum in Abu Dhabi last December, enabling the IF20 to demonstrate it was still active despite its exclusion from the broader 2022 G20 program.  FPPMS and IF20 have made clear their desire to supplant Indonesia’s NU-organised R20 and restore the IF20 to the next G20. In effect, Indonesia and UAE, through their proxies, are now competitors to manage what is arguably the world’s premier interfaith event.

Despite the lofty rhetoric of Indonesian and Emirati religious diplomacy, hard-headed and politically self-interested considerations drive the use of moderation and tolerance as strategic commodities. If aspects of these religious programs succeed in implanting moderate and pluralistic values in their respective societies, then there will be cause for praise. But it is also the case that moderation has also become a tool for crimping the ability of Indonesians and Emiratis to organise and express themselves freely. From this perspective, the diplomacy of religious moderation has an empty ring to it.

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Why is it that in the past few years Indonesia’s democratic scores have fallen while public satisfaction with government performance remains high?

Based on the Economist’s Democracy Index Report for 2022, Indonesia received the same score as in 2021, at 6.71 points out of 10, but its ranking fell from 52 to 54 out of a total of 167 countries. Similarly, from the data produced by Freedom House, Indonesia’s democratic score fell from 65 in 2017 to 59 in 2022.

Indeed, Indonesia’s deteriorating democratic fundamentals has given rise to a scholarly consensus about “democratic regression” and the general tightening of the democratic space in the Jokowi era.

But surveys of public opinion suggest that Indonesians do not share this deepening pessimism: instead, they demonstrate that there is consistent support for Jokowi’s government. The ISEAS Indonesian National Survey Project conducted in September 2022 highlighted that public satisfaction with the president increased marginally from 68% in the 2017 version to 71.8% in 2022. Another Kompas survey conducted from 25 January to 4 February 2023 also noted that general satisfaction with the current government stood at 69.3%, a marked increase from a similar survey conducted at the start of Jokowi’s second term (58.8%).

More broadly, Indonesians are strongly attached to democracy. Data from a 2022 Indikator survey indicates that 3 in 4 Indonesians believe that democracy is “the best system for Indonesia, even though it is not perfect”. This percentage has risen steadily since Indikator first posed this question to respondents in June 2012 (55.6%). There has therefore been a steady consolidation of public trust in democracy in the last 10 years. What accounts for the disparity between declining democratic scores and increased satisfaction with government performance?

Different conceptions of democracy

I would argue that the main reason why deteriorating democratic fundamentals as measured by international rating agencies are not reflected in the average Indonesian’s evaluation of government performance simply reflect the fact that the international ratings are tracking one conception of democracy, while domestic survey agencies are tracking another.

During the reform era—roughly from 1998 right up to the early 2010s—liberal reformers sought to build a system of checks of balances and expand civil liberties.

Reformers sought to build vertical accountability through free and fair elections, while also institutionalising horizontal accountability by expanding the role of state institutions able to check the executive, such as the legislature (DPR) and the Constitutional Court.

For a time, enough members of the political elite shared this vision with liberal civil society.

But this conception of democracy as a system of checks and balances appears to have fallen by the wayside in Indonesia: civil society figures I have spoken to now characterise the DPR as “paralysed” (lumpuh), unable to provide a check-and-balance role with respect to the executive.

Instead another conception of democracy that has emerged to replace the reform-era vision is that of an electoral democracy with an instrumentalist and performative logic. In this conception of democracy, democracy’s success is measured not by the robustness of its checks and balances but by its ability to deliver on concrete policy outcomes.

Using data from the 2016 Asian Barometer survey, Eve Warburton and Edward Aspinall have showed that Indonesian survey respondents tend to associate democracy with good governance and socioeconomic outcomes. When asked to choose between democracy and economic development, only 7% of Indonesians said that democracy is more important.

This explains the disconnect between the democratic scores produced by international rating agencies and the surveys of public satisfaction with government performance produced by domestic survey agencies. As most Indonesians do not define democracy in liberal terms but in instrumentalist terms, they report increased satisfaction with government performance, especially due to the current administration’s track record in infrastructure development and its social welfare initiatives.

Elites in power are also coalescing around the second vision of democracy. Both Jokowi and Prabowo Subianto, the two presidential candidates in the 2014 and 2019 elections, have espoused the instrumental logic of democracy at different points. Jokowi has previously argued that politicians and political parties must show “proof” that democracy improves the people’s welfare. Similarly, in his speech to CSIS in August 2021, Prabowo highlighted that the crucial test for any political system or ideology is its ability to provide a better life for the people.

Two conceptions of democracy and their implications

What are the concrete implications of growing elite confidence in this instrumental conception of democracy for how Indonesian democracy functions?

One is a steady weakening of the horizontal accountability mechanisms introduced in the early reform era to limit executive power. This is most apparent in the relationship between the executive and the legislature in the past few years. As President Jokowi consolidated his legislative coalition from 2016 onwards, the relationship between the executive and the parliament has overwhelmingly shifted to coordination and cooperation. As explained by one parliamentarian I spoke to, checks and balances are important, but policy implementation is equally important as part of the government coalition.

Indeed, the key institutional feature that has been tweaked to favour cooperation between the two branches is the 2018 amendment to the Law on Legislative Institutions (UU MD3) which automatically appoints the party with the most seats in parliament as the speaker of the DPR. With PDI-P cadres occupying both the speakership and the presidency after the 2019 elections, this has facilitated the melding of the two branches in a way more akin to a parliamentary system of government. Due to the strong intra-elite accord and Jokowi’s successful coalition management, what civil society actors perceive as the parliament’s abdication of its check-and-balance role actually reflects the shift to an instrumental model whereby parliament delegates power to the executive for the sake of expedient governance. This approach has been embodied in the increased delegation of regulatory authority from the parliament to the central government with virtually no parliamentary oversight built in (for instance, in the design of the New Capital Authority).

At the same time, other reform era checking institutions have been allowed to weaken under this intra-elite compact. The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) was weakened in 2019 with the abolition of its independent status and the imposition of a supervisory board to give the executive branch more influence over its operations. The independence of the Constitutional Court has recently been called into question, as one of the justices on the Court was unceremoniously removed from office for annulling legislation supported by the DPR.

These developments in Indonesia might seem point to the emergence in Indonesia of what political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell called “delegative democracy”—a system of government that relies on competitive elections to select presidents but in which the winner has virtually unconstrained executive power. Indonesia is not a delegative democracy: the president does not have uncontested power, and the basic structure of the constitutional design put in place by liberal reformers remains in place. Furthermore, elite self-interest continues to constrain presidential power. Efforts by President Jokowi’s supporters to push through a third presidential term, for instance, have floundered due to strong opposition from other elites.

Democracy has nonetheless developed a strong instrumental logic in Indonesia, with elites safeguarding elections and presidential term limits not because of a belief in democratic principles, but because they are convenient rules of the game to structure elite competition and prevent potentially destabilising elite splits. The reform-era vision of Indonesian democracy has given way to an instrumental electoral democracy in which vertical accountability mechanisms—elections—remain robust but horizontal accountability mechanisms have atrophied.

For better or worse this instrumental version of democracy also offers a system of government that is probably more effective in delivering policy outcomes for the average Indonesian. By temporarily fusing executive and legislative power in a manner more akin to parliamentary regimes (though there is of course no guarantee that the Speaker of the DPR and the president will be from the same party after the 2024 elections) the central government can move faster and more effectively in its priority areas.

For now, this configuration has enabled the government to enact legislation and make progress on many of the urgent problems in the country, such as poverty alleviation, agrarian reform, job creation, and the building of new infrastructure. However, the current administration’s “move fast” economic model have also sometimes generated more economic inequality: witness, for instance, as nickel processing activities in North Maluku have yet to translate into concrete benefits for locals.

But is the shift away from a liberal-democratic model a good development for Indonesia? With weakened horizontal accountability mechanisms, Indonesia is a more brittle democracy that is reliant on future voters being able to pick a competent and well-intentioned president. There is very little that voters can do if a future president obtains the support of the political elite and decides to unilaterally exercise executive power in ways that conflict with popular preferences.

Conclusion: ‘kinerja’ politics?

The Jokowi administration has been a watershed in making policy performance and successes a key legitimising principle for democratic government in Indonesia. Instead of competing to show who are better democrats, candidates must compete to burnish their track records and demonstrate their ability to improve the lives of ordinary Indonesians.

Indonesia continues to be beset by pressing domestic economic challenges, including the question of how to secure good quality employment for the large youth population, improve the quality of education and healthcare, and address longstanding socioeconomic issues related to social mobility and poverty alleviation. Therefore, the candidate who is best able to demonstrate their effectiveness in terms of their track record, and best able to articulate a compelling economic agenda, is likely to have an edge.

Electoral competition based on policy outcomes is a positive development for Indonesian citizens. Once in power, the nature of Indonesia’s increasingly “parliamentary” system requires the president to shed their populist garb to make pragmatic political deals with the other elites, necessitating both accommodation and compromise. This could lead to further democratic erosion, but like what President Jokowi did this allows future presidents to focus on economic development programmes that benefit their voters.

It is why I believe that Indonesia is steadily moving towards a new political era—one of kinerja (performance) politics—that takes as its reference point not democratic reform, but democratic legitimacy based on competitive elections anchored in an instrumental and performative logic.

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On 15 April 1965, Indonesia’s president Sukarno took North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung to the Bogor Botanical Gardens. Kim was presented with an orchard flower in his namesake: Kimilsungia.

While the visit resulted in little of substance, it remains fondly remembered in North Korea and Indonesia. In North Korea, the orchard has great symbolic value, as it was presented at a time when Pyongyang had been aggressively pushing forward a campaign of recognition and legitimacy throughout much of Asia and Africa. Kim Il-sung’s birth anniversary is celebrated with a Kimilsungia festival, where foreign dignitaries are often expected to present their own bouquet of flowers at the annual exhibition.

While having less symbolic value in Indonesia, this historical episode is still seen with elements of intrigue and, to some (especially the most ardent Sukarnoists), as a moment of pride. Kim’s 1965 visit symbolises a relatively romanticised period of Indonesian foreign policy, when Sukarno was perceived to have succeeded in manipulating great power competition to achieve a major foreign policy objective: the incorporation of West Papua into Indonesia.

Members of the Sukarno family and their supporters still maintain favourable views of North Korea. When Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno’s daughter, became president, she paid a visit to Pyongyang, being the first (and thus far only) Indonesian president to visit North Korea.

Megawati’s sister Rachmawati—a lucky recipient of an honorary doctorate from Kim Il-sung University—even awarded Kim Jong-un with the “Star of Sukarno” prize “for his fight against neo-colonialist imperialism.” She also wrote a book detailing the meeting between her father and Kim, where she described the two men as “great revolutionaries.”

While Indonesia today maintains a far more comprehensive relationship with South Korea, it still maintains cordial relations with the North, even continuing to be one of the few countries in the world with an embassy in Pyongyang (though it has temporarily closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic).

In many ways, the story of Indonesia’s diplomatic relationship with North Korea remains very much a Cold War era relationship, with the Sukarno–Kim visit functioning as a symbolic remembrance of Indonesia’s non-aligned credentials (even though, ironically, this period saw deepening alignment with China). My ongoing research, which has involved archival research in Indonesia, Australia, and the United States, attempts to unpack the under-examined diplomatic history of Indonesia–North Korea relations. While ties between the two states are mostly stable and dormant, reflecting on their history offers a glimpse into the perennial struggle that successive governments—from Suharto’s new order to the President Joko Widodo’s government—have had in demonstrating Indonesia’s non-aligned credentials.

How Pyongyang wooed Sukarno

The history of relations between Indonesia and North Korea is relatively obscure. A review of Indonesia’s national archives offers little insight into the relationship. Snippets of the relationship are, however, observable from publicly available sources.

While Indonesia and North Korea established diplomatic relations in 1964, political interactions can be further traced back to the 1950s. Amid the Korean War came the question of whether Indonesia should move to recognise and support either the North or South Koreans. The Korean War was interpreted by the Indonesian government as the first major Cold War conflict. Indonesia, then newly independent, had avoided overtly taking sides in the war, as a way to assert a new postcolonial independent identity and avoid getting entangled in great power rivalry.

But a shift in Indonesia’s approach to Korea did start to develop in the mid-1950s, amid growing frustrations at the United States for its reluctance to support Indonesia’s claims on West Irian, which at that stage had still been controlled by the Dutch. This led Indonesian leaders, most notably Sukarno, to seek support for Indonesia’s claims more assertively, including through overtures in the communist world.

This shift coincided with intense competition between Pyongyang and Seoul to seek legitimacy throughout much of the Asian-African world, following the Korean War armistice. Seeking to win over Indonesia, the North Korean leadership attempted to woo Indonesia’s foreign policy establishment. For example, in the wake of the Asian-African Conference in 1955, North Korean authorities issued official statements of support and sent observers to the conference, despite the fact that neither North nor South Korea were invited.

While there was initially little interest in Jakarta to forge ties with Pyongyang, the Indonesian Communist Party (or the PKI) began lobbying for Pyongyang’s support, culminating in a joint communique calling for West Irian’s transfer to Indonesia. Not long after, there were official interests in forging a relationship. Trade missions between Jakarta and Pyongyang followed. In November 1958, the Indonesian Ambassador to China became the first Indonesian diplomatic official to visit Pyongyang, opening the “Korean–Indonesian Friendship Society”. By June 1961, North Korea and Indonesia had established trade and consular relations. Eventually, North Korea would achieve the ultimate prize when it beat South Korea to securing formal diplomatic relations with Indonesia in 1964.

Pyongyang’s success can largely be attributed to Indonesia’s increasingly leftist turn from the late 1950s, which was triggered by Sukarno’s turn to authoritarianism. After years of experimenting with parliamentary democracy, Sukarno instituted a form of autocratic rule in 1959, which he referred to as “Guided Democracy.” His centralisation of power had implications on foreign policy, as it came to reflect the president’s increasingly hostile worldview. In a series of speeches starting with one before the UN General Assembly in 1960, Sukarno blamed imperialism and colonialism for the world’s injustices.

While Sukarno was not a communist, his government admired the independent stance of the North Korean leadership. According to a 1962 US diplomatic cable, “The government of Indonesia considers that the North Korean and North Vietnamese reign control over their governments as there are ‘no foreign troops there,’ whereas this is not the case in South Korea and South Vietnam.” Furthermore, in pursuing his objective of achieving berdikari, or self-sufficiency, Sukarno had seen in North Korea a model of a successful self-sufficient economy.

Moreover, while Sukarno had mulled over the prospects of forging ties with South Korea, he likely remained cautious about its deeply anti-communist fervour. President Syngman Rhee, while already deposed by the time Sukarno established ties with the North, had drummed up support for an internal rebellion in Indonesia in the 1950s, which Seoul had interpreted as an anti-communist revolution.

The eventual formation of ties with the DPRK in 1964 paved the way for two symbolic state visits, with Sukarno visiting Pyongyang in November 1964 and Kim visiting Jakarta in April 1965. Later, in his Independence Day speech on 17 August 1965, Sukarno provided the first formal recognition of the strategic convergence between Indonesia and North Korea by declaring the “Djakarta–Peking–Pyongyang–Hanoi–Phnom Penh axis” as a force to combat the forces of imperialism.

Despite the declaration of that axis, relations with North Korea did not develop beyond existing structures. The importance of North Korea to Indonesia’s foreign policy had thus centred on the value of Pyongyang’s support for Sukarno’s status-seeking pursuits among postcolonial states. The axis would be, however, very short-lived.

Why Suharto stuck with Pyongyang

The positive trajectory of Indonesia–North Korea relations, as symbolised by Sukarno’s “axis”, stumbled following a failed coup attempt on 30 September 1965, which was blamed on the PKI. Mass killings soon followed, along with the liquidation of the PKI and the eventual removal of Sukarno from power. The anti-communist general Suharto assumed the presidency in 1967, declaring a “New Order”.

Indonesia’s foreign policy moved away from Sukarno’s anti-imperialist crusades to focus on economic development and regional security, leading to closer alignment with the United States. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s relations with several communist countries deteriorated. Suharto froze relations with China. It also closed its embassy in Cuba. But the embassy in Pyongyang remained open.

Kim’s government blamed the downfall of the Sukarno government on the jealousy of the “right reactionary forces” whose actions were orchestrated by the United States. The Indonesian Ambassador to North Korea, Ahem Erningpradja, became a pariah. Not only was his movement restricted, but he was no longer invited to events where ambassadors of friendly countries are usually invited.

In Indonesia, many argued that the relationship with North Korea should be severed, especially since the North Korean embassy in Jakarta posed security risks. In 1969, North Korean diplomats, for example, were recorded trying to kidnap South Korean businesspeople in Jakarta. There were also attempts by North Korean diplomats and intelligence officials to gather information about Western diplomatic installations, which raised concerns that they could be targets of terrorist attacks.

However, the New Order regime chose to keep diplomatic channels open. It is likely that ties were maintained to allow the New Order regime to assert Indonesia’s non-aligned credentials, especially since they had also sought to establish ties with South Korea. While Suharto may saw great value in deepening economic and security engagement with the West, there was recognition that the principle of non-alignment had remained deeply ingrained in Indonesia’s foreign policy culture. In particular, foreign minister Adam Malik was an ardent defender of non-alignment and had been cautious not to allow Indonesian foreign policy to project an overtly pro-American stance.

While ties with North Korea never truly returned to their Sukarno-era state, the relationship did begin to warm in the 1970s. Malik attempted to act as an interlocutor between the North and South Koreans, as well as the Americans, by pushing for compromises on issues preventing peaceful unification.

While attempts to mediate were largely unsuccessful, Indonesia’s balanced ties with the South and North Koreans did eventually culminate in a request by President Jimmy Carter, in 1979, for Indonesia to facilitate a tripartite dialogue with the US, South Korea, and North Korea to ease tensions on the Peninsula. These talks, however, never commenced, as the North Koreans showed a tepid response to the proposal for talks. Any prospect of mediation under Carter eventually collapsed when South Korean President Park Chung-hee was assassinated in October 1979. The following year, Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan.

A relationship stuck in Cold War imaginations

Despite failed attempts at mediation, ties with North Korea did serve a symbolic purpose for the New Order, just as it did for Sukarno during Guided Democracy. The case of Indonesia–North Korea ties provide lessons into one shared driver of Indonesian foreign policy under Sukarno and Suharto, which was to maintain or enhance Indonesia’s non-aligned status. Sukarno’s decision to establish, and Suharto’s decision to maintain, ties were aimed at enhancing, and later maintaining, Indonesia’s status among non-aligned states. While Sukarno sought supporters for his adventurist crusades against anti-imperialist forces, Suharto had simply wanted others to recognise that Indonesia had remained non-aligned. North Korea, a distant communist land at the centre of a security flashpoint, had been an ideal partner for Indonesia to fulfill this role.

It can be argued that Indonesia’s relationship with North Korea has remained stuck in this framework, as North Korea’s appearance in contemporary Indonesian discourse surrounds either attempts to secure a mediating role on the Korean Peninsula, or occasional expressions of pride rooted in romantic memories of foreign policy during Guided Democracy. Almost two decades after she completed her presidency, Megawati Sukarnoputri is still on a mission to bring peace to the Peninsula, preaching Pancasila and other teachings from her father at think tank forums in Seoul and in meetings with North Korean officials. Some observers even call on the government to champion Megawati as a mediator on the Peninsula today, as Kim Jong-un will have to “listen to her”, since she was a friend of his father’s and Sukarno was a friend of his grandfather’s.

As Indonesian foreign policy makers reflect on Indonesia’s role in the world as a larger, more confident nation, some are choosing to look back at any semblances of past glory for inspiration. On the Korean Peninsula, no other historical episode has a much stronger appeal than the friendship between Sukarno and Kim Il-sung. While Indonesia today maintains a highly comprehensive relationship with South Korea, Indonesia’s relationship with North Korea is one that is not only moulded by the Cold War but one that remains stuck within it.

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