Studies in Asian Security. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. xvi, 290 pp. (Tables.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5036-0285-4.
Foreign policy-making at the domestic, regional, and global levels today is informed by the participation of a diversity of stakeholders. Not only do non-state actors increasingly engage in government-driven processes, but they also develop new solidarities among themselves to foster policy change that best reflects their views on international affairs. Jürgen Rüland’s analysis of the foreign policy debate occurring in Indonesia over the country’s evolving role in the region as well as ASEAN’s contribution to regional order provides an in-depth, country-focused view of foreign policy-making’s bottom-up dimension. He convincingly shows that Indonesian foreign policy stakeholders, despite drawing from liberal-cosmopolitan norms advanced by the European model, do not follow a “global” Western-based script of regional integration, but set their country on a distinct path, heavily informed by a local “cognitive prior.”
In The Indonesian Way, Rüland extends his empirical reach not only to the academe and NGO community, but to more unusual suspects: the press, the business sector, and the legislature. Drawing heavily on the norm localization framework developed by Amitav Acharya, Rüland maps out how each stakeholder group participates in the localization of norms like democracy, human rights, open trade, etc. that are central to the European regional integration model. This process occurs through the prism of local deeply-entrenched ideas that inform Indonesian foreign policy-making and multilateralism in the context of ASEAN. According to the author, the Indonesian “cognitive prior,” which combines a realist inclination towards soft balancing, a mixture of entitlement and vulnerability, as well as antiliberal, organicist, and corporatist proclivities in state-society relations, can be traced back to the Majapahit Empire (1293–1500s). How stakeholder groups partake in the framing, grafting, and pruning of European norms makes it possible to advance the main functions of governance—political order, welfare, and security—in a way that is compatible with both these external ideas and with local norms and their regional extension in the “ASEAN Way.”
Making a strong case for moving away from residual Western-centrism in the analysis of regional governance (chapter 1), Rüland then provides an overview of localization theory and suggests a number of addendums (chapter 2). His own version of localization makes room for rationalist dimensions, and accounts for variation in the way stakeholders engage in “grafting.” It also shows how localization is not a linear process linking the West to the “Rest,” but an omnidirectional one, taking detours through different corners of the non-Western world. Finally, it provides a longue durée analysis of localization, allowing for the possibility of reversal. After providing a historical review of Indonesian political thought as the basis for spelling out the local “cognitive prior” (chapter 3), the bulk of the demonstration tackles each stakeholder group individually (chapters 6–9). It shows how a particular group frames its position on foreign policy around three distinct “frames” informed by the functions of governance—democracy, welfare, security—grafts liberal-cosmopolitan norms to national and regional cognitive priors, and prunes external and regional ideas in the process, with a particular emphasis on supranationalism (external) and non-interference (regional). Chapter 10 then introduces a fourth, “leadership” frame to the study, showing how the influence of liberal-cosmopolitan norms tends to fade against the hard case of sovereignty issues, particularly the territorial dispute with Malaysia over the Ambalat Block and the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement. A brief and effective conclusion reviews the main components of the book, linking the empirical discussion more explicitly to a theoretical contribution.
The book’s contribution is particularly strong on the empirical side. It maps out the foreign policy debate in the Indonesian context in a comprehensive way, introducing stakeholder groups that have been neglected by regional analysts, including those who make room for non-state actors’ participation in governance. Indeed, much of the discussion has up until now remained focused on two types of actors: experts and NGOs. By introducing three additional sets of actors (press, legislature, and business) and treating them as stakeholder groups in their own right, Rüland provides a more complete account of the foreign policy debate and offers a welcome glimpse into how their positions might not only extend beyond Indonesia to other ASEAN member states, but develop a truly regional reach.
On the theoretical side, the reader is left wanting more. The author firmly grounds his work in existing literature and offers a fair assessment of the book’s added value on that front, which is substantive. Yet, the purported contribution to localization theory could have been framed less conservatively and could have been emphasized more explicitly in subsequent chapters. On a related note, the downside of adopting a structure that zeroes-in on the contribution of each stakeholder group to the debate is that the discussion often seems redundant. Indeed, while the initial impulse is certainly justified, it is not entirely convincing that the aforementioned “unusual” stakeholder groups end up warranting individual chapters, as their positions often depart only in a limited way from more developed positions advanced by other groups. This often gives the impression that discussing these variations in relation to other groups or bringing them together in a single chapter could have put the demonstration on equally strong grounds. Alternatively, structuring the demonstration around frames (democracy, welfare, and security) instead of groups would have given a better sense of how positions interact, crossing-over the stakeholder divide—they clearly do. This porosity is admirably covered in chapter 10, which discusses a new “leadership” frame, showing how Indonesian foreign policy is increasingly characterized by a return of the “cognitive prior.”
Despite these shortcomings, the book is a very welcome addition to recent, more theoretically-informed scholarship on foreign policy in Southeast Asia and ASEAN Studies, and will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers interested in this region. The author’s call for more studies on how discussions over foreign policy and regionalism take place in the domestic realm of ASEAN member states is warranted, and we can only hope others will follow suit.
Stéphanie Martel
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada