Its people agree that their democratic country should play a bigger global role; but what?

Indonesia's place in the global jungle

Banyan - Indonesia's place in the global jungle | Asia | The Economist

Their problems may be instructive for other countries

Japan and South Korea are struggling with old-age poverty

But golden rice could help thousands of nutrient-deficient children

The Philippines bans some genetically modified foods

Indian officialdom still treats citizens like subjects

Meet the maharajas of the world’s biggest democracy

They worry about their future, but do not blame the BJP

Even disillusioned young Indian voters favour Narendra Modi

This new business diaspora is younger, better-educated and ambitious

Chinese firms are expanding in South-East Asia

Asia

When Barack met Hamid

Smiling for the cameras

Imperfect peace

Minor explosions

An Easter story from Japan

Bitter toll

gv_safe

gb_safe

gb_safe_from_high

gb_safe_from_high_med

pos_goldman_inclusion_2024

pos_israel-hamas_war

gs_busfin

gs_science

barclays_energy_water

ts_energy

gs_science_geography

america_campaigns_elections

neg_omd_exclusion

gs_busfin_indus

america_department_energy

business_oil_gas

progressivemedia

blogs_environment

BY DINT of size, population and potential wealth, Indonesia has long loomed large over its own backyard. The archipelago nation bestrides the world's busiest sea lanes. Some 231m Indonesians account for two-fifths of the population of ASEAN, the ten-country Association of South-East Asian Nations. A young and reasonably educated population offers perennial promise, as do vast deposits of oil, gas and minerals, forests and palm-oil plantations. For all that ASEAN operates according to its famed consensus, Indonesia has been its stealth leader.

But President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has bolder aspirations. A liberal internationalist, Mr Yudhoyono convincingly won a second term last year, and monopolises the foreign-policy apparatus. He has brought Indonesia closer to Australia, its big southern neighbour with which it has a troubled past. He was supposed to have signed a “comprehensive partnership” with Barack Obama by now, but the American president delayed the trip in order to push his health-care reforms through Congress.

Mr Obama will return in June. He spent four boyhood years in Jakarta and a huge welcome awaits his pulang kampung (homecoming). Before then, Indonesia will mark the fifth anniversary of another (this time “strategic”) partnership, with China, when the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visits in late April. Indonesia, Mr Yudhoyono likes to say, has “1,000 friends and zero enemies”.

Mr Obama will return in June. He spent four boyhood years in Jakarta and a huge welcome awaits his pulang kampung (homecoming). Before then, Indonesia will mark the fifth anniversary of another (this time “strategic”) partnership, with China, when the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, visits in late April. Indonesia, Mr Yudhoyono likes to say, has “1,000 friends and zero enemies”.

Indonesia now wants to raise its diplomatic game, acting the part of a regional power with a global impact. One sign of this is a desire to be ranked among the BRIC economic club of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Another is to send peacekeepers as far away as to Lebanon and Darfur. A third is Mr Yudhoyono's admirable wish to make democracy and human rights a plank of foreign policy. But the country's rising ambitions are best epitomised by more urgent talk about how Indonesia can capitalise on its membership of the G20 group of major economies.

A powerful impetus for all this comes from its Asian neighbourhood. In both economic vitality and security importance, Indonesia pales beside both China and India. China's rise from regional to global power poses the biggest challenges for Indonesia, as its policymakers see it. But it is India's élan, both in terms of its economy and a newly polished image, that has got Indonesians worrying about their own image.

Compared with Indonesia, India has even more atrocious infrastructure, more intractable insurgencies, more terrorist attacks, and often awful relations with neighbours. Yet investment and tourists pour unfairly in, Indonesians complain. Meanwhile their country, a largely peaceable place with few terrorist attacks since the Bali bombing of 2002, is deemed unstable—and with a negative Muslim identity to boot. Australia, for all the improvement in relations in recent years, nevertheless advises nationals to “reconsider your need to travel to Indonesia”. Total Australian investment in Indonesia is less than it was in 1996. An Indonesian cabinet minister says that his country needs to change perceptions by aping India's “Incredible India” promotion that took Davos and the business world by storm in 2006.

Foreign perceptions are unhelpful in other areas too. The commonest description you hear when Indonesia is praised by Americans—that it is the world's most populous Muslim democracy—is a tag that thinking Indonesians chafe at. They think it limiting and certainly misleading. Indonesia prides itself on being a secular state that happens to have a Muslim majority. Moreover, they say, America is fooling itself if it thinks that Indonesia's brand of Islam can help the superpower with its problems in the Middle East, Iran or Afghanistan, where faraway Indonesia's syncretic practice is as likely to be abhorred as admired.

As for the elevation of the G20 to global prominence, Indonesians sometimes appear hardly able to believe their luck. The question is what they can do with it. On the one hand, Indonesia weathered the global financial crisis that gave the G20 its sense of purpose. On the other, it did so because Indonesia is still shockingly ill-integrated into the global economy. Besides shoddy infrastructure, it has an economy distorted by subsidies, a business climate hostile to foreign investment and a bureaucracy and legal system shot through with corruption. With a bit of joined-up reform, which after six years of stops and starts Mr Yudhoyono may be on the point of beginning in earnest, Indonesia's annual growth would surge from the present (admittedly respectable) 4.5-5.5% to rates closer to India's or China's.

More than most admit, Indonesia's international ambitions rest on shaky domestic foundations. Mr Yudhoyono has committed Indonesia to sweeping cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases, risking unpopularity among other developing nations. But thanks to widespread deforestation, much of it illegal, the country remains among the world's biggest emitters.

And despite the admirable advances of democracy and of sound fiscal management, prosperity is not entrenched. One in seven Indonesians still lives below the poverty line, and many more perch perilously just above it. By several measures of development—life expectancy, health care, sanitation—Indonesia scores well below the middle-income country it is. 

Poor governance at home has a bearing on soft-power aspirations abroad. A reputation mainly for having resources to plunder colours the views of Indonesia by India and China, huge buyers of Indonesian commodities. In countless areas, from illegal logging and fishing, to climate change, people-smuggling and extremism: a failure to prosper at home would turn the spotlight away from Indonesia's desire to solve global problems, and towards its capacity to generate them. 

<a href="https://www.economist.com/banyan/">Economist.com/blogs/banyan</a>

Banyan

Get to grips with a region where capital, climate and geopolitics collide

Go deeper with our Middle East newsletter. Every week our correspondents delve into the political, social and economic stories of a region that is rarely out of the news.

Sign up to our Middle East newsletter

Middle East Dispatch

Follow the action in Latin America, from the depths of the Brazilian Amazon to the Mexican-American border

Every week our correspondents share insights on politics, economics and business from an increasingly complex region

Stay informed with our weekly Latin America newsletter

El Boletín

A sharp round-up of the most important US political news

Sign up for updates from our correspondents and data journalists, poll tracker and election-forecast model as the 2024 race unfolds

The US in brief

Inside Europe, from the front lines in Ukraine to the corridors of power in Brussels

Stay informed with our weekly Europe newsletter

Café Europa

Understand a vast and complicated country that will increasingly shape the future

Stay informed with our weekly India newsletter

Essential India

The best of The Economist’s defence coverage, in one place

The War Room

A weekly conversation about culture. Because culture is a serious business

Exploring trends and connections across entertainment, the arts and politics

Broaden your perspective with our weekly culture newsletter

Plot Twist

Analysing the challenges facing Britain and what needs to be done to overcome them

Stay informed with our weekly Britain newsletter

Blighty

Understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world

Stay informed with our weekly China newsletter

Drum Tower

Your essential guide to global business and technology

From supply chains to semiconductors, The Bottom Line newsletter has you covered

Need to track the megatrends shaping business and technology?

The Bottom Line

Catch up quickly on the global stories that matter

Sign up to enjoy a mind-expanding mix of stories, delivered six days a week

Catch up quickly on the stories that matter

The World in Brief

A behind-the-scenes look at how we chose and designed this week’s cover

How we chose this week’s cover image

Cover Story

Exclusive insight from our correspondents in America

Exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America

Checks and Balance

A weekly fix of our mind-expanding science coverage

Curious about the world? Enjoy a weekly fix of our mind-expanding science coverage

Simply Science

Climate-change analysis that you won’t read elsewhere in The Economist

The Climate Issue

Expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics and markets

Money Talks

Taking you behind the scenes of our data journalism

Off the Charts

Long reads and life from 1843 magazine

The Extraordinary Story

The very best of our journalism, handpicked for you each weekday

A daily newsletter with the best of our journalism

Handpicked stories, in your inbox

The Economist today

Highlights from the latest weekly issue, introduced by our editor

Indonesia's place in the global jungle

Its people agree that their democratic country should play a bigger global role; but what?

Asia April 3rd 2010

From the April 3rd 2010 edition

More from Asia

Japan and South Korea are struggling with old-age poverty

The Philippines bans some genetically modified foods

Meet the maharajas of the world’s biggest democracy