Indonesia and Singapore: structure, politics and interests

Contemporary Southeast Asia, August, 2009 by Natasha Hamilton-hart

The Singapore-Indonesia relationship is commonly described as being subject to sharp fluctuations, shifting between periods of tension and relatively close cooperation. A conventional schema would commence with the period of hostility during Indonesia's Confrontation of Malaysia from 1963 to 1966, which also targeted Singapore by virtue of its temporary inclusion in Malaysia from 1963 until 1965. (2) Diplomatic relations improved with the change of regime in Indonesia, when President Sukarno was ousted by Soeharto's "New Order" government in 1966, deteriorated sharply when Singapore executed two Indonesian marines in 1968, and returned to an increasingly close and cooperative footing from 1973 until the end of the New Order in 1998. Under four successive Indonesian presidents since 1998, relations have been subject to a number of acerbic exchanges and occasionally obstructive policies, interspersed with declarations of cooperative intent and ongoing close relations in many functional areas.

The current state of bilateral relations appears to be somewhat prone to tension, beneath a veneer of official protestations to the contrary. As detailed below, a number of contentious issues remain outstanding, and progress towards resolving them has stalled since 2007. In the Indonesian press and parliament, disputes with Singapore over seemingly mundane issues have frequently been magnified, and senior Indonesian politicians have accused Singapore of insincerity in its dealings with Indonesia. Singapore, for its part, has remained officially open to cooperation, but has taken a relatively inflexible line on several contentious issues. As noted with regard to Singapore's relations with its neighbours, bilateral issues "are often kept on hold merely to avoid open conflict". (3)

This article examines patterns of cooperation and conflict between Indonesia and Singapore with a view to understanding why the relationship appears prone to recurrent uneasiness and, during certain periods, difficulty in resolving matters of mutual interest. A number of different potential explanatory factors are examined. The first section asks whether Singapore is in a fundamentally vulnerable position with regard to Indonesia due to structural, historical or demographic factors, and whether this might explain the apparent sensitivities surrounding the bilateral relationship. The second section looks at the role domestic political factors may play in driving the relationship, examining in particular the idea that the vagaries of Indonesia's domestic politics create tensions in the bilateral relationship during periods of political contestation or instability in Indonesia. The third section examines the structure of interests which link Indonesia and Singapore, asking whether irritants in the relationship are in fact out of line with the mix of complementary and competing interests that characterize the interlinked political economies of the two countries.

The principal arguments of this article can be briefly summarized. First, bilateral tensions are often magnified out of proportion, both by policy-makers and by scholarly accounts that view irritants in isolation from the large areas of complementarity and cooperation that exist. Second, the bilateral relationship is not inherently prone to exceptionally high levels of tension and instability. Most of the structural and historical factors commonly assumed to influence the relationship are not, in fact, determinative. Certain structural tensions in the relationship do exist, but they have operated over a longer time period than the post-1965 era, and are not fundamentally rooted in culture or demographics. Third, the pattern of cooperation and contestation is driven as much by Singaporean strategies, aspirations and politics as by Indonesian political shifts and leadership characteristics. Politicians on both sides have at times adopted a selective interpretation of the relationship, presenting it as more sensitive than it is, but the same fault need not be repeated in scholarly analyses.

It should be noted at the outset that an emphasis on the irritants in the relationship betrays a Singapore-centric orientation. The siege mentality which many accounts have attributed to Singaporean policymakers may capture the flavour of Singaporean self-representations with regard to its nearest neighbours, but the view of the bilateral relationship as seen from Indonesia is noticeably different. With a few exceptions, while Indonesia is depicted as presenting at least a latent threat for Singapore in work on Singapore's foreign relations, which tend to dwell on the irritants in the relationship, Indonesian accounts pay much less attention to the irritants and treat them as having much less significance. To take just one example, the pronouncement by Indonesian President B.J. Habibie that Singapore was a "little red dot" has been repeated ad infinitum in accounts of Singapore's foreign relations, and taken as an indicator of underlying ethnically-based hostility. Official Singaporean actors seem to have seized on the epithet with enthusiasm, using it as the title of a volume of quasi-official memoirs by Singaporean diplomats, and in speeches. (4) In contrast, the bilateral relationship with Singapore gets relatively little attention in accounts of Indonesian foreign policy, although it is certainly possible to find material aimed at a more popular Indonesian audience that focuses on Singapore. (5) Most accounts of Indonesian foreign policy covering the post-Soeharto presidencies, whether by Indonesians or others, barely mention Singapore at all, and not in terms that suggest hostility. (6)