'Nusantara' concept helps to unify RI

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia's archipelagic concept, known as Wawasan Nusantara, has evolved into one of the country's fundamental concepts and is now utilized as an important nation- building tool by the government, an academic said yesterday.

"Wawasan Nusantara is now organically linked to Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution, and is often spoken in the same breath as them," Dino Patti Djalal said at the launching of his book The Geopolitics of Indonesia's Maritime Territorial Policy.

He explained the fact that it is now tied to the country's sacred symbols indicates the extent to which the symbolic value of maritime territory has grown.

Speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the 30 year-old Canadian educated graduate likened Indonesian's current distinction of Wawasan Nusantara to such expounded doctrines as America's "manifest destiny" and Israel's "promised land".

The archipelagic concept has also gained international recognition with the advent of the 1982 United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea.

The current high national standing of Wawasan Nusantara is a far cry from its initial inception by Prime Minister Djuanda in 1957.

According to Dino, at the time the concept was not given much recognition by president Soekarno, who was apparently more interested in utilizing a system of political doctrines to unify the country.

This however changed with the birth of the New Order in the late 1960s.

"Indonesian politics is known for many things but symbolism has always been a consistent feature...The New Order was also actively engaged in this political symbolism and in crafting its own system was drawn to territorial symbolism," Dino said.

For this reason it soon became evident that maritime diplomacy along with economic diplomacy became a feature of Indonesian foreign policy.

While the archipelagic concept's bearing in Indonesia's identity seems to be firmly established there still remains questions on how it affects the country's interests in the southeast Asian sub-region as a whole.

Dino pointed out that in recent years there have been suggestions of Wawasan Nusantara developing an external role in which it is linked to not only national but also regional security.

The question still left unanswered however is how that role might be translated into direct policy. (mds)