'Nusantara' concept helps to unify RI

'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)