Eric Hiariej heads the International Relations department at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta. Andrew Philips is associate professor in international relations and strategy in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.
Foreign minister Retno LP Marsudi this week will welcome 200 academics from Indonesia, Australia, and the wider region to Gadjah Mada University (UGM), where they will commemorate the Asia-Africa Conference’s (KAA) 60th anniversary and debate its lessons for today’s world.
“The Bandung Conference and Beyond”, jointly sponsored by UGM and the University if Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies, engages a vital question for Indonesia: does the Bandung Conference and its legacy still matter for world politics?
Despite Indonesia’s lavish prepartions for the event, the conference’s contemporary importance seems at first easy to dismiss. With colonialism now but a bitter memory, the Bandung conference’s anti-imperialist message seems an echo of an increasingly distant age. Escalating strategic tensions in the Indo-Pacific, especially surrounding China’s rise, meanwhile, seem to mock the KAA’s call for Afro-Asian solidarity, and its vision for a less violent world.
Againts the sceptcis, we argue that the Bandung Conference and its legacies still matter, for three reasons.
Firts, the KAA remains a profound testament tothe power of ideas to change world politics for the better. Though colonialism’s demise now seems inevitable, it is all too easy to forget that the end of imperialism was contingent, and indeed fiercely contested, by the colonial powers.
In the wake of world War II, instutionaliezd racism remained a pervasive evil, and a contuinuing license for colonial oppression. Against this backdrop, Indonesia’s mobilization of an anti-imperialist consensus in Banding in 1955 played a key role in undermining colonialism’s legitimacy, thus paving the way for empires’ demise.
Without the KAA, European clonialism would perhaps have collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. But its end would have been later, and potentiially even bloodier, without the KAA.
Second, Indonesia’s poneering role at the KAA should be an inspiration for the country’s current leaders, for it showed that Jakarta can effetively lead on a world stage, rather than within Southeast Asia alone.
As a G20 member, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, and its third-largest democracy, Indonesia is today even better positioned than in 1955 to positivey shape the global order. And as the “Global maritime axis” linking together the Indo-Pacific The world’s most economically dynamic region, Indonesia will in any case soon struggle to sescape pressures to take on a leadership role commentsurate with a leadership role commensurate with its strategic centrality and growing economic heft.
In this context, the KAA reminds us that Indonesia has a long tradition of “thinking big” in working for a more just global order. This tradition should be seen as a vital asset for Indonesia, as its strategic horizons inevitably expand in the coming decades.
Finally, for international relations scholars especially, the KAA is worth remembering as a spur to finding new ways of studying and teaching world politics that challenge existing poer structures, rather than simply reinforcing them. We cannot cure the world’s ills by invoking zombie platitudes of “Afro-Asian Solidarity” that are divorced from today’s power realities.
But neither will be able to inspire tomorrow’s leaders to fight for a fairer and more peaceful world unless we also balance pragmatism with a healthy dose of idealism in our teachings.
For international relations to inspire as well as instruct, the discipline must itself be “decolonized”, so that it can include a wider range of voices and help us to better navigate an increasingly diverse world, where Asian and African powers are resurgent. The scholar EH Carr once observed that political science “is the study not only of what is, but of what ought to be”.
As we reflect this week on the KAA’s lessons and legacies, this basic truth resonates as strongly now as it did in 1955.
The Bandung spirit remains as urgently needed today as ever.
