STATEMENT OF THE MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS AT THE 116TH IPU ASSEMBLY, NUSA DUA - BALI, INDONESIA

 1 MAY 2007

Honourable Mr. Pier Ferdinando Casini, President of the IPU,
Honourable Speakers of Parliament,
Honourable Mr. Anders B. Johnsson, Secretary-General of the IPU,
Honourable Delegates,
Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great honour and pleasure for me to welcome members and presiding officers of national parliaments from around the world to this paradise island of Bali. It is also indeed an honor and privilege for me to address this august gathering. 

Your 116th General Assembly assumes tremendous significance in the light of the fundamental concerns of our time. As lawmakers and leaders of parliaments you are called upon to exercise your unique and considerable powers to address the threats and challenges confronting the world.

In the spirit of being helpful to that undertaking, I wish to share with you today a view of these challenges and how they can be more effectively addressed.

It is an Indonesian view, of course, but it may be useful if only because it takes into account the realities of the Asia-Pacific region and the dynamics of global and regional interaction that may not be so discernible from other vantage points.

Let me begin by with a recollection of the past two decades, a period that began with a surge of hope that many of the problems of the world would go away—simply because the Cold War had come to an end.

Because there was no longer an iron curtain between East and West, we thought we would finally live in a multilateral world, where there would be greater interaction among nations and peoples.

It would be a world that enjoyed the blessings of information technology, where finally the cause of economic and social development would benefit from the Peace Dividend. The money that used to be spent on the arms race, including the nuclear arms race among the superpowers, would now be spent on development.

We thought there would now be greater commitment for the developed countries to help the developing world. The countries of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) and the Group of 77, including Indonesia, began to anticipate the formation of a Global North-South partnership for development.

Their optimism rose even higher when in 1993, Indonesia, as Chairman of the NAM, presented to the Tokyo Summit of the Group of Seven most developed countries a formal message on how the imbalances of the world economic order could be rectified.

The response of the G-7 was positive, especially on the issue of the debt crisis in the developing world. However, over time it turned out that the response was not positive enough. Because of the persistent debt crisis, there is today a greater volume of financial flows from the developing world to the developed world.

At the same time, we witnessed an erosion of the commitment on the part of key donors to their official development aid commitment of .07 percent of GDP, which was pledged as far back as the 1970s.

There was no peace dividend. And there was no peace. Unilateralism reasserted itself in global affairs. The number of armed conflicts increased. Some old conflicts, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have persisted, and new ones, like the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, have broken out.

As if these were not enough, we also have to contend with international terrorism. Definitely, more people are being killed today than in the two decades before the end of the Cold War.

And today a new security threat that can inflict unprecedented suffering on humankind looms on the horizon: global warming. This means that 15 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and almost a decade after the Kyoto protocol, nothing decisive has been done by the developed and developing world together in a partnership to sustain the environment.

So many global summits have been held to address the great concerns of the time: poverty, human rights, social justice, the environment, trade and sustainable development, to name a few. These international conferences of the United Nations were all imbued with grand visions and each was a new fountain of hope. But the concrete results have not been equal to the vision and promise of the global partnership.

Honourable Delegates,

It well may be that the notion of a global partnership, at this stage, is too abstract for our habits of thinking as nation-states. We have yet to form the habit of transcending our short-term local interests as nation states in order to address our long-term interests as members of a global collective. To do that, we have to make a quantum leap—which is too difficult an exercise for many nations.

I think the remedy is to take an intermediate step, to move from national to global by way of the regional. This means promoting regional cooperation and making it a constant and vigorous complement of all our global undertakings.

Regionalism is a powerful motivator. When confronted with a major problem or threat in their immediate geographical neighbourhood, nations instinctively group together and address that problem or threat together. They know one another and their fears and hopes are similar.

Even at the global level, nations tend to deal with one another on a regional bloc basis. They deal and bargain with one another as regional groups. Thus regionalism has been playing an important role in global affairs.

That is why there have been regional groupings even before the Second World War. And they sharply increased in number in the 1950s. Not all were successful. Among the most successful are the European Union (EU) and, in this part of the world, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

ASEAN has had a great deal to do with Indonesia’s adjustment to globalization. If we think of globalization in terms of an open and competitive economy, trade by rules, peace and security and ultimately regional order—then ASEAN is the chief promoter of globalization in this part of the world.

The process of reformasi, which we in Indonesia launched in the late 1990s in the midst of an economic and political crisis, was actually an effort to adjust ourselves as a nation to living in a globalized world.

We made our democratic transition and instituted economic reform. We established equitable sharing of power and resources between the central government and the local units. The people began to have a greater say on decisions that affect their lives and households. They demanded greater accountability, good governance and an effective fight against corruption, and got all of these.

Thus the country was transformed in just about seven years into the new Indonesia.

It greatly helped that Indonesia was transforming itself at a time when ASEAN was also at the height of an internal integration process — politically, economically and socioculturally. And it helped that ASEAN was also starting a process of integration with its three economically dynamic Northeast Asian neighbours—China, Japan and South Korea—which is known as the ASEAN+3 process.

These processes were a major factor in the early recovery of the East Asian region from the devastation of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.

The ASEAN integration process began some 40 years ago as a modest process of dialogue and cooperation. Using a bottom-up, step-by-step approach, it contributed greatly to peace in the Asia-Pacific region that enabled us to focus our time, energy and resources to economic development.

ASEAN’s chief instrument for peace is the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) in Southeast Asia, which is a code of conduct governing interaction among member countries, and ASEAN with external powers.

In 2002, the ASEAN-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea was adopted—thereby transforming an area of potential conflict into an area of actual cooperation among rival claimants to parts or the whole of the South China Sea. This landmark declaration was the fruit of a process sponsored by Indonesia for more than a decade, the series of informal workshops on “Managing Potential Conflict in the South China Sea.”

Among the most remarkable achievements of ASEAN is the establishment of the ASEAN Free Trade Area, which has been in effect since 2002. From that time on, intra-ASEAN trade has been growing at an average of 14 per cent per year.

ASEAN has also cultivated the habit of dialogue and cooperation with its dialogue partners. Today, a network of free trade areas is being formed with these partners. With these free trade areas as building blocks, an East Asia-wide free trade area can be expected to be in place five years from now.

Moreover, ASEAN is in the driver’s seat of three vital regional processes: the ASEAN Regional Forum, which is the chief venue for discussion on security matters among powers that have an impact on the Asia-Pacific region, the ASEAN+3 process, and the East Asian Summit (EAS), which brings together 16 countries of an East Asia redefined to include India, Australia and New Zealand.

The East Asia Summit represents a population of 3.9 billion which is more than half of humankind and includes the second largest economy, Japan, and some of the most dynamic economies in the world today: China, India and South Korea. ASEAN itself, with its market of 560 million people is not without considerable economic dynamism. The total GDP of the members of East Asia Summit in 2005 is around 10 trillion US Dollars.

ASEAN is in the driver’s seat of these processes, because it gives them political coherence, without which cooperation among some key participants could be difficult.

To continue serving as the dynamic force of these processes, ASEAN must become even more robust politically and economically, and more globally competitive in every respect. It must become an ASEAN Community that rests on the pillars of an ASEAN Security Community, an ASEAN Economic Community, and an ASEAN Sociocultural Community.

That would constitute the ultimate ASEAN regional integration. To ensure that it achieves that within its new early deadline, the year 2015, ASEAN is now writing, finally, the ASEAN Charter.

Aside from giving ASEAN a legal personality, the ASEAN Charter will imbue it with a new sense of purpose, reaffirm and codify its key objectives and principles. It will strengthen its institutions and organizational structure and make ASEAN truly a regional organization of the peoples of Southeast Asia.

This means strengthening of people-to-people ties among ASEAN members. This also means that channels will be developed through which all stakeholders, especially parliaments and civil society, can be consulted on ASEAN activities and their participation enlisted for those activities.

Meanwhile, ASEAN continues to build bridges of dialogue and cooperation not only within its own region but also between regions, and between continents.

Thus it is actively involved in the processes of ASEM, the ASEAN-EU meeting, the APEC forum, the Far East-Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC). And it is a participating subregional organization in the New Asian-African Strategic Partnership for Development (NAASPD).

The dynamism of the ASEAN process effectively builds a case for the role of regional organization in complementing and facilitating the processes of cooperation at the global level.

Global processes are naturally difficult because most nation states are not yet broadminded enough to think as members of a global collective. And, often, because economic power and military power are often the main considerations in these global processes, the developing world is in no position to contribute to their coherence.

But when the countries of a region are united and they cooperate closely, they should be able to maintain regional security, regional prosperity, and sociocultural cohesiveness. By the same token they can contribute to the shaping of a better world.

Indeed, every successful regional order can serve as an important building block in the construction of the edifice that is an enhanced world order. Then we will have a world in which nations, regions and the entire human race are interconnected and aware of their indivisible destiny.

It will be a world that has been healed of its systemic maladies— including poverty, the inequities in the relations between and among nations, and the many threats to human security.

It will also be the ‘world order’ based on independence, abiding peace and social justice—that the founding fathers of Indonesia envisioned in our 1945 Constitution.

Thank you.