scholarly journals Repositioning Indonesia – Thoughts on the Indo-Pacific

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Anthony Milner

Before considering how best to reposition Indonesia in the world – and I will be looking, in particular, at Indonesia’s current Indo-Pacific initiative -  we need to ask how the world itself has been repositioned. The terms of reference for this conference go straight to this second question. They immediately highlight the theme of globalization, noting how it has promoted “growing connectivity among states” and “revolutionized human interaction”. How then has this region been reconfigured over the last decades? Until the mid-20th-century the entire Asian region was either under European colonial rule or strong Western imperial influence. That is how the region was structured – with the great centres of power in London, Paris, The Hague and Washington. After the extraordinary conquests by Japan, which effectively ended the Western imperial project, Asia was quickly drawn into the Cold War. Countries lined up as Communist or Anti-Communist, and some tried to sustain a degree of neutrality or equi-distance. At the end of the Cold War, in the last decade or so of the 20th-century, as is often commented, there was a unipolar moment – an America-dominated world with a sense of globalization not merely being economic, but also a globalization of ideas. One commentator wrote of the ‘end of history’ – the US had won, he said, with its liberal democratic ideology. Communism had been annihilated, and Western liberalism had the ‘wind in its hair’. This said, there were still objections. Dr Mahathir in Malaysia and a number of bright Foreign Ministry intellectuals in Singapore spoke of ‘Asian values’. They said you had to understand Asian values to explain the great economic transformation taking place in Asian countries – and there was also a need to respect Asian values in the political arena, and not just insist that all societies must develop in the same way. The democracy, human rights, and other supposed responsibilities of government which Westerners have tended to advocate, it was argued, are not necessarily universal norms.  

Author(s):  
Beverley Hooper

From the early 1970s, the US-China relationship was central to diplomatic reporting, with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s visit to Peking in October 1971, President Nixon’s historic visit in February 1972, and the establishment the following year of small liaison offices in Peking and Washington. Following each of Kissinger’s further visits in 1973 and 1974, senior diplomats virtually queued up at the liaison office to find out what progress, if any, had been made towards the normalization of US-China relations. Peking’s diplomats, like some of their colleagues elsewhere in the world, did not always see eye-to-eye with their foreign ministries. There was little chance of their becoming overly attached to Communist China, as the Japanologists and Arabists were sometimes accused of doing for Japan and Arab countries. At the same time, living and breathing the PRC led some diplomats to regard Chinese Communism as being rather more nuanced—and the government somewhat less belligerent—than the Cold War images portrayed in the West, particularly the United States.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​


2019 ◽  
pp. 409-435
Author(s):  
Magdalena Radomska

The paper focuses on the ways of visualizing political and economic transformation in the works of artists from post-communist Europe mainly in the 1990s. Those works, which today, in a wide geographical context, may be interpreted as problematizing the idea of transformation, were often originally appropriated by such discourses of the post-transformation decade as the art of the new media and technology (Estonia), performance (Russia), feminism (Lithuania), body art (Hungary), and critical art (Poland), which marginalized the problem of transformation. Analyses of the works of artists from Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia make it possible to determine and problematize the poles of transformation in a number of ways, pointing at the inadequacy of those poles which traditionally spread from the end of totalitarian communism to democracy identified with free market economy. By the same token, they allow one to question their apparent antithetical character which connects the transformation process to the binary structures of meaning established in the period of the Cold War. The presented analyses demonstrate that the gist of the transformation was not so much the fall of communism, which is surviving in the post-1989 art of East-Central Europe due to the leftist inclinations of many artists with a Marxist intellectual background, but the collapse of the binary structure of the world. Methodologically inspired by Boris Buden, Susan Buck-Morss, Marina Gržinić, Edit András, Boris Groys, Alexander Kiossev, and Igor Zabel, they restore the revolutionary character of 1989 and, simultaneously, a dialectical approach to the accepted poles of the transformation. An example of ideological appropriation, which may be interpreted as problematizing the political transformation, is Trap. Expulsion from Paradiseby the Lithuanian artist Eglė Rakauskaitė. The first part of the paper focuses on Jaan Toomik’s May 15-June 1, 1992, interpreted in the theoretical terms proposed by Marina Gržinić and Boris Groys as a work of art that visualizes the concept of post-communism as excrement of the transformation process. Placed in the context of such works as In Fat(1998) by Eglė Rakauskaitė, 200 000 Ft(1997) by the Hungarian artist Kriszta Nagy or Corrections(1996-1998) by Rassim Krastev from Bulgaria, Toomik’s work is one of many created at that time in East-Central Europe, which thematized the transformation process with reference to the artist’s body. Krastev’s Correctionsproblematizes the transformation as a process of self-colonization by the idiom of the West, as well as a modification of the utopia of production, one aspect of which was propaganda referring to the body, changing it in an instrument that transformed the political order into a consumerist utopia where bodies exist as marketable products. The part titled, “The Poles of Transformation as a Function of the Cold War,” focuses on A Western View(1989) by the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov and This is my blood(2001) by Alexander Kossolapov from Russia. In a theoretical context drawn from the texts by Zabel, Buden, and Ekaterina Degot, Solakov’s work has been interpreted as problematizing the transformation understood as refashioning the world, no longer based on the bipolar division into East and West. The paper ends with an analysis of Cunyi Yashi, a work of the Hungarian artist Róbert Szabó Benke, which problematizes the collapse of the bipolar world structure in politics and the binary coding of sexual identity. In Szabó Benke’s work, the transformation is represented as rejection of the binary models of identity – as questioning their role in the emergence of meanings in culture. 


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-199
Author(s):  
Adam Wielomski

The aim of this text is a contemporary estimation of the thesis formed in a famous book by Zbigniew Brzeziński and Carl Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956). This is a classic text of Western political science about totalitarianism, simultaneously scientific and political. Scientific, because it presents the idea of three types of political regimes in the 20th century: totalitarian, authoritarian, and liberal-democratic. Political, because the term “totalitarianism” was very useful in the time of the Cold War. This term presents the old (Nazi Germany) and new (Stalinist Russia) totalitarian states as equal political enemies of the USA, equal in their hostility to political and individual freedom, i.e. America’s creed. By using this term, the Americans can create a horrible picture of Russian communism as totalitarian, the same as Hitler’s regime, while presenting old enemies (West Germany, Italy, and Japan) as good friends of both the USA and freedom, because in this moment these states are democratic and liberal. The new term ended the old line of the delimitation between fascist or pro fascist and antifascist states and legitimates the new alliance between the USA and Franco’s Spain. The author analyses the definition of totalitarianism by Brzeziński and Friedrich as well as the political and ideological accusations made against this book by leftist critics.


2019 ◽  
Vol IV (IV) ◽  
pp. 468-475
Author(s):  
Shabnam Gul ◽  
Aftab Alam ◽  
Muhammad Faizan Asghar

The USA, the victor of the Cold War, became supper power in 1992 and started to exercise its hegemony in the world. China, a Cold War ally of the US, became a stronger economy and came forward to encounter the Primacy of the US in Asia. In the name of peaceful development and cooperation, China has become the supreme exporter of the world and the second economy of the world. The advancement PRC has made in the arena of technology, military, space technology, its engagements in different regions, its soft balancing strategy in the world displays that China wants to perform as a forthcoming hegemon of the world. This paper analyze both the soft and hard balancing tactics of China to counter the omnipotence of the US in different regions of the world. The strategies of China illustrates that it is searching for a multipolar world.


2021 ◽  
Vol 97 (5) ◽  
pp. 1353-1375
Author(s):  
Benjamin Miller

Abstract How did the attempt to make the world more liberal end up making the West less liberal? Following the end of the Cold War the US tried to promote liberalism in various parts of the world. This promotion took place under the liberal belief in its universality. A few of these attempts succeeded, most notably the integration of China into the global economy. Many other liberalizing endeavours failed, notably democracy-promotion in China, Russia and the Middle East. Yet, both the successes and the failures resulted in the rise of illiberal elements in the West as reflected in Brexit and Trumpism. The article shows how the outcomes of the attempts at liberalization—both the failures and the successes—generated these populist forces. The Chinese economic success took place at least partly because of the US-led integration of China into the international order. Yet, this success produced adverse economic effects in the West. Such outcomes led to the rise of economic populism. The American liberal interventions in the Middle East affected the rise of terrorism and of Muslim migration to the West. These developments influenced the rise of cultural populism in the West, which advances resentment of foreigners, migrants and minorities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-25
Author(s):  
Stacey Prickett

Between 1958 and 1961, Jerome Robbins's Ballets: U.S.A. company toured to European arts festivals with a repertory of new and existing works, most of which remain in performance more than six decades later. Cold War political and artistic imperatives intersected in choreography that circulated visions of “American” innovation and youthful vitality, danced to an eclectic range of scores by a mixed-race cast. Archival documentation of the funding process reveals discussions about aesthetic priorities and the choreographer's responsibility to the US government. Analysis of press coverage of the performances also considers the extent to which diplomatic objectives were achieved.


Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon

‘From confrontation to détente, 1958–68’ explores the events and forces that made the late 1950s and early 1960s a period of seemingly perpetual crisis. In the late 1950s, the Cold War entered perhaps its most dangerous phase, the time in which the danger of general nuclear war was highest. A succession of crises, culminating in 1962 with the epochal confrontation between Washington and Moscow over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, brought the world perilously close to a nuclear conflagration. On both sides of the superpower divide, risk-taking and shrill rhetoric reached levels not witnessed since the late 1940s. The US involvement in Vietnam, particularly the Vietnam War, is an important part of this history.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-395
Author(s):  
Alexander Anievas ◽  
Richard Saull

Abstract This article intervenes in IR debates on the origins and character of the postwar liberal international order. Dominant theorizations of the US-led Western order rest on a shared assumption of its essentially post-fascist character based on the liberal-democratic properties of its constitutive members. This article challenges this prevailing view. It does so through a critical historical and theoretical exploration of the role of far-right ideopolitical forces in the development of the liberal international order during the early Cold War period. Drawing on the concepts of “uneven and combined development” and “passive revolution” as alternative theoretical frames, the article focuses particular attention on the significance of former fascists in the workings and institutional fabric of a number of West European states and the relationship between the United States and NATO in far-right coup-plotting and violence that punctuated their national histories. Demonstrating these far-right “contributions” to the making and evolution of the Cold War order, the article offers a reconceptualization of liberal order construction and US hegemony that not only problematizes existing accounts of Cold War geopolitics but also demonstrates the structural interconnections between the far-right and liberal order-building projects that goes beyond the Cold War era.


2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Inoguchi

Stimulated by Ole Waever's (1998) examination of American and European developments in International Relations, this article examines the growth of the discipline of international relations in Japan, focusing on the major currents of the social science tradition since 1868 and the intellectual agenda of international relations since 1945. Postwar scholarship has reflected the main themes and questions of Japanese history — the causes of war, the struggle for peace, Japan's place in the world and Asia, and Japan's role in the Cold War. To an extent, the organization and substance of IR teaching and scholarship in Japan can be explained by reference to certain sociological and historical variables. Discussions about methodology have not mirrored the “great debates” of the United States, but the younger scholars are moving closer to the American pattern. Recent exposure to and interaction with American scholarship has become increasingly visible, allowing Japanese scholars to make important contributions to debates in the US.


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