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Fifth Jakarta Geopolitical Forum,

"Culture and Civilization: Humanity at the Crossroads"
October 2, 2021. Shortened version.

GLOBAL CIVILIZATIONAL PROGRESS IN AN AGE OF CRISIS:

LESSONS FROM INDONESIA FOR THE WORLD
Robert W. Hefner
Professor of Global Affairs, Pardee School of Global Affairs, Boston University

Let me begin my remarks today by expressing my deep thanks to the National Resilience

Institute of the Republic of Indonesia (LEMHANNAS RI) for inviting me to this timely and

important forum event. I also want to express my special thanks to Governor Agus Widjojo for

his leadership and vision, and also Ch Supt Jabinson Purba, S.H., M.H., who kindly extended me

the invitation and the terms of reference for this Fifth Jakarta Geopolitical Forum.

As the terms of reference for our forum emphasize, we live in an age of extraordinary

challenges, challenges that put in question the existing global order. In the terms of reference I

was provided for my own paper, I was invited to address the question of, How do you measure

the progress of human civilization? In the longer paper that I prepared for this conference, only

part of which I am presenting today, I answer this question by addressing another this conference

has posed: Apakah Indonesia mampu berkontribusi sebagai bagian dari membangun peradaban

dunia?

I have had the good fortune of having visited and done research in Indonesia now for 40

years, and that research has provided me with the wonderful opportunity to live in villages and

cities across the whole of the archipelago. In the course of this research, I have also had the

opportunity to collaborate with many thoughtful officials from the Ministry of Religious Affairs,

the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, and officials from the

Indonesian Embassy in Washington D.C. I have also been involved in Indonesian affairs in the
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U.S. for some thirty years, serving as a consultant to the U.S. government and various

international agencies, both on matters related to Indonesia, and, more generally, on debates

raging in policy circles as to Islam and modern world affairs.

One particularly vivid illustration of the enduring nature of some of the policy questions

these events addressed was my very first such conference forum, and echoes some of the

concerns we are addressing today. In 1995 I was invited to Washington DC by the U.S. State

Department to present my thoughts on Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations” thesis,

based on the article of that name Professor Huntington had published in 1993. Both in my

remarks in 1995 and today, I remain an unqualified critic of Huntington clash-of-civilization

thesis. However, I take exception to the “clash” model not because of any conviction that culture

and civilization are not deeply important features of global politics and development -- they most

certainly are vitally important. Instead, along with the organizers of the LEMHANNAS

conference, and with colleagues and friends like the late Alfred Stepan (Stepan 2011) and Ahmet

Kuru (2011, 2019), my primary objection centers on the simplistic way in which Huntington

portrays "civilization" as consisting of more or less unchanging and separate value

clusters. Huntington assumed that civilizations are organized around one set of unchanging

values for all time, and that there has been very little synergy or give-and-take across

civilizations.

However, as the organizers of this international conference make clear, in fact the contrary

reality is true. As Stepan, Kuru, and I and many others have also long argued, civilizations are

not hermetically sealed or historically segregated. The rise of the university and modern

medicine, mathematics, and science in the West from the twelfth century onward was possible in

large part only because of a university curriculum and scientific and medical literature that
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borrowed extensively from the scholarship of such medieval Muslim scholars as Ibn Sina

(Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes). In our age of global science, communications, and

education, synergies like these across civilizational divides have become all the more common.

As we talk in this forum about civilizations, then, it is important to put aside Samuel

Huntington’s essentializing model that assumes that civilizations evolve separately and are

forever defined by a single and unchanging set of values. The primary civilizational reality

today is that there have long been and continue to be synergies across cultures and civilizations.

No less important, countries like Indonesia that have long been a crossroads of civilizations are

uniquely well strengthen this positive synergy across cultures.

In the longer version of this paper, I present some general responses to the question of

How should we measure the progress of human civilizations? However, because time is short,

the core point on which I wish to focus the remainder of my remarks has to do with my

observation that Indonesia is uniquely well positioned to play a central role in some of the most

important of these cross-civilizational synergies. The zones of opportunity for Indonesia include

the lessons the country offers on the urgent problem of how to develop governance structures

that allow people of great ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity to live together and prosper

within a democratic order. Here Indonesia offers enormous lessons to the world.

Let me explain. The lessons Indonesia has to offer on these points are especially

noteworthy because, although they presuppose the presence of a democratic order, Pancasila

democracy and inclusive citizenship they prescribe differ in several important and helpful

ways from the model of democracy associated with what is often referred to as "Anglo-

American" liberalism like in my own country, the United States of America.

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What do I mean? Many Western policy and human rights organizations erroneously

assume that an American-style "separation of religion and state" is and should be the model for

religious governance in all nations of the world. However, this policy assumption is based on a

serious misreading of the global situation on religion-and-state relations. Although “there is no

single European pattern” (McLeod 2003:9), public religion in varied forms was a key feature of

nation-making and citizenship culture in most of the countries of modern Western Europe (C.

Smith 2003; McCleod 2003:4-5; Stepan 2011). Although, as Alfred Stepan has observed

(2011:114), some analysts assume that the formal separation of religion and state ostensibly

observed in the United States was the prototype for religion-state-society relations in Western

Europe, this was in fact not at all the case. No European country followed or today follows the

American "separationist" model.

Inasmuch as this is the case, it is deeply mistaken to assume that, if Indonesia is to

continue to develop democracy, it must conform to this rather simplistic understanding of the

American separationist model. On matters of religion and state, even most European Union

countries differ from the American model. In particular, most European countries still today

treat one or several national religions and religious institutions as favored public resources, and

they do so in materially significant ways. Almost one half of European countries provide state

funding to some clergy; more than one-third collect special taxes to support organized religions;

around one in five still have state-recognized, “established” religions (Stepan 2011: 117; cf. Fox

2008).

These European examples remind us that, on matters of religion and state, Indonesia is in

very good company: neither democracy nor multicultural citizenship require an American-style

"separation of Church and state." Moreover, although most Western European countries extend
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state recognition and support to a small number of Christian denominations and Judaism,

Indonesia extends full rights of state recognition to, not just Abrahamic religions (Islam and

Christianity), but to such Indic and Asian religious traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism. In

other words, the Indonesian state’s inclusivity on matters of religion is considerably more

generous than that of most Western European democracies.

As the 2017 Constitutional Court decision on "spiritual beliefs" (aliran kepercayaan

terhadap Tuhan yang Maha Esa) made clear, Indonesian politicians and the Indonesian public

disagree on whether to extend full rights of recognition to other spiritual traditions like those we

call kepercayaan, as well as world religious traditions like Bahai'ism and Judaism. I know from

discussions with colleagues in the Ministry of Religious Affairs that some government officials

would like to expand the list of state-recognized religions. That is a matter Indonesians will

likely continue to debate for many years, and it is a matter for the Indonesian people to resolve.

But my point here is that these evolving discussions are themselves illustrative of a species of

open public reflection to which Indonesia has dedicated itself more vigorously than have most

nations, including most modern Western democracies. And in this sense Indonesia offers a

very real contribution to the synergy of civilizations. It demonstrates that democracy is

compatible with a variety of religious and civilizational legacies -- but that to be compatible also

requires the crafting of institutions and legal traditions consonant with national traditions of

religion, kebhinekaan diversity, and sopan-santun recognition.

A second and related contribution Indonesian can make to a synergy of civilizations has to

do with demonstration-effects the country offers on matters of Islam and democracy. My point

here is that, notwithstanding the challenges it has faced, Indonesia has not only demonstrated that
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democracy and Islam are compatible, but that Muslim scholars, educators, and political leaders

are in fact critical to the success of any such democratic undertaking.

What exactly do I mean by this latter claim? What is so remarkable about Indonesia is

that the cultural ground for the return to democracy after May 1998 was laid, not by Western-

style secularist liberals, but by an alliance of democracy-minded Muslims and Indonesians of

other faiths. In other words, the return to democracy was made possible by cultural shifts in

favor of democracy as a system of government compatible with religion that had taken place in

Indonesia’s faith communities under the auspices of religious leaders and. Among the 82.7% of

the population that is Muslim, it was leaders and educators in mainstream organizations like the

Nahdlatul Ulama and the Muhammadiyah, along with the democracy-minded teachers in the

State Islamic and Muhammadiyah university systems, who led the way in the promotion of this

shift.

After the return to full democracy in 1998, Muslim educators and leaders in organizations

like NU and Muhammadiyah went even further: they now led the way in the formulation of

reform-minded curricular materials on Islam and democracy, civic education, and the adaptation

of Islamic law and ethics to the pluralist realities of modern Indonesia (Abdillah 1997; Feener

2007; Jackson and Bahrissalim 2007; Lukens Bull 2014; Jabali and Jamhari 2002; Ubaedillah

2015). Specialists of Islamic education and democratic reform across the Muslim world have

long emphasized the critical role played by teacher training and curricular reform in Islamic

higher education in efforts to promote democracy and pluralist citizenship (Doumato and Starrett

2007; Faour and Muasher 2011; Herrera and Torres 2006). No Muslim-majority country has

succeeded at a more ambitious educational initiative and democratic socialization project

of this sort than has Indonesia.

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There was one other way in which Indonesia's return to democracy provides evidence of

a remarkable and important synergy, and this has to do with the positive role played by the

armed forces in the return to democracy. This point is best illustrated by way of an international

comparison. In some structural respects, the Indonesian military in 1998 resembled the Egyptian

military in 2010, just prior to Egypt’s “Arab spring.” Both the Indonesian and Egyptian

militaries have played a proud role in guarding and maintaining their country’s national

independence. Both are involved in societal and economic as well as defense affairs. And in the

early years of their respected democratic transitions, both militaries held back and allowed the

democratic opening to proceed freely. However, in the end, the policies of the two military

establishments on the transitions underway diverged in a most fundamental way. In response to

the authoritarian mis-steps of the government of President Morsi, the military in Egypt

intervened and expelled the Morsi government from power, thereby bringing the democratic

transition to a halt (Bayat 2017:15; Skovgaard-Petersen 2017: 328-329). I am not interested one

way or another in taking sides in this Egyptian matter. My point is simply that the Indonesian

armed forces command acted entirely differently and with far greater wisdom. The Indonesian

armed forces supported the electoral and legislative reforms, and in so doing it contributed

vitally to the success of Indonesia’s democratic transition.

In all three of the regards that I have emphasized today, Indonesia offers important

lessons to the world. Indonesia has demonstrated that democracy works best when it is not

constructed in a one-size-fits-all or “Western” manner, but in a manner that responds to and

scales up the unique historical and cultural legacies of the society in which democratic

institutions are embedded. To state the matter differently, the lesson from the Indonesian

example is that a synergy across civilizations on matters like democracy and citizenship is best
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achieved, not where democracy is assumed to take a single form like that of a Western "secular

liberalism," but where it both draws on international models and institutions while also adjusting

those institutions to national culture and traditions. Rather than weakening democracy through

adjustments like these Indonesia has strengthened it. In other words, Indonesia has allowed

democracy to flourish because it has encouraged democracy to develop deep roots in national

traditions of religion, adat-custom, and sopan-santun civility. In an age of democratic setbacks

and civilizational anxieties, Indonesia has provided a deeply important and positive model to the

whole world.