Pustaka Ilmiah Universitas Padjadjaran

Abstrak

Challenges For Indonesia’s Foreign Policy Making In The Reformation Era

This paper is devoted to analysis of the possible challenges of Indonesia’s foreign policy making in the reformation era. It discusses some significant developments, such as the Indonesia’s economic and political crises and globalisation, diplomatic issues on human rights, and new dimensions of security challenges. These challenges are assumed to have an important bearing the alternative futures for Indonesia and its foreign policy performance in the Reformation era.

The crisis in Indonesia has taken on a dynamic of its own. What began as a currency crisis in the third quarter of 1997 rapidly turned into a deep financial crisis with wide-ranging economic and social impacts, and finally became a serious political crisis that exploded in May 1998, forcing President Soeharto to resign. Soeharto’s departure, however, did not resolve the crisis. Of the states afflicted by the Asian economic crisis, Indonesia was struck the hardest.3 The World Bank, in its Executive Summary of the 1998 Country Economic Memorandum, 16 July 1998, stated that “Indonesia is in deep crisis. A country that achieved decades of rapid growth, stability, and poverty reduction, is now near economic collapse… No country in recent history, let alone one the size of Indonesia, has ever suffered such a dramatic reversal of fortune.” The road to recovery will not be a short and easy one.