INTRODUCTION

Since the 1970s, Southeast Asia has witnessed the emergence of religious resurgence amongst the Malays, popularly referred to as the dakwah movement. Essentially an urban phenomenon, it is manifested in a puritanical understanding and experience of Islam expressed in various domains of life, not excluding the Muslim law otherwise known as Shariah. While there has been considerable research on the problems of Shariah revivalism in neighbouring countries, the same cannot be said for Singapore, where the Muslims are subjected to the same laws as non-Muslims in all areas except in the domain of the family and inheritance. In these areas, the AMLA (1968), supplemented by the classical Muslim law, in particular the tenets of the Shafie school, bind them while non-Muslims are subjected to the Woman's Charter (1960). This chapter analyses the mode of thinking of Singapore's Shariah revivalist proponents based on their discourse. It argues that their imagination of the Shariah is not only alienated from the legal history and tradition of the community, but reflects and breeds exclusivist and dogmatic perceptions of Shariah which impedes prospects for the development of effective Muslim law, imperative for the well-being of Muslims and the wider community.

ISLAMIC RESURGENCE

Shariah revivalism is a major facet of the Islamic resurgence in Singapore that emerged about a decade after Independence amidst unprecedented social change induced by the process of development and nation building. For the Malays already mired in socio-economic problems under the colonial rule, adaptation to the demands of the new socio-political conditions proved highly challenging. Their stark socio-economic lag compared to non- Malays quickly drew the attention of scholars and community leaders alike who warned that their manifold problems did not bode well for the young nation as a whole.

In their attempts to alleviate the problems and propel the community's progress, the Malay elites constantly evoked religious values and cultural traditions, an effort reinforced by the government's emphasis on multiculturalism in its search for national identity. The turn to Islam as ballast for the community's socio-economic progress was neither novel nor unexpected given its strong influence on the lives of the Malays. However the potential of the religion in preparing and facilitating adaptation to the demands of modernization in the value sphere was impeded by the emergence of a religious experience strongly characterized by exclusivist, puritan and authoritarian traits.

In this chapter we discuss how international trade cooperation has influenced the process of globalisation in Indonesia. International trade cooperation here refers to the set of rules and institutions, binding and non-binding commitments, and principles and best practices that define the conduct of international trade, including the movement of goods, ser¬vices, investment and people. We evaluate the role of international trade cooperation in shaping both the reform process in Indonesia and, more generally, Indonesia's response to globalisation. We are interested in how the country has managed to balance the domestic political pressure for protection, on the one hand, against its role in international forums, on the other.

The chapter consists of five sections. In the first section we discuss the experience of Indonesia with globalisation. We then examine the role of international trade arrangements such as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Asso¬ciation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in shaping that experience. Next, we highlight two cases in which trade facilitation has contributed to Indonesia's global eco¬nomic integration: logistics and tourism. This is followed by a discussion of the recent trend towards protectionism in Indonesia and its implica-tions for regional trade negotiations. We end with some conclusions and recommendations.

THE CASE FOR GLOBALISATION: INDONESIA's EXPERIENCE

Globalisation has benefited a large number of countries. As one of the East Asian ‘miracle’ countries, Indonesia achieved high and sustained eco¬nomic growth, reductions in poverty and improvements in equity during the period 1965–90 by maintaining an open trade and investment policy (World Bank 1993). Many developing countries were able to grow faster than the advanced economies, leading to a narrowing of the gap between the two groups of nations. Baldwin (2016), for instance, shows that the share of developed (G7) economies in world GDP has declined sharply since 1990, while that of six fast-growing industrialising countries (China, Korea, India, Indonesia, Poland and Thailand) has risen.

More open economies generally grow faster than less open economies. But openness needs to be managed. That is, to participate in the global economy, countries need not only to open their economies to trade, invest-ment and technology, but also to make supply-side investments to ensure that the benefits of openness are widely distributed. These investments include making sure that the country's population is equipped with the skills to take advantage of global opportunities, that there are social safety nets in place to manage the volatility that is inevitably associated with globalisation, and that the benefits are spatially dispersed.

Indonesia is an excellent laboratory for exploring these issues. After progressively disengaging from the global economy during the first two decades of independence, Indonesia has created a policy regime that has been broadly open since 1966. There were major and successful reform episodes in the late 1960s and the first half of the 1980s, and the economy and polity recovered surprisingly quickly from the deep economic and political crises of 1997–98. But the quotation above captures the central theme of this chapter: Indonesia continues to experience widespread ambivalence towards globalisation, and, as a result, the country is miss¬ing out on some of the opportunities available to more open economies.

In this chapter, we illustrate these issues by examining the links between Indonesia's policy environment and its export performance. In particular, as a case study we focus on the three most important footloose manufactured exports for most developing economies: garments, foot¬wear and electronics.

INDONESIA AND GLOBALISATION

An overview

It is a well-established empirical and theoretical proposition that, in times of growing world trade, more open economies generally grow faster than less open ones (Bhagwati 2004). Openness has also been central to East Asian economic success. All the high-growth East Asian economies adopted variants of the export-oriented development strategy, albeit with considerable variation from free-trade Singapore to the heavily managed Korean model of export orientation (Perkins 2013). At least until recently, these economies were able to achieve dramatic export success, in the context of a benign and increasingly open global economy in which the principle of multilateralism by and large held sway.

Since independence in 1945, Indonesia has sought to play a role in regional affairs proportionate to its size and location, while at the same time avoid¬ing involvement in the rivalries among major powers. This has become known as the ‘independent and active’ foreign policy doctrine of Indonesia. Territorial integrity and national security are two of the most important facets of the country's foreign policy. As early as 1957, as part of its Archi¬pelagic Outlook (Wawasan Nusantara) policy, the Indonesian government issued a declaration stating that all the waters surrounding and between the islands in the territory came within Indonesia's sovereignty. Although the declaration met with almost universal international condemnation at the time, two and a half decades later, in one of the country's best-known diplomatic and legal successes, Indonesia succeeded in having the ‘archi¬pelagic principle’ incorporated into the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. This effectively gave legal and political support to Indonesia's territory as consisting of the islands, the intervening seas and the wider economic zone around the edges, thus greatly expanding the jurisdictional boundaries of the country.

With the ascension of President Suharto in the late 1960s, Indonesian foreign policy shifted from the confrontational character of the Sukarno years to an emphasis on close bilateral and multilateral cooperation, espe¬cially with other countries in the region. Post-Suharto governments have continued to stress pragmatism and good neighbourly relations, although national sentiment does flare up occasionally, sparked by incidents in which Indonesia's national pride has been ‘offended’ (mostly by Malaysia and Australia). As Anwar (2014) points out, pragmatism continues to act as a brake in most of these cases, preventing them from escalating into more severe conflicts. In summary, for the past half-century Indonesia has pursued a foreign policy that is geared towards protecting the national interest through cooperation rather than confrontation, through economic development rather than political adventurism, and through independ¬ent and active policy-making rather than alliances. The big question is whether such an approach to foreign policy still serves Indonesia well in dealing with the current regional and global dynamics, in particular the multiple territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

The world is finally recovering from the 2007–08 global financial crisis. After contracting sharply in 2009 and increasing slowly in the subsequent years, world real GDP growth returned to 3 per cent in 2017. Ten years after the crisis, it appears that growth is at last showing sustainable signs of recovery. Other challenges remain, however. Trade growth has slowed and, despite an improvement in 2017, remains lower than before the global financial crisis. The slowdown in trade growth has been attributed to cycli¬cal factors and to structural factors such as a lack of productivity growth and the maturation of global value chains. Protectionism is another factor, although, to date, it is not so much the increase in protectionist measures as the high level of uncertainty about trade policy that is affecting trade.

The policy uncertainty stems primarily from the perceived lack of ben¬efits from globalisation. Almost half the world's population—that is, more than 3 billion people—have to survive on $2.50 or less every day. The richest 10 per cent of the global population owns more than 85 per cent of the global wealth. Inequality has increased even in the countries where poverty has declined. These factors are widely seen as the main causes of the re-emergence of anti-globalisation sentiment around the world, prompting leaders to adopt populist and inward-looking policies. The electoral consequences have been surprising; they include the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, the success of the ‘leave’ campaign in the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Meanwhile, those in power show an increas¬ingly authoritarian inclination—Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia and Xi in China, to name a few—often by exploiting the public's misgivings about globalisation.

In Indonesia, the discontent with globalisation is apparent in rising nationalism, a rejection of foreign interference and a distrust of democracy that is reminiscent of the New Order. The disappointment with globalisa¬tion is not entirely unjustified. In Indonesia as in many other countries, globalisation has had both good and bad results. Trade always creates both winners and losers, and in the absence of a well-functioning com¬pensation mechanism and the free movement of labour across sectors, the winners appear to be concentrated disproportionately among a small number of elites. Corruption has only worsened this situation, allow¬ing the dark side of globalisation to dominate.

Protectionism and anti-globalisation are on the rise again. Protectionism has been rising since the global financial crisis in 2009, and populist and nationalist tendencies, especially in the United States, have escalated anti-globalisation to a whole new level. The World Trade Organization reported a significant increase in the number of trade-restrictive measures introduced by G20 countries, from a total of 381 in October 2010 to 1,671 in October 2016 (WT0 2016: 4). This is particularly worrying considering that trade growth has stagnated at the same time.

The vote in the United Kingdom in June 2016 to leave the European Union and the presidential election result in the United States in Novem¬ber 2016 caught everyone by surprise. In the former case, the popular vote to leave an economic bloc that has provided many benefits for the British economy was difficult to understand and seemed to run counter to the national interest. In the latter case, Donald Trump's promise to ‘make America great again’ by changing trading rules that he considered did not benefit the United States clearly struck a chord with many Americans. Since he came to office in January 2017, the United States has withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), reopened negotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), unilaterally imposed tariffs on a number of products in the name of ‘fair trade’ and ‘national security’, and signalled that the United States will not abide by WTO rulings. More than any other country, China has been targeted due to its large trade deficit with the United States and its alleged theft of intellectual property rights. These events are indications of a contagious new populism and nationalism that may affect other parts of the world, especially with the retreat of the United States from being the champion of an open world economic order.

Indonesians had an ambivalent attitude towards economic openness even before the rise of the anti-globalisation movement in advanced coun¬tries. The increase in trade restrictions in Indonesia since 2001 has been referred to as ‘creeping protectionism’ (Basri and Patunru 2012; Patunru and Rahardja 2015).

There has been a shift in Indonesian political rhetoric on food policy over the last decade, away from food security (ketahanan pangan) and towards food sovereignty (kedaulatan pangan). This shift is not unique to Indonesia; it reflects a broader movement by activist peasant organisations around the world to emphasise sovereignty over security in relation to food. The way in which the concept is being interpreted and applied by political actors in Indonesia, however, is distinctive, in that it draws strongly on a perceived need to protect the nation—the bangsa—although not neces¬sarily the individual citizens within it.

This chapter examines the processes by which food discourses have been constructed, recast and deployed in Indonesia. The first section looks at the wider global discourses on food security and the second focuses on the history of food policy in Indonesia. The third section explains the more recent embrace of the concept of food sovereignty by the state and addresses the implications of this rhetorical shift for Indonesian food policy.

This discursive arena responds to the very real challenges that Indo¬nesia faces in terms of ensuring that adequate and nutritious food is accessible to a population that exceeds 250 million. The Food and Agri¬culture Organization has estimated that, in 2014–16, Indonesia had 20.3 million undernourished people (FAO et al. 2017: 89). Child malnutrition presents a critical and unresolved challenge for the country, with stunting affecting 37 per cent of Indonesian children aged under five in 2013, com¬pared with only 12 per cent across the entire East Asia and Pacific region (DKP and WFP 2015). Unlike many other indicators of food insecurity, rates of malnutrition have actually worsened in recent years, indicating that current policy is ill equipped to address key nutritional challenges. Patterns of food insecurity in Indonesia have a strong geographical dimen-sion: 52 of the 58 districts identified by Indonesia's Food Security Council (Dewan Ketahanan Pangan) and the World Food Programme in 2015 as ‘severely vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity’ were located in the far eastern regions of Papua, Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara (DKP and WFP 2015). This raises serious questions about the scale at which food insecurity should be addressed.

In 2016 more than 7 million Indonesians were working as overseas migrant workers. Most were low-skilled women from poor villages with little access to decent jobs at home. Under an exploitative, centralistic, high-cost and gender-blind migration scheme, the recruiters who act as middlemen for corporate interests view Indonesian villages simply as marketplaces where they can make large profits from exploiting uneducated, unskilled villagers. Not infrequently, they use intimidation and other practices to force villagers to work overseas. Although Law No. 39/2004 on the Place¬ment and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers should protect the interests of those workers, in practice it has served as a vehicle for human rights violations. As a result, human trafficking activities often start at the village level, disguised as an official placement program for migrant workers under Law No. 39/2004.

To address this situation, in 2014 Migrant CARE, an Indonesian non-government organisation, established a village-based program for migrant workers: Village of Care for Migrant Workers (Desbumi). At present, more than 50 villages in East Nusa Tenggara, West Nusa Tenggara, Central Java, East Java and West Java are involved in this program. In each area, Desbumi provides information, assistance with documentation, a migrant worker database, grievance mechanisms, a compilation of relevant village rules and regulations, and post-migration economic empowerment, to ensure that migrant workers from the most at-risk villages have a safe and worthwhile migration experience. All these activities and services are listed on village government websites. The intention is to place the village at the forefront of efforts to protect migrant workers. This is important not only because the village is where the problems start, but also because villages have gained political power and increased funding under Law No. 6/2014 on Villages, which took effect in December 2014.

BACKGROUND

The 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia states that every citizen has the right to work and to live a decent life, as stipulated in article 27(2): ‘Each citizen shall be entitled to an occupation and an existence proper for a human being’. This has not been fully accomplished, however. Accord¬ing to data from the central statistics agency, BPS, 7 million working-age Indonesians were unemployed in 2016, and 28 million people were living below the poverty line.

INTRODUCTION

Transmission of ideas from the Middle East to Southeast Asia has been ongoing for centuries through various agencies and mediums. Notably, translations of religious texts and devotional works became important facets of Islamization of the Malay world. Today, such transmission continues beyond the conventional theological, legal and mystical aspects of Islam. Translation works add to the already expansive critical Islamic discourse in Indonesia. Variants of Islamic discourse from the Middle East, including contributions by diaspora Middle Eastern writers living in the Euro-American metropolis, have entered the Indonesian scene via translation and adaptation works. They range from writings of prominent and established ulama (Islamic religious scholars), to revivalist Islamist, reformist, liberal, and leftist-leaning Muslim writers.

This chapter first highlights the historical transmission of Islam into Southeast Asia. Here, the role of religio-cultural transmitters, such as the ulama and missionaries, was vital in translating Arabic works into Indonesian languages and disseminating them. The chapter then examines the significance of these translated Arabic works in Indonesia's Islamic discourse. It then highlights how the dominance of works with fundamentalist bend could give a false impression of their popularity. By contrast, one should also underscore the presence of critical Islamic works—written by leading Muslim liberals and reformists—which have been translated into Bahasa Indonesia from its Arabic sources. These critical works are instrumental in facilitating and enhancing the critical Islamic discourse in Indonesia.

TRANSMISSION OF ISLAMIC KNOWLEDGE IN HISTORY

Transmissions of Islamic knowledge in the past were primarily made possible in two forms: direct transmission by the ulama; and through translations of Arabic works to local languages of classical Islamic texts or kitab kuning (Azyumardi 2004). Islamization was given further boost with the efforts in translating Islamic works originally in Arabic into Malay, Javanese, Sundanese and all other languages in the region (Riddel 2001). Arabic works pertaining to doctrinal creed and law were translated and adapted into the Malay/Javanese language, while the nexus between the local ulama with those in the Middle East, along with local authorities, were instrumental in deepening the process of Islamization in the region (Burhanudin 2012).

The aim of this volume is to understand contemporary sociocultural and political challenges facing Islam in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. It is particularly interesting to examine how Muslims in these three countries grapple with modernization and change which has significantly impacted laws, politics, ideas, and consumption patterns. Undeniably, there are many books in the market that have addressed similar concerns. Previously, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute has published books discussing similar issues. They include Readings on Islam in Southeast Asia (compiled by Ahmad Ibrahim, Sharon Siddique, and Yasmin Hussain in 1985); Islam in Southeast Asia: Political, Social and Strategic Challenges for the 21st Century (edited by K.S. Nathan and Mohammad Hashim Kamali in 2005); Voices of Islam in Southeast Asia: A Contemporary Sourcebook (complied by Greg Fealy and Virginia Hooker in 2006).

This edited volume does not attempt to cover Islam in all Southeast Asian countries, except for the three maritime states mentioned above. It is also focusing less on security issues such as the ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) or Al-Qaeda threat. In fact, the book makes a deliberate move not to cover separatist movements in the Southern Philippines and Southern Thailand, or the humanitarian crisis in Myanmar, even though these issues concern Muslims as well. The book is a modest attempt to take stock on recent developments facing the three countries that scholars used to consider the bastion of “moderate” Islam.

Quite the reverse, scholars today are alarmed that Islam in Southeast Asia is becoming more conservative, radical and intolerant. They are also anxious with groups promoting political Islam (also referred to as Islamism) and how such fundamentalist ideas will impact multicultural societies in the region. Conservative preachers can now mobilize thousands of people to support their exclusivist agendas, causing much distress to the scholars.

Undeniably, Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore have begun to outwardly express their piety. The dakwah movement (referred to as Islamic resurgence by some) which emerged in the 1970s decreased the Malay and Indonesian character of how Islam is practised in the region.