ABSTRACT
Indonesia’s position vis-a-vis Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at the turn of Twenty-First century mirrored, the country’s position at the time of the grouping’s inception in August 1967. Indonesia’s long-standing sense of status-dissonance grew into a full-scale ‘post-ASEAN’ debate with Rizal Sukma’s call for a ‘post-ASEAN foreign policy in a Post-G8 world’ in October 2009. As ASEAN celebrates its fiftieth anniversary and embarks on the journey as ‘an ASEAN Community’, Indonesia is charting a foreign policy course that is no longer predicated on ASEAN-centrality and its ASEAN leadership. While the ASEAN Plus Three connected ASEAN with the Northeast Asian powers, ASEAN created an East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005 that connected the grouping with the geopolitics of both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The EAS served various important purposes of Indonesia’s ASEAN Plus posture. The domestic debate on the Indonesian preference for the EAS was initiated by Jakarta-based Center for Strategic and International Studies intellectuals.
