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Indonesia Singapore and Malaysia
Singapore, ASEAN's own ethnic Chinese newly
industrialized
economy (NIE), is geostrategically locked in the often
suspicious
embrace of its Indonesian and Malaysian neighbors.
Twenty-five
years after the end of Confrontation, a racially tinged,
jealous
Indonesian ambivalence toward Singapore, had been replaced
by a
fragile new economic and political warmth. Rather then see
Indonesian economic development as part of a zero-sum game
in
competition with favored Singapore, Jakarta now sought to
harness
Singapore's capital, technology, and managerial expertise
to its
own abundant resources of land and labor in an
economically
integrative process of a growth triangle. Although the
scheme
theoretically included peninsular Malaysia's southernmost
Johore
state, the dynamic action of the growth triangle was on
the
islands of Indonesia's Riau Province--Batam, Bintan, and
Karimun-
-to the south of Singapore
(see Industry
, ch. 3). As long
as
Indonesia perceived the growth triangle in terms of
functional
interdependence in joint economic development at the
maritime
core of ASEAN, local and regionalized economic cooperation
strengthened a common interest in good relations. If, on
the
other hand, aggressive Singapore private and state capital
were
to take on exploitative characteristics, threatening to
turn
Indonesian cheap labor, cheap land, and cheap water
hinterland
into a colonial-style dependency, the old antagonisms
toward
Singapore were likely to reemerge in Jakarta.
New interdependencies between Indonesia and Singapore
had
also been forged in the unlikely area of security
cooperation. An
unprecedented degree of military cooperation through
personnel
exchanges, joint military exercises, and a joint air
combat range
allowed Singapore to demonstrate its value as an ally in a
South
China Sea security environment. Influential
nongovernmental
Indonesian voices openly promoted military trilateralism
among
Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.
In the years after the end of Confrontation,
IndonesianMalaysian relations improved as both governments became
committed
to development and cooperation in ASEAN. This new warmth
was
reinforced by the natural affinities of race, religion,
culture,
and language. Irritants such as illegal Indonesian
immigrants in
Malaysia and Indonesian concerns about Malaysia's export
of
radical Islamic audio tapes existed, but intensive and
extensive
bilateral ties generally promoted good relations. Toward
the end
of the 1980s, however, a distancing between the senior
leaderships of the two countries could be discerned as
they took
different approaches to the problems of interaction with
their
major trading partners and as Malaysia became uneasy about
the
developing relations between Singapore and Indonesia.
Jakarta's
1992 rejection in ASEAN of Malaysia's East Asian Economic
Group
scheme underlined the different perceptions of the two
capitals,
differences that seemed to be growing. At the Nonaligned
Movement
summit, for example, Prime Minister Mahathir bin
Mohammad's
radically South and Islamic stance was in sharp contrast
to
Suharto's moderate position.
Data as of November 1992
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