I recently saw a Reddit thread asking about Indonesia’s low cultural impact relative to its size. As the fourth most populous country in the world, it does seem a bit unusual for such a large country to have such little soft power.

I gave the question a good think, and below are my bullet points:

  • In general, low people mobility for many reasons: economic, cultural, and religious conservatism.
  • A middle class population that does not have enough capital to afford migration
    • By comparison, India has a comparatively much larger upper class (via its caste-based hierarchy), which allows this very specific class of society to exert large Indian influence abroad.
      • Indian government also actively encourages the creation of ‘highly exportable’ individuals with its education system i.e. STEM education and heavy emphasis on English proficiency
    • Indonesia’s diaspora relies mostly on hard labour exports e.g. construction workers, domestic helpers, which due to their socioeconomic status do not project much soft power overseas.
  • Generally conservative societies, due to a homogenous population and cultural & religious factors:
    • Low incentives to study English which leads to low proficiency of the language, but English as lingua franca is a key point for globalisation
    • Society which discourages external migration and puts high emphasis on collective good i.e. Gotong Royong
      • As opposed to a more pragmatic lndia/Thailand, which values upward mobility more than collective good (though it also exists).
    • Although Indonesia is heterogenous in general, its regions are heavily localised i.e. people of similar backgrounds (race, religion, etc) are concentrated in the same few places.
      • Homogeneity disincentivises population migrations to elsewhere, as there would be less incentives to do so as well as pressure to retain the tight-knit communities they are living in.
  • Industry that focuses on raw material exports as opposed to processed goods (e.g. vehicles/consumer electronics) and/or non-tangible cultural exports (e.g. movies, food)
  • Protectionist economies create bad influencers
    • Indonesia’s markets generally operate under Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) model, which protects domestic industries from external competition by encouraging purchase of domestic goods
    • Because of less competition, opportunity costs of exporting abroad becomes too high (e.g. to comply with strict foreign regulations), incentivising producers to produce domestically instead, as opposed to creating high-value specialty goods to be exported abroad.
    • Because ISI is primarily enforced through heavy import taxes, populace will also be much more likely to buy locally produced goods, as they are much cheaper.
    • As a consequence, Indonesia has little-to-no specialty goods exported abroad, which leads to less soft power:
      • Thailand has Monthong durians, specialty mangoes, and jasmine rice
      • Japan has its Crown melons, Shine Muscat grapes, Hokkaido dairy, etc
  • Government and populace that has failed to commoditise their culture (e.g. for tourism in Thailand)
    • Thailand and Japan, for better and for worse, commoditises their culture heavily for tourism e.g. history, culture, religion, etc.
    • An Indonesian outlier for this would of course be Bali, but similar successes of such scale have yet to be found in any other region of Indonesia.

If I had more time I would’ve reformatted this into a proper essay, but unfortunately I typed this on my phone early in the morning and by now I have lost motivation to turn it into a proper piece of writing, sorry!