The Rising Visibility of Indonesia
Indonesia on the rise?
Greetings,
We all love holidays don’t we?
By the time this post went live, it’s currently Lebaran in Indonesia. What’s Lebaran? To summarize, it’s a celebration of Idul Fitri and thus the end of Ramadan. For the Muslims, this means the end of their daily fasting.
That’s Indonesia. What about the US?
Not sure about elsewhere but where I currently stay in Chicago, it’s Spring Break for the school students. This is why I have spent much of this week in Wisconsin Dells with my brother and his family as we enjoy the holidays. As an aside, I took some picture of the Kalahari Resorts, the place we went to. Click the following for the Flickr Photo Album.
Personally, I don’t think is my finest work. Water parks are not exactly the place to take pictures, and the lighting in that place isn’t really all that great for photos. But I figured that Flickr account needed some love.
The point of this strange opening (given the title) is that it was on my to Wisconsin Dells that I ran into this truck:
Any Indonesian will recognize that sign anywhere. It’s Indomie, the Indonesian instant noodle sensation! And yes these pictures were taken in Wisconsin (or at least on the way there).
The reason why I found the existence of this truck shocking is because when people think of Wisconsin, they don’t exactly think of Indonesia. Heck, I think most people in America don’t think much about Indonesia to begin with. But there’s a good explanation for the existence of this truck.
Apparently, University of Wisconsin-Madison has a lot of Indonesian students studying there (at least according to my brother). So there seems to be a market for Indonesian food in the area.
This visibility is a pleasant surprise for me. Indonesia isn’t exactly the most well-known country in the world. It certainly wasn’t the most well-known country in America.
I remember reading Indonesian short stories for my literature class back in High School. One of the stories I read tells of an Indonesian immigrant family in the US. Their American neighbors asked them where they came from; when the Indonesian family answered ‘Indonesia’, the Americans responded with, “you mean Indochina?”
From my understanding, I think those stories were written in the 80s or 90s when the Vietnam War was still fresh in the minds of Americans.
Even decades later when I found myself in the United States, people still don’t know what the heck is an “Indonesia”. If you tell Americans that you’re from China or India or Mexico, they’ll know what country you’re talking about. If you tell Americans that you’re from Indonesia, they’ll go, “where is that?”
I’ve had people mistook me for a Filipino, a Mexican, or even a Guatemalan.
Now I was talking about America here, but the same can be said for the world at large. Just look at geopolitics. Everyone knows that the United States is the preeminent power in the world. Then there are their lackeys like the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, Australia, and so on. Their main rival is a coalition led by Russia and China. In general, this coalition is known as BRICS, an acronym short for five countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Notice that Indonesia’s absent from the acronym. But hold that thought, I’ll get back to this.
When it comes to the world stage, Indonesia had for the longest time been content to remain in the background and not draw too much attention.
But is this changing?
I think so. First let’s go back to BRICS. While Indonesia is not one of the five founding members of that alliance, it is actually a member of it. Indeed, it’s actually the newest member of BRICS, having achieved full membership earlier this year on January 6th.1
But years before this, Indonesia had also become a member of the G20, an exclusive forum of nations where they discuss economics, politics, and more.2 As if to show the country’s importance, Indonesia hosted the 2022 Summit which was held in Bali.
There’s a lot more to say about Indonesia’s place in current geopolitics, but I’ll hold that for a future post. I think I made my point here.
Now let’s move on to sports.
As a country, Indonesia isn’t exactly known for its sporting prowess. It’s not like we’re China or the US where we just gobble up all the Olympic medals like a fat kid gobbling up all the food at the local buffet. For example, here’s our performance in the latest Olympics in Paris:
Historically, Indonesia was known to be good at badminton. And recently, Indonesia did well in obscure sports like weightlifting or rock climbing. But in terms of the big popular sports, Indonesia might as well not existed. I am speaking, of course, about football soccer.
If you’re not familiar with Indonesia, you might be surprised to learn that Indonesia is big on soccer. Really big. Yet I couldn’t really blame anyone for not knowing that. After all, it’s not like the country has anything to show for that fanaticism. For as long as I can remember, whenever I think of the Indonesian national team (or timnas, short for ‘tim nasional’ in Indonesian), this image would describe better than words my thoughts on the team:
And it’s not just me. When people talk about the idea of Indonesia making it to the World Cup, it was always treated as a joke. Deep down, we knew we had no chance. And mind you, Asia is not exactly known for being a tough continent in terms of world soccer. That’s how bad the team was.
Yet this changed very recently - basically last year. For the first time in a while, definitely in my lifetime, there is the feeling that Indonesia might actually qualify for the World Cup. With two games to go in the current round of qualifications, here’s how things are shaping up in Indonesia’s group:
There’s a lot to be gleaned from this. But to keep things short, Indonesia’s in a good spot. For all intents and purposes, they only needed one more win to secure a Top 4 spot which would take the team to the next round of qualifications. And given that the next game was a home game against a floundering Chinese team, they have a completely winnable game on their hands. Unfortunately, the Top 2 spot which gives direct qualification seems out of reach at this point. However, the fact that Indonesia even made it this far was almost inconceivable just a few years ago.
Unless you know how bad Indonesia’s soccer team had been, then you can’t really appreciate how crazy the current situation is.
Of course, there’s a pretty good explanation for Indonesia’s seemingly inexplicable rise in world soccer, but I’m already digressing at this point. In the future, I might write a dedicated post about the timnas.
For now, I’ll close with this video. It shows a British guy3 who went to Jakarta to watch Indonesia’s game against Bahrain in which Indonesia won 1-0. I’m not usually a fan of this type of content, but it’s a great “outsider’s look” into Indonesian soccer culture and the newfound hype behind the national team:
So what do you think? Is Indonesia on the rise? Has Indonesia become more visible on the world stage?
It certainly seems that way.
Until next time, Michael P. Marpaung
Other than the original five and Indonesia, other members of BRICS include the following: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.
Not as exclusive as the G7 which are made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the USA (also the EU).
I think he’s an expat but I’m not sure. You’ll see a lot of foreigners in the Gelora Bung Karno (GBK) part of Jakarta.
People were always shocked when we said it's the 4th largest country by population, right behind US.