Formally – and it might be said finally – Indonesia has been admitted to the BRICS group of nations. Founded in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, China and India, BRICS has expanded rapidly as a global counter to the G7 group of major economies as a forum for developing countries.

BRICS now encompasses Iran, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. Indonesia is a vast archipelago of thousands of islands and the richest and most populous nation in South-east Asia. Its foreign ministry spokesman told the German news channel Deutsche Welle that joining BRICS was a way to strengthen ‘south-south co-operation’ and the ‘aspirations of Global South countries’. Russia and China, the big players in BRICS, have warmly welcomed Indonesia into the club.

There is a lot of discussion of mutually beneficial partnerships in an uncertain geopolitical order, but look beyond the usual diplomatic flimflam and some interesting questions bubble to the surface. One is why Indonesia resisted BRICS membership for so long. The former president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo attended BRICS gatherings, but insisted that he would not ‘rush into joining’. There was doubt among his advisors about the economic benefits that membership would bring, but more pressing was a problem that has dominated Indonesian politics since independence. According to the commentator Radityo Dharmaputra, Widodo’s hesitancy was all about optics: ‘The image of Indonesia being seen as part of the China-Russia world would be a problem.’

At the end of the Second World War, Indonesians fought a bitter and violent war to secure independence from the Dutch. Indonesia has sometimes been called ‘the impossible nation’ – its modern form cobbled together from the colonial territories of the Dutch East Indies. It comprises 17,000 islands spread across the Pacific and Indian oceans; its people speak hundreds of different languages and dialects; the majority of Indonesians are Muslims, but Indonesia consists of 1,300 ethnic groups with at least 95 per cent native to the archipelago. Minority migrant groups, such as Chinese, Arab and Indian, make up the remainder. Despite this astonishing diversity, Indonesia has proven remarkably resilient as a nation state – or, in the words of that expert on all matters Indonesian, Benedict Anderson, an ‘imagined community’.

Indonesia owes much to its first president, Sukarno, who rode the dizzying riptides of diversity unleashed after the nation’s violent birth with charismatic political virtuosity. Sukarno was firmly committed to non-alignment: a movement forged at the Bandung or Asian-African Conference in 1955 at the overheating peak of the Cold War. The core idea of non-alignment was that countries of what used to be called the developing world should shun alliances with the two superpowers, the United States and the USSR wrestling for global control. Instead, non-aligned countries emerging from the decaying old empires in Asia and Africa should join together to support national self-determination. One of the key figures in the non-alignment movement was neither African nor Asian. In 1961, the non-aligned nations met again, this time in Belgrade, under the leadership of Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito.

As the Cold War engulfed South-east Asia in the 1960s and the United States committed its huge military arsenal to halting the spread of Communism, Sukarno’s non-aligned status came under intense pressure from every side. The Americans feared the power of the huge Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, and suspected that Sukarno was reaching out to Communist China. In 1965, the United States covertly assisted factions in the Indonesian army to liquidate the PKI and, eventually, to remove Sukarno from power. The new president, Suharto, a pragmatic army general, in effect re-aligned Indonesia with the United States. Suharto is remembered today as the ‘Father of Development’. Indonesia became richer and so did Suharto – but at the cost of ubiquitous corruption and authoritarianism. Suharto was eventually toppled from power in 1998 after years of student led protests. Seen in this deeper perspective, it is unsurprising that Indonesian leaders would be wary of any kind of global alignment. Non-alignment is built into the convoluted DNA strands of this vast nation.

Indonesians love ghost stories, and it was perhaps the unquiet spirit of Indonesia’s first president who whispered caution in the ear of ‘Joko’ Widodo. But Widodo is no longer in power. His successor Prabowo Subianto is in the mould of Suharto: an army officer with blood on his hands. He was commander of one of the special forces, or Kopassus units, sent by Suharto to crush the independence movement in East Timor in 1983. In 1998, Prabowo organised paramilitary campaigns against students and activists demonstrating against the Suharto government. After he was discharged from the miliary, Probowo and his brother Hashim made fortunes from a succession of business ventures. He was Suharto reborn. Despite his wealth, it took Probowo three expensive attempts to become president, eventually ousting Joko Widodo in 2024.

Of course, alignment with the BRICS nations is not the same as embracing any of the former superpowers of the Cold War. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to contest that the two most powerful BRICS nations, the Russian Federation and Communist China, are seeking friends. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is a pariah nation for western nations; following the armed conflicts involving its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran too is viewed by western nations as a terrorist sponsor tarred with the brush of Islamist extremism.

Perhaps this is what troubled the hesitant former president. Like Sukarno, Tito and the other architects of non-alignment during the Cold War that burned hot in South-east Asia, Widodo feared the embrace of the Bear and the Dragon. Subianto Probowo, the army veteran and business titan moulded in the Suharto years of ‘development’, looks toward a horizon, it would seem, of golden opportunity as a member of the new global club.