Indonesia’s social cohesion lesson for Australia

In Australia, “Asia capability” is again being asked to do heavy lifting. In evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into building Asia capability (Opens in new window), language learning is repeatedly linked to prosperity, security, and social cohesion. The claim is plausible. But it can also sound thin, as if cohesion were a soft by-product of classroom hours and cultural awareness days.

Indonesia offers a sterner lesson. Cohesion is not a sentiment. It is infrastructure.

By infrastructure I mean the physical, policy and moral arrangements that make some forms of social action easier and others harder. Social cohesion, in this modest sense, is not everyone liking each other. It is the everyday absence of physical violence between groups who might disagree, compete or mistrust each other.

In the parts of Indonesia that I know best, especially Semarang in Central Java (Opens in new window) and Cirebon in West Java (Opens in new window), this infrastructure begins before children can speak. Babies are often carried on the hip, facing out. The world arrives as a stream of others: neighbours, traders, cousins, strangers, older children, and passers-by. As children grow, caregivers prompt them to greet. Say hello. Acknowledge that person. Notice who is there.

This may seem too small to matter. It is not. A society that constantly rehearses acknowledgement is building public regard. Greeting is not civility as polish; it is a low-cost mechanism for making social presence mutual.

Schools add a second layer. As Barbara Leigh, Lyn Parker (Opens in new window), Jim Sneddon (Opens in new window), and others have pointed out, Indonesian children encounter the nation as a deliberately plural object. They learn that Indonesia is made of many ethnic groups, languages, and religions, held together by the national language, Indonesian, and the national philosophy Pancasila, especially the motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, commonly translated as “Unity in Diversity” but better as “Different but United”. Afternoon religious classes commonly teach students to respect those of other faiths. Civics and social studies place difference inside the frame of nationhood. Indonesian language classes do not only teach grammar. They reproduce a story about Indonesian as a bridge for inter-ethnic talk.

More generally, an ethic of friendship is part of a proverb that can be found inscribed in Indonesia’s landscapes, such as in the entrance to a Bandung neighbourhood (below) where point five in a sign in Sundanese says “one enemy is one too many, while one thousand friends isn’t enough”, and in televised representations of Indonesian neighbourhoods (Opens in new window).

There are obvious limits. State slogans can flatten difference, and tolerance taught from above does not guarantee equality below, especially when political gain is sought (Opens in new window). But the point is not that Indonesia has solved pluralism. It is that Indonesia has built routines for living with it.

The third layer is neighbourhood governance. In urban Indonesia, disputes rarely begin in the courts and often do not begin with police. People have options before escalation: siblings, parents, nearby relatives, neighbours, ward (Rukun Tetangga) and neighbourhood (Rukun Warga) heads, religious leaders, and respected elders. These figures absorb heat. They translate grievance into language that can be heard. They allow people to retreat without humiliation.

When disputes sharpen, neighbourhood heads or religious leaders may mediate. In many urban areas, monthly neighbourhood meetings (Opens in new window) provide a forum to discuss waste, security, health posts, roads, drains, neighbourhood projects and their funding, and celebrations, religious and otherwise. These meetings are not always egalitarian. Gender, class, ethnicity and reputation matter. Yet regularity matters too. It creates a civic rhythm in which neighbours meet not only when something has gone wrong.

There are also less comfortable forms of enforcement. Gossip is one. In the Indonesian neighbourhoods I have studied (Opens in new window), gossip about misbehaviour is sometimes designed to be relayed to the person being discussed. It stings because it is indirect. But that indirectness is also the point: correction without open confrontation, discipline without immediate rupture.

Language is woven through all this. Migrants to Indonesian cities often already speak Indonesian. Yet in Semarang I found that newcomers learned local Javanese not because communication required it, but because belonging did (Opens in new window). Using a local language, even imperfectly, signalled investment in the neighbourhood. It said: I am not merely passing through your space; I am trying to inhabit it with you.

That is a useful lesson for Australia. Asian language learning can contribute to social cohesion, but not because vocabulary magically produces virtue. It works when language learning is embedded in relationships, repeated encounters, obligations, humour, discomfort and repair. It works when language is part of a thicker infrastructure of coexistence.

Indonesia’s arrangements are imperfect. They can exclude as well as include. They can silence as well as settle. But they remind us that social cohesion is made before the crisis, not during it. It is made in greetings, classrooms, neighbourhood meetings, mediated disputes, small acts of linguistic accommodation, and the moral pressure of being known.

Australia should invest in Asian languages – replacing questions about economic viability with those that centre around what infrastructures of acknowledgement, obligation, and repair those languages help us build.