What is Indonesia? The national identity of the Nusantara has shifted so frequently that it is no longer clear what initially united—or separated—it from other civilizations. This inconsistency serves as a stark indication that Indonesia’s domestic and foreign policies lack coherence within a single diplomatic architecture; they move sporadically, driven only by populist trends and short-term electoral cycles, rather than reflecting a unified identity. One of the narratives that has been submerged is that of the “Maritime State of Indonesia.”

The Global Maritime Axis (Poros Maritim Dunia, PMD) narrative was born in 2014 and collapsed in 2019 during President Jokowi’s era. Initially, it was designed to monetize Indonesia’s geopolitical position at the nexus of trade in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Today, the continuity of this identity-driven diplomacy has thinned under the pragmatism of President Prabowo, who is no longer interested in mere “formalities.” While maritime infrastructure expansion continues, it is no longer narrated as an assertion of power but reduced to routine economic activity.

For pre-modern Nusantara, the sea was the lifeblood of civilization as well as the medium through which collective struggle and shared fate were experienced. In other words, it shaped the consciousness of what it meant to be Indonesian. Today, the separation between national identity and national interest presents a fundamental problem: the people have lost the imagination of togetherness because the essence that unites them is no longer present in the practice of statecraft.

In the context of global multipolarity, national identity must be reaffirmed. Without it, Indonesia not only loses its global position but also becomes increasingly alien to its own citizens. The crucial question is: how can the sea and maritime patriotism be grounded as a tangible foundation for the architecture of state power in the multipolar era?

The Historical Chain of Maritime Identity

Until relatively recently, political identity in the Nusantara was local and homogeneous: clan, religion, family. Each civilization, agrarian or maritime, isolated itself; constrained by topography, repeated social interaction was nearly impossible. It was only after the era of Austronesian maritime nomad migrations—documented by Bérénice Bellina and Nagatsu Kazufumi in Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia—that the seeds of unified political ideas and social identity naturally emerged.

The contribution of maritime nomads to Indonesia was not linear but transformational across eras. They did not “create Indonesia” in a modern sense, but they preserved the social, cultural, and spatial preconditions that made Indonesia imaginable—and ultimately realizable.

This contribution produced two significant legacies. First, habituation of integration: language (the lingua franca of Malay in the West and Bajau in the East) and the expansion of land-sea feeder trade practices (enabled by the symbiosis of massive thalassocracies like Srivijaya and China) allowed the Nusantara to be read as a single socio-economic space, even in the absence of a centralized state. Second, habituation of spatiality: the practice of securing straits and conducting maritime expeditions by pre-colonial maritime powers planted the imagination of sea-based territoriality—a proto-border consciousness that lived in practice, though not yet institutionalized.

This historical legacy laid the foundation for the modern collective imagination. In line with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, modern nations do not arise solely from institutions but from shared historical-emotional experiences that allow a community to be imagined as a legitimate political unity. For Indonesia, the DNA that unites was maritime: the sea was from the outset imagined as the cultural glue binding authority and archipelagic nationhood within the political mythology of Tanah–Air.

The coexistence of land and sea initially appeared at local and emotional levels—as reflected in the poetry of Muhammad Yamin—before being politically expanded in the 1930s and consolidated into a political mythology through the 1928 Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda), with the sea implicitly included within the “national land” as understood in the modern territorial framework. As noted by Sulistiyono et al. in Traditional Knowledge and Origin of Maritime Territorialisation Idea in Indonesia, this step also served as an antithesis to the 1939 Dutch colonial island-by-island divide, which restricted the sea to three miles per island and turned inter-island waters into “international enclaves”—an anti-thalassocracy project cloaked in pro-agrarian narrative that sought to fracture the unified maritime consciousness and reduce the Nusantara into a fragmented archipelago where the sea served only as a divider.

Indonesian nationalists were astute. Integrating maritime concepts did not aim to sharpen a zero-sum dichotomy between agrarian and maritime; rather, it framed identity politics through a logic of coexistence. The objective was clear: to restore territorial unity, negate colonial fragmentation, and affirm Indonesia’s legitimacy as a sovereign and original archipelagic nation—a strategy that proved highly successful.

This precedent must be recognized by President Prabowo. The vitality of national mythology does not rely solely on juridical or historical validity but on the principle of originality. Humans are meaning-seeking beings, and mythology provides the appropriate justification to explain realities they cannot fully comprehend. In the context of anti-colonial movements, the political mythology of Tanah–Air succeeded because it instilled the belief that Indonesia existed in its entirety prior to colonialism. Hence, the mythology holds sacred motivational power: it unites loyalty, builds collective self-confidence, and becomes the foundation of patriotism and renewed national pride—crucial for liberating Indonesia from colonial mentality, both past and future. This originality must be reactivated through an integrated maritime imagination in the multipolar era; without it, Indonesia risks being reduced once again to a land-based country merely surrounded by the sea.

Harmonizing Maritime Diplomacy

The realization of this maritime imagination in practice demands the harmonization of diplomacy, which can be understood through Robert Putnam’s two-level game framework: Indonesia’s foreign policy is not only executed on the international stage (Level I) but also entirely dependent on domestic cohesion and support (Level II).

Combining Anderson and Putnam provides clear direction: Anderson explains how communities are imagined, while Putnam explains how those imaginations are politically sustained. First, a new maritime normality must be created—not as an infrastructure project but as a Civilizational Project that decentralizes industry and anchors local communities economically. The core task is no longer physical expansion, but the development of maritime human capital through the enculturation of integrated identity. In short: cultivate an organic maritime fanaticism from the roots!

Lessons from the PMD 2014–2019 policy precedent show that this “software” element was neglected. While maritime hardware—sea toll routes, port modernization, increased cargo capacity—shines on paper, in practice it failed to resolve structural problems, particularly two: interregional production imbalances and economic actor inequality in maritime space.

Regarding the maritime industrial ecosystem, WALHI presents compelling data: in 28 Coastal and Small Islands Spatial Plans (RZWP3K), the ratio of space allocated to fishermen versus corporate investment/extraction reached 1:160 hectares—locals barely participate as economic subjects in the maritime economy. This imbalance triggers harsher domino effects: investments are prone to stagnation due to politicization; infrastructure, initially designed not for coastal community needs but as an elitist extractive fetish pursuing quick profit, is abandoned when populist electoral trends wane, forcing communities to return to fishing with minimal facilities—essentially starting over.

This cycle must be changed. Institutionalizing maritimology is not about indoctrinating people blindly in maritime life but creating preconditions where maritime choices become rational, profitable, and sustainable for both coastal communities and connected agrarian hinterlands. It includes key interventions on the demand-supply side, particularly for citizens: long-term fiscal incentives, regulatory simplification, risk-based social security access, maritime spatial correction, fair market and logistics mechanisms, and maritime security and defense as prerequisites for business stability and sovereign living space. Only then can industrialization evolve naturally from extractive and conventional service bases to advanced science-based manufacturing. One practical entry point for generating early popularity is through Prabowo’s MBG, where local marine raw materials enter mass consumption chains.

Within the Anderson-Putnam framework, national success from this mythological scheme not only expands strategic flexibility at Level I (regional) but also revitalizes growth foundations and patriotism. In short: citizens take pride in defending a state that also makes them feel meaningful. This reciprocal cycle creates a more durable path to national prosperity.

Second, Revitalizing Regional Maritime Centrality. Bebas-Aktif and Tanah–Air must go regional—not merely as an exercise in ASEAN geopolitical jargon standardization but as seeds of cross-civilizational integration based on real capacities. Amid the chaos of multipolarity and the emergence of radical pragmatism steeped in transactional logic, the shallowness of economic interdependence alone can no longer protect ASEAN unity from fragmentation, such as 1-vs-1 brutalist diplomacy like Trump’s. Here, value-based diplomacy functions not as empty morality but as a cohesion instrument: rebuilding solidarity and trust, and enforcing collective discipline so ASEAN moves as a single unit. Divided, ASEAN is easily dominated; united, it possesses leverage.

This momentum is increasingly relevant as China–US competition grows more complex and the Indo-Pacific landscape becomes crowded with ascending middle powers. Within the Anderson–Putnam framework, strengthening cohesion (Level II) is not merely internalizing solidarity but building political and legitimacy bases that enable ASEAN and Indonesia to reinforce their collective and individual bargaining positions on the international stage (Level I), creating a reciprocal link between domestic stability and regional influence.

ASEAN must recognize itself as a geopolitical primadonna. Failure to perceive both potential and risk could end the region’s fifty years of remarkable progress. The region’s strength lies in its ability to unite positions while maintaining strategic flexibility. True, ASEAN is a nexus of great-power trade circulation—most recently, within Russia’s maritimeology vision via integration into three routes: Chennai-Vladivostok Maritime Corridor (CVMC), International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), and the Northern Sea Route (NSR). However, this ancient maritime civilization is too glorious to be reduced merely to a stopover or trade corridor; it requires an integrated diplomatic ecosystem—a regional maritime community. Concrete efforts manifest in four pillars: joint maritime security (functional collective security), maritime economic interoperability (economic and logistical integration), maritime industrial and technological capacity (industrial and technological maritime capability), and environmental stewardship (ecological governance). These pillars empower ASEAN to perceive itself as an autonomous maritime civilization, not a territory merely traversed but a subject shaping the currents of history.

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Analysis Center for BRICS+ and ASEAN