Indonesia's Post-Suharto Foreign Policymaking - an Actor-Centric Analysis: A Study of the Roles of Key Policymakers in the Indonesia-China Strategic Partnerships under President Yudhoyono

This thesis examines the strategic partnership agreement that President Yudhoyono signed in 2005 and upgraded to a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement in 2013. "How did foreign policy actors, the president, bureaucratic actors, and parliament, individually and in interaction with each other, shape Indonesian foreign policy under Yudhoyono's presidency?" is the main research question. To address this question, the thesis combines Allison's bureaucratic politics model with Hermann's model of leader-driven foreign policy change, situating them within a “structure-and-agency” framework. It finds that the decisions to sign the agreements and implement the ASEAN-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA) were motivated by the president's vision of economic prosperity. However, focusing solely on the president and his vision proves inadequate, because democratisation has increased the number of actors influencing foreign policy. This thesis concludes that bureaucratic actors, with varying degrees of influence and involvement, provided input through cabinet meetings and interministerial coordination. The Foreign Ministry played a key role in the making of the partnership agreements with China, while the Ministry of Trade was dominant in ACFTA. In addition, Parliament’s Commission I, in charge of foreign policy matters, and all political parties in it, from both coalition and opposition, endorsed the partnership agreements, finding that they were in line with perceived national interest. ACFTA, on the other hand, was dominated by Commission VI. In this case, the majority of parties rejected the agreement, because they believed that its implementation threatened their own political interests as well as perceived national interest.

Keywords: Strategic Partnership Agreements, president, bureaucratic actors, parliament