Strangers Without Strangeness: Ethics and Difference Between Australia and the Indonesian New Order

Abstract

It has become a powerful cliché among foreign policy elites that Australia and Indonesia are 'strange neighbours'. As different as we are in culture, historical experience, religious tradition or economic development, so the argument runs, we must find a way to live together. In the context of the international intervention in East Timor to prevent the post-referendum violence, such a gulf in values seems to have only widened and become more bitter. Yet rather than accept this at face value, this essay takes a step back to question the ontology that has framed the transnational encounter between 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'. It questions the images of sameness and difference mobilised by the rhetoric of 'strange neighbours', and analyses how it has facilitated a series of tactics in which elite accommodations could be managed and policed, and a repressive politics of sameness played out at both domestic and transnational levels. Here rhetorics of difference and mutual respect are paradoxically revealed as integral to a systematic repression of difference. The essay argues for a new kind of transnational encounter based not on totalising images of identity and egoistic self-interest, but on interdependence and generosity - upon what Kristeva calls a willingness to cultivate the strangeness within ourselves, to promote the togetherness of the foreigners we all recognise ourselves to be. This requires a new ethical relation which simultaneously deconstructs the claims of hegemonic identities and frames a new kind of politics based on encounters within and between identities which are themselves no longer whole.