Geostrategic Media Political Commentary, Analysis, Security, Defense
Dr. Yashwant Singh
The India–Indonesia model demonstrates that civilizational memory can be retrieved as a shared diplomatic resource when deployed as a basis for mutual recognition rather than civilizational hierarchy – real or perceived.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Indonesia underscored that the India-Indonesia partnership rests not only on contemporary strategic and economic interests but also on a shared civilizational heritage that quietly reinforces trust beyond what diplomatic agreements alone can achieve. This essay argues that a “civilizational-memory” framework, properly specified, not romanticized, offers something that dominant contemporary paradigms of international order do not: an account of why certain partnerships achieve unusual durability and social legitimacy, and how historical narrative can be marshalled toward pluralism rather than exclusion. It further argues that this framework, when tested against the leading state-led conceptual architectures currently shaping Asian and European geopolitics, such as China’s tianxia/community-of-common-destiny discourse, Japan’s postwar regionalism, and the European Union’s normative-power self-conception, reveals a structural advantage: it is the only one of the four that does not require a hierarch. That claim needs to be earned, not asserted, so the remainder of the essay works through each comparison in turn before addressing the framework’s genuine vulnerabilities.
Specifying the Framework
Four claims, not one, are doing the work here, and they should not be allowed to blur together:
- A descriptive claim. Civilizational contact across the pre-modern Indian Ocean world, the longue durée studied by scholars such as K.N. Chaudhuri and, in a different idiom, by George Coedès on Indianized Southeast Asia, was overwhelmingly constituted through trade, pilgrimage, and courtly emulation rather than conquest. Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist epigraphic record, the Old Javanese Ramayana Kakawin, and the continued use of Sanskrit-derived honorifics in Indonesian state ceremony are not vestiges of Indian political control; they are evidence of voluntary cultural absorption by Southeast Asian polities that then indigenized what they borrowed.
- A political-psychological claim. Because this history is not experienced domestically as a history of domination, it can be invoked bilaterally without triggering the historical grievance that civilizational rhetoric provokes elsewhere: compare the very different reception civilizational appeals receive in, say, Sino-Vietnamese or Russo-Ukrainiancontexts, where shared civilizational vocabulary has historically been a prelude to claims of political subordination rather than an alternative to them.
- A normative claim. Because of (1) and (2), civilizational memory can function as a supplement to interest-based diplomacy rather than a substitute for it or a weapon against it, but only if it is deliberately decoupled from irredentism, majoritarian identity politics, and zero-sum historical score-settling. This is a conditional, not a guarantee. Civilizational rhetoric is a technology with no built-in safety catch; whether it stabilizes or destabilizes a relationship depends on the political intent of whoever deploys it.
- An institutional claim. Civilizational memory lowers the transaction costs of cooperation by supplying a pre-existing repertoire of symbols, narratives, and cultural familiarity that states can translate into durable institutions. Unlike purely interest-based partnerships, which often require continuous renegotiation as material incentives shift, relationships anchored in shared historical memory possess an additional layer of social legitimacy that cushions periods of strategic disagreement. This does not eliminate conflicts of interest, but it makes them more manageable by embedding state-to-state engagement within wider networks of educational exchange, heritage conservation, religious tourism, scholarly collaboration, and public diplomacy. In the India-Indonesia case, centuries of shared cultural reference points, from Borobudur and Prambanan to Sanskritic vocabulary, the Ramayana tradition, and maritime commercial history, provide a reservoir of legitimacy that governments can continually reactivate without requiring either side to accept political hierarchy or compromise sovereign equality.
Held apart this way, the framework becomes falsifiable and comparable rather than merely inspirational.
Testing the Framework Against Rival Architectures
China’s Tianxia and the Community of Common Destiny
Chinese scholars such as Zhao Tingyang have revived the pre-imperial concept of tianxia (“all under heaven”) as an alternative to the Westphalian state system, and this vocabulary now circulates in official discourse as the “community of common destiny for mankind.” The concept is genuinely ambitious: it proposes a relational, rather than adversarial, ontology of world order. But it retains, even in its most cosmopolitan academic formulations, an implicit centre, a civilizational or political core toward which the periphery is oriented, historically Beijing’s imperial court, and by extension in contemporary usage, the Chinese party-state. Critics both Western and Asian (Feng Zhang and William Callahan among them) have noted that this makes tianxia discourse difficult to disentangle from a hierarchical vision of regional order, whatever its authors’ intent. Civilizational memory of the India-Indonesia type does not require a hub. Neither society claims priority over the other; the historical relationship is read as mutual enrichment across a maritime commons, not as emanation from a centre. This is a structural, not merely rhetorical, difference, and it is the reason the model travels better to genuinely plural regions.
Japan’s Postwar Regionalism
Japan’s regional diplomacy since the 1977 Fukuda Doctrine has been comparatively successful precisely because it renounced historical hierarchy in favour of “heart-to-heart” partnership rhetoric with Southeast Asia, a deliberate attempt to escape the shadow of wartime occupation. But this very success illustrates the limits of a framework built primarily on the disavowal of a difficult civilizational past rather than the affirmative retrieval of a shared one. Japan’s regional diplomacy is generous but civilizationally thin: it cannot draw on a pre-modern narrative of mutual absorption with most of maritime Southeast Asia in the way India can, because that deeper historical layer largely does not exist between Japan and, say, Indonesia or Vietnam in the same density. This is not a criticism of Japanese statecraft, which has been prudent and effective on its own terms; it is an observation that not every bilateral relationship has the raw historical material to build a civilizational bridge, and that frameworks generalized from India’s unusually rich case should not be applied mechanically elsewhere.
The European Union’s Normative Power
Ian Manners’ influential account of the EU as a “normative power,” an actor that exports order through the attractiveness of its values (human rights, rule of law, market integration) rather than through coercion or civilizational appeal, offers the closest Western analogue to a non-hierarchical framework. But normative power, on its own account, is explicitly post-civilizational: it brackets historical and religious particularity in favour of a claimed universalism grounded in Enlightenment constitutionalism. This has real strengths, but it also explains a recurring EU difficulty: partners in South Asia, the Gulf, and parts of Africa frequently experience EU normative diplomacy as culturally exogenous even when its substantive content, notably rule of law and pluralism, is something they independently value. A civilizational-memory framework, by contrast, tries to ground universal values (pluralism, coexistence, mutual respect) in categories the partner society already recognizes as its own, rather than in categories borrowed from Brussels. Put differently: the EU exports norms; the India-Indonesia model retrieves norms that both sides can plausibly claim they already possessed.
Extending the Comparison: Turkey and Iran
The problematization of the civilizational framework in the opening remarks of the essay acquires sharper analytical significance when one considers that Turkey and Iran sit atop comparably rich civilizational inheritances. Both states already possess active, state-sponsored civilizational discourses: Turkey’s Ottoman-nostalgic and pan-Turkic vocabularies under the AKP, and Iran’s Persianate and Shi’a-inflected historical self-presentation. The relevant question the India-Indonesia case poses to both is not whether to draw on civilizational memory, as they already do, extensively, but which register of civilizational memory to foreground. Ottoman and Safavid-era historical narratives, when deployed regionally, have frequently been read by neighbours (Arab states in Turkey’s case, Gulf Arab states and Israel in Iran’s case) as claims to renewed regional primacy rather than as invitations to horizontal partnership, precisely because both empires were, historically, hierarchical political orders, not the diffuse maritime-commercial networks that connected India and Southeast Asia. This suggests the India-Indonesia model is transferable to Ankara and Tehran only if they can identify pre-imperial or non-imperial layers of their own civilizational inheritance, for example, Anatolian, Silk Road-commercial, or pre-Safavid Persianate cultural exchange with Central and South Asia, that carry less hierarchical freight than their imperial-era vocabularies. That is a much more demanding exercise than simply invoking “civilizational depth,” and it is where a genuinely scholarly treatment of the thesis should be more cautious than the original framing allows.
Where the Framework Is Vulnerable
Intellectual honesty requires stating the objections a well-informed critic would raise, because the framework does not escape them merely by disclaiming bad intent.
The instrumentalization problem. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis and the more benign “civilizational bridge” thesis advanced here draw on the same underlying premise, that civilizations are meaningful units of political analysis, and history offers abundant examples of civilizational rhetoric curdling into majoritarian domestic politics even when its international messaging remains generous. A narrower, exclusivist strand of Hindu-nationalist readings of India’s Indic cultural export to Southeast Asia, for instance, exist in tension with India’s own religious pluralism at home; a framework that celebrates cultural transmission abroad while remaining silent on minority rights domestically is not actually escaping the exclusionary use of civilizational narrative, it has simply relocated it.
The selection-effect problem. The India-Indonesia relationship is invoked as exemplary partly because it is genuinely unusual: few bilateral relationships combine this density of pre-modern cultural transmission with this absence of subsequent political subordination. Generalizing from a favourable outlier to a universal diplomatic method risks the same error civilizational-determinist theories have long committed: mistaking a permissive historical condition for a replicable policy instrument.
The verification problem. Unlike trade volumes or treaty compliance, “civilizational trust” is not independently measurable, which makes the framework difficult to falsify and easy to invoke post hoc to explain whatever cooperation has already occurred for conventional strategic reasons.
None of these objections defeats the framework outright, but they do mean its strongest form is considerably more modest than “civilizations are bridges, not boundaries” as a stand-alone slogan suggests. The more defensible claim is narrower: civilizational memory can lower the transaction costs of trust-building where the underlying history is genuinely non-hierarchical, and it should be treated as a fragile, politically contingent resource rather than a natural law of international relations.
History as Resource, Not Destiny
Set against tianxia’s implicit centre, Japan’s civilizationally thin but diplomatically prudent disavowal strategy, and the EU’s deliberately post-civilizational universalism, the India-Indonesia relationship illustrates a genuinely distinct fourth path: retrieval of a historically horizontal cultural memory in service of a plural present. That path is real, and it is underexploited in mainstream international-relations theorizing, which remains more comfortable with material-interest and institutional-design explanations than with cultural-historical ones. But its extension to Turkey, Iran, or any other civilizationally rich state is a matter of careful historical selection, not simple analogy, and its greatest danger, everywhere it is tried, is the ease with which a bridge can be quietly re-narrated as a claim to precedence. Whether civilizational memory serves peace or rivalry is therefore not a property of history itself; it is a property of the political intent brought to bear on it, and that is precisely the variable no diplomatic communiqué can guarantee in advance.
Author’s Bio:
Dr. Yashwant Singh is a sociologist, served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at GITAM (Deemed to be) University, Bengaluru Campus, India. He holds an M.Phil. in Sociology from the University of Delhi and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Hyderabad, India. His research interests include urban sociology, the sociology of development and geopolitics. His writings have appeared on several digital platforms, including Geostrategic Media, South Asia Journal, Modern Diplomacy, World Geostrategic Insights and IA-Forum.
