[Unpar] Summer Course: Day 1

As I previously mentioned in this post, I will participate on summer course held by cooperation of  Unpar, Federal Republic of Germany, University of Giessen, University of Jena, and ITB.  Since I don’t have another topic to blog about, I decide to report my activity in this blog, hopefully it will make me get out from the writer’s block quick. Honesty I am too lazy to write about anything since my internet connection was dropped.  

 And yes, as I mentioned earlier, we are talking about Good Governance. Sounds familiar? For some unapparent reason Federal Republic of Germany is very aggressive in promoting capacity-building for our country. In short, they want to assist mansources and encouraging the value of good governance, as demonstrated by Federal Republic of Germany. Since this is intercultural discussion, we could expect clashes. Well, looking at Germany’s homogeneity and how it’s nowhere close to Indonesia’s, we might have hard time to bridge our difference.

The opening session was held in mgr Geisse room, faculty of social and politic. The event began at 10.30, followed by speeches from the project coordinators. After passing series of boring speeches, bla-bla-blas and the formalities, the keynote speakers begin to take the floors.

The first was Prof. Dr. Thomas Meyer with speech titled “The social dimension of dimension of good governane and democracy”. He said that while democracy is not perfect system, it is making equality more probable. But the problem begins everyone don’t have equal chance. The poor people for example, wouldn’t put democracy for their priority. They are more concerned for daily survival, and such concept is too good for society.

 Jurgen Rueland carried speech about “Region and Cooperation in southeast Asia”, he pointed some arguments that ASEAN is evolving into governance and ASEAN has successfully exporting its value to outside region. This is demonstrated in the establishment of regional security forum such as ARF (ASEAN regional forum), but again, ASEAN still have long way to go, since it still needs to localize the externa value, there is necessity to make semantic adapation as soon as possible. ASEAN at the present, still sovereignty-centered, as clliche and stereotypical as it sounds, he ended and emphasized that ASEAN still doesnt include the grassroot components in its integration.

 Franz Magnis-Suseno, a well known public figure also became a keynote speaker in the opening session. he delivered speech about “Democracy in Indonesia”. He pointed various challenges for democracy in Indonesia such a interest group, military involvement in civil affair, the acute corruption in government institution in parliement for example, has hurt the trust of public toward the government. Money politic destroyed this country’s morality in unbelievably deep impact.

And yes, as tedious as it sounds, we will discuss about good governance and regional cooperation in the next 10 days. I hope I didn’t choose a wrong topic since good governance is nowhere my interest, I chose the topic only because it somehow does not serve my interest. But since we will talk about ASEAN and regional governance, I hope I could get something from this short summer course. I also meet a lot of new people from Germany, let’s see If I could make some new friends here .

Other than me, Edna, Mahel, and Cherika also participate in this event. Check their blog too, perhaps they will do coverage as well. No photo available to upload yet because my internet connection in peril.

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