Jakarta (ANTARA) – President Prabowo Subianto emphasized that lasting economic growth depends on strong support mechanisms and mutual commitment from all elements of the country to nationalism.
“The nature of modern economy is that it does not progress or develop on its own. Growth is stimulated and sustained by nationalism,” Subianto said, while quoting the economic theory of sociologist Professor Liah Greenfeld, in Bandar Lampung, Lampung, on Wednesday.
President Subianto made the statement at the 18th National Conference of the Indonesian Young Entrepreneurs Association (HIPMI).
According to him, such principle has been adopted by countries with major economic powers. He cited the historical examples of the economic revival of Japan, the United States, Western Europe, and China, attributing their success to a strong foundation of nationalism.
Liah Greenfeld’s death genuinely saddened me. While I did not know her well, we spoke every year at the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa conference in Washington, DC. We often ended up sitting together at breakfast before the conference sessions started, talking about politics, religion, nationalism, Islam, and whatever else happened to come up. What always struck me about her was how approachable and intellectually curious she was. Here was a world-renowned scholar and distinguished professor at Boston University, yet she never carried herself with the kind of arrogance that sometimes exists in academic circles.
I always thought that was a breath of fresh air because it’s so easy for the academic world to get wrapped up in showing off who’s more accomplished, instead of being about learning, listening, and figuring out what’s true. It wasn’t like that with Greenfeld. She had a way of being genuinely interested when she talked to people, even with someone like me who was far less accomplished academically. That really stuck with me. There was a humility about her that made conversations with her feel relaxed and natural. And maybe, looking back, it also was something that made her scholarly work so innovative and influential. People who remain open continue to see things that others do not.
Her influence on the study of nationalism was enormous. Her book Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, helped reshape how many scholars understood nationalism and modern identity. Greenfeld argued that nationalism was not simply extremism or tribal politics, but one of the major forces shaping the modern world itself. She connected it to democracy, economics, culture, identity, and even psychology. Later works like Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experienceexplored how culture and systems of meaning shape human experience and mental life. What made her work stand out was that she was willing to ask large civilizational questions at a time when much of academia was becoming increasingly narrow and specialized.
Liah Greenfeld died in Boston on 13 May 2026. She had been born on 22 August 1954 in Vladivostok, the Russian city open to the Sea of Japan, and from an early age she dreamed of becoming a poet. In truth, she never ceased to be one: when a serious illness struck her in the early 2000s, she returned to writing verse with the same intensity with which she had analyzed nationalism, modernity, and madness. The loss is immense — for sociology, for nationalism studies, and for all those who knew and loved her. What bound me to her was a shared passion for the history of nationalism and for poetry.
