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The After World War II

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Shortly after World War II most of the European powers that had once held dominion over vast colonies across the globe found their grips on these territories lessened. Even before the end of the war, some of these colonies decided to begin preparations to seize their own destinies from the hands of their masters, and become sovereign entities. One of these colonies was the Dutch East Indies, which was under Dutch control for more than 150 years. The nation that would form from this freed colony would be Indonesia, and on August 17th 1945 the Indonesian people declared their sovereignty and independence from Dutch rule. After four long years of fighting and tense negotiations, the Dutch finally recognized Indonesian independence at the end of 1949. The President of this new fledgling nation was a man by the name of Achmad Sukarno, and he would lead this nation through its revolution in 1945 up until 1967 when he was forced to resign. His reign was one of founding, which demeaned the idea of parliamentary democracy as inappropriate for the Indonesian people, and so he adopted a policy known as Guided democracy, a type of autocratic rule. But due to the diversity of both the people and radical differences of political parties within this new weak state and the uneven representation of political factions, this governmental system was doomed to fail. The instability of the new Indonesian government coupled with the attempts of Indonesia’s first president to pit different

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