Around the globe, at the end of World War II and the defeat of the Axis powers, regime-transitions manifested themselves in many different shapes. Usually, historians have analysed political transitions primarily from the context of the nation-state. This fits in with a tendency to identify political reconstruction with national resurrection. ...
(Show more)Around the globe, at the end of World War II and the defeat of the Axis powers, regime-transitions manifested themselves in many different shapes. Usually, historians have analysed political transitions primarily from the context of the nation-state. This fits in with a tendency to identify political reconstruction with national resurrection. In order to provoke new insight, this paper attempts a comparative examination of transitions in two cases that are quite far apart and different in nature, but connected by historical (colonial) ties: the Netherlands and Indonesia.
The Netherlands were? occupied and governed by neighbouring Germany between 1940 and 1944-45. This same period saw the virtual end of Dutch colonial rule over the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, which was occupied and governed by Japan from 1942 to 1945. Both regimes of occupation claimed to establish a completely ‘new order’ in Europe and Asia on the ruins of the preceding liberal and imperialist states. But ambitions to establish a new world order did not end with the conclusion of the Second World War. The defeat of Germany and Japan in May/August 1945 ushered in another phase of transition, in which the dynamics of authority and legitimacy were again reformulated. In both the Netherlands and Indonesia, military occupations by the Allied Powers were instrumental in establishing post-war regimes that advertised themselves as the re-establishment of self-determination and at the same time as a departure from the pre-war situation. In the Netherlands, a period of transition was to produce a stable government of undivided legitimacy once more. In Indonesia, the process of decolonization was accelerated and transition pointed the way to several, contending, attempts at establishing a new political equilibrium, one dictated by the Dutch, others aiming at an independent statehood.
Although the nature and the outcome of transition may have been completely different in the two countries, the synchronic rhythms of postwar recovery and reinvention beg for comparison: the cataclysmic collapse of the old order in 1940 and 1942; the way in which the occupying powers compromised themselves by means of repressive policies; the borrowing of political and military power from the British and American Allies; the struggle to re-establish transitionary rule as a self-sustaining process towards recapturing political power and beating political contenders (parts of the former resistance movement in Holland, nationalist formations in the Indies); and finally appeal to the urge to innovate national politics and world relations.
Within this context, we intend to analyse strategies of political legitimation of the different contenders during the period of transition, with reference to local, national and international perspectives. Our purpose is to discover – from a comparative perspective - at which levels during the transitionary period political authority was accumulated, was accepted and thus could be effective, or not.
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