Drawing on primary sources and moving beyond traditional diplomatic history, this chapter approaches the Belgrade Conference of non-aligned states in an original way, informed by methods of cultural history of diplomacy. A black and white photograph showing presidents Sukarno of Indonesia and Tito of Yugoslavia, hosts of the 1955 Bandung and 1961 Belgrade Conference (events that defined the non-alignment), respectively, serves as a departure point for analysis. Essentially, the chapter asks, What can the image, created by a Yugoslav news agency photographer on the eve of the conference, tell us beyond ‘obvious’? The photograph shows the two statesmen in an open-roofed car in front of the Yugoslav parliament building, the conference venue; the motorcade is secured by uniformed guards on motorcycles, and is observed by citizens, standing still in the background. It allows us to imagine the conference as a piece of diplomatic theatre, with actors, stage, audience, and security. And it urges us to zoom out further to explore the context in which the event captured by the photographic lens took place.

West German President Heinrich Lübke’s 1963 trip to Indonesia was the first official visit of a Western head of state to the island nation. An official German photograph shows him paying his respects in a war heroes’ cemetery. This chapter explores the political significance of the ceremonial and deconstructs this photograph. The chapter is a thick description of this state visit as an interaction between West Germany and Indonesia at the time of decolonisation. The chapter departs from the realist paradigm of the history of diplomacy and interprets the visit in terms of the cultural history of diplomacy. Cultural aspects of diplomacy create political meaning and shape political outcomes. Style and substance of diplomatic encounters mutually condition each other. These insights provide the basis for a cultural history of global diplomacy, one that helps us break down boundaries between binary categories such as East and West, while at the same time displaying an awareness of global asymmetries.

The three cases in this section fall along a spectrum of varied relationships with the pre-war metropoles that governed them. Ukraine as of June 1941 was a fully integrated constituent republic of a territorially contiguous Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was Nazi Germany that sought to colonize it. Yet Ukraine’s recent history complicated the picture significantly, as will be discussed below. And the initial German invasion was misread by certain Ukrainian nationalists as an opportunity for national liberation. The Philippines and the Dutch East Indies were both subject to governance by distant, overseas imperial metropoles, and their indigenous populations did not, by and large, have US or Dutch citizenship, respectively. However, in the case of the Philippines, an elected government functioned semi-autonomously in the capital Manila, and in the mid-1930s a firm deadline of 1946 had been agreed upon for the termination of American rule and the granting of formal political independence to the Philippines. The Dutch government had no such plans to relinquish control over the East Indies.

An Epilogue traces the main legacies for Southeast Asia of its wartime occupation. For most of the region, occupation resulted in revolution or civil war and often a fundamental societal shift, opening the way for post-war social and political transformations. Recovery to pre-war levels of per capita GDP was slow for several countries. Only by the 1990s did the long-term trajectory of an outward-looking, export-oriented Southeast Asia reassert itself.

By mid-1966, about half a million adherents of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were dead, many more were arbitrarily imprisoned and even more lost civil rights. The biggest communist party outside the communist bloc disappeared almost overnight, as did its affiliated social organisations. It was the worst political violence since Indonesia´s 1945-1949 war of national liberation. How could this happen? The chapter first dismisses two once-popular analytical approaches. Neither behaviourist depictions of rampaging anti-communist crowds, nor statist images of a military conducting pogroms on its own are adequate to the known facts. It then develops a contentious politics approach with multiple collective actors. The cold war looms large; the economy is politicised; institutions are weak, factionalised, and deeply embedded in various social formations. Contention escalates from September 1963, as President Sukarno and the PKI pivot from the gradualist Soviet Union to a militant People´s Republic of China. An emerging legitimation crisis pits a social justice discourse popular among lower classes against a growing middle class religious, law-and-order discourse. When the PKI leadership makes a false move on 1 October 1965, the military mobilises its allies to strike back, with genocidal results.

This chapter highlights the life and leadership of Megawati Sukarnoputri, who became the first modern Muslim woman head of the state. The eldest daughter of Sukarno, Indonesia’s national hero, Megawati emerged as a leader at a time when Indonesian society was in the grips of social and political crises. Her swift rise to power unsettled powerful men, who belittled her as only a “housewife,” and perceived her political campaigning as disruptive and subversive. Fearing rapid loss of his legitimacy, the dictator Suharto made political alliances with hardline Islamist parties to prevent Megawati’s presidential campaign. But he failed spectacularly to stop her or to dampen her public support. I discuss the intense political rivalry over the presidency following Suharto’s fall, and the appeal to the Prophetic hadith to disqualify Megawati. It became clear that it was not genuine religious conviction that sought to block a woman’s political advancement, but the intense anxiety of the male political elite whose political dominance was in jeopardy. She was neither a “stupid housewife” nor did her leadership doom Indonesia. She turned out to be a canny politician: calm and unpretentious, the likes of whom Indonesia had not seen before.