“The World’s Largest Muslim-Majority Country”

Elizabeth Pisani ponders Indonesia's future – and its past:

Indonesia is essentially a make-believe nation. It was brought into notional existence in 1945 with a declaration of independence of unsurpassed vagueness. It reads, in its totality:

"We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters which concern the transfer of power etc will be executed carefully and in the shortest possible time."

There’s a lot wrapped up in that "etc"—not least some consensus about what constitutes "Indonesia." Sukarno, the visionary demagogue who blurted out the declaration of independence after the defeat of Japan in the second world war and became the new country’s first president, took it to mean the remains of the former Dutch colony, the Dutch East Indies. But that colony itself was a shape-shifting beast without cultural, linguistic, religious or even geographical coherence, its only raison d’être the fattening of purses in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.