ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces that when the floods of war and Japanese occupation receded from the once peaceful and prosperous countries of Southeast Asia. The institution of an international trusteeship, written into the Charter of the United Nations at the San Francisco conference, was made obligatory only in its application to former mandated territories and enemy colonies, and even so it has remained almost stillborn unto the present day. The victors of World War II seem seriously divided. Democrats and totalitarians, liberals and communists hold diametrically opposite views on these problems as on others, and the democrats threaten to fall out among themselves in the way they usually do until they are confronted with an imminent peril. The facts in postwar Southeast Asia no longer allow that gradual schooling for nationhood which was the promise of the last half-century of the colonial era.
