Yet it has held together remarkably well, helped by the imposition of a national language, Bahasa Indonesia, and 32 years of centralised dictatorship under Suharto, together with an army and a bureaucracy that have helped flatten the unsightly bulges of diversity.The Indonesia through which Ms Pisani travels, however, seems to be in the process of uninventing itself.
Anton Balasingham, the theoretician of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), states that the causes of the militarization of the Tamil youth were unemployment, lack of opportunities for higher education, and the imposition of an alien language.
Unlike other nationalisms, he explained, which reclaimed the tongue of the people against the imperialist imposition of the language by which they were governed, black people had to use the language of domination imposed by French colonialism as cement for their shared Négritude and as "miraculous weapons"[3] against that same domination.
For years after the 1928 imposition of a Roman alphabet, experts from the institute scoured rural Turkey to find examples of pure Turkish on which to base the new language.
I queried the imposition of a break fee with TalkTalk in a letter, with no reply.
The imposition of a six-point penalty for running a yellow light produced howls of protest.
In New York, however, lawyers for the city have resisted the imposition of a monitor.
On March 12th the Arab League endorsed the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya.
The imposition of a third centre-left candidate would close the door on any possible accommodation.
