145. General administrative noncooperation

Early on in the Second World War, Bulgaria was a member of the Axis powers, having signed the Tripartite Pact on March 1, 1941. However, Bulgaria was not emotionally attached to the ideals of the major Axis powers. They simply signed on because they desired - and were guaranteed by Germany - the nearby territories of Thrace and Macedonia, which they had lost after their defeat in World War One. As a result, though Hitler was certainly a persuasive influence on Bulgaria’s foreign and domestic policy, he was not quite dictating every action taken by Bulgaria’s ruler, Tzar Boris III.

For much of the nineteenth century, Finland was under Russian rule. This began in 1809 when Finland was made part of the Russian Empire. As part of the Russian Empire, Finland was autonomous in domestic policy but not foreign policy. Finland was allowed to create its own laws through its parliament, but Russian tsars controlled Finland and decided Finnish foreign affairs. Finns generally had no problem with this situation because the Russian government did not interfere with internal affairs.

In the 1840’s there were high tensions between Hungary and the Austrian Empire. Hungary, a part of the larger Austrian Empire, was characterized by nationalistic fervor and that feeling erupted in a violent insurgency in 1848. Franz Josef, the emperor of the Austrian Empire, forcefully put down the rebellion, with assistance from Russian military forces.

In the 1940s, Nazi Germany under the government of Adolf Hitler was advancing its conquest of Europe during the Second World War. By May 1940, Luxembourg, a small neutral country bordering Germany, was placed under military occupation by forces of the Third Reich. The meager resistance made by local police forces and customs officers at the border crossing was quickly crushed by the German Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany.

Benin gained its independence from France in 1960 and was then named Dahomey.  Colonel Mathieu Kérékou took power of the country in a coup in 1972 and later renamed the country the People’s Republic of Benin, organized the economy under a Marxist-Leninist ideology, and outlawed all political parties except his People’s Revolutionary Party of Benin.  By the 1980s, Kérékou remained as the president of Benin, but the economy was failing.  The government had to lower government aid to students and the salaries for civil servants and in 1988 the state owned banks crashed.  Fa

Turks and Caicos is a British Territory of 8 islands in the Caribbean with a formal population of approximately 15,000, mostly descendants of African slaves. England appoints a Governor to the island for a minimum of three years, but the islands also have their own local government, a legislative council of 13 ministers. Because of their geographic location, the islands are a convenient stop in drug smuggling to the United States. The drug trade through the Islands climaxed in 1985, when U.S. authorities caught a native official bringing drugs to the United States.

At the beginning of April 1961, after nearly seven years of war in Algeria as France tried to maintain its control there, French President Charles de Gaulle announced that he would begin negotiations with the Algerian nationalists and soon relinquish control of the colony.  At the time France had approximately 500,000 soldiers stationed in Algeria and very few remaining at home.  Several of the generals in Algeria, however, did not want to concede to the Algerian nationalists.  

Through the 1830s, the Cherokee owned incredibly rich, fertile land that was desired by their white neighbors. In 1828, gold was discovered in Cherokee nation, setting off the Georgia gold rush. Though the Cherokee had been resisting social forces trying to displace them, legal pressure began to mount to allow access to the land and to remove the Cherokee from it. In 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, forcing the Cherokee in Georgia and other areas east of the Mississippi River to relocate to other Indian lands in the West, primarily in Oklahoma.

Since assuming the role of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev pushed for a program of economic openness and political restructuring, prompting resistance and suspicion from hard-line members of the Communist Party. Russia had declared its sovereignty in June 1990, beginning a period of constitutional reform. By the early 90’s, the Soviet Union, with Gorbachev as the first executive ‘President’, was in economic and political crisis. 

In 1984, the Guinean President Lansana Conté first seized power through a coup, and after that won three elections. In 2006, Transparency International ranked Guinea as the most corrupt country in Africa. Also in 2006, labor and trade union alliances launched two general strikes, protesting the economic misery in Guinea and the government in general.

In March 1920, Walther von Lüttwitz, a commanding general in the German army, and Wolfgang Kapp, a German provincial official (with the help of a few other German officials, such as Chief of Staff, General Hans von Seeckt and his collaborators in the Ministry of Defense), attempted a coup d'état (called the Kapp Putsch). The conspirators had two main aims in mind: to avoid the implementation of certain articles in the Treaty of Versailles (such as the reduction of the German army) and to replace the government of the Republic with a Rightist regime.

“I have decided to quit as president.”- Indonesian President Suharto, 21st May 1998

These words echoed across Indonesia, as students who had been occupying parliament for the past three days fell to their knees; while others cheered around television sets watching their president, in power for the past thirty years, resign.

In July 1975, the Dahe Dam on the Dahe River in Shanyang Township, southern China, was completed.  The environmental toll of the project accumulated within months.  Upstream of the dam, rising waters swamped homes and farmland, while downstream, water coming from the spillways scoured away riverbank, causing widespread erosion and loss of fertile land.  The government anticipated a certain amount of upstream flooding, and accordingly compensated the affected population and relocated them when necessary.  In the haste to complete the project, however, the engineers had ne

In the 1930s, many South American countries experienced great upheavals. This was due mostly to the fact that there were many dictators in the majority of the countries there. These upheavals came in many forms and leaders used many different tactics, however they often resulted in the government being overthrown. One such overthrowing was attempted in Ecuador in 1933 during the regime of President Jean de Dios Martinez Mera.

Margaret Thatcher was reelected for her third term in 1987. One of the changes she promised to implement was to levy a flat tax that she called a “Community Charge,” although it became popularly known as the poll tax. A flat tax means that everybody, regardless of wealth, has to pay the same amount. The tax was to be set in the 1989-1990 financial year in Scotland, and in the 1990-1991 financial year in England. However, it was unpopular from the moment she proposed it, and she met resistance from both the people and her party.

Language is an important aspect of culture as it communicates and preserves heritage, ideas, and identity. Pakistan and India became independent from British rule in August of 1947. The British Imperial Government, the Indian Muslim League, and the Indian National Congress split the region based on religious lines of Hinduism and Islam. Large regions that were majority Muslim became Pakistan, and regions that were majority Hindu became India. Pakistan was geographically separated into East Pakistan (modern day Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (modern day Pakistan).