How a conference in Indonesia 70 years ago formed the bedrock for today's Global South

The Bandung Conference of 1955 was essentially a meeting of Asian and African states that were newly independent. Getty

Last month, East Asia and the region well beyond marked three important anniversaries. First, at the end of April it was 50 years since the reunification of Vietnam. Second, a few days earlier in 1975, the Khmer Rouge had come to power in Cambodia.

And third, mid-April was the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, which laid the foundations for the establishment in 1961 of the Non-Aligned Movement, chiefly through the efforts of five developing world titans: India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito.

The first two anniversaries generated quite a lot of coverage, with thoughtful pieces published in states that participated in the war in Vietnam, including the country itself, the US and Australia. The famous image is of the last helicopters taking off from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon as the North Vietnamese forces closed in, but even the way one describes the event is loaded: was it the liberation of South Vietnam from a corrupt US-backed regime by the victorious communists? Or was it a justification for the domino theory, that once the capitalist West allowed one state in the region to be taken over by the “reds”, others would follow?

The disastrous and genocidal consequences of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia have also been widely examined, including some analysis of why many of its people have an ambivalent attitude towards that four-year period. As the Cambodian-American political scientist Sophal Ear wrote last month: “For many young people, it’s something their parents don’t talk about and the state prefers to frame selectively.”

It was somewhat different, however, when it came to the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. Celebrations of the latter failed to register in large sections of the western press, to the extent that the Economist recently published an article headlined: “How the Global South forgot its own birthday.”

India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Indonesia's Sukarno and Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito kickstarted the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s. Getty Images

The meeting in 1955 at the Indonesian city of Bandung – also known as the Afro-Asian Conference – brought together participants from 29 countries, representing more than 50 per cent of the global population at the time, and is considered a key moment in building solidarity among the countries that are now sometimes called the “Global South”. A 10-point “declaration on promotion of world peace and co-operation” was agreed, and stirring speeches were delivered. Nehru, India’s then prime minister, set the tone when he declared: “For too long we, of Asia, have been petitioners in western courts and chancelleries. That story must belong to the past. We propose to stand on our own feet. We do not intend to be a plaything of others.”

Setting the stage for the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement, a major development at the height of the Cold War, was a highly significant movement. If the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference had indeed “passed with barely a squeak”, as the Economist put it, that would have been quite shocking. But that was not the case at all.

There were big conferences in Beijing and Jakarta, the former co-hosted by the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the latter held in co-operation with the London thinktank Chatham House and Oxford University. There were panel discussions and events in – among other cities – Delhi, Johannesburg, Colombo, Doha, Moscow and Hyderabad, op-eds published in newspapers from Tanzania to South Korea, and at least one new book. This is a far from exhaustive list, but it does show that the anniversary was celebrated widely and received extensive media coverage – just not, perhaps, in the outlets the Economist editors care to read or view.

But that is, I’m afraid, symptomatic of how Bandung and everything that followed has been treated for decades by what we might refer to now as the “old world order”. The Non-Aligned Movement and the Group of 77 developing countries established at the UN in 1964? They were derided as meaningless talking shops, hardly worth mentioning – even while their luminaries, such as Indonesia’s then president, Sukarno, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, were viewed as sufficiently dangerous for the CIA to devise countless operations to undermine or overthrow them.

In fact, the Bandung principles – including those of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, insistence on peaceful means to settle international disputes, resistance to great-power coercion, and promotion of co-operation and conciliation – have long been at the heart of South-South discourse. They were taken further and incorporated into subsequent organisations such as the Association of South-East Asian Nations (formed in 1967), and have been reborn, as it were, in Brics – which many see as the 21st-century successor of Bandung.

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Of course, Brics as a grouping is also frequently dismissed in certain quarters. Yet why, as I asked in these pages nearly two years ago, are so many countries keen to join if it is irrelevant?

Part of this is a refusal to depart from seeing the world through the prism of highly formal structures such as the EU and Nato. We know what they have achieved. (A highly mismanaged migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and war with Russia, would be one brutal – but true – answer.) What, ask the naysayers, were the concrete consequences of the Bandung Conference?

Let’s say I asked those same people this question: how did the yearning for freedom and belief in religion contribute to the downfall of officially atheist communist regimes in the Cold War? They would insist that those beliefs did have effects – and I would agree with them – but they would find it almost impossible to quantify them.

So with Bandung. It’s the spirit of the conference, the power of the idea, that has lived on and has grown. The Economist’s writer doesn’t get it, saying the fact that India has moved from a policy of non-alignment to one of multi-alignment shows that the notion of collective solidarity has failed.

On the contrary, non-alignment was a sign of the times: middle powers and small countries didn’t want to end up as client states of great powers. Multi-alignment – which is the position of most countries in the Global South – means they want to be friends with all. And being friends entails mutual respect and a degree of similar standing. That’s a sign of confidence. It’s a sign of success. And it’s a measure of just how far those countries have come since they gathered at Bandung all those years ago.