Chapter 15: History: Non-Aligned Movement
In July 1956, three heads of government met on Brioni, a small island off the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia. Jawaharlal Nehru had come from India and Gamal Abdel Nasser from Egypt. Their host was Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav President. All three led states that sat awkwardly outside the two great alliances of the day. Each had won or held its independence recently, and each was being courted by both sides. Diplomats in Washington and in Moscow expected them, sooner or later, to choose. For two days the three talked, and then they issued a joint statement. The question they had set themselves was practical rather than philosophical. Could a poor, newly independent state stay out of both camps and still be listened to? Their answer was that staying out did not have to mean staying silent. A state could refuse to join a military alliance and still take a position on every dispute that mattered. It would judge each question on what it thought right, not on what an ally expected. Refusing to take sides between the blocs was itself a foreign policy, and it needed defending. Nothing was founded on that island. No organisation was set up, and no membership list was drawn. But an argument had been made in public by three leaders together. Within five years that argument had a name, a summit and a growing membership.
Diagram
Fig. 15.0-1 Caption: Nehru, Nasser and Tito met on the island of Brioni in July 1956, five years before the movement they helped found held its first summit. Brief: Source a documented press photograph of the July 1956 Brioni meeting showing Nehru, Nasser and Tito together. Label each figure with name and country. Caption must carry the date and place. Do not crop out the setting.
15.1 The Meaning Of Non-Alignment
The word ‘non-alignment’ describes a choice, and a choice only makes sense against the alternatives. To understand it, we first have to see the world that made the choice necessary.
That world took shape in the years after 1945. It was a world in which most states were expected to stand behind one of two great powers.
15.1.1 A World Divided Into Two Blocs
The Second World War ended in 1945 with the defeat of the Axis powers. The alliance that had defeated them did not survive the peace for long.
The United States of America and the Soviet Union emerged from the war as the two strongest states. Within a few years each had gathered a group of states around it. Such a group is called a power bloc — a set of states that follow the lead of one great power in defence and foreign policy.
The rivalry between the two blocs is known as the Cold War. It was a long period of hostility, propaganda and armed preparation, in which the two superpowers never fought each other directly.
Each bloc built a military alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, formed in 1949, is a military alliance of the United States, Canada and a number of West European states. The Warsaw Pact, formed in 1955, was a military alliance of the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe. In both, an attack on one member was to be treated as an attack on all.
The Pressure On The New States
These same years were the years of decolonisation. India became independent in 1947, Indonesia in 1949, Ghana in 1957, and seventeen African states in 1960 alone.
Every one of these states needed money, machinery, food aid and support at the United Nations. Both superpowers were willing to supply all four — to their friends. The unstated price was a place in the bloc.
Map 15.1 shows how the world looked when this pressure was at its height.
Map
Map 15.1 Caption: The two blocs and the states outside them, around 1961. Brief: World map showing the position around 1961, not today. Shade NATO members in one tone, Warsaw Pact members in a second, and states that had declared themselves non-aligned in a third; leave all others unshaded. Label the USA, the USSR, India, Egypt, Yugoslavia, Indonesia and Ghana. Boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India; India shown in full extent, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. State in the key that alliance memberships and state boundaries are those of the period, not of today.
The map is useful for one thing above all: it shows how few of the world’s states were formally inside either alliance, and how much of the map was still deciding.
What it cannot show is what a shading actually meant on the ground. A state shaded as non-aligned might still be taking wheat from one superpower and machinery from the other. Nor can a single colour show disagreement inside a bloc, or the fact that many states changed their position within a few years. A map fixes one moment; the politics did not stay fixed.
15.1.2 What Non-Alignment Means
Non-alignment is the international policy of a sovereign state under which it does not attach itself to any power bloc, and at the same time takes an active part in world affairs to promote peace, harmony and cooperation.
Two halves of that sentence matter equally. The first half is a refusal — no bloc, no military alliance. The second half is a commitment — to speak and act on international questions rather than withdraw from them.
The Main Features
The policy is usually set out in five features:
- It is not aligned to any of the power blocs.
- It is opposed to military alliances such as NATO, SEATO and the Warsaw Pact.
- It keeps for the state the freedom to take its own foreign policy decisions.
- It does not stand aloof from international problems, but takes an active part in them. Non-alignment therefore stands for action, not for passivity.
- It judges every issue on its merits, and upholds the right of all peoples to freedom and justice.
Taken together, these amount to a claim about independence. A state that has just won the right to govern itself does not want its foreign policy decided in another capital.
15.1.3 What Non-Alignment Is Not
Three older ideas are often confused with non-alignment, and the difference is worth pinning down.
Neutrality is a legal position taken in a particular war: a neutral state takes no part in that war and gives no help to either side. Non-alignment is not tied to a war at all. It is a standing policy in peacetime, and a non-aligned state may take a very loud position on a conflict it is not fighting in.
Isolationism is a policy of staying out of world affairs generally. Non-alignment is the opposite; its whole point is participation, at the United Nations and elsewhere.
Non-commitment would mean refusing to take a stand. Non-aligned states did take stands — against colonial rule, against apartheid in South Africa, against nuclear testing. What they refused was to take those stands on instruction.
The distinction was not merely verbal. Critics in both blocs argued that a state which would not join an alliance was really sitting on the fence. Non-aligned leaders answered that judging each case on its merits is a harder position to hold than following an ally.
15.2 Why The New Nations Chose Not To Align
No single reason explains the choice. States as different as India, Egypt, Indonesia, Ghana and Yugoslavia arrived at the same policy by somewhat different roads.
Six factors, however, run through most of their thinking. They are worth taking one at a time.
The Fear Of Another War
The first factor was simple alarm. Two world wars had been fought within the lifetime of the leaders now taking office in Asia and Africa.
The division of the world into two armed camps looked to them like the beginning of a third. Both blocs now held nuclear weapons, and each new alliance and base drew the line more sharply.
Their conclusion was that joining a bloc would import someone else’s quarrel. A state that stayed outside both camps kept its distance from the danger, and could argue for cooling the rivalry down.
Freedom Still Unfinished
The second factor was that colonial rule had not ended everywhere. Imperialism — the control of one country’s land, people and resources by another state — was still a fact in much of Africa and Asia in the 1950s.
New states that had just thrown off foreign rule were unwilling to enter an alliance led by the very powers still holding colonies. Several of the leading members of both blocs were colonial powers, and said openly that they intended to remain so.
There was also a newer worry. Neo-colonialism is control exercised over a formally independent country through economic pressure, debt or dependence on a single foreign market, rather than through direct rule. Alliance membership, many leaders feared, was one route to exactly that.
The Right To Judge For Themselves
The third factor was the wish to keep an independent judgement. Membership of a bloc carried an expectation: you voted with your allies at the United Nations, whatever you thought of the question.
The new states wanted to settle their own disputes without outside interference, and to weigh each international question on what it was worth. That is why non-alignment is described as judging an issue on merit.
A fourth factor followed from this. Rather than quarrel with the great powers, these states wanted moderation and goodwill towards all of them, and friendly dealings with both blocs at once. Distance was not meant as hostility.
Development Needed Both Sides
The fifth factor was economic, and for most of these states it was the most pressing of all. They were poor, their industries were small, and their people’s standard of living was low.
Development on the scale they wanted needed capital and technical knowledge from abroad. Both blocs could supply dams, steel plants, fertiliser factories and training — and each preferred to supply its friends.
A state inside a bloc could realistically draw on one side only. A state outside both could ask both, and could refuse conditions it disliked. Non-alignment was, among other things, a development strategy.
For the same reason these states pressed for changes in the way world trade and finance worked. They argued that prices, credit and shipping were arranged to suit the industrial countries, and that the arrangement itself needed reform.
Numbers Instead Of Weapons
The sixth factor was a calculation about power. Individually these states had small armies, little money and no nuclear weapons, and none of them expected that to change soon.
What they had was numbers. As decolonisation continued, they came to form a large share of the membership of the United Nations, where every state has one vote in the General Assembly.
Acting together, they believed, they could exert moral pressure on questions of war and peace even without military strength. Whether moral pressure is a real kind of power is a question this chapter returns to.
15.3 Panchsheel
Non-alignment began as a position taken by individual governments. Before it could become a movement, it needed a shared set of rules that states could point to.
The first such statement came not from a large conference but from a single agreement between two neighbours.
15.3.1 The Meaning Of Panchsheel
In 1954 India and China signed an agreement whose preamble set out five principles of peaceful co-existence. These five principles are known together as Panchsheel, from the Sanskrit words for ‘five’ and ‘conduct’ — five rules of conduct between states.
That is the meaning of the term, and it is all the term means: a set of five principles, agreed in 1954, on how sovereign states should deal with one another. They were later described as the guidelines on which the Non-Aligned Movement grew.
The principles themselves are worth reading once, because the rest of the chapter assumes them.
Read together, the five say something narrow and something large. The narrow claim is that borders and internal affairs are not to be meddled with. The large claim is that states with very different political systems can live side by side without one converting or defeating the other.
That larger claim is what made the principles useful outside India and China. A world of two rival systems either has to fight or has to find terms for co-existence, and here were terms already written down.
What the extract cannot tell us is anything about conduct. It records what two governments undertook in 1954, not what either did afterwards, and it names no one who could decide the question if they disagreed.
15.3.2 The Bandung Conference, 1955
A year later the principles were given practical shape at a much larger meeting. In April 1955 the Asian–African Conference met at Bandung in Indonesia.
Twenty-nine countries of Asia and Africa attended. The meeting had been sponsored by five states — India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia — which had been discussing Asian affairs together for some time, and Indonesia acted as host.
What Bandung Agreed
The delegates condemned colonialism in all its forms and racial discrimination, including apartheid in South Africa — the system of enforced racial separation and white minority rule. They called for economic and cultural cooperation among the countries of Asia and Africa, and for peaceful settlement of disputes.
They also set out principles for relations between states that took in the five of 1954 and added to them, including respect for the right of every nation to defend itself and rejection of arrangements that served the interests of a great power.
Bandung mattered because of who was in the room. Countries that had until recently been ruled from Europe were now discussing world affairs with each other, and without their former rulers present.
Bandung Was Not Yet Non-Alignment
It is easy, looking back, to treat Bandung as the first non-aligned conference. It was not, and the difference is instructive.
Bandung’s test for admission was geography — a state was invited because it was Asian or African. Several of those present were firmly inside a bloc; Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines and others held alliance treaties with Western powers, and China was closely tied to the Soviet Union.
The debates at Bandung were sharp for exactly that reason. Delegates from allied states argued that alliances were a legitimate way for a weak country to make itself safe, while others argued that alliances were what had divided the world in the first place.
What Bandung produced was therefore a demonstration rather than an organisation. It showed that Asian and African states could meet, argue and agree on a text. Turning that into a movement required a different test for membership, and that test was applied six years later.
15.4 The Founding Of The Movement
Between the meeting at Bandung and the founding of the movement lie six years. In those years the number of independent states in Africa rose sharply, and the Cold War grew colder.
The idea of a conference of the non-aligned themselves was pressed hardest by the leaders who had been arguing the case since the mid-1950s.
15.4.1 The Belgrade Summit Of 1961
A preparatory meeting was held at Cairo in June 1961 to settle who could attend. Its answer was a set of tests, and the tests are the clearest definition of non-alignment the movement ever produced.
A state qualified if it followed an independent policy based on non-alignment, or was moving towards one. It had to support movements for national independence. It could not belong to a multilateral military alliance formed in the context of the great-power conflict, and any base or bilateral military agreement it had granted must not have been granted in that context either.
This was a much narrower door than Bandung’s. Geography no longer counted; conduct did.
Timeline TL 15.1 sets out the road from the 1954 agreement to the first summit.
The first summit conference of non-aligned countries met at Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, in September 1961. Twenty-five countries took part, and three Latin American states attended as observers.
A Summit Held In A Bad Month
The timing was not comfortable. Weeks earlier the wall dividing Berlin had gone up, and as the delegates gathered the Soviet Union announced that it was resuming nuclear testing.
The agenda reflected this. The summit discussed the crisis over Berlin, the fighting in the Congo, the question of which government should represent China at the United Nations, and apartheid in South Africa.
Its declarations set out the movement’s core positions. It affirmed peaceful co-existence, declared imperialism a threat to world peace, demanded the immediate and complete ending of colonial rule, and called for general disarmament. Disarmament means the reduction or removal of a state’s weapons, especially nuclear weapons, by agreement.
The summit also sent messages to the leaders of both superpowers, urging them to negotiate rather than let the crisis harden. That was non-alignment doing what it claimed to do — refusing to join either side, and refusing to keep quiet.
Fig. 15.4-1 shows the delegates at the opening of the conference.
Diagram
Fig. 15.4-1 Caption: Delegates at the first summit conference of non-aligned countries, Belgrade, September 1961. Brief: Source a documented photograph of the opening of the September 1961 Belgrade summit, showing the assembled delegations rather than a single leader. Label the place and date. If a hall photograph is unavailable, use a documented group photograph of the participating heads of state and government at that summit.
A photograph of this kind is good evidence of one thing: it shows who came, and that they came together. That was itself the point being made, and the delegations knew the picture would be published.
It cannot show what was argued inside the hall, and the arguments were real. Some delegations wanted the summit to concentrate on ending colonial rule, while others wanted it to concentrate on easing the superpower crisis. A photograph flattens a disagreement into a row of smiling figures.
15.4.2 The Architects Of NAM
Five leaders are usually named as the architects of the Non-Aligned Movement:
- Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India
- Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia
- Gamal Abdel Nasser, President of Egypt
- Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana
- Sukarno, President of Indonesia
The first three of these are often called the founding fathers of the movement, since it was their meetings in the 1950s that made the case in public before any organisation existed.
The five did not think alike about everything. They led states with different histories, different economic systems and different neighbours, and they disagreed about how far the movement should go in criticising each superpower.
What they shared was the judgement that a small or newly independent state loses more than it gains by attaching itself to a great power. That judgement is what the movement was built on.
15.5 The Objectives Of The Non-Aligned Movement
At the start, the movement’s main objective was stated narrowly. It was to keep the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa out of the rivalry between the superpowers, and so to protect and preserve the independence they had just won.
Around that central aim the summits set out a wider list. These are the objectives usually given for the movement.
The Objectives Stated
- To remove the causes that could lead to war.
- To protect the newly won freedom of the new states of Asia and Africa from colonial domination.
- To oppose colonialism, imperialism and racial discrimination.
- To uphold the sovereign equality of all states — the principle that every state, large or small, has the same standing in international law.
- To encourage friendly relations among countries.
- To press for the peaceful settlement of international disputes.
- To oppose the use of force and the use of nuclear weapons.
- To strengthen the United Nations as an organ of world peace.
- To protect human rights and to protect the environment.
- To build a New International Economic Order, a reformed set of rules for world trade, aid and finance intended to give developing countries fairer terms.
Three Families Of Aims
A list of ten is hard to hold in the head, and it is more useful to see that the objectives fall into three groups.
The first group is about war and peace: removing the causes of war, opposing force and nuclear weapons, settling disputes peacefully, and strengthening the United Nations. Here the movement was asking the great powers to behave differently.
The second group is about freedom: ending colonial rule, opposing imperialism and racial discrimination, and defending the equality of states. Here the movement was speaking for peoples still under foreign rule, including those living under apartheid.
The third group is about development: fairer terms of trade and finance, and later the protection of human rights and of the environment. Here the members were speaking for themselves, as poor states in a world economy they had not designed.
The three groups are connected by one assumption. The non-aligned held that peace, freedom from foreign control and economic fairness stand or fall together, because a state that is poor and dependent is not truly free.
Cartoon 15.1 states that argument in a single image.
Cartoon
Cartoon 15.1 Caption: The non-aligned states argued that refusing to stand with either bloc was a position, not an absence of one. Brief: Two very large figures face each other, each armed and each labelled with a bloc name, not with any real person. Between and below them stands a group of small figures holding a single placard reading ‘We will judge each question ourselves’. Exaggerate the size difference between the blocs and the group. Draw no real, identifiable individual, and no national or religious symbol on any figure. Discuss: What claim about power is the cartoonist making by drawing the small figures together rather than singly?
The cartoon makes one point well: numbers were the only resource the non-aligned had, and a shared position was the only way to use them.
It cannot show the cost of that shared position. Holding a group of very different states together meant agreeing on general language, and general language is easier to sign than to act on. Nor can a single drawing show that the two large figures were themselves competing for the small ones’ support, which gave the small states more room than the picture suggests.
Aims And Achievements Are Not The Same Thing
Objectives are statements of intent. Reading a list of them tells you what a movement wanted, not what it did.
The non-aligned had no army, no treaty binding members to act together, and for many years no permanent secretariat. Their method was the resolution, the summit declaration and the vote at the United Nations.
That method achieved some things. Non-aligned pressure kept colonial rule and racial discrimination high on the agenda of the General Assembly, and gave weight to demands for disarmament and for reform of the world economy.
It also failed at others. The movement could not prevent wars between its own members, and its declarations were often not turned into coordinated action. Whether that is a failure of the movement or of what any group of weak states can do is a fair question to argue about.
15.6 The Role Of Jawaharlal Nehru
India was among the first countries to declare that it would join neither bloc, and it did so before most of Asia and Africa were independent. That declaration was Jawaharlal Nehru’s.
Nehru was India’s first Prime Minister, and for his entire term he also held the foreign affairs portfolio himself. Foreign policy was therefore made where he sat, and the argument for non-alignment was made in his words.
15.6.1 Nehru’s Case Against Joining A Bloc
Nehru set out the position early. Speaking as head of the interim government in September 1946, almost a year before independence, he said India would keep away from the power politics of groups ranged against one another.
His central argument was about judgement. A state that ties itself to a great power, he held, gives up its own opinion; it must then pursue the policy its ally wants rather than the one it would choose. For a country that had just ended foreign rule, that was too high a price.
He was equally opposed to the alliances built by both sides. He criticised NATO, CENTO and SEATO, formed by the United States and its partners, and the Warsaw Pact and the bodies grouped around the Soviet Union. In his view such pacts encouraged colonialism and imperialism and drove the race for armaments.
Not Neutral, And Not A Third Bloc
Two misunderstandings followed him throughout, and he answered both.
The first was that non-alignment meant neutrality. Addressing the United States Congress in 1949, Nehru rejected that reading directly: where freedom was in danger, justice was threatened or aggression took place, India would not be neutral. Its policy was one of active effort to build peace, not of standing aside.
The second was that the non-aligned were forming a bloc of their own. Nehru denied this too. He was committed to parliamentary democracy and civil liberties, but he did not accept the economic claims of either camp, and he argued for what he called democratic socialism. Non-alignment, on his account, was not meant to create a third camp but to keep decision-making in the hands of the newly independent states themselves.
15.6.2 India’s Non-Aligned Policy In Action
An argument is only as good as what a government does with it. Four strands of Indian action in the Nehru years show the policy at work.
Mediation Where Neither Bloc Could Act
The first was mediation. Because India belonged to neither camp, it could sometimes be accepted by both as an honest broker.
Speaking For Peoples Still Unfree
The second strand was support for peoples still under colonial or racial rule. India pressed the case of colonies seeking independence and objected to apartheid in South Africa from its earliest years at the United Nations.
In 1962 India was among the states that pressed the General Assembly to call on members to take diplomatic and economic measures against South Africa until it abandoned racial discrimination.
Working For Disarmament
The third strand was disarmament. Nehru argued repeatedly against the arms race and called for the ending of nuclear tests and the destruction of existing stockpiles.
Following that policy, India signed the treaty of 1963 that banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water. It was a limited treaty, and it did not stop underground testing, but it was the first international check on the practice.
Building The Movement Itself
The fourth strand was the movement. Nehru worked with the other architects through the 1950s to turn a shared instinct into meetings, criteria and declarations.
He died in 1964, three years after the first summit. India continued to describe non-alignment as the basis of its foreign policy long after him.
15.7 Summary
- After 1945 the wartime alliance broke up and the world divided into two power blocs, one led by the United States and the other by the Soviet Union. Their rivalry, carried on without direct war between them, is called the Cold War.
- Each bloc built a military alliance — NATO in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955. At the same moment colonial rule was ending across Asia and Africa, and every new state was pressed to choose a side in return for aid and support.
- Non-alignment is the policy of a sovereign state that joins no power bloc and no military alliance, while taking an active part in world affairs to promote peace and cooperation. Its main features are:
- no alignment with any bloc and opposition to military alliances;
- freedom to take its own foreign policy decisions;
- active participation in international problems rather than aloofness;
- judgement of every issue on its merits, and support for freedom and justice.
- Non-alignment is not neutrality, which applies to a particular war; not isolationism, which avoids world affairs altogether; and not non-commitment, since the non-aligned took strong positions. What they refused was to take those positions on instruction.
- Six factors pushed the new states towards non-alignment: fear of being drawn into another war; distrust of powers that still held colonies; the wish to keep an independent judgement; the wish for goodwill with all the big powers; the need for capital and technical help from both sides; and the belief that their numbers gave them moral force without weapons.
- Panchsheel means the five principles of peaceful co-existence, set out in an agreement signed by India and China in 1954. The principles were taken as the guidelines on which the movement grew.
- The Bandung Conference of April 1955 brought twenty-nine Asian and African states together in Indonesia. It condemned colonialism and racial discrimination and called for cooperation, but its test for admission was geography, so several states present belonged to blocs.
- A preparatory meeting at Cairo in June 1961 fixed a narrower test based on conduct: an independent policy of non-alignment, support for independence movements, and no membership of a great-power military alliance. Conduct, not geography, now decided membership.
- The first summit met at Belgrade in September 1961, with twenty-five participating countries and three Latin American observers. It discussed Berlin, the Congo, Chinese representation at the United Nations and apartheid, demanded an end to colonial rule, called for disarmament and urged both superpowers to negotiate.
- Five leaders are named as the architects of the movement: Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Sukarno of Indonesia. The first three are often called its founding fathers.
- The objectives of the movement fall into three families: preventing war and strengthening the United Nations; ending colonial rule, imperialism and racial discrimination while upholding the sovereign equality of states; and securing development, including a New International Economic Order and, later, human rights and the environment.
- Nehru argued that a state which aligns itself with a great power surrenders its own opinion. He rejected the alliances of both camps, denied that non-alignment meant neutrality, and denied that the non-aligned were forming a third bloc.
- India’s policy showed itself in action: mediation that neither bloc could perform, as in Korea in 1953; opposition to colonial rule and to apartheid at the United Nations; support for disarmament, including the 1963 treaty banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and under water; and the building of the movement itself.
- The movement’s method was the declaration, the summit and the vote, since it had no army and no binding treaty. That method kept colonialism, racial discrimination and disarmament on the world agenda, but it could not stop wars, including wars between its own members.
15.8 Key Terms
- Apartheid — the system of enforced racial separation and white minority rule that operated in South Africa.
- Cold War — the long rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, carried on through hostility, propaganda and armed preparation, without direct war between them.
- Disarmament — the reduction or removal of a state’s weapons, especially nuclear weapons, by agreement.
- Imperialism — the control of one country’s land, people and resources by another state.
- Isolationism — a policy of staying out of world affairs generally, rather than only out of alliances.
- Neo-colonialism — control exercised over a formally independent country through economic pressure, debt or dependence, rather than through direct rule.
- Neutrality — the legal position of a state that takes no part in a particular war and helps neither side in it.
- New International Economic Order — a reformed set of rules for world trade, aid and finance, demanded by developing countries to secure fairer terms.
- Non-alignment — the policy of a sovereign state that joins no power bloc and no military alliance, while taking an active part in world affairs to promote peace and cooperation.
- Panchsheel — the five principles of peaceful co-existence agreed between India and China in 1954.
- Power bloc — a group of states that follow the lead of one great power in defence and foreign policy.
15.9 Points to Ponder
- If a state refuses every alliance but accepts aid from both blocs, whose decision is it really taking? What would you look at to find out?
- Bandung admitted states because of where they were; Cairo admitted them because of how they behaved. What does a movement gain, and what does it lose, when it changes its test for membership in that way?
- The non-aligned had numbers but no armies. Under what conditions can numbers alone change what powerful states do — and when can they not?
- Nehru argued that alignment costs a country its own opinion. Is that always true? Can you think of a case where being tied to an ally would leave a small state freer rather than less free?
- A movement that keeps a question on the world’s agenda but cannot settle it — has it succeeded or failed? How would you measure the difference?
- Photographs, declarations and summit lists survive from 1961, but private conversations mostly do not. How should that shape the way we judge what the first summit actually achieved?
15.10 Objective Questions
- The first summit conference of non-aligned countries was held at
- Bandung
- Cairo
- Belgrade
- Peking [1 mark]
- Non-alignment differs from neutrality chiefly because
- it applies only while a war is being fought
- it is a standing policy that includes active participation in world affairs
- it forbids all dealings with the two power blocs
- it requires membership of a regional military alliance [1 mark]
- The demand for fairer rules of world trade, aid and finance was expressed in the call for
- the Warsaw Pact
- a New International Economic Order
- a Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission
- an Asian–African Conference [1 mark]
- Choose the correct option. Assertion (A): The newly independent countries of Asia and Africa needed capital and technical knowledge from abroad. Reason (R): Non-alignment allowed them to seek assistance from both power blocs.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true but R is false
- A is false but R is true [1 mark]
- Choose the correct option. Assertion (A): Non-alignment is not the same as isolation. Reason (R): The non-aligned states took an active part in the work of the United Nations.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true but R is false
- A is false but R is true [1 mark]
- Match the leader in Column I with the country in Column II. [1 mark]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. Josip Broz Tito | i. Indonesia |
| b. Gamal Abdel Nasser | ii. Yugoslavia |
| c. Kwame Nkrumah | iii. Ghana |
| d. Sukarno | iv. Egypt |
Fill in the blank. The Asian–African Conference of April 1955 was held at ______ in Indonesia. [1 mark]
State whether the following statement is true or false. The Non-Aligned Movement was launched with a treaty binding its members to defend one another in war. [1 mark]
15.11 Check Your Concepts
Define non-alignment. [2 marks]
State the meaning of the term Panchsheel. [2 marks]
Name any three architects of the Non-Aligned Movement, and state the country each of them led. [3 marks]
Differentiate between non-alignment and neutrality. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, why non-alignment is described as a policy of action rather than of aloofness. [4 marks]
Why is it said that the Bandung Conference of 1955 was not yet a conference of the non-aligned? [4 marks]
Describe the objectives of the Non-Aligned Movement. [5 marks]
Trace the causes that led the newly independent states of Asia and Africa to adopt non-alignment, and explain the part Jawaharlal Nehru played in turning that choice into a movement. [6 marks]
15.12 Show Your Skills
- Study the description of the postage stamp given below and answer the questions that follow. A commemorative stamp issued by a member country carries three portraits side by side. Each portrait is labelled with a name and a country — India, Yugoslavia and Egypt. Along the top edge run the words ‘Non-Aligned Movement’, and along the bottom edge the year of the movement’s first summit.
- Name the three leaders most likely shown on the stamp, and state what they are usually called in relation to this movement.
- State any two objectives of the movement whose name appears on the stamp.
- State one thing about the movement that a commemorative stamp cannot tell a historian. [5 marks]
- Read the situation given below and answer the questions that follow. It is 1960. A country in Africa has become independent in the past year. One superpower offers it a defence agreement, weapons and a military base, together with generous aid. The other offers credit for a steel plant and training for its engineers, on condition that it votes with that bloc at the United Nations. The new government’s ministers are divided, and the Prime Minister asks what a non-aligned policy would require.
- State what a non-aligned policy would require the government to refuse in each offer, and what it could still accept.
- Explain why such a decision would not amount to isolationism.
- State one risk the country would carry by taking this course. [5 marks]
- Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow. When the first summit of the non-aligned countries met in September 1961, the wall dividing Berlin had just gone up and one superpower had announced that it was resuming nuclear testing. The delegates discussed Berlin, the fighting in the Congo and racial discrimination in South Africa. They demanded an end to colonial rule, called for general disarmament, and sent messages to the leaders of both superpowers urging them to negotiate.
- Name the city where this summit was held, and state the test of membership that had been fixed for it three months earlier.
- Explain why a single meeting took up both the Berlin crisis and the ending of colonial rule.
- The movement’s method was the declaration, the summit and the vote. State one thing this method could achieve and one thing it could not. [6 marks]