How the Non-Aligned Movement Took Shape

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The Non Aligned Movement was not founded in a moment of triumph. It was assembled, over roughly fifteen years, by leaders of countries that had just stopped being colonies and who found that the two victorious superpowers expected them to enlist immediately in a new quarrel. The movement that resulted was loose, argumentative and frequently ineffective, and it nevertheless became the largest grouping of states outside the United Nations itself, with a membership that eventually passed one hundred and twenty countries.

The setting: decolonisation meets the Cold War

Between 1945 and 1965 the political map of Asia and Africa was remade. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Indonesia in 1949, Ghana in 1957, and 1960 alone saw more than a dozen African states gain independence. These new governments faced identical problems: no capital, weak administrations, borders drawn by others, and populations expecting immediate improvement in living standards.

Simultaneously, the United States was building an alliance system, NATO in 1949, then in Asia the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation and the Baghdad Pact, later the Central Treaty Organisation, which drew in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The Soviet Union responded with the Warsaw Pact in 1955 and with offers of aid and arms. Military assistance was available on generous terms to any government willing to pick a side. That was the pressure the non aligned states were resisting, and it was not abstract: Pakistan's alliance with the United States directly shaped India's calculations, and alliance politics repeatedly interacted with local disputes in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

From Colombo to Bandung to Belgrade

The sequence of meetings matters because each one added something. A Colombo conference of South Asian prime ministers in 1954 brought together the leaders of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Burma, now Myanmar, and Indonesia, and produced the idea of a wider Asian African gathering. In April 1954 India and China signed an agreement on Tibet whose preamble set out the five principles known as Panchsheel: mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non aggression, non interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. These supplied a vocabulary.

The Asian African Conference met at Bandung in West Java, Indonesia, in April 1955, hosted by President Sukarno, with delegations from twenty nine countries representing a very large share of the world's population. Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, Kwame Nkrumah's Gold Coast delegation and others attended. Bandung was not a founding meeting of the Non Aligned Movement, and it included states that were formally allied to the West, which produced sharp argument about whether the conference should condemn all forms of colonialism including Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. The final communique set out ten principles on peaceful coexistence, self determination and racial equality. Its lasting achievement was demonstrating that Asian and African states could convene without European or American sponsorship at all.

Non alignment proper was organised in the following years, largely through the personal diplomacy of Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. Tito's position was distinctive: a communist leader who had broken with Stalin in 1948 and therefore needed a constituency outside both blocs. A meeting on the Adriatic island of Brijuni in July 1956 brought Tito, Nehru and Nasser together, and the Suez crisis later that year, when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt after Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, gave the emerging group a defining cause. The first summit conference of non aligned countries met at Belgrade in September 1961, with twenty five participating states. Membership criteria were adopted requiring an independent policy based on peaceful coexistence, support for national liberation movements, and no membership of a multilateral military alliance concluded in the context of great power conflict, nor a bilateral alliance or foreign base arranged in that context.

What the movement did, and what defeated it

The movement's real work was done in the United Nations General Assembly, where numbers count and where the non aligned bloc, overlapping heavily with the Group of 77 formed in 1964, could set the agenda. It pushed the campaign against apartheid in South Africa and against Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique, supported the independence of Namibia, and championed the New International Economic Order, a package of demands adopted by the General Assembly in 1974 seeking better commodity prices, technology transfer, and reform of trade and finance rules. Very little of the economic programme was achieved, because the industrialised countries whose consent was required had no incentive to agree, and the oil price shocks of the 1970s split the group between oil exporters and oil importing developing countries who suffered badly.

The movement also struggled with its own coherence. Members fought each other: India and Pakistan repeatedly, Iran and Iraq through the 1980s, Ethiopia and Somalia, and the movement had no mechanism to stop them. Cuba under Fidel Castro, which hosted the 1979 summit in Havana, argued that the socialist bloc was the natural ally of the non aligned world, a position rejected by others and undermined within months by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, itself a non aligned member. Some members hosted foreign bases while professing the criteria they had signed.

The end of the Cold War removed the movement's organising premise. It did not dissolve. Summits have continued at intervals in Jakarta, Durban, Kuala Lumpur, Havana, Tehran, Caracas, Baku and Kampala, and the membership remains very large, but the agenda has shifted to development finance, debt, climate justice and vaccine access, areas where other groupings, the Group of 77, the African Union, the BRICS grouping and the Group of Twenty, now compete for the same space. Historians disagree about the verdict. One reading treats the movement as a rhetorical exercise that never constrained any great power. Another notes that a coalition of poor states successfully placed decolonisation, racial equality and economic inequality at the centre of international debate for a generation, and that these were not inevitable outcomes. Both readings can be held at once, and most careful accounts do.

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