The Third World Challenge: The Fate of Nonalignment

Fouad Ajami

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1980/81

Article preview: first 500 of 8,293 words total.

Summary:  ?The only really nonaligned countries in the world,? the president of Sri Lanka once quipped, ?are the United States and the Soviet Union.? A quarter-century after the great historic meeting in Bandung in 1955, what remains of nonalignment? How has the Third World fared since then? How have the heirs of the great historic figures, who most recently met in Havana in September 1979, acquitted themselves and handled the legacy? What kind of baggage will the nonaligned take to their next meeting in Baghdad in 1982? The last surviving member of the leading Bandung figures, U Nu of Burma, now tells us that the movement has been betrayed: ?I cannot honestly call it a nonaligned movement. . . . As far as I am concerned I do not see any bright future for it.?

Fouad Ajami is Associate Professor and Director of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies of The Johns Hopkins University. His book The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

"The only really nonaligned countries in the world," the president of Sri Lanka once quipped, "are the United States and the Soviet Union."1 A quarter-century after the great historic meeting in Bandung in 1955, what remains of nonalignment? How has the Third World fared since then? How have the heirs of the great historic figures, who most recently met in Havana in September 1979, acquitted themselves and handled the legacy? What kind of baggage will the nonaligned take to their next meeting in Baghdad in 1982? The last surviving member of the leading Bandung figures, U Nu of Burma, now tells us that the movement has been betrayed: "I cannot honestly call it a nonaligned movement. . . . As far as I am concerned I do not see any bright future for it."2

A quarter-century is long enough for an "audit." To follow the twists and turns of the Third World journey is to illuminate not only the path of the Third World but the global background against which it operated as well. The hope into which Third World states were born reflected the buoyancy and enthusiasm of youth. It also reflected the hubris of the West-its belief that its former wards would find their way, that the West knew the answers to social fragmentation and breakdown, and that aid and social engineering would remake "traditional" societies.

Likewise, today's despair is in part the harvest of Third World nationalism and in part the product of the liberal world order maintained by the West. The West no longer promises. Its ideas, gunboats, and technology incorporated others into the world and now it does not know what to do with them. There has been a "double revolt," if you will, against the liberal world order-a revolt by clients who no longer believe and by patrons who are too disillusioned and too besieged to honor previous codes and commitments.

II

The men who met in Bandung were dreamers. The world they lived in was not really theirs; relatively speaking they had clean hands. The basic case made in Bandung was simple and issued from classical liberal roots: that men could come together and create states and these states could fulfill their dreams. As their host, Indonesian President Sukarno, put it, they were the "first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind." The hall in which they met, he told his guests, "is filled with and contains the undying, indomitable and invincible spirit of those who went before us. Their struggle and their sacrifice paved the way for this meeting."

The colonial case was no longer persuasive. The West had lost both the nerve and the means to enforce it; and those at the receiving end had lost their tolerance for it. The leaders in Bandung could rightly feel that history was on their side, and that their enemies were swimming against the current. "We knew," said Sukarno, "how to oppose and destroy."3

The weapons and the sordid deeds ...

End of preview: first 500 of 8,293 words total.