Abstract
In an irony that would likely have both surprised and gratified its founders, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has outlived the bipolar Cold War alignments that inspired its creation in the first place. It has come to be seen as synonymous with the so-called ‘Third World,’ another entity which the superpower conflict helped to create. As such, the persuasion that NAM champions — originally dubbed ‘neutralism’ but purposefully renamed ‘nonalignment’ by its founders — has historically been perceived as race- (and class-) inflected; as being the de facto collective stance of the non-European developing-nations of the global South.1 This membership was not, or not entirely, a grouping imposed by the Western camp. Although it was a French demographer who coined the term ‘Third World,’ there was always — most critically in the rhetoric of many global-South actors themselves — a racial dimension to the concept and the neutralist-nonaligned ideology that accompanied it. As a consequence, for contemporaries and scholars, NAM seemed by extension to equal non-white as well. But it is important to remember that neutralism-nonalignment, as a response to the Cold War, didn’t start out that way. ‘Race,’ broadly understood, shaped its conceptual and linguistic evolution in important ways. This historical relationship between Cold War neutralism-nonalignment — an ideological position that could be adopted by movements of various stripes — and race — a complex subject central to the postwar age of decolonization and civil rights — raises fascinating questions.
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Notes
On the ‘global race revolution,’ see Jason Parker ‘“Made- in-America Revolutions”? The “Black University” and the Decolonization of the Black Atlantic,’ Journal ofAmerican History, Vol. 96, No. 3 (December 2009), 727–8. The burgeoning literature on this and other ‘north-south’ dimensions of the east-west Cold War has already produced some landmark scholarship, including
Matthew Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict During the Algerian War for Independence,’ American Historical Review, 105 (June 2000), 739–69;
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); and the
Bancroft-Prizewinning Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Michael Hunt, Ideology and US Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987);
Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1988);
Thomas Noer, Cold War and Black Liberation: The United States and White Rule in Africa, 1948–1968 (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1988);
Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997);
Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001);
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000);
Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also
Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. DuBois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986);
Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1988 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003);
Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Connelly, ‘Cold War Lens’; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007);
Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001).
Robert Vitalis, ‘The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung,’ unpublished paper (2009), in author’s possession; Itty Abraham, ‘From Bandung to NAM: Non-alignment and Indian Foreign Policy, 1947–1965,’ Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol. 46, No. 2 (April 2008), 195–219;
Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens OH: University of Georgia Press, 2010e).
Mark Lawrence, ‘The Rise and Fall of Nonalignment,’ in Robert McMahon, ed., The Cold War in the Third World (forthcoming 2011, Oxford University Press), 7.
A brief note on style: although the term ‘Third World’ has come to be seen as passé, its use by contemporary actors argues for its use here. In addition, when the two parts of the hybrid term ‘neutralism-nonalignment’ are used individually, it is meant to reflect the historicity of its usage: neutralism was more common before the middle 1950s, nonalignment afterward. As for the term ‘Third World,’ see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chapters 1 and 2; and
Leslie Wolf-Phillips, ‘Why “Third World”: Origin, Definition and Usage,’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4 (October 1987), 1311–27.
In addition to the works in note 4, the insights of Ivan Hannaford and Kenan Malik have been especially useful in exploring the subject. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1996);
Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History, and Culture in Western Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996).
On neutralism-nonalignment, see Lawrence, ‘Rise and Fall’; Robert Rakove, ‘A Genuine Departure: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World’ (PhD Diss.), University of Virginia, December 2008; H.W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism, 1947–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and contemporary accounts, above all
G.H. Jansen, Nonalignment and the Afro-Asian States (New York, 1966); also
Lawrence W. Martin, ed., Neutralism and Nonalignment: The New States in World Affairs (New York, 1962).
Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008), chapter 1.
Robert McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996);
Andrew Rotter, Comrades at Odds: The United States and India, 1947–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000);
Kenton J. Clymer, Quest for Freedom: The United States and India’s Independence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, 38–9. See also U.S. Bajpai, ed., Nonalignment, Perspectives and Prospects (Delhi: Lancer Books, 1983);
C.R. Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy (Delhi: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and
K.P. Mishra and K.R. Narayanan, eds., Non-alignment in Contemporary International Relations (New Delhi, 1981), cited in Abraham, ‘From Bandung to NAM,’ 195.
McMahon, Cold War on the Periphery, chapter 3; Rotter, Comrades at Odds, 169–70, 211–13; William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 153–7.
On this strain in American views of Asia, see William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese-Americans in American Fiction, 1850–1940 (Hamden, 1982); and
John R. Eperjesi, The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American Culture (Hanover, 2005). However, in her article on the conference, journalist Peggy Durdin explicitly dismissed the notion that Bandung would call forth the ‘Yellow Peril.’ New York Times Magazine, 5 June 1955, cited in Jones, ‘A “Segregated” Asia?,’ 862.
After lamenting discrimination against non-white visitors to Washington on the campaign trail, Eisenhower in 1953 desegregated all federal facilities in the District of Columbia, and in subsequent years ‘worked behind the scenes to secure desegregation of [Washington] theaters and hotels.’ Philip Klinkner and Rogers Smith, Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 237. See also Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 96, 99.
The Bandung conference was the subject of both contemporary and recent scholarly analysis, receiving relatively less attention in the middle period between. Accounts of the time include George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956);
Richard Wright, The Color Curtain (New York, 1956; reprinted Oxford University Press, 1995);
Carlos Romulo, The Meaning of Bandung (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956);
A. Appadorai, The Bandung Conference (New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs, 1955);
David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (New York: Halstead Press, 1973); and more recently,
Nicholas Tarling, ‘Ah-Ah: Britain and the Bandung Conference of 1955,’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March 1992), 74–112; Samir Amin calls it the ‘Bandung Era’ in Re-reading the Postwar Period: An Intellectual Irinerary (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994);
Cary Fraser, ‘An American Dilemma: Race and Realpolitik in the American Response to the Bandung Conference, 1955,’ in Brenda Gayle Plummer, ed., Window on Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 115–40; Jason Parker, ‘Cold War II: The Eisenhower Administration, the Bandung Conference, and the Re-periodization of the Postwar Era,’ Diplomatic History (November 2006), 867–92;
Matthew Jones, ‘A “Segregated” Asia? Race, the Bandung Conference, and Pan-Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954–55,’ Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 5 (November 2005), 841–68;
Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen, eds., Afro-Asian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2006);
Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, eds., Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Lee, Making a World After Empire. For treatments of Bandung in the race-diplomacy literature, see Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, 167–73; Plummer, Rising Wind, 247–56; Lauren, Power and Prejudice, 209; Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line; Brands, Specter, 117–18; Home, Black and Red, 190–1.
This was not, contrary to much of the literature, due to a policy of deliberate exclusion on the organizers’ part. Wright, The Color Curtain, 88, cited in Vitalis, ‘Midnight Ride,’ 27. At the same time, the invitation extended to the multiracial but white-dominated Central African Federation was done ‘in order to establish the principle that the conference would not be merely a gathering of coloured races.’ Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, abridged ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 283.
Nehru was far from alone in this. For example, as Vitalis notes, Indonesian socialist Soetan Sjahrir opposed the race-tinted ‘self-glorifying and egocentric tone of anti-colonial nationalism’ that accompanied much of the rhetoric of neutralism-nonalignment at and after Bandung. Clive J. Christie, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia 1900–1980: Political Ideas of the Anticolonial Era (Richmond, 2001), 70–2, cited in Vitalis, ‘Midnight Ride,’ 27.
Lee, Making a World After Empire, 15. Lee here cites Vijay Prashad, who writes, ‘What [the conference] meant was simple: that the colonized world had now emerged to claim its space in world affairs… the Bandung Spirit was a refusal of both economic subordination and cultural suppression… The audacity of Bandung produced its own image.’ Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), 45–6.
John Munro demonstrates this in his dissertation, noting the raft of mentions of the conference by African American figures: W. Alphaeus Hunton, Decision in Africa: Sources of Current Conflict (New York: International Publishers, 1957);
Frank London Brown, Trumbull Park (2005; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1959),
Malcolm X, ‘Message to the Grassroots,’ in George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1965), 3–18; ‘General Baker,’ in Robert H., Mast, ed., Detroit Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 305–13;
Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 81–2.
John Munro, ‘The Anticolonial Front: Cold War Imperialism and the Struggle Against Global White Supremacy, 1945–1960,’ PhD Diss., University of California-Santa Barbara (December 2010), 12. See also
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York: Verso Books, 2004);
Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, eds., Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
Fanon Che Wilkins, ‘Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950–65,’ Radical History Review, 95 (Spring 2006), 191–210.
Rahul Mukherji, ‘Appraising the Legacy of Bandung: A View From India,’ in See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya, eds., Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2008), 167–9. Pancheel’s five principles, according to N. Jayapalan, can be summarized as: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty; non-aggression; non-intervention; mutual benefit and equality; and peaceful co-existence.
N. Jayapalan, The Foreign Policy of India (New York, 2001), 55.
This tension would persist in the conference aftermath as various actors weighed the merits of a’second Bandung’ as opposed to the ‘nonaligned conference’ envisioned at Brioni. John Garver, Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry in the Twentieth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 123.
James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and African, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
On the AAPSO, see Charles Neuhauser, Third World Politics: China and the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, 1957–1967 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
‘The State of the Nation and the World’ (Speech at meeting of Congress Parliamentary Party, New Delhi), 27 July 1956, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, A.K. Damodaran, Mushirul Hasan, eds., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd series, Vol. 34 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 19.
Nkrumah made ‘positive neutralism,’ ‘non-alignment,’ and ‘Pan-Africanism’ central to his public-relations efforts both at home and abroad — and used the terms more or less interchangeably. USIS-Accra to USIA, 2 February 1960, folder #3, Box 1, Foreign Service Despatches 1954–65: Africa & Australia, RG 306. See also Evan White, ‘Kwame Nkrumah: Cold War Modernity, Pan-African Ideology and the Geopolitics of Development,’ Geopolitics, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 2003), 99–124. Nasser used the coinage ‘positive neutralism’ tirelessly; see for example ‘Speech Delivered to Delegation of Arabs from the United States, 10 August 1959’; ‘Speech at Inaugural Session of National Assembly, 9 July 1960’; and ‘Speech on Return from General Assembly of United Nations, 5 October 1960,’ all in Gamal Abdel Nasser, Gamal Abdel Nasser on Nonalignment (Cairo, no publication date).
See especially ‘Introduction,’ Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (London, 1961); and
Opoku Agyeman, Nkrumah’s Ghana and East Africa: Pan-Africanism and African Interstate Relations (Rutherford New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), 28. Though as Agyeman shows important parts of East Africa — above all Kenya — disagreed. See ibid., 184–6, and
Agyeman, The Failure of Grassroots Pan-Africanism: The Case of the All-African Trade Union Federation (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). See also
Daryl Zizwe Poe, Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism (New York: Routledge, 2003).
As Lawrence observes, ‘The scope and complexity of this development surely accounts for the fact that remarkably few scholars have studied nonalignment during the Cold War in any sort of all-encompassing way. Rather, historians have mostly examined small slices of the larger arc, isolating either particular moments’ or places. Lawrence, ‘Rise and Fall,’ 3. The exceptions are Prashad, The Darker Nations; Jansen, Nonalignment and the Afro-Asian State; Westad, The Global Cold War; and D.K. Fieldhouse, The West and the Third World (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999).
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Parker, J. (2011). Ideology, Race and Nonalignment in US Cold War Foreign Relations: or, How the Cold War Racialized Neutralism Without Neutralizing Race. In: Sewell, B., Lucas, S. (eds) Challenging US Foreign Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230349209_5
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