Cold war era - CHALLENGE TO BIPOLARITY

CHALLENGE TO BIPOLARITY

We have already seen how the Cold War tended to divide the world into two rival alliances. It was in this context that nonalignment offered the newly decolonized countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America a third option-not to join either alliance.

The roots of NAM went back to the friendship between three leaders - Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito. India's Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser - who held a meeting in 1956. Indonesia's Sukarno and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah strongly supported them. These five leaders came to be known as the five founders of NAM. The first non-aligned summit was held in Belgrade in 1961. 

This was the culmination of at least three factors:

(1) cooperation among these five countries.

(2) growing Cold War tensions and its widening arenas, and

(3) the dramatic entry of many newly decolonized African countries into the inter- national arena. By 1960, there were 16 new African members in the UN.

The first summit was attended by 25 member states. Over the years, the membership of NAM has expanded. The latest meeting, the 17th summit, was held in Venezuela in 2016. It included 120 member states and 17 observer countries.

As non-alignment grew into a popular international movement, countries of various different political systems and interests joined it. This made the movement less homogeneous and also made it more difficult to define in very neat and precise terms: what did it really stand for? Increasingly.

NAM was easier to define in terms of what it was not. It was not about being a member of an alliance. The policy of staying away from alliances should not be considered isolationism or neutrality. Non-alignment is not isolationism since isolationism means remaining aloof from world affairs. Isolationism sums up the foreign policy of the US from the American War of Independence in 1787 up to the beginning of the First World War. In comparison, the non-aligned countries, including India, played an active role in mediating between the two rival alliances in the cause of peace and stability. Their strength was based on their unity and their resolve to remain non-aligned despite the attempt by the two superpowers to bring them into their alliances

Non-alignment is also not neutrality. Neutrality refers principally to a policy of staying out of war. States practising neutrality are not required to help end a war. They do not get involved in wars and do not take any position on the appropriateness or morality of a war. Non-aligned states, including India, were actually involved in wars for various reasons. They also worked to prevent war between others and tried to end wars that had broken out.

NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER

The non-aligned countries were more than merely mediators during the Cold War. The challenge for most of the non-aligned countries - a majority of them were categorised as the Least Developed Countries (LDC) - was to be more developed economically and to lift their people out of poverty. Economic development was also vital for the independence of the new countries. Without sustained development, a country could not be truly free. It would remain dependent on the richer countries including the colonial powers from which political freedom had been achieved.  The idea of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) originated with this realisation, The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) brought out a report in 1972 entitled Towards a New Trade Policy for Development. The report proposed a reform of the global trading system so as to:

(1) give the LDCs control over their natural resources exploited by the developed Western countries,

(ii) obtain access to Western markets so that the LDCS could sell their products and, therefore, make trade more beneficial for the poorer countries,

(ii) reduce the cost of technology from the Western countries, and

(iv) provide the LDCs with a greater role in international economic institutions. Gradually, the nature of non- alignment changed to give greater importance to economic issues.

In 1961, at the first summit in Belgrade, economic issues had not been very important. By the mid-1970s, they had become the most important issues. As a result, NAM became an economic pressure group. By the late 1980s, however, the NIEO initiative had faded, mainly because of the stiff opposition from the developed countries who acted as a united group while the non-aligned countries struggled to maintain their unity in the face of this opposition.