Bandung Conference

Five newly independent states with no significant military power met to coordinate, because coordination was the only instrument available to them. Weak states combine because combination is the one way to acquire weight, and the immediate context was a war in Indochina neither bloc consulted them about.

The sponsors chose who to invite, and the choices were political: China yes, Israel no, both Koreas no, South Africa no. An invitation list is a claim about who belongs, and these five governments awarded themselves the power to decide it for a whole conference.

Twenty-nine governments with almost no military or economic power convened, and the great powers paid attention. That is a real effect and it is worth being precise about its source: not capability but numbers, and the votes those numbers would command in the General Assembly.

The economic discussions revealed how little the participants had to offer each other: they exported similar commodities to the same industrial buyers and had no capital. Solidarity does not create complementarity, and the trade among them remained marginal for decades.

Condemnation cost nothing and achieved something, because it committed a bloc of states to vote together in the Assembly on every colonial question thereafter. Words backed by numbers in a body that passes resolutions are an instrument, and the colonial powers found them increasingly expensive to resist.

Pakistan, Turkey, Iraq and the Philippines were in Western pacts and would not condemn them; India and others regarded such pacts as colonialism continued. The disagreement was fundamental and was papered over, because the appearance of unity was worth more to everyone than resolving it.

Zhou set aside his prepared speech, spoke briefly and conciliatorily, and spent the conference in private meetings with the delegations most suspicious of him. It was an exercise in reducing the threat China presented, executed with considerable skill and to considerable effect.

Ten principles were adopted, no organisation was created, and within a decade several signatories were at war with each other. Declarations of principle among states with divergent interests describe an aspiration, and this one was overtaken by events within a few years.

A bipolar system forces third parties to choose, and these governments were looking for a third option. The whole non-aligned project is an attempt to escape the alternatives a bipolar structure presents, and it succeeded better as a diplomatic posture than as a source of security.

Inviting China was the sponsors' largest decision, bringing a great power into a gathering of weak states. It gave the conference weight and it also gave Beijing a platform, and the asymmetry between one nuclear-aspiring great power and twenty-eight others was managed rather than resolved.

Non-alignment was a strategy for extracting benefits from both blocs rather than a renunciation of the contest. States that refuse to commit can be courted by both sides, which is a genuine source of leverage available specifically in a bipolar system and lost when it ends.

Dependence on a few primary commodities, priced in markets they did not control, was the shared structural condition. Political independence had not altered the economic position these states occupied, and the conference identified the problem far more clearly than any remedy for it.

Both superpowers were competing for influence among these states, which gave anticolonial demands leverage they would not otherwise have had. Bipolar competition accelerated decolonisation, because neither pole could afford to be identified with the colonial powers.

States facing immediate regional threats sought great-power protection while those without such threats could afford non-alignment. The split followed each participant's security situation rather than its principles, which is why no formula could reconcile it.

China was diplomatically isolated, excluded from the United Nations and recently at war with the United States, and needed relationships wherever it could find them. A state without allies courts the uncommitted, and Bandung was the largest gathering of uncommitted states available.

India and China signed the same document and fought a border war seven years later; India and Pakistan both signed and fought twice. Shared principles do not survive contact with a territorial dispute, and the conference had no mechanism for handling one.

The five were parliamentary states with active publics and recent independence movements, and their populations were hostile to any arrangement resembling the imperial relationships just ended. Domestic opinion made alignment with either bloc politically costly, which shaped the foreign policy.

The participants had incompatible domestic systems, from parliamentary democracies to monarchies to a communist state, and the sponsors chose to organise around anticolonialism rather than around any shared form of government. That choice made the conference possible and limited what it could agree.

Sukarno told delegates that this was the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind, and the claim to a right of self-determination ran through everything. Anticolonialism was argued as a principle the West itself professed, and turned against its authors.

Delegates pressed for greater access to development finance and for a larger voice in the Bank and the Fund, where voting was weighted by subscription. The demand was for the existing institutions to be opened rather than replaced, and it took twenty years to produce much.

The condemnation of racial discrimination and of apartheid connected the anticolonial argument to civil rights struggles elsewhere, and American delegations noticed. Segregation at home became an international liability at precisely the moment the United States was courting these governments.

The Ceylonese prime minister raised Soviet control of eastern Europe as a form of colonialism, which forced an argument the sponsors had hoped to avoid. Open debate among sovereign delegations produced a genuine confrontation, and the conference was more interesting for it.

He offered to negotiate on Taiwan, on overseas Chinese nationality and on border questions, addressing the specific fears of specific governments. Diplomacy conducted as a series of concrete bilateral reassurances is more effective than any general declaration, and he understood that.

The principles included respect for human rights and for the Charter, adopted by governments several of which were already suppressing their own oppositions. Endorsing standards that one's own conduct fails is common, and it still creates a benchmark that can be invoked later.

Starting with a small group of five and expanding to twenty-nine is a standard and effective sequence: establish agreement among the willing, then widen. The Colombo powers built the coalition that made a larger conference possible, and did the preparatory work themselves.

Agreeing the place, date, agenda and invitations in advance, at a smaller meeting, is precisely the preparation that makes a large conference workable. Bogor did the procedural work, and Bandung's success four months later rested on it.

The conference produced no secretariat, no headquarters and no permanent body, which limited what it could do afterwards. Movements that decline to build institutions depend on repeated summits and personal relationships, and both are fragile as the founding generation passes.

The proposals here, commodity price stabilisation, technical assistance, development finance, became the agenda of UNCTAD in 1964 and the New International Economic Order in the seventies. Bandung was the origin of a programme pursued through international institutions for thirty years.

The resolutions gave the Assembly's decolonisation committees a mandate and a majority, and the machinery ground on for thirty years producing plebiscites, reports and admissions. Slow institutional process did the work that the declarations only demanded.

The drafters resolved it by writing principles broad enough that both positions fitted: collective defence was legitimate if not used to serve great-power interests. Deliberate ambiguity preserved consensus, at the cost of a text that constrained nobody.

The nationality question, whether Chinese communities abroad owed allegiance to Beijing, was settled by a treaty with Indonesia signed at the conference. Converting a fear into a specific negotiable issue and then signing an instrument is how diplomatic anxiety is actually reduced.

Without a secretariat the movement had to reconstitute itself at each summit, and the Non-Aligned Movement founded in 1961 supplied only a partial remedy. The absence of a permanent body meant Bandung's programme depended on the United Nations to be pursued at all.

These states were asserting a right to participate in shaping international order rather than merely to be admitted to it. The claim was that international society's rules had been made by Europeans for Europeans, and that its new members had standing to revise them.

Twenty-nine states representing more than half the world's population convened without any great power of the Western bloc present. The society of states was being reconstituted from outside its traditional centre, which is the conference's structural significance.

The participants did not reject international society; they demanded full membership in it, invoking the Charter, sovereignty and non-intervention repeatedly. This was a claim to have the existing rules applied universally rather than a proposal to replace them.

Economic sovereignty, including the right to control natural resources, was asserted as an attribute of independence rather than a matter for negotiation with former rulers. That claim entered international society's vocabulary here and was pressed through the Assembly for decades.

Colonialism had been a legitimate institution of international society within living memory, regulated rather than prohibited. Its condemnation by half the world's states marked its removal from the category of acceptable practice, which is among the fastest normative changes on record.

What held the conference together was a shared claim to sovereign equality rather than a shared alignment. That is a thin basis and it was sufficient, because sovereign equality was precisely what these states had recently acquired and most wanted affirmed.

Zhou's endorsement of peaceful coexistence placed a revolutionary state inside the vocabulary of the society of states, at least in public. Accepting the language of sovereignty and non-intervention was the price of admission, and China paid it.

The ten principles restate the Charter with an anticolonial emphasis: sovereign equality, non-aggression, non-intervention, peaceful settlement of disputes. What is striking is how conservative they are. The newest members of international society affirmed its existing rules rather than proposing others, and asked only that those rules be applied to everyone, including to themselves.

Asia and Africa were being spoken of as a political category rather than a geographic one, which had not previously been the case. Constructing that identity, of formerly colonised peoples with shared interests, was the conference's most durable achievement.

Excluding Israel and South Africa while including China defined the conference's identity as anticolonial and anti-racial rather than anti-communist. The boundaries drawn at Bogor determined what Bandung would come to stand for, more than any resolution adopted there.

Richard Wright, Adam Malik and journalists from three continents reported the conference as an event in world history, and its meaning spread well beyond the communiqué. Bandung became a reference point for anticolonial politics for decades, invoked far more often than it was read.

Framing poverty as a legacy of colonial extraction rather than as a natural condition changed the terms of every subsequent development argument. The explanation a group accepts for its own position determines what it demands, and this one demanded restitution as well as assistance.

Describing colonialism as an evil which should speedily be brought to an end, in a document signed by twenty-nine governments, made the position hard to argue against openly. Once a norm reaches that point, defenders switch from justification to delay.

The disputes showed that the third world was a category being constructed rather than one that existed, and its coherence depended on which questions were asked. Identities of this kind hold on the issues that created them and fracture on everything else.

Bandung transformed China's image from an aggressive revolutionary power to a leader of the decolonising world, and the transformation was achieved almost entirely by performance. What states are understood to be can change faster than what they do.

Bandung's afterlife has been far larger than its immediate results: it is invoked as the origin of the third world, of non-alignment and of the global south. The memory of the conference became a political resource that successive generations have drawn on.