Lessons from the Non-Aligned Movement

THIS comment has been triggered by the outcome — or the lack of it — of the recent BRICS+ summit in Brazil. BRICS+ is important as it is seen as the premier forum representing the Global South. India was represented by PM Narendra Modi, but China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were absent.

Advertisement

This led to some commentators pointing to its diminishing relevance in a world of raging conflicts, breakdown of multilateral trading rules and recourse to blatant unilateralism and protectionism, and the retreat from universal collaborative action to tackle global challenges such as climate change, pandemics and the ungoverned fields of cyberspace and artificial intelligence (AI).

Is BRICS+ the manifestation of multipolarity and leadership of the Global South? Or have recent geopolitical developments shown up its lack of capacity to exercise meaningful influence? More controversially, how does the Global South rate in terms of its role and influence with the now dormant and largely orphaned Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)?

Members of the NAM had neither economic nor military capacities during the movement’s heyday between 1965 and 1990, when the Cold War ended. In the shifting geopolitical equations of the post-Cold War era, the NAM has been reduced to a lingering relic of the past.

One of its founding members and acknowledged leaders, India, today seems to regard it as an embarrassing interlude in its post-Independence history. Aspiring to the leadership of the newly minted Global South is more inviting.

And yet it is a paradox that the countries of the Global South, enjoying far greater economic, military and technological capabilities than their non-aligned forebears, seem less effectual in influencing issues of international peace and security, trade and commerce and global governance of new domains such as climate change, cyber security, AI and public health than the NAM in the past.

An objective recounting of NAM’s role in the Cold War years uncovers a more substantive geopolitical role and greater impact on international norm-setting than the Global South has been able to achieve.

I recall that as an Indian representative to the then Committee on Disarmament in Geneva, the Group of Non-Aligned and Neutral Nations (Group of 21) played a key role in the conclusion of the chemical weapons treaty, kept up the pressure for the conclusion of a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and ensured that nuclear disarmament remained high on the international agenda. It is thanks to the initiative of the NAM that the UN was able to convene, successively, three Special Sessions on Disarmament (1978, 1982 and 1988), which focused international attention on the vital issues of peace and security.

Is the Global South capable of mobilising the large constituency of developing countries to convene such an international gathering to address the dangerous and even reckless recourse to aggression and coercive violence that threatens humanity itself?

An argument is advanced that while the non-aligned countries had a solidarity born from their common experience of colonialism and imperialism, that has long faded; that today there is far greater political and economic diversity among nations of the Global South than among NAM countries; that their interests are more divergent. This is not a tenable argument.

Just as the NAM was focused on the creation of a more fair and equitable global order, so is the Global South. That should be the basis for renewed solidarity.

It is said that during the Cold War, there was a convergence of interests in opposing Western dominance, that more recently there is a complex web of interdependencies binding developing and advanced countries together. During the Cold War, most post-colonial countries were even more tied economically to their erstwhile metropolitan masters than they are today. And yet they banded together to demand a more equitable economic and trading system and managed to achieve some success.

The WTO multilateral regime owes greatly to the collective negotiating effort of the non-aligned countries. I saw this in action during my assignment in Geneva (1980-83). Today, the Global South is powerless against the unilateralism of Trump’s America. Each trading partner is being picked off one by one. The situation cries out for a collective rebuff from the Global South countries who have created a multipolar economic order but are unable to leverage this into a powerful rejection of selfish unilateralism.

Trump threatens the BRICS+ against pursuing financial and monetary independence; and the BRICS+ get suitably intimidated. If one compares such behaviour to the NAM willingness to confront overwhelming power, then the Global South and its representatives seem unusually timid.

The NAM was too quick to declare itself irrelevant once the Cold War ended. The US was never comfortable with the NAM, even if it was like a nagging aunt rather than a threat. A country which liked to clothe its cynical pursuit of power and influence in high moral rhetoric did not appreciate that there was a group of nations led by charismatic leaders who articulated a compelling vision of a more peaceful, equitable and just international order and a global economic regime which supported their efforts towards achieving the economic and social development of their peoples.

The end of the Cold War was not only presented as a victory for American exceptionalism, but a validation of the US-led global order. This had no place for any competing narrative, including the vision driving non-alignment. The NAM was not relevant only in the context of the Cold War. It was a search for strategic autonomy in an unequal world dominated by just a few powerful countries. That search did not end with the Cold War.

If the countries of the Global South boast of more economic, military and technological capabilities today than they did as developing countries in the pre-Cold War era, why are they unable to come together to resist the reassertion of US and Western dominance? Why does their word not count in tackling global issues like climate change, where their contribution is indispensable?

The lesson from the NAM is that there is no overarching vision which unites them today; that their policies are driven by transactional imperatives, without being anchored in some larger vision of the future. Nehru spoke of the pursuit of “enlightened self-interest” as the guiding principle of India’s foreign policy and its role in the NAM. Its leadership of the Global South needs to learn this lesson from the past.

Shyam Saran is a former Foreign Secretary.