Save Nonalignment From Its Cumbrous ‘Movement’

To anyone who attended the first summit of the Nonaligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, the ninth summit, held in the same city this month, was an anti-climactic and deeply depressing event. This time at Belgrade, it was even more evident than at the two preceding summits that the Nonaligned Movement has lost its way because it has lost its raison d’etre. It now has little or nothing to do with nonalignment as such.

At the two earlier meetings, in New Delhi and Harare, Zimbabwe, members complained that the movement had become ineffective and irrelevant, and had been bypassed by world events largely because its sessions consisted merely of long speeches and longer documents. As a result, Belgrade was designated as the summit of reform.

To cut down on documentation, the Yugoslavs drafted a 10-page comprehensive final declaration, a summation of the movement’s global position, plus nine political and nine economic resolutions, about 25 pages long altogether. But the 18 resolutions grew to 45; one, on southern Africa, replaced the Yugoslav draft of 2 1/2 pages with a text 20 pages long. In short, the movement refused to depart from its bad old ways of verbiage and verbosity.

As for matters of substance, the Yugoslav draft declaration really said it all, but not for those countries the Yugoslavs described as “conservative and dogmatic.”

The draft suggested that with the thawing of the Cold War, the priority objective of the movement should no longer be rhetorical anti-colonialism, necessarily anti-Western. Instead, taking advantage of the thaw, nonaligned nations should set themselves new global objectives, such as the environment, the menace of drugs, disarmament.

But the conservative dogmatics, stuck in the mind set of the ‘60s and ‘70s, would have none of it. Colonialism and imperialism are not dead, they insisted, and must continue to be denounced. They dredged up the fact that 20 territories--sparrow droppings on the map of the world--were still under alien domination. Their additions to the original draft gave the final declaration a fusty, backward-looking tone.

Some participants said the Nonaligned Movement had to find new goals because its function was to act as a bridge or a buffer between East and West. This is a complete misunderstanding of what nonalignment was supposed to be. Jawaharlal Nehru was its sole progenitor and began practicing it in independent India’s foreign policy after 1948. His concept of nonalignment was that each country should have the courage to practice independence of judgment in world affairs, irrespective of the positions of the big powers: sometimes with one of them, sometimes with the other, sometimes with neither; a policy of active choice, not neutralism and not equidistance.

Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito did not understand the logical conclusion to Nehru’s concept--that the nonaligned should be nonaligned even toward the other nonaligned. So in June, 1961, when Nasser suggested to Nehru the holding of a conference of the nonaligned, leading to a Nonaligned Movement, Nehru firmly rejected the suggestion.

Nasser and Tito then went ahead on their own, and Nehru, after long hesitation, was embarrassed into attending the first conference in Belgrade in September, 1961. Nehru’s expectation was that nonalignment, as an idea, had to make its own way in the world through sincere acceptance by each state--not by the state becoming the member of a “movement.”

The change for the worse came in 1964 when the Nonaligned Movement automatically accepted as members all 22 nations of the newly formed Organization of African Unity. With each successive enlargement in membership, from the original 25 to the 102 represented this month in Belgrade, the gap between nonalignment and the Nonaligned Movement grew wider. In the last few years, an increasing number of members have felt that the movement had become not only meaningless but flagrantly hypocritical.

But for the sake of form, all--including the Yugoslavs, the most serious members of the movement--have to sing its praises. Thus the Yugoslavs, in their opening speeches, claimed the movement had done much to bring about the success of anti-colonialism and liberation.

It is virtually impossible, however, to find a single instance in which the Nonaligned Movement as such, or a group of countries acting for it, took positive action to push forward a liberation movement. Certainly this did not happen in the long drawn-out struggles in Algeria, southern Africa and West Asia, or for the displaced Palestinians. The movement’s so-called anti-colonial “achievements” are a classical case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)--the logical fallacy of thinking that a happening which follows another must be its result.

On almost every issue at Belgrade, members passed the buck to the United Nations or the U.N. secretary general. Given this, it is surely time for the Nonaligned Movement, its bloated membership two-thirds that of the United Nations, to stop duplicating the world body and get out of its way.

Recently the movement has put greater emphasis on economic issues, with a lot said about the “New Economic Order” and the “South-South” dialogue. At long last, it was openly admitted at Belgrade that these had come to naught, and that it is the North-South dialogue that matters--particularly on the matter of Third World debt. Nearly every speaker referred to this terrible menace hanging over the economies of nonaligned nations.

Only one speaker was brutally realistic. Libya’s Col. Moammar Kadafi, forgetting his milk camels and his horses and his nubile female guards, opined that since the nonaligned countries had gotten into debt by living beyond their means, they were undeserving of either sympathy or assistance. And how serious were the 18 economic resolutions, none of which mentioned the prime cause of economic woes--too many babies?

President George Vassiliou of Cyprus told the meeting that the Nonaligned Movement’s ideas had become commonplace and that it risked being left in history’s wake. What really needs to be done is to rescue the simple, original idea of nonalignment from the cumbrous, inert “movement” that bears its name. There are only about 20 truly nonaligned countries: They should be able to slip away and do their own thing. But alas, that is highly improbable.