The International History Review

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Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War:

Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-
Alignment

Jeffrey James Byrne

To cite this article: Jeffrey James Byrne (2015) Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War:
Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment, The International History Review, 37:5,
912-932, DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2015.1051569

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The International History Review, 2015
Vol. 37, No. 5, 912 932, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2015.1051569

Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria,

and the Struggle for Non-Alignment
Jeffrey James Byrne*

While historians are paying greater attention to the role of the post-colonial Third
World in international affairs, there is a tendency to focus on North South
relations and the discourse of the 1955 Bandung Conference. Relying principally
on Yugoslav and Algerian archival sources, this paper re-emphasises the dynamic
historicity of ‘Third Worldism’ and the significance of ‘South South’
connections. It explores the evolution of the Third World movement in the
decade following Bandung, when smaller countries and non-state movements
exerted greater influence while larger actors, such as India and China, quarrelled.
The founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961 represented a
victory for smaller actors who took a more provocative and subversive approach
to international relations, to the extent that NAM was a means for the weak to
wage the cold war on their terms. Over the following half-decade, Non-Alignment
supplanted Afro-Asianism as the primary organisational concept for the Third
World, confirming that the Third World was a political project with a potentially
unbounded membership rather than the expression of a non-Western, non-white
identity.
Keywords: cold war; Third World; decolonisation; Bandung Conference; Non-
Aligned Movement; Algeria; Yugoslavia; Africa; Sino-Soviet split

I. Introduction
Third Worldism in general, and non-alignment specifically, remain difficult phenom-
ena to assess in a comprehensive and satisfying manner. Grappling with the sheer
geographical scale of Third Worldism as an inspiration for political mobilisation and
the ubiquity of its invocation in different walks of life, scholars have variously
described it over the years as a movement, a project, an ideology, a trend, a vogue, a
e, and so on.1 But in addition to the inherent unwieldiness of the subject,
mentalit

Third Worldism as a field of historical inquiry has also long suffered from the limited
availability of primary sources. Consequently, while recent years have seen a growing
number of successful explorations of Third Worldism, often in particular national
contexts and often making use of new archival opportunities in the developing world,
scholars have traditionally tended to dwell on the grandiose rhetoric that Third

*Email: [email protected]. An early draft of this article was first presented at the ‘Role of the
Neutrals and Non-Aligned in the Global Cold War, 1949 1989’ conference at the University of
Lausanne, March 2014. I would like to thank the organisers and other participants for their
stimulating comments and feedback. I am also indebted to Gil-li Vardi, Robert Rakove, and the
CISAC community at Stanford for the opportunity to present a much-improved draft in

January 2015. Svetozar Rajak and Jovan Cavo ski provided invaluable assistance to my research
in Belgrade. Lastly, I thank my anonymous reviewers for their useful critiques.

Ó 2015 Taylor & Francis

 The International History Review 913

World statesmen and stateswomen produced in such abundance, to the neglect of

other methodologies and lines of inquiry.2 As the political scientist Robert Vitalis
illustrates in a recent article, this near-exclusive focus on discourse analysis has pro-
duced a body of literature riddled with imprecision: analytical imprecision in the
sense that the Third World is often described with sweeping, un-disprovable generali-
ties, as well as a more mundane imprecision over basic facts.3 In particular, the
mythology of the April 1955 Bandung Conference often occludes the historicity of
Third World internationalism as a whole, including the geopolitical context of that
particular event and the changing contexts of subsequent meetings of a similar
nature.4 When judged solely by its loftiest rhetoric, it is only natural for one to con-
clude that Third Worldism was either a fairly hypocritical talking shop for dictators
that had little tangible effect on international affairs, or, conversely, a celebration of
post-colonial identity that was terribly important in some vague way that cannot be
explained to your students’ satisfaction.
In reality, of course, ‘Third Worldism’ was a framework created by political elites
in order to achieve political goals. Though this project had extremely ambitious goals
(perhaps over-ambitious), it was also a doctrine for pragmatic and practicable for-
eign policies. As one Algerian diplomat insisted to his colleagues in the early 1960s:
‘We cannot do anything just by shouting slogans, our leadership must come from
what we do.’5 Relying chiefly on the archives of Algeria and the former Yugoslavia
to delve beyond public rhetoric, this paper explores the evolution of non-alignment,
or positive neutralism, in the decade following Bandung. In two distinct phases -
from Bandung to the Non-Aligned Movement’s founding in Belgrade, September
1961, and then from Belgrade to the non-event of the Afro-Asian summit in Algiers,
or ‘Bandung 2’, in 1965 - the participating governments resolved two fundamental
questions about the meaning and purpose of non-alignment (and, by extension, of
the Third World project more broadly). Contrary to the public rhetoric of all con-
cerned, the two debates concluded in a manner that departed from the agenda set at
Bandung.
More specifically, the first phase, 1955 61, which concluded with the formal
founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at Belgrade, also saw propagation
of a new understanding of non-alignment that I will call ‘insurgent neutralism’. The
founding of NAM was a victory for smaller, more insurgent countries like Yugosla-
via and Egypt at the expense of their Indian ally, which until that point had probably
exerted the greatest spiritual and moral influence in the elaboration of Third World-
ism. The inherently different geopolitical concerns of a large potential great power
like India, in comparison to those of the smaller countries and non-state national-lib-
eration movements like the Algerian FLN, led to a more provocative and inten-
tionally destabilising concept of non-alignment than that advanced by Jawaharlal
Nehru and his colleagues. Particularly notable, given that the public rhetoric of
NAM continued to advocate the Third World’s disengagement from the cold war
and the end of the arms race, was the fact that many of these (comparatively) smaller
countries and liberation movements practised non-alignment as a policy of engaging
and exploiting cold-war tensions to their own ends.
The second phase, roughly 1962 to 1965, was one in which NAM vied with Afro-
Asianism as the primary organising principle in Third World affairs. Although this
choice was one imposed on the majority of developing countries as an extension of
the feuds between China and India, on the one hand, and China and the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia on the other, it did entail a consequential existential debate.
914 J. Byrne

The question was whether the Third World was the expression of an identity - an
explicitly southern, non-white, poor, and post-colonial identity - or whether it was a
political project that welcomed any country or organisation that shared the same
goals. Seeking to marginalise their Soviet and Yugoslav rivals, the Chinese leadership
most vociferously argued for a basically racial, or geographical, definition of the
Third World’s constituency. However, this effort to, in a sense, recast the cold war as
a racial war ultimately failed to convince even its main intended audience in black
Africa. The failure to orchestrate a second Afro-Asian summit in Algeria in 1965 left
the Non-Aligned Movement as the primary manifestation of Third World mobilisa-
tion, and paved the way for the movement’s geographical expansion.

II. Bandung to Belgrade: the rise of insurgent neutralism

Although the Belgrade Conference that founded the Non-Alignment Movement in
September 1961 is often portrayed as a successor to the 1955 Bandung meeting, in
reality it reflected a geopolitical project distinct from, and to some degree competitive
with, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement. Unlike Bandung, the primary organisers
of the Belgrade summit were the Yugoslav and Egyptian governments, with their
Indian partners showing real ambivalence about the endeavour. There was also only
a partial overlap of countries that participated in the two conferences, so the Bel-
grade meeting cannot simply be described as an expansion of Bandung’s constitu-
ency. Indeed, Belgrade reflected a three-pronged evolution of related changes in
Third World affairs since 1955: the Westward shift of its geographical centre of grav-
ity away from Asia toward Africa and Latin America; a new willingness to include
non-state national-liberation movements in diplomatic events; and, thirdly, the
growing influence of smaller countries, such as Yugoslavia and Egypt, that
responded to quite different geopolitical imperatives than those of a country like
India, which had hitherto been the prime mover of the Third Worldist trend in spiri-
tual as well as political terms. The experiences of the Algerian Front de Lib
eration
Nationale (FLN) during this period reveal how the combined effect of these three
changes was to make Third Worldism a more aggressive force in international
affairs, in spite of its pacifist rhetoric. Non-alignment, in particular, became a much
more provocative doctrine than its practitioners publicly admitted to. Although the
speech-makers at Belgrade deliberately echoed the rhetoric of Bandung and insisted
on the continuity of their purpose, the 1961 conference was nevertheless a triumph
for those who understand non-alignment as a means for weak countries and move-
ments to fight the cold war, rather than to abstain from it.
Although the figures that came to be seen as the original architects of non-align-
ment - India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, and Gamal Abdel
Nasser of Egypt - had each espoused the principle of neutrality for several years prior
to the 1955 Bandung Conference, it was the latter event that established it as a
cornerstone of the post-colonial approach to international affairs. As is also true of
other aspects of the Third Worldist movement, the popular and scholarly reification
of all things related to Bandung ensured that the version of non-alignment propa-
gated in 1955 overshadowed the concept’s subsequent evolution and practical appli-
cation. Above all, the high-minded (which is not to say insincere) speeches of the
Bandung participants portrayed non-alignment as an inherently pacifist and stabil-
ity-promoting doctrine that stood in opposition to the West’s history of interminable
conflict, of which the cold war was merely the latest and most dangerous
 The International History Review 915

manifestation. Sukarno, the Indonesian President and host of the conference, set the
tone for the rest of the proceedings with his passionate opening speech that portrayed
the Third World as a vital moral force that would save the world from the dangers of
imperialism, war, and nuclear annihilation. The developing nations, he predicted,
would transform international life by mobilising ‘all the spiritual, all the moral, all
the political strength of Asia and Africa on the side of peace’.6 With Nehru’s argu-
ably the most influential voice on the subject of neutralism and non-alignment, the
twenty-nine heads of state in attendance called not only for the cold war’s excision
from the Southern Hemisphere - specifically in the form of military alliances with the
industrialised nations - but also for its cessation on a global scale through collective
military de-escalation. The Cold War, they argued, was a multi-faceted menace for
the developing countries: it had already brought conflict to Korea and Vietnam; it
carried the menace of even more devastating nuclear conflict; and it distracted the
rich world from the much more pressing problem of the economic disparities between
North and South. Even a solid ally of the United States such as the Philippine dele-
gate, Carlos Romulo, called for a reduction in cold-war tensions, or d
etente, on the
premise that the two superpowers should redirect the costs of their arms race into
economic assistance for the developing countries.7
All in all, it seems fair to say that the rhetoric Bandung and the vision of non-
alignment expressed there were emphatically opposed to the expansion and continua-
tion of the cold war. Yet there were indications that at least some of the attendant
leaders might not share this view in practice. Most glaringly, their unanimous con-
demnation of military alliances contradicted the fact that most of their countries
were already in formal military collaboration with the United States, the Soviet
Union, or one of the major European powers. Carlos Romero’s intervention sug-
gested a more fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, he decried the Cold War
as a distraction from the needs of the developing world, yet by challenging Washing-
ton to respond to Soviet influence in Asia by offering a ‘Marshall Plan for the Third
World’, he was also implicitly suggesting that superpower competition, rather than
d
etente, could benefit the poorer nations.
Furthermore, the Bandung Conference and the concept of neutrality espoused
there largely reflected Indian and, to a lesser extent, Chinese, geopolitical interests at
that time. On the one hand, India and the other Asian countries conceived of the
conference as a means to manage Communist China’s growing involvement in
regional and world affairs. That is, although the national leaders who attended the
conference ostensibly directed their comments towards the two superpowers, their
espousal of a peaceful, rules-bound approach to international relations was also for
the benefit of the Chinese delegation, led by Zhou En Lai, who represented a country
of enormous latent power. In turn, pariahs with respect to the United Nations sys-
tem, the Chinese leadership was eager to assure their neighbours and the wider world
of their unthreatening intentions.8 Consequently, it was something of a happy, unin-
tended consequence for the conference organisers that Bandung immediately
acquired such an exalted, mythic status throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
Moreover, without denying the genuine moral impulse behind their advocacy of
non-alignment, especially on Indian officials’ part, it was also true that it was India
and China’s common interest to minimise the superpowers’ involvement in Asian
affairs. Recent scholarship drawing on both countries’ archives has shown how,
when Nehru visited Mao Zedong in Peking in 1954, the leaders of the world’s two
most populous countries agreed that it was their common destiny to dominate Asian
916 J. Byrne

affairs, once their domestic modernisation drives had undone the damage of centu-
ries of colonial subjugation and developmental retardation. From the vantage of
Delhi and Peking, therefore, the Cold War was a force that could only delay their
inevitable and natural geopolitical expansion. ‘America and some European
countries’, Nehru told Mao, ‘have seen Asian countries becoming strong and are
envious. They envy China becoming strong, they also envy India becoming strong.’9
It helped, of course, that India and China were also large enough countries that they
did not need to worry about attracting Soviet or US largesse; at least one of the two
superpowers was sure to provide significant economic aid even in the event of a sub-
stantial d
etente.10 As Nehru later acknowledged: ‘If we had been some odd little
nation somewhere in Asia or Europe … [our non-aligned foreign policy] … would
not have mattered much. But because we count … [e]verything we do becomes a mat-
ter for comment … [W]e are potentially a great nation and a big Power.’11
While this entente between Delhi and Peking was short lived, the Great Power
rationale for expulsing the cold war from Asia (or even the entire Third World) cer-
tainly continued to appeal to Indian policy-makers. The belief that India already had
at least one foot in the door to the exclusive club of Great Powers informed Delhi’s
open preference for a less provocative and destabilising approach to international
affairs. As the historian Mithi Mookerjee has argued recently in the pages of this
journal, Nehru and his officials initially applied a mediating, almost legalistic mental-
ity to international relations, employing a discourse of justice while assuming a role
akin to that of advocate for the Third World. Nehru cautioned his peers in Asia and
Africa against stoking international tensions on the basis that ‘the moment we enter
into the sphere of strong language and condemnation, we cease to have any real
effect. Immediately, whether we wish it or not, we become parties to the Cold War,
and the appeal to reason or to the emotions of the other party is lost.’12 In other
words, in seeking to minimise the cold war’s effect on the Southern Hemisphere,
Indian policy-makers’ ideological inclinations converged with their conception of the
national interest.
In the wake of Bandung, Nehru collaborated with Egypt’s new President, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, and Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia to elaborate on and demonstrate
their shared commitment to cold-war neutralism. Through a series of head-to-head
meetings, the three leaders formed a conspicuous triumvirate in international affairs
in the years between Bandung and Belgrade. The fact that the three men had power-
ful and charismatic public personas, though very different styles, helped strengthen
the impression that non-alignment was a rising force. In a laudatory account of
Nasser’s diplomacy in this period, the Egyptian journalist, Muhammad Haykel,
described the three as ‘an unlikely casting for Porthos, Aramis, and Athos, and yet
they behaved like the Musketeers: “All for one, and one for all.”’13 Their alliance
typified the appeal of Third World internationalism in a more general sense. On the
one hand, there was limited scope for substantive co-operation between three poor
countries with separate regional concerns - although the substantial Yugoslav and
Indian contingent in the United Nations Emergency Force in the Sinai Peninsula,
brought in at Nasser’s request after the Suez Crisis, was an example of how their soli-
darity could be given more concrete expression.14 But at the same time, geographical
separation also made it all the easier to form an alliance because the three were not
directly competing or clashing with one another. On the contrary, their relationship
opened up new opportunities for diplomatic expansion: it lent credibility to the claim
that India was a major force in global affairs; it provided a valuable outlet for
 The International History Review 917

Yugoslav foreign policy, for which there was little scope in Europe; and it reinforced
Nasser’s bid for leadership in the wider Arab world.15
Yet there was a subtle but consequential divergence among the ‘Three Musket-
eers’ even in the early stages of their collaboration. The Yugoslav and Egyptian lead-
ers exhibited greater inclination for what their Indian colleague later dubbed the
‘agitational’ interpretation of their shared doctrine. When Tito visited India in
December 1954, he and Nehru debated the finer points of a joint declaration on
global affairs. Notably, it was the Yugoslav leader who first attached the qualifier
‘active’ to the term ‘non-alignment’, to which his counterpart assented.16 For his
part, Nasser admitted that his own conversation with Nehru in Delhi the following
April, while on the way to the Afro-Asian Summit, was revelatory for him and led
him to understand that ‘the only policy for us would be [one] of positive neutrality
and non-alignment.’ Even so, he noted on another occasion, at Bandung he had not
shared the Indian Prime Minister’s insistence on ‘true neutrality’ in the sense of total
abstention from military alliances, as he (Nasser) believed in the possibility of pursu-
ing a non-aligned course ‘between isolationist neutrality and NATO type pacts’.17
While the degree of disagreement between Nasser and Tito, on the one hand, and
Nehru, on the other, should not be exaggerated, subsequent developments proved
that such moments were early indicators of a nuanced yet significant difference of
opinion over non-alignment.
Indeed, in the years immediately subsequent to Bandung, India’s Great Power
aspirations and preference for avoiding confrontation frequently contradicted the
experiences of its two partners in neutrality. Most importantly, during the 1956 Suez
Crisis, it was the intervention of the two superpowers that allowed Nasser to seize his
greatest triumph from the jaws of an imminent catastrophe. It was certainly true that
many observers elsewhere in Africa concluded from Suez that Third World actors
could profitably exploit cold-war tensions by pitting the superpowers against one
another and against the European imperialist powers. The prominent Kenyan
nationalist leader, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, later attested to Suez’s influence by
observing: ‘It was the abortive Suez adventure in 1956 … that united all of Africa
and Asia and the Arab World.’18 In the late 1950s, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and
Guinea’s Ahmed S
ekou Tour
e both fostered relations with Washington and Moscow
in order, first, to reduce the influence of the former colonial power in their countries
and, second, to encourage a sense of competition between the Americans and Soviets
with respect to economic aid. Nkrumah’s Volta River Dam project, which oscillated
between Western and Soviet support, became one of the most memorable examples
of the economic cold war in the Third World (as did, for different reasons, Moscow’s
delivery of snow ploughs to the airport in Conakry).19 In each case - Suez, Ghana,
Guinea - nationalists in Africa saw the cold war as an opportunity to gain some
advantage in their lopsided, confining relationship with the retreating imperial
powers of Britain and France. In other words, in the context of the colonial dichot-
omy, the cold war was a ‘third way’ to pursue an anti-imperial agenda.
The war in Algeria proved to be one of the issues that most clearly exposed
India’s more cautious approach to international affairs in comparison to its Yugo-
slav and Egyptian partners. Indeed, Nehru was initially opposed to liberation move-
ments like the FLN even attending the Bandung meeting because of the hostility it
may provoke in the West. He had explained apologetically to one Algerian envoy
that with the conference already threatened by ‘all sorts of plots’, it was imperative
that the participants avoid controversies like the Algerian question.20 Over the next
918 J. Byrne

few years, India did extend significant public and practical support to the Algerian
nationalists, but the latter became increasingly dissatisfied with what they saw as a
persistent timidity in Delhi. In particular, Nehru refused to risk a full rupture with
Paris by formally recognising the FLN as the representative of a sovereign nation.
Receiving another FLN envoy in March 1958, the Indian Prime Minister pled impo-
tence in the face of French intractability. ‘We have done all that we can,’ he offered,
rather weakly, ‘but [if] France won’t budge … what can we do?’21 As they dined with
some Yugoslav diplomats in Tunis that same month, senior figures in the Algerian
nationalist movement made clear that they did not at all agree with Nehru’s sugges-
tion that he might be better placed to help them, in the long run, if he stayed on good
terms with the new French President, Charles De Gaulle.22 From the FLN’s perspec-
tive, India was a friend and ally, but a frustratingly unassertive one that consistently
failed to do as much as it could - or should - for Algeria.
In contrast, on this particular occasion in March 1958 as well as several others,
the FLN’s leaders assured the Yugoslavians of their warmest appreciation for
Belgrade’s efforts on their behalf. The Algerians described their friends across the
Mediterranean as their closest non-Arab allies: an effusive statement of approval
given that the FLN’s public insistence on the unsurpassable ‘fraternal’ quality of its
relations with other Arab peoples.23 The gratitude the Algerians showed to Yugosla-
via is particularly notable because, in political terms, Belgrade maintained a diplo-
matic position on Algeria that was largely indistinguishable from Delhi’s. That is,
Yugoslavia practised de facto recognition of the FLN as the representative of the
Algerian nation, but like India still heeded France’s stern warnings against going so
far as to announce its formal, de jure recognition of the movement. In fact, while crit-
ical of Nehru’s reluctance to antagonise Paris, the Algerian rebels sympathised with
the Yugoslav government’s concerns in that same regard.24 One reason for this seem-
ing inconsistency is that the Algerian nationalists simply held potential allies to dif-
ferent standards: as a middle-sized European communist country, they expected less
from Yugoslavia in terms of anti-colonial solidarity than they did from India, a
major Asian power and former colony. The second reason is that the Yugoslavs
diverged from the Indians in another vital respect: they were willing to provide food,
medicine, and military supplies to the Algerian mujahideen. Obtaining material sup-
port for the war effort was as important to the FLN leadership as the task of securing
diplomatic recognition, and on this matter the Yugoslavians and the Egyptians (who
had provided the Algerian rebels with armaments from the beginning of their strug-
gle) showed themselves significantly less risk averse than their Indian counterparts.25
Indeed, while the FLN wished that Delhi would get its hands dirty and ‘enter the
fray’ (sortir de sa r

eserve), so to speak, Indian diplomacy explicitly pursued what it
considered to be a wiser, more measured approach to anti-colonial controversies.26
In the words of one sympathetic analysis written several years later, India ‘became
more emphatic in this period [the late 1950s] than ever in rejecting agitational
approaches in international politics and having, instead, the diplomatic approach of
a sober type commensurate with her dignity and self-respect’.27 The Congo Crisis in
1960 1 brought another notable demonstration of Indian restraint. After the over-
throw and assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba,
Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and Nasser’s government both angrily withdrew their
troops from the United Nations peace-keeping forces in the country, with Cairo’s Al
Ahram accurately conveying Ghananian and Egyptian attitudes by comparing the
UN’s role in Congo to that of the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. Ghana and
 The International History Review 919

Egypt both then began to support the Lumumbist rebel government in the east of
Congo. In contrast, Nehru earned US approval by working to restore the UN’s cred-
ibility, spearheading the creation of a new peace-keeping force, and refused to recog-
nise the rebel government.28 It is crucial to recognise that a fundamental difference
of strategic interests underlay each of the ‘Three Musketeers’ approach to the Third
World movement and non-alignment. Whereas Nehru considered India to be a latent
Great Power whose natural heft in global affairs could only be diminished by the
interference of the superpowers, Nasser and Tito (and even more so the Algerian reb-
els) saw the Third World scene as a means to amplify their much smaller countries’
geopolitical influence in multiple regions - a goal that often required taking more
provocative or divisive positions on issues like Algeria and Congo.29
Fundamentally, divergent conceptions of ‘non-alignment’ were emerging among,
on the one hand, smaller countries and non-state liberation movements, and on the
other hand, a powerful country like India that already had many of the interests of a
‘status quo’ power, since its leadership expected to soon join that exclusive club, if it
were not already a member. For Nasser, his bold turn to Czechoslovakia for arma-
ments, and then to the Soviet Union for military and economic assistance, had been
vindicated by the triumph at Suez, Moscow’s subsequent willingness to substitute for
the West in funding the Aswan Dam project, and then in 1962, the Kremlin’s very
active support for Egypt’s intervention in the Yemeni Civil War.30 Alternatively,
Yugoslavia ‘enjoyed’ a unique and awkward position in Europe, the odd-one-out
among the communist countries that had little choice but to pursue active relations
with both sides in the Cold War, accruing significant economic benefits in return. In
both cases, active engagement and risk-taking, rather than shrinking from Cold War
controversies and attention, produced significant positive results. Likewise, even the
Algerian nationalists decided to brave the cold-war maelstrom, calculating that
entering an alliance with China and then, it was hoped, the Soviet Union would not
make an enemy of Washington, but actually compel the Americans to support their
cause. ‘As long as Western leaders are not absolutely convinced,’ argued one of the
FLN’s diplomats, ‘that Algeria’s political orientation threatens the current equilib-
rium in North Africa … they will not apply decisive pressure on France.’31 Crucially,
growing numbers of Third World forces shared this concept of non-alignment that
exploited and even exacerbated the cold war. It was from that perspective, for exam-
ple, that Sukarno admitted to the Algerian revolutionaries, in early 1960, that he
shared their fears that d

etente between Washington and Moscow would be a negative
development for the Third World.32
As Nehru had feared, therefore, the Belgrade Conference in September 1961 did,
on the whole, constitute a significant victory for the more ‘agitational’ approach to
Third World solidarity. Yugoslavia and Egypt were eager to link non-alignment
with some of the most contentious and polarising crises in the Third World. The
selection of invitees had been largely determined by each country’s positions with
regard to the divisive Cuban and Congolese situations, and the so-called ‘radicals’
drove the agenda for the most part, such as Ghana, Egypt, Mali, Yugoslavia, Cuba,
and Indonesia.33 Against the Indian Prime Minister’s wishes but with the firm sup-
port of Sukarno and Nkrumah, among others, both the Algerian FLN and the rebel
Congolese government in Sharpeville were invited to attend with the status of sover-
eign governments - a major diplomatic coup for both.34 An internal FLN report
enthused that their participation in the Non-Aligned Summit would be ‘practically
the first time that Algeria is participating on an equal footing in an international
920 J. Byrne

conference of such importance’; the movement’s leaders would later regard it as an

even more significant accomplishment than their presence at Bandung, five years
prior.35 Contrary to the tenor of that earlier meeting, and with fourteen other Afri-
can liberation movements also attending as observers, Belgrade represented an
emphatic validation of the use of violence in the struggle against imperialism. More-
over, the status of the Algerian and Congolese delegations blurred the lines between
sovereign states and non-state actors in a manner that troubled many post-colonial
political elites and which the Bandung organisers had studiously avoided. Unlike
those leaders of newly independent states who were interested above all in strength-
ening an international order that buttressed their authority, destabilisation was the
fundamental purpose of groups like the FLN.
The Indian delegation soon found itself leading a rear-guard action (though not
without support from some other Asian governments in particular) to ensure that the
final declaration did not wholly reflect the radicals’ agenda.36 Perhaps counter-intui-
tively, the moderates endeavoured to make sure that the declaration did not focus on
anti-colonial questions to the exclusion of recent cold-war developments such as the
construction of the Berlin Wall and a massive Soviet hydrogen-bomb test on the eve
of the summit. The Algerians, again, exemplified the effort to bind non-alignment to
‘radical’ anti-imperialism, declaring in their address to the assembly that:

We cannot imagine that a country can avail itself of the advantages of a non-alignment
policy without fully pledging itself to the peoples struggling for independence. Nor do
we think that a country can fight for liberation from colonial domination without plac-
ing its liberation movement within the independent and dynamic framework of non-
alignment.37

However, while being thoroughly sympathetic to the anti-colonial cause, Nehru

and his colleagues were also eager that the Non-Alignment Movement not give the
impression of overlooking the Soviet Union’s sins against world peace while taking
positions on Third World questions that officials in Washington interpreted as basi-
cally anti-Western. The debate over the Belgrade declaration essentially came down
to whether non-alignment was primarily a critique of the cold war or, alternatively,
an expression of anti-imperialism, cold-war ramifications be damned. (In that
respect, the Belgrade meeting is underappreciated as a step towards the conflation of
‘anti-imperialism’ and ‘anti-Americanism’).
While Nehru won the short-term battle over the content of the Belgrade final dec-
laration, such diplomatic niceties did not convincingly conceal the fact that the more
provocative and subversive faction had the dominant voice in the Non-Aligned
Movement. Whereas the 1955 Afro-Asian summit was largely the product of a fleet-
ing Delhi Peking axis, only one of those two great countries participated in Belgrade
(and reluctantly at that). The Yugoslav government’s public documentation point-
edly described the September 1961 event as ‘a conference of small and medium-sized
countries’.38 Rather than bending over backwards to demonstrate even-handedness
in the East West rivalry, the radicals took ownership of the cold war to achieve their
own goals. In short, Belgrade celebrated the neutralism of the insurgents.

III. Belgrade to Algiers: the Third World as a non-racial project

The next phase in the evolution of non-alignment, roughly from the founding of the
Non-Aligned Movement at Belgrade to the end of 1965, saw intense disagreement
 The International History Review 921

about the nature and purpose of the entire Third World concept. Newly emboldened
by the Belgrade meeting, the smaller and medium-sized countries found yet more rea-
son to resent ‘great power chauvinism’ as China, the Soviet Union, and India started
to hijack Third Worldist diplomatic functions in order to play out their rivalries.
Most damagingly, fearing that the Non-Aligned Movement was a tool of their ideo-
logical opponents within the Communist world, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia,
the Chinese leadership attempted to derail that project and champion the Afro-Asian
identity instead. Far from being synonymous, Afro-Asianism and non-alignment
became two distinct and, in the minds of some, competing expressions of Third
World solidarity. Although the majority of participants in the Third World endeav-
our resented efforts to separate Afro-Asianism and non-alignment as mobilising con-
cepts, and strenuously denied any incompatibility between the two, the reality is that
Afro-Asian collapsed as an organising idea with the failure to hold a second heads-
of-state summit, or ‘Bandung 2’, in Algiers in the summer of 1965. At that point,
Non-Alignment became the undisputed bedrock of Third Worldism as an organised
and sustained political project.
While this period of discord was largely the product of Great Power rivalries, it
also took the form of an important existential debate on the ‘Third World’ as an
organising principle. Schisms within the communist world drove this debate, as
Peking, Moscow, and Belgrade started to compete intensively with one another for
the friendship of developing countries.39 On the one hand, the Chinese leadership
championed the ‘Afro-Asian’ identity specifically in the hope of excluding the Soviets
and the Yugoslavs, now their bitterest ideological foes, from Third World affairs.
Starting in roughly 1962, the Chinese government waged a determined propaganda
campaign in Africa that portrayed the Soviet Union as being every bit as neo-impe-
rial as the United States. While there was certainly a political and economic rationale
to their campaign, Mao Zedong and his subordinates did not shy from explicitly
racial language either, telling Africans that ‘[t]hese Europeans are all the same … we
non-whites must hold together’, as one Kenyan newspaper reported.40 In contrast,
accusing their Chinese counterparts of bigotry reminiscent of the colonial era, Yugo-
slav and Soviet representatives insisted that anti-neo-colonialism was a collective
endeavour, or project, that should be open to any who shared the same goals - even
if they should be white or European. While the communist countries’ competing
positions were plainly self-serving, their feud did nevertheless query the nature of the
Third World. Was it chiefly an expression of post-colonial identity, or was it a pro-
gramme of action?
The Algerian perspective on this debate is particularly revealing because the lead-
ers of that newly independent country, from July 1962, sincerely believed that the
Third World’s unity and convergence was vital to their national interests. Algeria’s
first Prime Minister (later President), Ahmed Ben Bella, was the energetic figurehead
of his country’s foreign policy, but the new Algerian elite, drawn almost entirely
from the ranks of the FLN, shared a broad consensus on international affairs. While
they felt that Third World unity was a desirable goal in itself, in order to maximise
their collective power, the Algerians also believed that their country was particularly
well placed at the intersection of multiple regions and international agendas. Algeria,
they calculated, could enjoy an influence quite disproportionate to its size and wealth
by acting as a bridge between sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world, Africa and
Europe, non-alignment and Afro-Asianism, and the socialist and anti-colonialist
movements. Matters of principle aside, from a practical perspective this strategy
922 J. Byrne

required that Algerian diplomacy be assertive in multiple domains, since little influ-
ence accrued to the meek, no matter how fortuitously located. Already committed to
Afro-Asianism and Non-Alignment, in the first year of independence alone Algeria
forged a strong alliance with Cuba, played a pivotal role in the founding of the
Organisation of African Unity (OAU), served as a base of support for guerrillas
from Latin America, Africa, and Palestine, and became one of the very few non-
communist countries in which the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front
maintained an office.
It bears noting that Western observers, both at the time and after the fact, rarely
appreciated that there was a rational and realistic basis for such a poor country’s
seemingly provocative and over-ambitious approach to international affairs. For
example, when Ben Bella warned the UN General Assembly on 9 October 1962 that
Algeria’s liberation struggled had ‘surpassed its national context in order to serve,
henceforth, as a point of reference to all peoples still under colonial domination’ and
promised all possible assistance to anti-colonial causes in southern Africa and Pales-
tine, British and US officials attributed it to the ‘first flush of enthusiasm’ and conde-
scendingly predicted that the young head of state would soon abandon his ‘naive
ideas’ and ‘revolutionary clich
es’ in order to focus on Algeria’s own affairs.41 Despite
these confident prognostications, however, Algiers quickly earned the moniker
‘Mecca of Revolution’ (probably coined by the nationalist leader from Guinea-Bis-
sau, Amilcar Cabral) by dint of the shelter and assistance that Ben Bella’s govern-
ment provided to a wide array of revolutionary and nationalist movements, and also
because the city served as a point of contact between African rebels, on the one
hand, and potential benefactors such as Yugoslavia, Cuba, and China on the other.
‘Conscious of Algeria’s weight in Africa and the Arab world’, the Algerian Ambassa-
dor at Belgrade, R
edha Malek, reported in August 1963: ‘The Yugoslavians would
like to strengthen their own cooperation with African and Arab countries through of
their good relations with us. For this reason they are especially interested in Algeria
developing a close rapport with African countries south of the Sahara.’42 Ironically,
relations with France, the former colonial occupier, offered another early validation
of the Algerian calculation that its activist foreign policy could be a net asset, rather
than a burden on scarce resources. For Paris, too, valued Algiers as an entry-point to
the Southern Hemisphere, with one senior French official going so far as to describe
the country as ‘the “narrow doorway” through which we enter the Third World …
[with whom a] quarrel … risks undermining the efforts of our diplomacy in the whole
world.’43 For this reason, France continued to supply its former colony with very
substantial quantities of economic assistance. In other words, there was good reason
for the Algerian government to believe that a less ambitious foreign policy could
directly hurt their economic interests.
In practice, therefore, Ben Bella and Algeria’s diplomatic team consistently strove
to expand the various Third World groups they participated in - arguing that the
Afro-Asian movement should extend to Latin America, for example, and that the
northern, Arab countries should participate in the continental African unity project-
while also encouraging co-operation and co-ordination between those groups. Alge-
ria, like Egypt, tried to rally sub-Saharan Africa to the cause of Palestinian national-
ism, while simultaneously also putting anti-colonial causes in southern Africa on the
agenda of the Arab League. Algiers participated in the on-going Non-Aligned and
Afro-Asian themed meetings with equal enthusiasm, arguing for their symbiosis on
the basis that the non-aligned countries ‘see themselves as the successors and
 The International History Review 923

maintainers of the Bandung principles’ and that ‘the interaction between the two
movements is so deep that we can say that Non-Alignment is the adopted child of
Afro-Asianism.’44 The basic Algerian philosophy on world affairs, as Ben Bella
explained to Tito when he visited Belgrade himself in March 1964, was to unite all
‘progressive forces’ regardless of geographical or cultural barriers. The new Organi-
sation of African Unity should be a paragon of non-alignment, he said, and the
Soviet Union should be welcomed to the Afro-Asian movement as an objective ally
in the battle against imperialism.
It soon became apparent that China’s hostile relationship with both the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia was the greatest obstacle to the Algerian vision of Third
World solidarity - even more so than controversies like the Sino-Indian and Indone-
sian-Malaysian confrontations. On the one hand, a state of competition between
Great Powers could be a boon for smaller countries, and the FLN themselves had
already exploited Sino-Soviet tensions in the latter stages of their independence
struggle. Since the Belgrade Conference, however, the costs of the Sino-Soviet split
had begun to outweigh the benefits even for those accustomed to profiting from such
rivalries. It was not just that Moscow and Peking had become the two greatest bene-
factors of the more radical wing of the Third World scene; more problematic still
were the ways in which their dispute exacerbated other lines of fracture. Reportedly,
Nehru wrote to Nasser that ‘China’s main purpose seems to be disrupt the policy of
non-alignment which has gained widespread support, not only among the Afro-
Asian countries, but also from the Great Powers. I think our own conflict with China
should be seen against this background.’45 Meanwhile, as tensions within the Com-
munist world became more public and acrimonious, diplomats from China, the
Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia started to hijack Third Worldist diplomatic functions
with their recriminatory shouting matches. The governments of smaller countries
complained that Communist battles had spoiled the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Conferences in Moshi, Tanganyika, in February 1963, as well as in Algiers, in March
1964.46 The French newspaper, Le Monde, captured one African attendee’s frustra-
tions with the latter event:
We are not Marxist-Leninists, and most of us haven’t read a line of ‘The Capital’. So
what interest can we have in your doctrinaire quarrels? I have had enough of this situa-
tion where whenever I eat my sandwich I am accosted by someone who wants to know
my opinion on the Soviet stand, and when I drink my coffee, by someone who asks me
about the Chinese arguments. I want to be able to eat in peace!47

Algiers was particularly troubled by the Chinese government’s racial line of

attack against the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. With a sub-Saharan African audi-
ence especially in mind, Peking argued that a white, northern, and industrialised peo-
ples like the Russians and Yugoslavs could not truly understand or share the
problems of the Southern Hemisphere. ‘Our circumstances are fairly similar’, Mao
Zedong said, ‘… so when we talk to you, there is no feeling that I bully you or you
bully me, nobody has a superiority complex, we are both of a colored race.’48 These
efforts to stoke racial tensions greatly concerned Soviet and Yugoslav officials. One
expert in Moscow complained that as a result of China’s cynical exploitation of the
continent’s sensitive colonial legacy, black Africans ‘now relate to all whites with sus-
picion, and they know very little about the Soviet Union’, although in reality part of
the problem was that those Africans who did get to know Soviet society, typically by
studying there, frequently encountered crude and virulent racism.49 Likewise, when
924 J. Byrne

Ben Bella visited Yugoslavia in March 1964 and had lengthy discussions with Tito on
international affairs, his host railed against the suggestion that ‘all blacks are good
and all whites bad’ and ‘the wrongheaded idea of divisions according to race merits
the strongest censure.’50 The danger to Yugoslavia’s Third World policy was two-
fold: on the one hand, China denounced the principle of non-alignment on the prem-
ise that it was inherently moderate and weakened the anti-imperial cause, while at
the same time the racial angle was an attack on Yugoslavia’s credentials that lay
beyond the realm of political or strategic debate. But the collision of race and politics
also frustrated the Algerian preference, which was shared by many of their peers in
the Southern Hemisphere, to further the convergence of different strands of Third
Worldist mobilisation, including Afro-Asianism, non-alignment, Arab nationalism,
and pan-Africanism.
It was in this fashion that the dispute between communist countries exacerbated
the key existential debate within the Third World movement in this period, roughly
the early- to mid-1960s. Was ‘Third Worldism’ fundamentally an expression of geo-
graphical, cultural, or racial identity - a declaration that ‘we are here’? The mythol-
ogy of Bandung, already deeply embedded in the political culture of the Southern
Hemisphere by this point, arguably reflected that understanding of the term by cele-
brating the symbolism and atmospherics of the 1955 conference, rather than the nar-
rower geopolitical circumstances and motivations. Or, alternatively, was the Third
World a political project, open to all who shared its goals? The leaders of Algeria and
Yugoslavia agreed that the Non-Aligned Movement should be an expression of this
political, goal-oriented, and geographical unbounded conception of anti-imperial
solidarity. Ben Bella told Tito, during a visit to the latter’s homeland in March 1964:

A correction to the idea of nonalignment needs to be brought about, as well as an

enlargement of the circle of nonaligned states … All the countries that signed the charter
adopted at the Addis Ababa conference and all African countries that adopted the reso-
lution about nonalignment could participate at the [next] conference. Of course, in addi-
tion to Asian countries, Latin American and European countries, among them Finland,
would participate at that conference too. We also think that ideas about continents and
skin color need to be overcome because progressive forces exist all around the world.51

The Algerian position was informed by the FLN’s experience of receiving support
from diverse and distant quarters - including China, Cuba, and Yugoslavia - during
its own war of independence. As Ben Bella succinctly stated at an earlier point in his
discussions with his Balkan counterpart: ‘The conceptualization [of solidarity] has to
be political, and not racial.’52
Additionally, though, the Algerians quietly shared the Yugoslav concern that
racial dynamics might be an obstacle for their diplomacy in sub-Saharan Africa.
Like Nasser’s Egypt, perhaps even more so, Algeria considered Africa a vital and
natural domain in which to pursue its goals. The two Arab countries were deeply
involved in continental diplomacy - the second OAU meeting took place in Cairo in
the summer of 1964 - while also being members of the more radical grouping, with
countries like Ghana and Congo-Brazzaville, which enthusiastically supported the
various guerrilla movements and liberation parties in southern Africa.53 Rapidly
expanding their contacts and representation south of the Sahara, the political elites
of both Arab countries stressed their African identity and roots for benefit of domes-
tic and foreign audiences. Nasser had written in 1956’s Philosophy of the Revolution
that the Egyptian people were deeply committed to the fight against imperialism
 The International History Review 925

south of the Sahara because ‘we ourselves are in Africa … we who are the guardians
of the Continent’s Northern gate - we who constitute the connecting link between
the Conintent and the outer World.’54 Likewise, before his death in late 1961, Frantz
Fanon had urged Algeria to unite Africa, describing Algiers as ‘the continental city’.
When asked by a Kenyan journalist in 1963 whether he worked primarily ‘for Arab
Unity or for African Unity’, Nasser insisted that he saw no contradiction between
the two.55 Indeed, a journalist present for the Algerian President’s address to the
founding conference of the OAU reported that he had never felt ‘such a profound
sense of African unity as when I listened to Ben Bella, tears in his eyes, visibly moved,
urge his listeners to rush to the assistance of the men dying south of the equator’.56
The prominent Kenyan nationalist, Tom Mboye, needed no further convincing. ‘I
have come to believe that the great majority of Arabs in North Africa look on them-
selves as African’, he wrote, ‘… [and] Nasser, Ben Bella and [Tunisia’s Habib] Bour-
guiba demonstrated fully at the Addis Ababa conference their commitment to Pan-
Africanism.’57
Still, China’s efforts to stoke racial animus risked exacerbating long-standing
trans-Saharan sensitivities. Certainly, there was significant diversity of skin colour in
North Africa, with some communities in the southern regions being quite dark-
skinned. Accordingly, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the Conference of Inde-
pendent African States in Monrovia told the attendees in August 1959 that Egyptians
had historically ‘freely intermixed with peoples all along the River Nile, up to the
innermost heart of Africa, in the Great Lake Region. We have mixed blood in our
veins. I shout it to the world and I am proud of it.’58 Yet Ben Bella captured
the more common view when he told Tito that ‘we are white like you, maybe a little
more brown.’59 In fact, when Mali’s President, Modibo Keita, visited Algeria in
the summer of 1964, his hosts made a concerted effort to assuage his suspicions of
white Africa - and of Nasser in particular - by demonstrating that ‘Africanism [was]
deeply embedded in the popular consciousness.’60
That said, inhabitants of the Arab littoral could be guilty of condescension or
appearing to possess a sense of superiority with regard to black Africa. For example,
during his incarceration in the Algerian War of independence, Ben Bella shared with
his cellmates his hope that ‘in two or three generations, Arab civilisation and the
Arabic language could become the point commun of all the countries of Africa.’61
Likewise, Egyptian officials had a tendency to air publicly the sentiment that they
felt a responsibility to ‘help spread the light of knowledge and civilization’ or become
‘the bridge of civilization and culture’ to sub-Saharan Africa.62 In this respect, Cairo
and Algiers’ sense of revolutionary mission and their claim to be the torchbearers of
progressivism on their continent ran the risk of echoing older, European and Arab
discourses that rankled on the other side of the Sahara.
Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s mission to join the rebellion in eastern Congo, in the sec-
ond half of 1965, offered proof that a spirit of Third World solidarity provided no
inoculation from transcultural misunderstandings and misguided presumption.
Though the Argentine’s self-appointed mission had dim prospects in any case, given
the objective facts on the ground in Congo, it was also rather arrogant to believe
that, lacking any familiarity with the local language or culture, his mere presence
would provide an inspiring and instructional example to the Congolese. His own
account of the adventure can make for uncomfortable reading, although Guevara
does not shy from self-criticism. Notably, his Algerian and Egyptian allies had tried
to deter him from going. According to Mohamed Haikal, the Egyptian President
926 J. Byrne

warned the Argentine that ‘if you want to become another Tarzan, a white man com-
ing among black men, leading them and protecting them … it can’t be done.’63
In fact, by that point Egyptian diplomacy had experienced some chastening
moments itself. Those opposed to the radical Arab countries’ activities in black
Africa, or to the growing influence of their Yugoslav and Cuban allies, sometimes
tried to exploit historical and racial sensitivities. For example, many found the Arab
countries’ campaign to persuade the rest of Africa to break ties with Israel in solidar-
ity with the Palestinians to be heavy-handed and presumptuous. The Foreign Minis-
ter of Sierra Leone, Dr John Karefa Smart, observed sharply in early 1964 that
‘African members of the League will have to decide soon where they stand. Are they
in the Middle East or in Africa?’64 Algeria and Egypt also openly stirred unrest and
abetted dissidents (along with like-minded allies such as Ghana and Mali) in several
non-Arab African countries that pursued, in their view, neo-imperialist policies. At a
contentious OAU meeting in March 1965, with the continent again riven by the on-
going crisis in Congo, the Senegalese Foreign Minister complained pointedly that
some countries were practising ‘a kind of internal imperialism in Africa’ by trying to
overthrow regimes they disliked.65
Moise Tshombe, the Congolese Prime Minister, dubbed ‘imperialism’s walking
corpse’ by the radical countries who hoped to overthrow him, tried to capitalise on
anti-Arab sentiment in black Africa in the most direct and unambiguous fashion.66
Arriving in Paris after the October 1964 Non-Aligned summit in Cairo, where the
hosts had humiliatingly placed him under what amounted to house arrest, Tshombe
told reporters that Nasser was ‘motivated only by a feeling of domination vis-a-vis
the Congo and black Africa’.67 Rather more creatively, he staged a ‘re-enactment’ of
Arab slave-raiders descending ruthlessly on a nineteenth-century Congolese village
for a crowd of 50,000 in L
eopoldville’s main stadium.68 Of course, Tshombe’s own
use of white South African and Belgian mercenaries, supported by the US Central
Intelligence Agency, to crush the rebellion in Eastern Congo was devastating for his
standing within Africa, while also lending more credibility to China’s insistence on
the necessity of armed guerrilla struggle against Western imperialism.69
On the whole, however, China’s effort to, in a sense, fight the cold war as a race
war failed quite dramatically in 1965. In general, the Third World’s ethno-racial
topography did not correlate with political dynamics in a consistent or neat way. For
example, guided by political rather than ethnic or linguistic identity, in January 1964
Algeria and China supported the mostly black African, left-wing revolution in Zanzi-
bar against the predominantly Arab sultanate.70 Conversely, as early as 1964 5, the
Algerians and the Chinese seemed to prefer alternate factions in Angola’s fragmented
nationalist scene: the Algerians approved of the MPLA’s description of itself as a
post-racial and inclusive movement, whereas Peking backed the unabashedly tribalist
Jonas Savimbi.71 At the same time, the Kenyan President, Jomo Kenyatta, was
becoming ever more concerned by Chinese support for left-wing forces in East Africa
that included, he suspected, his own Vice-President, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. Odi-
nga’s call for the rapid ‘Africanization’ of Kenya’s politics and economy contra-
dicted Kenyatta’s declaration that the country’s white community would actually
need to grow in the near future in the pursuit of industrialisation and development.
Meanwhile, Senegal’s L
eopold S
edar Senghor epitomised the way that some of
Africa’s elites took pride in their n

egritude as well their contributions to a more cos-
mopolitan conception of French or British culture; such constituencies were not
receptive to the idea of a strict Western/non-Western dichotomy.72
 The International History Review 927

Of course, multiple factors were involved in all of these situations, but that was
precisely the problem for China’s emphasis on a racial, or at least implicitly racial,
definition of anti-imperialism: racial dynamics simply did not map onto political
ones in any clear or consistent pattern. In the African context in particular, domestic
considerations gave most of the continent’s new national elites ample reason to focus
on purely political structures and purely political raisons d’^etre, rather than racial or
cultural-identity-driven politics that, even with its simple white/non-white emphasis,
Chinese propaganda seemed to encourage. Few were the African countries that by
the mid-1960s did not already face internal racial, ethnic, linguistic, or religious ten-
sions. Most of the continent’s new elites were also susceptible, in one way or another,
to having the reductive anti-colonial discourse, even with racial overtones, turned
against them by minority interests. Moreover, in Eastern Africa, Indian and Chinese
minorities were themselves increasingly the subject of inter-communal discrimination
or even violence. Ultimately, as one African diplomat said to explain the failure of
the Chinese line by late 1965: ‘Here in Africa, if you’re not black, it makes no differ-
ence what color you are.’73
In the end, China’s inability to find much support for its racial argument contrib-
uted to the collapse of Afro-Asianism as an organising principle. The majority of poten-
tial participants in the Second Summit of Afro-Asian Heads of State (‘Bandung 2’),
scheduled to take place in Algiers in June 1965, favoured including the Soviet Union in
the meeting, including the Algerian host government.74 While the coup d’
etat against
Ben Bella on the eve of the conference provided the immediate justification for a delay,
Peking withdrew its support for staging it at a later date because of the likelihood of
Soviet participation. The fact that the USSR and Yugoslavia were important allies and
providers of aid to many developing countries was probably decisive, but the Chinese
government’s racial rationale for their exclusion also rankled. Ultimately, the politics
of identity was dangerous territory for most post-colonial states, whichever camp of
the cold war they tilted toward. It left the Non-Aligned Movement, with its inclusive
political agenda, as the sole manifestation of ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘anti-neo-imperialist’
solidarity.

IV. Conclusions
The Non-Aligned Movement experienced a lull in activity in the late 1960s, as a
result of the contentions discussed above as well as the demise (political or literal) of
many of the first generation of Third Worldist statesmen, including Nehru (who died
in May 1964), Ben Bella, Nkrumah, Sukarno (all victims of coups), and Nasser
(whose influence was much diminished after the disaster of the 1967 Arab-Israeli
War). But the resurgence that the movement experienced at the close of the decade
up the mid-1970s - a period that later proved to be the high point of its influence in
international affairs - was the consequence of the great existential debates examined
in this paper. The success of a provocative yet inclusive concept of Third World neu-
tralism enabled the great expansion of NAM’s membership to include nearly every
country in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in addition to some European countries,
while still retaining the capacity to mobilise effectively this massive coalition behind
a single cohesive agenda. Granted, this expansion was facilitated by the movement’s
new focus on economic, rather than purely political issues. Most developing coun-
tries agreed on the need to protect their variant of economic nationalism (whether
defined as socialism or state capitalism) from the integrated liberal economic order
928 J. Byrne

constructed by the United States, Western Europe, and Japan.75 Yet even so, the
destabilising ‘insurgent neutralism’ that first asserted itself at Belgrade in 1961 con-
tinued to set the agenda of the enlarged NAM.
Indeed, non-alignment’s 1970s zenith was not due, as commonly claimed, to new-
found credibility in the context of superpower d
etente and the West’s sense of eco-
nomic crisis following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. Instead, NAM’s
activism in this period can be seen an anti-systemic rebellion against d
etente - and spe-
cifically against the economic dimensions of the East West rapprochement that raised
the spectre of the industrialised world erecting a barrier of trade agreements that
encircled the globe and rebutted the aspirations of the poor South. The movement’s
public pronouncements on d
etente were notably ambivalent given that the countries of
the Third World had been calling for an end to the Cold War and to the arms race
since Bandung, if not earlier. For example, echoing previous (discreet) expressions of
concern by the likes of Ben Bella, Sukarno, and others that d
etente might destroy the
poor countries’ main source of leverage in the international sphere, the new Algerian
president, Houari Boumedienne, opened the September 1973 NAM summit in his cap-
ital with the observation that recent co-operation between Moscow and Washington
looked very much like a superpower ‘pretension to reign over the world’.76 In that
spirit, the final declaration of the Algiers meeting argued that the improvement of rela-
tions between East and West, ‘[have] had little appreciable effect on the development
of the developing countries’. The global economic order, the declaration continued,
was essentially the old imperial system adapted in order to ‘perpetuate in another
form their stranglehold on the resources of the developing countries and to ensure for
themselves all kinds of privileges and guaranteed markets for their manufactured
products and services’.77 Although it is a subject for investigation at a later time, there
is reason to think that the Third World’s economic policies of that time— the New
International Economic Order and even the oil-price hikes — were actually efforts to
re-intensify the sense of competition and rivalry between the great powers.78

Notes
1. Some of the more successful synthetic studies of Third Worldism are V. Prashad, The
Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York, 2007); F.D. Colburn,
The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries (Princeton, N.J, 1994); P. Willetts, The Non-
Aligned Movement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance (London, 1978); R.A. Mor-
timer, The Third World Coalition in International Politics (New York, 1980); and, more
concisely, the chapter on non-alignment by M. Atwood Lawrence in R.J. McMahon
(ed), The Cold War in the Third World, Reinterpreting History (New York, 2013).
2. More recent studies taking advantage of innovative research on Third Worldism include
P.T. Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Orga-
nization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (New York, 2012); T. Harmer,
Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill, 2011); A. DeRoche, ‘Non-
Alignment on the Racial Frontier: Zambia and the USA, 1964 68’, Cold War History,
vii (2007), 227 50; R. Kullaa, Non-Alignment and Its Origins in Cold War Europe: Yugo-
slavia, Finland and the Soviet Challenge (London, 2012); K. Haddad-Fonda, ‘An Illusory
Alliance: Revolutionary Legitimacy and Sino-Algerian Relations, 1958 1962’, The Jour-
nal of North African Studies, xix (2014), 338 57.
3. R. Vitalis, ‘The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-
doong)’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and
Development, iv (2013), 261 88.
4. A useful collection of essays on Bandung’s legacy can be found in C.J. Lee, Making a
World after Empire the Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens, 2010).
 The International History Review 929

5. Quotation from ‘Ben Bella seeks aid for Angolans’, The New York Times, 13 May 1963,
8.
6. Sukarno’s Bandung speech, 18 April 1955, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/
1955sukarno-bandong.html [Accessed 20 May 2011].
7. An excellent, enthusiastic first-person account of Bandung is R. Wright, The Color Cur-
tain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland, 1956); also useful is G. Kahin, The
Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955 (Ithaca, 1956) and C.J. Lee,
‘Conference Report: “Bandung and Beyond”: Rethinking Afro-Asian Connections dur-
ing the Twentieth Century’, African Affairs, civ (2005), 683 84.
8. I. Abraham, ‘From Bandung to NAM: Non-Alignment and Indian Foreign Policy,
1947 65’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, xlvi (2008), 195 219; S. Guang
Zhang, ‘Constructing “Peaceful Coexistence”: China’s Diplomacy toward the Geneva
and Bandung Conferences, 1954 55’, Cold War History, vii (2007), 509 28; G.G. Ste-
vens, ‘Arab Neutralism and Bandung’, Middle East Journal, xi (1957), 139 52.
9. Quoted in S.W. Khan, ‘Cold War Cooperation: New Chinese Evidence on Jawaharlal
Nehru’s 1954 Visit to Beijing’, Cold War History, xi (2011), 197 222. See also G.
Boqu
erat, ‘India’s Commitment to Peaceful Coexistence and the Settlement of the Indo-
china War’, Cold War History, v (2005), 211 34.
10. On India’s balancing of Soviet and US economic relations, see R.J. McMahon, The Cold
War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York, 1994), 38 9.
11. Quoted in P. Willetts, The Non-Aligned Movement: The Origins of a Third World Alliance
(Frances Pinter, 1978), 5 7.
12. Nehru quoted in M. Mukherjee, ‘“A World of Illusion”: The Legacy of Empire in India’s
Foreign Relations, 1947 62’, The International History Review, xxxii (2010), 253 71.
13. M. Haikal, Nasser, The Cairo Documents (London, 1972), 253.
14. G. Rosner, The United Nations Emergency Force (New York, 1963), 122 3.
15. A.Z. Rubinstein, Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned World (Princeton, 1970), 242 6.
16. S. Rajak, ‘No Bargaining Chips, No Spheres of Interest: The Yugoslav Origins of Cold
War Non-Alignment’, Journal of Cold War Studies, xvi (2014), 146 79.
17. Nasser quoted in E. Podeh, ‘The Drift towards Neutrality: Egyptian Foreign Policy dur-
ing the Early Nasserist Era, 1952 55’, Middle Eastern Studies, xxxii (1996), 159 78.
18. Quoted in M.O. Beshir, Terramedia: Themes in Afro-Arab Relations (London, 1982), 52.
19. T.J. Noer, ‘The New Frontier and African Neutralism: Kennedy, Nkrumah, and the
Volta River Project’, Diplomatic History, iix (1984), 61 79; P. E. Muehlenbeck,
‘Kennedy and Tour
e: A Success in Personal Diplomacy’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, xix
(2008), 69 95; S. Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and
the Congo, 1956 1964 (Stanford, CA, 2010).
20. Y. Courriere, La Guerre d’Alg
erie: Le Temps des L
eopards (Paris, 1969), 77.
21. Quoted in ‘Report on the GPRA mission to India in March 1958’, A[rchives] N[ationales
d’]A[lg
erie], archives of the F[ront de] L[ib
eration] N[ationale], G[ouvernement] P[rovi-
soire de la] R[
epublique] A[lg
erienne] (1954-62), M[inistere des] A[ffaires] E[xt
erieures],
dossier 3.13. See also ‘Report on the activity of the African-Asian section’, 9 May 1961,
ANA, FLN (1954-62), GPRA, MAE, dossier 7.3.3. Readers should note that documents
from the archives of the wartime FLN and the Algerian Foreign Ministry shortly after
independence frequently lack identifying information such as author, recipient, or date.
From an archival point of view, the wartime FLN (1954 62) is also a distinct entity
from the FLN party in independent Algeria, after 1962.
22. ‘Record of talks between envoy I. Topaloski, president of the Algerian Provisional Gov-
ernment, Ferhat Abbas, and members of government Belkacem, Boussouf, and Cherif’,
10 Mar. 1959, A[rchives] of J[osip] B[roz] T[ito], 837, Cabinet of the President of the
Republic [KPR], I-5-b/2-1 [the spelling of Algerian names has been adjusted].
23. For example, see Malek to Algiers, ‘Overview of Algero-Yugoslav relations’, 19 August
1963, ANA, archives of the R[
epublique] A[lg
erienne] D[
emocratique et] P[opulaire], M
[inistere des] A[ffaires] E[trangeres], series 33/2000, box 166.
24. Record of Topaloski-Abbas talks, 10 March 1959, AJBT, 837, KPR I-5-b/2-1.
25. See the notes by Mi
cunovi
c, 6 Nov. 1959, and Topaloski, 10 Dec. 1959, on discussions
with Ferhat Abbas, AJBT, 837, KPR I-5-b/2-1.
930 J. Byrne

26. ‘Report on the activity of the African-Asian section’, 9 May 1961, ANA, FLN
(1954 62), GPRA, MAE, dossier 7.3.3.
27. D. Narayan Mallik, The Development of Non-Alignment in India’s Foreign Policy (Allaha-
bad, 1967), 216 7.
28. ‘UAR to Withdraw Troops’, New York Times, 8 Dec. 1960, 4; ‘Nehru Calls for a Strong
UN’, Christian Science Monitor, 18 Feb. 1961, 2.
29. J.C. Campbell, Tito’s Separate Road: American and Yugoslavia in World Politics, (New
York, 1967), 76 8.
30. S. Yaqub, Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); and N.J. Ashton, Eisenhower, Macmillan and the Problem of
Nasser: Anglo-American Relations and Arab Nationalism, 1955 59 (London, 1996); J.
Ferris, ‘Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention in Yemen, 1962 1963’, Journal of Cold
War Studies, x (2008), 5 36.
31. Ghany, ‘The Algerian Question in the Western World’, 27 March 1960, ANA, FLN
(1954-62), GPRA, MAE, dossier 48.3.3.
32. See Brahimi’s report from Jakartha, 15 Jan. 1960, ANA, FLN (1954-62), GPRA, MAE,
dossier 8.3; and Krim’s report on discussions between him, Francis, and Subandrio in
Cairo, 25 April 1960, ANA, FLN (1954-62), GPRA, MAE, dossier 46.2.
33. Mortimer, Third World Coalition, 12 13.
34. ‘Backgrounder: Communication from the Yugoslav Ambassador’, 22 May 1961, ANA,
FLN (1954-62), GPRA, MAE, dossier 8.13.5.3.
35. ‘Report on Foreign Policy’, August 1961, ANA, archives relating to meetings of the C
[onseil] N[ational de la] R[
evolution] A[lg
erienne], dossier 8. 9.
36. Y. Nasenko, Jawaharlal Nehru and India’s Foreign Policy (New Delhi, 1977), 275 6.
37. Conference of Heads of States or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, Belgrade, Sep-
tember 1 6, 1961 (Belgrade, 1962), 243.
38. Quoted in G.H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London, 1966), 306.
39. On the Sino-Soviet split, see S. Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet
Struggle for Supremacy, 1962 1967 (Stanford, CA, 2009) and L.M. Luthi, The Sino-
Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, Princeton Studies in International History
and Politics (Princeton, N.J., 2008). The recent doctoral dissertation of J.S. Friedman,
‘Reviving Revolution: The Sino-Soviet Split, the “Third World”, and the Fate of the
Left’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 2011), is a long-overdue examination of
the Sino-Soviet split in the Third World specifically. K. Haddad-Fonda, ‘Revolutionary
Allies: Sino-Egyptian and Sino-Algerian Relations in the Bandung Decade’ (Ph.D. dis-
sertation, University of Oxford, 2013), is another original and insightful investigation.
40. Nairobi’s Daily Nation, 12 Mar. 1962, as cited in W.A.C. Adie, ‘China, Russia, and the
Third World’ The China Quarterly, xi (1962), 200 13.
41. ‘Speech to the United Nations General Assembly’, 9 Oct. 1961, Discours du Pr
esident Ben
Bella du 28 Septembre 1962 au 12 d
ecembre 1962 (Algiers, 1963), 31 6; Campbell to
Scrivener, 8 Nov. 1962 [United Kingdom National Archives], F[oreign] O[ffice records],
371, fo.165654; ‘Memorandum from Robert W. Komer of the National Security Council
Staff to President Kennedy’, 13 Oct. 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States,
1961 1963, xi, 102 4.
42. Malek, ‘Overview of Algero-Yugoslav relations’, 19 Aug. 1963, ANA, RADP, MAE,
series 33/2000, box 166.
43. Quoted in Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘La cooperation avec l’Alg
erie ind
ependante’ in De
Gaulle et son Si
ecle (Paris, 1992), vi. 216.
44. ‘Examination of the international situation in light of the first Afro-Asian conference and
appreciation of the ten Bandung principles’, undated, ANA, RADP, MAE, series 32/
2000, box 24.
45. Haikal, Nasser, 295 6.
46. O.A. Amer, ‘China and the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, 1958 1967’ (
Ph.D. dissertation, Universit
e de Geneve, 1972), 120 1.
47. D. Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement; Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World
(Jerusalem, 1973), 185 6.
48. Radchenko, Two Suns, 82.
49. Friedman, ‘Reviving Revolution’, 78 9.
 The International History Review 931

50. ‘Minutes from the Yugoslav-Algerian talks and the meeting between President Tito and
Ben Bella’, 11 March 1964, AJBT, 837, KPR 1-3-a/2-8.
51. Ibid.
52. ‘Minutes from the Yugoslav-Algerian talks and the meeting between President Tito and
Ben Bella’, 6 March 1964, AJBT, 837, KPR 1-3-a/2-8.
53. R. Mortimer, ‘The Algerian Revolution in Search of the African Revolution’, Journal of
Modern African Studies, iix (1970), 363 87.
54. M.O. Beshir, Terramedia: Themes in Afro-Arab Relations (London, 1982), 69 70.
55. T.Y. Ismael, The U.A.R. in Africa; Egypt’s Policy Under Nasser (Evanston, 1971), 69.
56. Quoted in O.A. Westad, Global Cold War (Cambridge, 2005), 106 7.
57. T. Mboya, Freedom and After (London, 1963), 231.
58. Ismael, U.A.R. in Africa, 71 2.
59. ‘Minutes from the Yugoslav-Algerian talks and the meeting between President Tito and
Ben Bella’, 11 March 1964, AJBT, 837, KPR 1-3-a/2-8.
60. Dizdarevi
c, ‘Ben Bella on S
ekou Tour
e’s visit’, 6 April 1964, Diplomatic Archives of the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia [DASMIP], P[olitical] A[rchives], year 1964, f
[older], d[ocument] 415452.
61. Recordings of the conversations of FLN prisoners, 1 Feb. 1961, no. 255, [Paris, Archives
of the Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres], [Secr
etariat d’Etat aux Affaires Alg
eriennes],
carton 14.
62. Nasser quoted in Ismael, U.A.R. in Africa, 109 10.
63. Haikal, Nasser, 349; J.G. Casta~ neda, Companero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara
(New York, 1997), 276 83.
64. Quoted in Ismael, U.A.R. in Africa, 70.
65. ‘Congo Issue Dividing African Group’, New York Times, 8 March 1965, 7.
66. For Algeria’s role in the anti-Tshombe front, see N. Grimaud, La politique ext
erieure de
l’Alg
erie (1962 1978) (Paris, 1984), 274; P. Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana,
Washington, and Africa, 1959 1976 (Chapel Hill, 2002), 65; and also Harbi, African
desk, ‘Weekly report (week of 12/2 to 19/2/1965)’, 20 Feb. 1965, ANA, RADP, MAE,
series 33/2000, box 275.
67. ‘Tshombe in Paris: Says Nasser Acts to Weaken Congo’, New York Times, 10 Oct. 1964,
1.
68. ‘Tshombe’s Villlage Epic’, New York Times, 20 Oct. 1964, 16.
69. On the Congo Crisis in the early 1960s, see M. Kalb, The Congo Cables: The Cold War in
Africa from Eisenhower to Kennedy (New York, 1982) and C. Young, Politics in the
Congo: Decolonization and Independence (Princeton, 1965).
70. On the small but supportive Algerian and Cuban roles in the Zanzibar Revolution, see
Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 59 60, and the declassified CIA report, ‘Zanzibar: The
Hundred Days’ Revolution’, 21 Feb. 1966, [Central Intelligence Agency], [Freedom of
Information Act Electronic Reading Room], d[document number]
5077054e993247d4d82b6a87 [Accessed at http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/docu
ment_conversions/14/esau-28.pdf on 25 August 2014].
71. S.F. Jackson, ‘China’s Third World Foreign Policy: The Case of Angola and Mozambi-
que, 1961 93’, China Quarterly, cxlii (1995), 388 422; Friedman, ‘Reviving Revolution’,
408.
72. F. Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British
Africa (Cambridge, 1996); T. Chafer, ‘Education and Political Socialisation of a
National-Colonial Political Elite in French West Africa, 1936 47’, Journal of Imperial &
Commonwealth History, xxxv (2007), 437 58.
73. ‘Afro-Asians Hold an Autopsy’, New York Times, 7 Nov. 1965, E1.
74. On China’s failure to convince the Algerian and Egyptian governments to prioritise Ban-
dung 2 over Non-Alignment, see Haddad-Fonda, ‘Revolutionary Allies’, 242 96.
75. On Third World economic mobilization in this era, see G. Garavini, ‘Completing Decol-
onization: The 1973 ‘Oil Shock’ and the Struggle for Economic Rights’, International
History Review, xxxiii (2011), 473 87; C.R.W. Dietrich, ‘“Arab Oil Belongs to the Ara-
bs”: Raw Material Sovereignty, Cold War Boundaries, and the Nationalisation of the
Iraq Petroleum Company, 1967 1973’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, xxii (2011), 450 79; V.
Ogle, ‘State Rights against Private Capital: The “New International Economic Order”
932 J. Byrne

and the Struggle over Aid, Trade, and Foreign Investment, 1962 1981’, Humanity: An
International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, v (2014),
211 34.
76. Bouteflika and Boumedienne quoted in Mortimer, Third World Coalition, 39.
77. ‘Fourth Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries: Eco-
nomic Declaration’ in O. Jankowitsch-Prevor and K.P. Sauvant (eds), The Third World
without Superpowers: The Collected Documents of the Non-Aligned Countries (Dobbs
Ferry, N.Y., 1978), ii, 214 26.
78. An excellent collection of essays on the end of the Cold War in the Third World can be
found in A.M. Kalinovsky and S. Radchenko (eds), The End of the Cold War and the
Third World: New Perspectives on Regional Conflict (New York, 2011).