Francis P Sempa
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Johnson dismissed the group as a collection of moral poseurs “adept at words, but not much else”. Andrea Benvenuti, an associate professor of international relations at the University of South Wales, is not as dismissive about Bandung and its organizers as Johnson was, but he, too, concludes that Bandung failed to bring about its professed goal of “Afro-Asian solidarity”.
Benvenuti’s book, however, is not about Bandung in general, but rather its role in Indian foreign policy as envisioned by its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was at first quite skeptical about convening such a conference. His vision for Indian foreign policy was to create a “zone of peace” in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East which would be free of Cold War alignments. Nehru opposed US efforts to organize anti-communist alliances in Asia and the Middle East. He viewed the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) as dangerous to peace. The backdrop for Bandung included the Korean and Indochina Wars, the Geneva Conference, and the crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Nehru saw the United States as a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union or China. Benvenuti quotes a Commonwealth Relations Office assessment that Nehru had an “utter distrust” of the United States, and considered it an “ignorant power” that was “drunk and hopelessly unreliable”. SEATO and CENTO were viewed as an attempt to “encircle” India. Even worse from India’s perspective, was warming relations between the US and Pakistan.
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