Age of the Nonaligned

The river of History looks placid: only when the snows melt on the high mountains do floods break the banks and sweep away all the dirt and refuse. And so do epochal changes in the journey of humankind: they come without fanfare, but they hurtle down upon the world with elemental fury sweeping away the debris of yesterday and freshen up the soil for the golden crop of tomorrow.

The Nonaligned Summit that met and deliberated in New Delhi last week opened the floodgates of History. In a sense, it marked the end of one epoch in human history and the beginning of another. For here was the biggest gathering of the world’s dispossessed now coming into their own. It would be underplaying its significance if it is compared to the United Nations, for here was a gathering of people with a similar history and common motivation—not a market-place where the affluent flaunt their wealth and power to overawe the deprived among nations.

The Nonaligned, one and all, have broken out of the shell of colonialism and are ready to lend a helping hand to those others who are striving to destroy its last vestiges, and to guard against its return by the back-door. The relevance of Indira Gandhi’s words can be denied by nobody when she said that “anti-imperialism still conditions our outlook†and that “we cannot risk any shadow on our freedom of judgement and action†. With all their thousand and one differences and divergences, with their varying levels of social awareness, those who gathered in New Delhi have one common bond that binds them—the refusal to be the docile camp-followers of those who have so long arrogated to themselves the prerogative to rule and dictate. It is this spirit embodying “the courage and strength of self-reliance†that determined the credentials of those who came: that is why accolades came to Yasser Arafat and Sam Nujomo, to Julius Nyerere and Maurice Bishop—not to speak of Fidel Castro and Pham Van Dong—and the failure to discern this spirit that made Rajaratnam a miserable misfit.

What the New Delhi Summit has announced to the world is that decisions concerning humanity shall no longer be left to the chanceries of the so-called Great Powers, but have to be the right and responsibility of the Nonaligned. A handful of regimes grabbing the monopoly of productive forces, cornering science, technology and the media, long presided over the wealth of nations and had power over their people. But the inexorable dictates of History awakening millions of the long-deprived have humbled that arrogance of might over right, and the newly free have come to demand the democratisation of international relations, economic and political.

It is no accident that the Nonaligned Summit, as the rightful voice of the overwhelming majority of humankind, has raised as its first and foremost demand a halt to the mad race of nuclear arms literally bringing the world to the brink of annihilation, turning it into the ghastly habit of beetles and cockroaches. Those who inhabit the earth have the right to save it and not leave its fate in the hands of nuclear megalomaniacs. This strident indictment of the arms race by the Nonaligned Summit shall find ready response from millions upon millions of crusaders for peace within the strongholds of military blocs. Indira Gandhi has rightly claimed Nonalignment as “history’s biggest peace movement†. Inherent in this claim is the unvanquished truth that in the final analysis it is not the missiles but the masses spread across continents that shall decide the future of the world.

A halt to the arms race provides resources for the dispossessed and the impoverished, while the well-being of the common man in the developed world is also assured. This linkage—pointed out by far-seeing minds long back—has now assumed a new dimension. The major industrialised countries of the West in the past used to pass on their economic burdens to the developing world by manipulation of trade and finance. That game is no longer possible. This time, the North itself is confronted with the grim prospect of an unrelieved economic crisis side by side with the imminence of the breakdown of their Bretton Woods structure. But the rulers in the West seem to be afflicted by the delusion that the structure can be repaired and need not be thoroughly rebuilt. US Treasury Secretary Donald Reagan wants no drastic treatment but only palliatives to keep going the US-dominated international agencies: this betrays a myopic outlook. Enlightened minds even in the West realise the bankruptcy of such an approach.

It is in this area that the Nonaligned Summit has come out with a categoric demand for a thorough-going restructuring of international economic relations, because, as the New Delhi Message warns, “never before have the economic fortunes of the developed and developing nations been so closely linked together†. No longer can the club of the North solve their own economic malaise; nor is the Third World prepared to take on their burden. It is not surprising that the clearest analysis of the world economic crisis today is provided by the opening section of the Economic Declaration of the Nonaligned Summit.

The crux of the Summit stand is that the developing world no longer whines and complains, nor does it wait with a beggar’s bowl at the doorstep of the affluent. A new temper has come over the South and the way out is provided by the Nonaligned by means of “a thorough-going restructuring†of the present economic order “through a process of global negotiations†. It demands—not meekly begs for—urgent relief measures for the very survival of the most depressed among the developing countries. Not a revised Bretton Woods but a world conference with universal participation to take up the questions of Money and Finance for development. As part of the same basic approach, the Nonaligned Summit has spelt out concretely the possibility and urgency of South-South cooperation for collective self-reliance.

All those bring out the central point that the developing countries today are collectively taking a global view of basic issues—the sure sign of an epochal change. Gone are the days when they would only beg and beseech the so-called rich nations. Today they have reached the awareness that they have to take a total view of the world’s ills and help in remedying the ills. Here at long last has opened up the vista of not only the democratisation of international relations but the possibility of a more equitable international order—in other words, placing on the agenda of the day the concept of the New International Economic Order.

On the political plane also, the Nonaligned Summit has shown a new temper, so long missing in the world arena. Wallowing in the ideological pig-sty of the West, many of our pundits—both grey-haired and green-horn—had almost written off the Nonaligned Movement because of the inner tensions and squabbles that beset it: some even were ready to write its obituary. The fact that heads of a hundred regimes coming from diverse backgrounds, facing difficult problems of different types, could hammer out a common approach to a number of formidable issues shows a level of statesmanship which none of the bloc politics can claim. Here is no sect of conformists, nor of a boss leading his subsidiaries, but a fraternity of equals seized with a sense of urgency—at least that is how the more mature among them have set the pace. The over-riding consideration has been the imperative of unity—the realisation that we have now to hang together, far too long have we been hanged separately. Here is the essence of consensus.

This new approach in tackling international issues is going to be the new diplomacy of tomorrow. For it, even the most intractable of problems does not look insurmountable. At the very last hour before its concluding session, the Nonaligned Summit could bring in the first signs of moderation in the Iraq-Iran military confrontation. Cease-fire may yet be far away but the door is opened, howsoever slightly. Not the UN nor the Islamic Summit could register even that much of progress. And in the weeks to come, the prospects of peace may improve. At the other end of the continent of Asia, the Nonaligned leadership has good reasons to hope that it will be able to forge normalisation between Indo-China and its ASEAN neighbours in the not distant future.

The North has grown aged and is fast getting incapacitated: the megatons of lethal power no longer ensures imperial domination but paralyses its faculties. The Third World has arrived—this is the message of the Seventh Summit of the Nonaligned.

(Mainstream March 19, 1983)