The First Conference Of The Third World

Premier Zhou Enlai speaks at the Afro-Asian Bandung Conference held in Indonesia, April, 1955. During the meeting, Premier Zhou advocated the principle of "seeking common ground while shelving differences" and suggested setting the Five Principles as a base for establishing friendly, cooperative relations between countries of different social systems.

The First Conference Of The Third World
Bandung’s lost illusions
By Jean Lacouture**

Le Monde Diplomatique
May 2005
http://mondediplo.com/2005/05/17bandung

The term third world was first used at a conference in Bandung, Indonesia, 50 years ago, when representatives of half the planet, formerly the old colonial empires, met. The conference’s main figures -Nehru, Nasser, Zhou Enlai - were already in power. Others, including the leaders of independence movements in North Africa, were still struggling and unknown.

BANDUNG, which is the name of a hill resort in Java, may mean little to those who were born during the cold war, 1949-1989, and the spread of the empire of the United States. It might suggest a forgotten conference or battle sometime between Yalta and Dien Bien Phu. But for those of us who tramped the world with a pen in our hands and an expired or forged visa in our pockets, it meant a great deal for two or three decades. It symbolized the age of decolonization, when empires were rolled back by means other than total war and a new world seemed possible.

We could choose a dozen turning points in history between the death of Stalin in 1953, which ended the bellicose phase of Soviet communism, and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, which marked the end of the cold war: the Geneva peace accords of 1954 that terminated France’s war in Indochina; the Cuban missile crisis of 1963 when nuclear war seem edimminent; the explosion of China’s hydrogen bomb in 1967; the collapse of US forces in Saigon in 1975; the emergence of militant Islam, in the form of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1979. Among them we would have to include the few days in the spring of 1955 when representatives of more than half of humanity gathered in Bandung, an hour’s flight from Jakarta, to proclaim the end of the colonial era and the emancipation of the peoples of Asia and Africa.

Today it is hard to imagine the impact of the Bandung conference, which represented a much larger proportion of the world’s population than the peace conferences of Versailles in 1919 or Yalta in 1945. It did not change the face of the earth or even greatly advance African emancipation. But it was a worldwide version of the 1789 Estates-General. Leopold Sédar Senghor (1) likened it to a gigantic release of prisoners. Quoting Jean Giraudoux’s Electra, the geographer Yves Lacoste called Bandung the dawn of a new era. The conference prompted the economist Alfred Sauvy to coin the term "third world" - often attributed to his publisher, the ethnologist Georges Balandier, who, I remember, had already used the term.

It refers to the beginning of the French Revolution and the passage from Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s 1789 pamphlet:

"What is the third estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something"(2). Sauvy designated all the peoples of Asia and Africa as the "third world": they belonged to neither the European "nobility" nor the US "clergy" but accounted for a huge share of the world’s human and material resources and were determined to have that fact recognized by the capitalist and communist worlds.

The idea was widely accepted by enlightened liberals, at least by their social-democratic strands, but was denounced as a distraction by Afro-Asian revolutionaries, who maintained that the proletariat of the workers and of colonized peoples were inseparable, and were not prepared to take a position between capitalism and Marxism-Leninism.

The third-worldism that emerged from Bandung – a resurrection of colonized peoples led by men like the prime minister of communist China, Zhou Enlai (3) – should not be confused with non-alignment, a strategy promoted by Yugoslavia’s president, Marshal Josip Tito, at a conference in Belgrade in 1961 which, independent of the colonial question, was aimed at coordinating the actions of states (4) that resented for cibleenlistment in either the western or the Soviet camp.

The Bandung conference, which was attended by such vociferous allies of the West as Sri Lanka (then still called Ceylon), Pakistan, Turkey and Iran, signaled the end of the colonial era. The Belgrade conference was a platform for neutrality or non-alignment.

The proposal to hold an Afro-Asian con­ference in Bandung, put at the disposal of the delegates by the Indonesian president, Ahmad Sukarno (5), came from the Colombo group: India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Burma and Indonesia. The success of the initiative surpassed their expectations: more than 1,000 representatives of 50 states and 30 anti-colonial resistance movements, including the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), the Tunisian Neo-Destour movement and the Moroccan Istiqlal (Tunisia and Morocco did not gain independence until 1955-56), arrived to a warm welcome from the Indonesian authorities, whose organization liabilities were widely praised.

Those in France who had laughed at the Afro-Asian jamboree were surprised by a report from Le Monde’s perceptive and moderate special correspondent, Robert Guillain: "People in Europe and America are already describing this as a conference of Asian and African revolt against white oppression. I believe it is nothing of the kind. Seen from close up, the revolt is not particularly fierce. The rebels are gentler than one imagines. Does that mean we should not take the conference seriously? Not at all. But it is not a tragedy. This festival of the brown, yellow and black, from which white faces are absent, is a sign of the times. But it is much more of a celebration than a plot. And that is what the Indonesians clearly intended it to be. This much can be said: the organizers of the Afro-Asian conference assures us that it is not a racial assembly, a war machine directed against the West, or the beginning of an anti-white block" (6).

Guillain noted a compelling desire for unity rather than moderation, and for an Afro-Asian League of Nations in the near future. The wretched of the earth were dreaming of paradise rather than revenge. Almost all the reports filed in the seven days of the conference were similar.

Not that Sukarno’s guests, who included India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, were all imbued with a spirit of neutrality. The second dominant figure at the conference was Zhou, prime minister of China, which did not yet describe its revolution as cultural and had not distanced itself from the post-Stalinists in Moscow. China had finished participation in the Korean War only two years earlier and was staunchly supporting North Vietnam, represented by Pham Van Dong, against Washington.

Beside the Chinese was the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was moving swiftly to the left, and Hocine Ait Ahmed, leader of the Algerian uprising that had begun on 1 November 1954.

The pro-US party included the Turks, the Iraqis and the Pakistanis, who were signatories to the Baghdad Pact (7), plus the Sinhalese. They quickly attempted to get the conference to condemn Marxist influence from either side of the Suez Canal. One of the rare incidents during the peaceable proceedings was the result of an attempted denunciation of Soviet colonialism, but otherwise the atmosphere mostly remained calm throughout. To the great disappointment of the Tunisian revolutionary Salah Ben Youssef and others from the Maghreb, the representatives of the large countries refused to turn the conference into an indictment of France, which was more exposed to anti-colonialist campaigns at the time than was Britain.

Nehru, considered a guarantor of relative moderation by his British friends and also the US and France, had at first appeared to be the force behind the conference. But Zhou, Mao’s closest companion, soon took the leading role. Ten months earlier, at the Indochina conference in Geneva, he had emerged as a man of compromise, a diplomatic virtuoso with a smile for everyone. All reports from Bandung agreed that Zhou set the tone from the outset. His principle was that the proceedings of the pluralistic, multi-ethnic conference could not be governed by ideology: the only possible strategy was to dissolve colonialism in an ocean of peace.

Neither the anti-colonial diatribes of the North Africans nor the rhetorical accusations directed against Israel by Nasser and his Syrian and Libyan colleagues upset the consensus. The only major incident happened when Ceylon’s prime minister, Sir John Kowetawala, supporting the US, urged the conference not to be obsessed by the old-style colonialism of the French and British; but to be equally critical of the new colonial regimes that the Soviet Union had imposed on Eastern Europe. Amid uproar, several delegates, including three spokesmen from the Arab world, protested that the conference had not been called to "listen to the propaganda of John Foster Dulles" (then the US secretary of state, who was already talking about "the struggle between good and evil") and that Kowetawala’s accusation was out of place at an Afro-Asian conference. He dropped the matter; content to know his outburst would gain him credit in the right quarters.

Zhou joined in the criticism of Kowetawala’s diplomatic gaffe. But during a break in the proceedings he was seen conferring with Kowetawala, who reported with some satisfaction that Zhou had told him there were "interesting points in his intervention". Not content with initiating an anti-Soviet strategy that was to emerge publicly 10 years later, Zhou began at the conference a manoeuvre with the US that prefigured the deal he struck with Henry Kissinger in the early 1970s over Vietnam. It was particularly effective as it came on the fourth day, when the conference was flagging.

Zhou intimated that the Taiwan issue could be settled peacefully and the area made neutral, especially as US forces were intending to leave the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Provided that Washington did not continue personal support for Jiang Kaishek (8), a peaceful solution to Taiwan could be envisaged. The conference was encouraged by this suggestion, which received favourable comment in London and Paris. But the Chinese overture was ignored by those for whom it was intended: US state department strategists saw it as a trap. Perhaps they were right, but their suspicious view was a preparation for difficult times ahead.

Whether Washington liked it or not, Zhou had imposed himself as the master of ceremonies at a worldwide conference. By his generous manner as well as official acts, formal moderation and use of the language of peace, he opened a highway for Chinese diplomacy. He had avoided committing himself too far in support of North Vietnam, which, a year after the Geneva partition, had not yet begun its great campaign to recover the south; the Chinese were in no hurry to see this successfully completed. As François Mauriac said about Germany, Zhou was so fond of Vietnam that he preferred to have two Vietnams rather than one.

Reading the reports of the conference today, one is struck by the vagueness, even emptiness, of the deliberations, as well as by their moderation. Those who compared them with the reports from the Tricontinental conference in 1966 (9) noted that the newly independent peoples had by then become much more aggressively militant. Historians drew parallels with the change of tone between the Constituent Assembly of 1791 and the Convention of 1794.

I was a foreign correspondent in Cairo at the time of Bandung and watched Nasser take off for Indonesia. He was tense, worried about tension on the border with Israel, the prospect of having to arrange future arms purchases through eastern bloc suppliers rather than western arms dealers, and the risk of reprisals from Washington. His departure was low key. The Egyptian left, which was mostly still rather cool towards him, had begun to form Bandung committees, especially in the universities, but they were poorly rewarded: Nasser’s departure was accompanied by the arrest of several Marxist leaders, as if he wanted to let the West know that his trip had no ideological significance.

On his return 10 days later, Nasser was given a hero’s welcome. The Egyptian and international press had highlighted his role in Bandung, where the respect shown to him, rather than his brief speeches, had made him appear as the third great figure at the conference. I had seen many emotional demonstrations in the streets of Cairo, when crowds had carried huge banners bearing Nasser’s slogan "Lift your head, my brother, the time of humiliation has passed". But in that spring of 1955 the Egyptian capital went into an ecstatic trance that ended only with Nasser’s funeral 15 years later. The full meaning of the change was evident when the leaders of the militant left sent Nasser a message of congratulations that was published in the official press, which seldom allowed them into the limelight. The message came from the prisons into which Nasser had thrown the leaders, a rare tribute to a jailer. Two young Marxist activists, Baghat Elnadi and Adel Rifrat, joined the Bandung committees: a few years later they published, under the joint pseudonym Mahmoud Hussein, Class Conflict in Egypt (10), familiar to everyone interested in the social and cultural history of the Arab Middle East.

Despite its lack of ideological and strategic content, the Bandung conference was a new dawn for colonized peoples. Perhaps it was more of a moment in history than a moment that made history. The talking produced more effervescence than practical proposals. Yet it changed the international balance of forces. The US was rebuffed, Moscow put in the shade and French colonialism harshly condemned. China became a major influence.

Bandung may not have lived up to the expectations of third-world revolutionaries, but it established the third world as a player in the political arena, not just a source of exploitable human and raw material.

The idea of the third world has lost much of its appeal since then. One of the best minds of its generation, Paul-Marie de La Gorce, who died recently at the age of 76, was in a state of exultation through the conference. But almost 20 years ago he drew a sad conclusion: "Many hopes have been disappointed, many illusions shattered, many predictions belied by history. Now disenchantment and skepticism are all the rage: the third world, it is said, has solved none of its problems, not hunger, not underdevelopment, not disunity; its attempts at socialism have ended in tropical dictatorships, its capitalist ventures in cosmopolitan corruption. At any rate, no power centre or developmental axis has emerged. It is a remarkable fact that Pascal Bruckner’s The Tears of the White Man (11) - a book filled with bitterness and resentment, in which all anti – colonialism, any effort to understand the third world or combat underdevelopment are equated with guilt feelings, self-hatred and masochism - has had considerable success in France." (12)

What used to be called the third world lost much of its moral and strategic attraction between Bandung and the Iraq war, via the killings of Che Guevara and Mehdi Ben Barka, the defeat of Nasserism, the sterile Vietnam victory and the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. The dislocation of the socialist camp and the great Sino-Soviet quarrel must take much of the blame, as must France’s pathetic neo-colonialist manoeuvres in Africa and, even more so, Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism, which destroyed the Algerian revolution, among other things. There is also the current corruption of local elites, a self-satisfied bureaucracy and omnipresent police repression.

Will Bandung be remembered only as a lost illusion? In France the storming of the Bastille led to the empire, the Restoration and war, and only finally to the republic. Perhaps the present Bush system will result in other Bandung’s one day soon.

**Jean Lacouture is a historian and author most recently of ‘Gamal Abdel Nasser’ (Bayard/BNF, Paris, May 2005)

Translated by Barry Smerin

Also read: End of empires.

(1) Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), Senegalese poet and statesman.

(2) Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748-1863), Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état? Paris, January 1789.

(3) The name of the former prime minister and foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, formerly transcribed as Chou En-lai, is now Zhou Enlai in the official transliteration.

(4) Cuba (where the revolutionaries took power in January 1959) became the first Latin American state to join the non-aligned states of African and Asia in Belgrade.

(5) See Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Ahmad Sukarno, "Speech at the opening of the Bandung conference", 18 April 1955.

(6) Le Monde, 27 April 1955.

(7) A mutual defense treaty concluded on 24 February 1955 by Iraq, Turkey, Britain, Pakistan and Iran, under the aegis of the US. Its aim was to contain nationalist movements and Soviet influence in the regions.

(8) Jiang Kaishek (1887-1975), formerly transliterated Chiang Kai-shek, general and president of the Republic of China. After his victory over the Japanese, he was defeated by Mao Zedong’s communist forces and took refuge with his army on the island of Taiwan, protected by the US.

(9) The Tricontinental conference of African, Asian and Latin American peoples, held in Havana in January 1966, which led to the Organization for Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Latin American Solidarity Organization.

(10) Class conflict in Egypt, 1945-1970, translated by Michel Chirman, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1973.

(11) The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt, translated by William Beer, Macmillan, London, 1986.

(12) "Le recul des grandes aspirations révolutionnaires", Le Monde diplomatique, May 1984.

More links:
http://en.chinabroadcast.cn/2238/2005-4-15/33@228070.htm
http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/ziliao/3602/3604/t18053.htm
http://english.people.com.cn/200406/28/eng20040628_147763.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Principles_of_Peaceful_Coexistence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_coexistence


The Ten Principles of Bandung (Dasa Sila Bandung) :

1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations;

2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations;

3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations, large and small;

4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country;

5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations;

6. (a) Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers and (b) Abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries;

7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country;

8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement or other peaceful means of the parties' own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations;

9. Promotion of mutual interests and co-operation;

10. Respect for justice and international obligations.

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