Non-Aligned Movement

• 1. Introduction

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  The Non-Aligned Movement speaks for 121 countries and 55 percent of the world's population, yet most people have never heard of it. It is the second-largest grouping of states on earth, trailing only the United Nations itself. Its members span Africa, Asia, Latin America, and parts of Europe, gathered around a single stubborn idea: that a nation does not have to pick a side. How did this coalition come to exist? Who built it, and why? And what happens to a movement born to resist two superpowers when one of those superpowers simply collapses?

• 2. A World Splitting in Two

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  In 1950, India and Yugoslavia walked into the United Nations and refused. Both countries declined to align with any side in the web of alliances surrounding the Korean War. That refusal gave a name to an idea: "non-alignment," used publicly for the first time that year at the UN. The Cold War had divided the globe sharply. On one side sat the pro-Soviet socialist bloc, anchored by the Warsaw Pact. On the other stood the pro-American capitalist group, many of whose members belonged to NATO. Newly independent nations in Asia and Africa watched these blocs form and feared being pulled into orbits they had not chosen.

  Indian diplomat V. K. Krishna Menon first used the phrase as a formal doctrine at the United Nations in 1953. A year later, in a speech in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai together described five principles for guiding Sino-Indian relations, called Panchsheel. Those five restraints included mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in domestic affairs, and peaceful coexistence. They would become the philosophical backbone of the movement that followed.

• 3. Bandung and the Brijuni Islands

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  On the 19th of July 1956, three leaders gathered on the Brijuni islands off the Yugoslav coast and signed the Declaration of Brijuni. Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser put their names to a document that read, in part: "Peace can not be achieved with separation, but with the aspiration towards collective security in global terms and expansion of freedom, as well as terminating the domination of one country over another."

  The groundwork had been laid the year before at Bandung, Indonesia, where president Sukarno hosted a 1955 conference of Asian and African states. The room that day was striking. Sukarno, Nasser, Nehru, Tito, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ho Chi Minh, Zhou Enlai, Norodom Sihanouk, U Thant, and a young Indira Gandhi all attended. The conference adopted a declaration on world peace and cooperation and a collective pledge to stay neutral in the Cold War. Six years later, that momentum produced the first Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, held in Belgrade in September 1961. The formal movement had arrived.

• 4. Cuba's Rise and Fall

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  Through the 1970s, Cuba built an outsized presence inside the movement. The country established military advisory missions abroad and launched economic and social reform programs across developing nations. At the 1976 world conference, members applauded what they called Cuban internationalism for its role assisting Angola against South Africa's strategy in that region. The next summit, scheduled for Havana in 1979, was to be chaired by Fidel Castro himself. September 1979 marked what one account called the zenith of Cuban prestige within the movement. Most attendees believed Cuba was not aligned with the Soviet camp.

  Then, in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The calculation collapsed. At the United Nations, nonaligned members voted 56 to 9, with 26 abstaining, to condemn the Soviet intervention. Cuba voted against the resolution, siding with the USSR. Castro, rather than becoming the movement's high-profile spokesman, went quiet. The membership was deeply fractured, especially among predominantly Muslim states that condemned the Soviet-Afghan War. Cuba's leadership of the movement effectively ended with that vote.

• 5. Ideology Without a Fixed Compass

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  The range of people who have chaired the Non-Aligned Movement tells its own story. Suharto of Indonesia, described as a militaristic anti-communist, held the chair from 1992 to 1995. Nelson Mandela, democratic socialist and anti-apartheid leader, served from 1998 to 1999. Mohamed Morsi, a conservative Islamist, held it briefly in 2012. Josip Broz Tito, a Marxist-Leninist, was the first chair. Ernesto Samper of Colombia, a social liberal, served from 1995 to 1998. Unified by declared commitment to world peace and security, the movement described itself at the seventh summit in New Delhi in March 1983 as "history's biggest peace movement."

  During the 1970s and early 1980s, the NAM sponsored campaigns for the New International Economic Order, pushing to restructure commercial relations between developed and developing nations. A related initiative, the New World Information and Communication Order, produced the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool in 1975, later converted into the NAM News Network in 2005. The movement also backed UN Resolution 3379 in 1975, a non-binding measure that equated Zionism with racial discrimination, which produced bloc voting that led to a series of UN resolutions targeting Israel in the years that followed.

• 6. After the Cold War

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  Yugoslavia's breakup in 1991-1992 hit the movement directly. One of the founding members had fractured. A Ministerial Meeting in New York in 1992 suspended Yugoslavia's membership. The successor states showed little interest in joining; Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia retain only observer status. Membership applications from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Costa Rica were rejected in 1995 and 1998 respectively. Malta and Cyprus left in 2004 when they joined the European Union. Azerbaijan and Fiji became the most recent entrants, both joining in 2011.

  The 16th summit, held in Tehran from the 26th to the 31st of August 2012, drew representatives from over 150 countries, including 27 presidents, two kings and emirs, and seven prime ministers. Iran took over from Egypt as chair for the period 2012 to 2015. The 19th summit took place in Kampala, Uganda, in January 2024, under the slogan "Deepening Cooperation for Shared Global Affluence." The 20th summit is expected to be hosted by Uzbekistan in 2029. The movement has refocused on globalization, debt burdens, unfair trade practices, and what it frames as Western hegemony in a post-bipolar world, with the NAM Centre for South-South Technical Cooperation, based in Jakarta and established in 1995, serving as one operational arm of that effort.