Paul Stubbs, Jelena Vidojević – The concept of non-alignment and its relevance today

Jelena Vidojević in conversation with Paul Stubbs

Jelena Vidojević is a political scientist and co-founder of the New South Institute. She is also the editor of the ‘ Missing Voices: Critical Thinking in Times of Polycrisis’ series .

Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in Zagreb, Croatia for over thirty years. He is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Economics, Zagreb.

Photo: Bandung Conference 1955 Source: Wikimedia Commons

JV: Over the past decade, coinciding with the deepening crisis of the liberal international order, there has been a renewed interest in the history of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and other expressions of Third World solidarity, particularly the Bandung Conference, across parts of the Balkans and the Global South more widely.

In much of Africa, political leaders and scholars have invoked the need to revive the “Spirit of Bandung”. What is striking, however, is that these calls rarely invoke the Belgrade Conference of 1961, despite its foundational role in the institutionalisation of the NAM. While Bandung was an important and symbolic gathering, it was a one-off conference, whereas Belgrade marked the beginning of a more comprehensive and long-lasting political project that developed a far more ambitious agenda. Why, then, has Belgrade, and more broadly Yugoslavia’s contribution to Third World internationalism, become something of a blind spot in contemporary African nostalgia for Third World solidarity?

PS: There are so many ways to approach this intriguing question. Let me add even one more layer of complexity. I think we can see three events in the period between 1955 and 1965 as fundamental to the articulation of the voice of the Global South and the elaboration of a different kind of worldmaking project: the Bandung conference of 1955, the Belgrade non-aligned summit of 1961, and the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba in 1966. A Bandung spirit and a Havana spirit or “spirit of the Tricontinental” are frequently evoked, but a Belgrade spirit or a NAM spirit much less frequently. Recently, I wrote that all three are needed for an understanding of global anti-fascism and its links with decolonial internationalism.

In a way, “spirits” are easier to imagine if what is being dealt with is a one-off event that could, but never really did, have a longer-term institutional presence. The NAM, despite its stuttering start, became an important, institutionalised structure and had a real, rather than a symbolic, role throughout the 1970s and beyond. The contradictions of the NAM are harder to ignore, therefore, than those of Bandung or the Tricontinental because the last two never had to implement things in practice. Bandung and Havana can thus be reformulated as radical utopian worldmaking projects, whereas the NAM was far more pragmatic – as it had to be in order to survive and prosper.

It is also important to acknowledge that Yugoslavia played little or no role in Bandung, although it offered diplomatic support and its leadership recognised the significance of the occasion. It was not invited to the Tricontinental and perceived it as a kind of impractical radicalism. Yugoslavia was, however, both one of the initiators of the NAM and the country most committed to its continuation. It played a role, I have argued, as a kind of “liminal hegemon”, steering the movement, writing drafts of communiques before the summits happened, but also acknowledging that being in Europe, and being relatively more developed than most NAM states, its leading role had to be tempered and built through consensus.

Early scholarship on the NAM was not as dominated by Yugoslav authors as its rediscovery has been. This is partly because that rediscovery was inextricably linked to a kind of parallel rediscovery of Yugoslavia in a global order during the Cold War and its ability, partly through the NAM, to punch above its weight in global diplomacy. Many students came from NAM countries to study in Yugoslavia, few Yugoslavs studied in the countries those students came from. Similarly, Yugoslav companies and workers were very much in demand in many NAM member states, whereas there was very little direct presence of companies or workers from NAM states in Yugoslavia. I am arguing, I think, that a degree of Yugocentrism is understandable, although we are now getting many more nuanced studies of bilateral and multilateral relations within the NAM, and with the Soviet Union and China, which add to our knowledge.

The third dimension is the fact that for the first and second generation of decolonial and liberation movement leaders, in Africa in particular, the NAM was just one of many arenas in which to build a case for a radical new world order. The African Union, the G-77, even (for some African states) the Commonwealth, were just as, if not more, important. The struggle against apartheid, as our own ongoing research suggests, relied far more on tangible support from the Soviet Union, Eastern European socialist countries, and Cuba than on the NAM and Yugoslavia, even though, not unlike the support of the Scandinavian states, and activists in the Global North, it was far from irrelevant. This just means, I think, that the memories of African politicians and social movements who invoke Third World Internationalism give only a small role to the NAM and an even more marginal role to Yugoslavia.

Of course, Yugoslavia is a country that has not existed for, arguably, 35 years, so that also contributes to the skewed memory. Yugoslavia had strong links with SWAPO in South West Africa (as it was then) from as early as the late 1950s. In the late 1980s, when UN peace keepers were needed, SWAPO insisted this should include a Yugoslav contingent. Just a few years later, Namibians were serving as peacekeepers in what had already become known as the former Yugoslavia.

JV: The NAM emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War as one of several major “anti-systemic world-making” projects. Despite the diversity of its membership, did it articulate a shared vision of an alternative international order? What were the core principles that united its members?

Today, are any coherent visions of a future world order emerging from the Global South? BRICS and to some extent the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), are often portrayed as the “vanguard of the World Majority”, actors with the potential to shape new international rules, influence global policymaking, and develop institutional alternatives to the Western-dominated order. Yet how realistic is it to expect the emergence of a genuinely transformative or emancipatory project? Do these groupings articulate a coherent vision of a new world order, or are they better understood as pragmatic coalitions of states with overlapping but ultimately divergent interests?

PS: Notwithstanding its pragmatic, and changing, character, I think we can chart a set of unifying principles or beliefs, although these were not necessarily exclusive to the NAM. Some derived from the UN Charter, some came straight from the China-India Panchsheel principles and, indeed, from the Bandung conference, and they evolved over time. When lecturing on the topic of the NAM, I often show a segment of Yugoslav newsreel footage from the 1961 summit, which spoke of “new vistas of hope for an anxious world”. 5 It then provided a list of concerns that the delegates would give their immediate attention to. In the order suggested at the time, these were: the general situation in the world; the establishment and strengthening of international peace and security; respect for the right of nations to self-determination; the struggle against imperialism, and the liquidation of colonialism and neo-colonialism; respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, and non-interference in their internal affairs; racial discrimination and the policy of apartheid; general and complete disarmament, the banning of nuclear experiments, and the maintenance of military bases on foreign territory; peaceful co-existence amongst states with different social systems; the role and structure of the United Nations and the application of its resolutions; unequal economic development; and the improvement of international economic and technical co-operation. Now, one might argue that these are at a high level of generality, but they do offer a set of more or less coherent principles which suggested a more pro-active engagement which questions of East-West and North-South conflicts than mere neutrality did.

Having said all of this, the principle that all states should have the right to define their own political, economic, and social systems meant that there was a rule that internal affairs within NAM member states should never be questioned. Governments could be overthrown by their militaries, as happened early on, for example, in Ghana; left leaning states could be overthrown by neo-fascist dictatorships, as happened in Indonesia; and minorities could be persecuted, as happened not infrequently in a number of NAM countries including, I would suggest, in Yugoslavia; without any of these actions calling NAM membership into question.

Disputes, even armed conflicts, between Member States were not to be the focus of plenary discussion but, rather, the subject of quiet diplomacy on the fringes of summits. At the same time China never became a member of the NAM because of India’s steadfast opposition, much as it was opposed China’s membership of the G-77. Similarly, Pakistan only joined in 1979 after it abandoned its pro-US stance and was marginalised within the NAM by India. Cuba and some of the more radical Arab states, especially Libya, sought to expel Egypt from the NAM after the peace treaty with Israel, also in 1979, a move opposed by more moderate NAM states as a matter of principle. In the 1980s, the Iran-Iraq war pretty much destroyed the unity of the movement, a unity that was never restored. Of course, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the wars of the Yugoslav succession from 1991, the NAM lost influence to the point of becoming practically irrelevant.

So that leads us on to the second part of your question, in terms of who carries the torch of the NAM today. To whom should we look for coherent visions of a future world order both from the Global South and for the Global South. In terms of realpolitik, this is probably BRICS or, with its current expansion, BRICS+. Even the recent expansion of the group to 11 countries, and even allowing for possible further expansion, BRICS+ involves a fraction of the countries that were involved in the NAM at its height. Even more importantly, China is the dominant force in BRICS+, at least economically, not least because of its rise as a global economic superpower, in a period when, in many ways, countries of Africa and Latin America have become delinked from global capitalism. Russia needs BRICS+ to challenge a Western-led sanctions regime in the light of its invasion of Ukraine, and BRICS+ allows it to continue to play a role in the Global South. BRICS+ has a series of initiatives on terms of trade, finance, de-dollarisation, and development, that has the potential to shake the foundations of the current hypocritical rules-based international order. However, the precise forms this will take remain uncertain.

I worry that many of the initiatives fall short of the “collective self-reliance” or genuine and equitable “South-South co-operation” that the NAM was all about. BRICS+, and in particular Chinese, visions of development tend to be extractivist, neo-colonial, and exploitative, seeking to shape the rules of a new global capitalist order in their own interests although this is, I think, far from the whole story. I believe there is hope that the sheer size and importance of China may mean that it can build infrastructure and model low carbon futures in ways that respond to the broader needs of the Global South. I know little about the SCO but suspect similar problems can be seen there. One hope for progressive futures lies, perhaps, in forms of regional co-operation such as occurred during the “pink tide” in Latin America experimenting with transnational forms of economic and social rights.

JV: How should we understand the meaning of non-alignment today? Does the concept still offer a viable framework for states seeking to navigate a complex international order, or does it require fundamental rethinking?

Non-alignment has never been a singular or fixed concept. It meant different things to different countries, reflecting their distinct historical experiences, regional circumstances, development priorities, and security concerns. The contrasting visions advanced by Yugoslavia and Cuba within the NAM illustrate this diversity well.

Yet much of this complexity has been lost in contemporary debates. Today, “non-alignment” is often reduced to a caricature, that, for example, often conflates contemporary Russia with the Soviet Union, defines itself primarily through anti-Western sentiment, and invokes the solidarities of a bygone era without adequately accounting for the profound transformations of the international system. In the process, the concept is stripped of the strategic thinking that originally underpinned it: the pursuit of national interests, development objectives, and security concerns in the complex times. Can you please share your thoughts on this?

PS : So, let me start with a distinction between “Non-Alignment” as a particular institutional form, and “non-alignment” as a set of principles and strategic choices for states to make in terms of international relations. Non-Alignment holds little interest today, I think, whereas non-alignment, although it can mean many different things, remains extremely relevant regardless of whether we see the current global order as unipolar (the United States frantically holding on to its position as a global hegemon despite serious challenges), as bipolar (the United States and China instead of the Cold War United States and the Soviet Union), multi-polar (with three or more competing near hegemons), or merely chaotic.

A recent book sees one way out of the current “polycrisis” through Active Non-Alignment that can be embraced even by smaller and weaker states in the Global South. It suggests a kind of instrumentalised “hedging of your bets”, never fully committing to one global power or another but judging each issue in terms of national interests or, more appropriately I would say, on global principles such as fighting climate change, reforming multilateral institutions, prioritising equitable development, fostering equality, and the like.

The refusal of many countries to take sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict should not be interpreted as indifference, but as a critique of the hypocrisy of a supposed Rules-Based Order in which the United States and NATO countries, in particular, interpret or manipulate the rules, including the defence of universal human rights, to suit their own interests. It could be evidence, indeed, less in terms of “this is not our war” and more in terms of “why should we prioritise this war and not many others?”.

Whilst I am sympathetic to some of the arguments in the book, it completely misreads the old, really existing, NAM. Rather than supporting new forms of non-dogmatic socialism that were a feature of many of the key NAM states (including some in Africa), it rehashes a rather mundane “capitalism with a human face” logic in which growth in gross domestic product is the only measure of progress, and the only path open for the Global South is to claim its rightful share of the global capitalist pie.

I could not agree more with your point about the danger of a caricatured version of non-alignment, and even non-alignment, which uses it as a synonym for a crude anti-Western perspective. Nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary Serbia, with the Vučić regime just as prone to forgetting or ridiculing the legacy of the NAM as the regimes in other post-Yugoslav states, except when it celebrates a particular anniversary of the Belgrade summit. The sixtieth anniversary meeting in 2021 included the Russian Federation as an observer, coincided with an arms fair in an adjacent hall, and cemented Vučić’s position, as refusing to choose between Russia, China, the European Union (EU), and the United States, and rather dealing with each in ways that strengthened his kleptocratic rule.

There is a wonderful short news clip of the visit to Serbia of Ugandan President Museveni in July 2023, where he recalls the legacy of Yugoslavia’s, and Tito’s, non-aligned leadership, the important work of Yugoslav companies in Africa, and his own meeting, as a student leader at the time, with then Yugoslav foreign minister Edvard Kardelj at the University of Dar es Salaam. Sadly, I could not find the clip, but it shows the rather concerned reactions of senior figures in the Serbian government as it dawned on them how Museveni’s narrative was out of synch with their own.

Of course, Vučić’s regime, like some others, is enabled by what orthodox political scientists term “illiberalism”, but which I would describe as “authoritarianism”, by dominant actors. This is precisely because of his openness to circuits of predatory transnational capital, whether it be the EU, which turns a blind eye to environmental issues and suppression of protests because he has enabled lithium mining by EU companies, or the Trump regime, because of openness to megalomaniacal real estate deals involving members of Trump’s family. So, “hedging your bets” is not really a form of principled non-alignment, the values still have to matter.

JV: With a remarkably dynamic agenda, the NAM continually evolved in response to the most pressing challenges facing the countries of the Third World. While its early years were dominated by questions of decolonisation, self-determination, and the threat of nuclear confrontation, the Movement shifted its focus during the 1970s towards envisioning and building a new international economic order. Central to this agenda was the development of alternative forms of economic cooperation among countries of the Global South, underpinned by the principle of collective self-reliance .

Fifty years later, many of the structural inequalities and asymmetries identified by the proponents of the New International Economic Order remain relevant, even as the global political and economic landscape has been profoundly transformed. What might an NIEO look like today? Which of the original NIEO’s aspirations remain applicable, and what new principles, institutions, and forms of cooperation would be needed to address the realities of a twenty-first-century world?

PS : I have just finished a draft discussion paper for the Vienna Global Forum on precisely this question. It follows on from a podcast hosted by them and featuring Vijay Prashad and myself. It is true that in the 1970s, once the threat of mutually assured destruction in the event of a nuclear conflict involving the superpowers had receded, the NAM turned its full attention to economic issues. Questions of global economic inequality had been on the NAM’s agenda from the beginning, however, influenced by Kwame Nkrumah’s important 1965 thesis on neo-colonialism which stated that: “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside”.

The origins of what became the NIEO can be traced directly to the 1970 Lusaka NAM summit which referred to “the poverty of developing nations” and their “economic dependency” as a structural problem of the existing global economic order, calling for rapid change in the fields of trade, finance and technology. The 1973 Algiers NAM summit, followed by the oil crisis of October 1973 – when oil-producing states who were members of OPEC raised oil prices and limited supplies and sales in response to the war in the Middle East – gave the Global South both a clear set of demands and greater leverage. The Algerians, in particular, sought to take the example of OPEC and, through the UN General Assembly, to broaden the agenda and embed OPEC’s confrontation with the industrial states over oil into a confrontation between the entire Global South and the Global North, focused on all commodities, raw materials, industrial goods, and the entire development agenda.

I have written at length about the NIEO’s “troika”, which saw the NAM acting as a kind of Global South think tank, the more formal group of developing countries, the G-77, acting as a kind of Parliament of the Global South, with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) providing much needed technical expertise, particularly in relation to commodity prices. UNCTAD’s special status within the UN, was meant to preserve its relative autonomy but, in reality, meant it had few real powers. This, along with contradictions between its roles as a technical assistance agency, analytical “think tank”, “honest broker”, and “Global South advocate”, limited its achievements.

UNCTAD’s difficulties, which led to a sense of frustration in the Global South, also contributed to a continued role for the NAM in articulating the NIEO. The NAM was important in ensuring that the countries of the Global South maintained unity regarding the NIEO. Political elites were extremely strategic, discussing “maximalist” and “minimalist” demands, and recognising the different interests of oil-producing and oil-dependent states. Of course, the NIEO was killed off, as the interregnum that produced it gave way to a paradigm shift in terms of neoliberalism, taking the form of a Southern debt crisis, enforced austerity and structural adjustment.

In terms of the situation today, it is worth quoting Nils Gilman, who has written that the upsurge in interest in the NIEO in the last decade or more, in both academic and activist circles, represents “part of the search for the reconstruction of a ‘usable past’ that can ground the imagining of a new post-neoliberal global economic system” and, I would add, global governance and world order more generally. As I hinted earlier, today’s world is different in some ways from when the NIEO was passed, without a vote, at the sixth special session of the UN General Assembly on 1 May 1974. China, which accounted for only 2% of global GDP then, accounts for 22% now. The American century in terms of what Branko Milanović calls “geoeconomics” has ended and the Asian century has begun.

Yet many things remain similar or have grown worse. Most of Latin America and Africa have become delinked from the gains of global capitalism, the share of export trade from the least developed countries still hovers around a miserly 1%, and UNCTAD suggests that roughly two thirds of developing countries and over 80% of the least developed countries remain dependent on exporting primary commodities, constituting more than 60% of their total exports.Development assistance has fallen not only in relative but, largely as a result of the actions of the Trump regime, also in absolute terms.

The scale and power of multi-national corporations have grown with Big Tech replacing Big Oil as the key sector. Whilst oil originated, in large part, in the Global South and could be nationalised, Big Tech is Northern (if also partly Chinese) and protected by international property rights. The Global South debt crisis has become chronic and the IFIs still push for harsh austerity and the slashing of social welfare, education, and health budgets.

In other words, the themes tackled by the NIEO remain highly relevant today. Of course, there are also global challenges that the NIEO failed to address: climate change and the escalating environmental crisis; the question of migration, including forced migration; social rights for the poor and excluded; the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI and so on.

It is not hard to find extremely coherent statements of what a new NIEO should look like. In my recent book, I focus on two such statements. One is “A Plan to Save the Planet”, produced by a platform of 26 radical research institutes, led by Vijay Prashad and his colleagues in the Tricontinental Institute. It addresses the interlocking apartheids of money, medicine and food, linking these to control over science and technology, finance, resources, weapons, and communications by a small group of corporations and governments. The second is the Progressive International, formed by Yanis Varoufakis and others in 2020. They met in Havana on 27 January 2023, where delegates from more than 25 countries discussed a NIEO for the 21 st century. The Havana Declaration states: “economic liberation will not be granted but must be seized. (…) [O]ur vision today can only be realized through the collective action of the South and the formation of new and alternative institutions to share critical technology, tackle sovereign debt, drive development finance, face future pandemics together, as well as coordinate positions on international climate action and the protection of national sovereignty over the extraction of natural resources”.

I wish I could tell you which institutions might have the vision and the leverage to help bring these programmes about. Perhaps a revitalised G-77, even though it is fundamentally fragmented as a result of the rise of Asia? Perhaps a radicalised and more progressive BRICS++, combining South-South interstate co-operation with transnational movements from below? Perhaps the initiative of Spain’s Sanchez and Brazil’s Lula for a new transnational left alliance? Perhaps a revitalised UN? I can only say that I do not know – we have to believe in what Stuart Hall once called “the play of contingency” – but I am not particularly optimistic, at least in the short-term.

JV: The influence and achievements of the NAM during its most successful period were closely tied to the authority of the United Nations. Today, however, multilateralism appears to be in retreat. Global institutions, most notably the United Nations, established in the aftermath of the Second World War, are increasingly constrained in their ability to respond effectively, and in some cases at all, to the world’s most pressing challenges.

How does this changing international context affect the prospects of contemporary groupings seeking to advance the interests of the Global South? Can organisations such as BRICS, the G77, or the NAM exercise meaningful influence in an era of weakening multilateralism? Does the erosion of the UN-centred international order fundamentally limit their ability to shape global governance?

PS: There is a lot to unpick in your suggestion that the NAM and the UN were “closely tied” together. By 1973, perhaps even before, the NAM could boast that half of the UN member countries were also NAM members, a result of the emergence from colonialism of newly independent nations in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the same time, Amilcar Cabral, at the NAM summit in Cairo in 1964, famously described the UN as “a giant with its hands tied behind its back”. The role of permanent members of the Security Council and their veto powers, the lack of representation of Global South interests in many UN bodies and agencies, the constant lack of funds to do meaningful development work, were all concerns of the NAM, which was forced to act as a more truly global institution than the UN could be, and as a forceful advocate of UN reform.

Since the Second World War and, even more so, since the dominance of neoliberalism following the defeat of the NIEO, there have been two parallel sets of global governance bodies: on the one side, the UN and its agencies; on the other side the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation. Of course, there has also been a third global actor, the United States and its NATO allies, willing and able to use military force, with or (more usually) without even bothering to seek UN approval, to maintain their interests.

The fact that the United States is the major global military power and, indeed, despite huge cuts under Trump 2.0, the major donor to the UN, does not bode well for the future, not least because the EU has embarked on an orgy of military spending and yet more cuts to welfare. Bizarrely, a UN without the United States might be a less irrelevant body than it is now. Of course, the United States is far from the only country whose actions breach the UN charter consistently. In any case, a reformed, properly funded, UN seems like a utopian pipe dream although I do think that some kinds of global revenue raising could at least narrow the gap between utopia and reality.

I keep coming back to the section on UN reform in the 1979 book by the Algerian legal scholar and advocate Mohammed Bedjaoui, on The New International Order. The “obsolete” global order he critiques there, which he termed “an international law of appropriation” underpinned by “dependence, exploitation, the looting of the resources of the Third World and the introduction of zones of influence”, is still in place today, albeit more fragile than ever. Bedjaoui felt that a new international legal order based on self-determination, the right to development, and sovereignty over natural resources was both necessary and possible. I suggest that new order would need to combine reparative justice with global socioeconomic justice, whilst respecting planetary boundaries and the rights of non-humans, a true global commons, in other words. What kind of institutional fabric, real or imagined, could bring this about is beyond me, I am afraid.

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