The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War, 1961–1973 ✣ Lorenz M. Luthi¨ Introduction The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was a product of the Cold War. Without the political division of Europe and East Asia between the two superpowers and their respective smaller allies in the 1950s, the NAM would not have found its place in international relations. In the context of an increasingly globalized contest between Soviet-style Communism and Western liberalism, the states that considered themselves non-aligned formed a loose association in 1961 designed to provide them with a collective voice in international relations. However, non-alignment did not mean that all of them were political fence sitters. Some were Communist states themselves, others liberal democracies, and still others conservative monarchies. How, then, did this group of countries come together? Their fundamental concern was the feeling that they had no voice on issues that concerned the whole world. In the context of the nuclear arms race of the 1950s and the danger of a worldwide nuclear conflagration, they believed they had to contribute to the solution of the problem even if they were neither the reason for nor a part of it. Being a potential victim in a future global war was sufficient to claim a voice in the debate at that time. Belonging to a disparate lot of countries was the motivation to form some sort of association. It was no wonder that the calls for a conference of the neutral or non-aligned grew to a chorus during the fifteenth meeting of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in the fall of 1960 in New York. Could there have been any better platform than the sole international organization that brought together nearly all of the world’s states, including the neutral and non-aligned? Once established, what was the agenda of non-alignment? In reality, agree- ment on the necessity to find a joint voice was difficult to transform into joint policies. Issuing declarations was easier than finding and promoting solutions to complex problems. This was the result not only of the disparate nature of Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 2016, pp. 98–147, doi:10.1162/JCWS_a_00682 C 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 98 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00682 by guest on 30 September 2021 The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War membership but also of the challenging problems that the young movement faced in the 1960s and early 1970s. Although the movement chose to speak about certain problems, other issues imposed themselves on the agenda. Thus, internal weakness was compounded by external forces threatening to tear apart the movement. Any discussion of the Non-Aligned Movement and its connections to the Cold War requires first a clear definition and demarcation of the terms and problems involved. When the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito called for the creation of a new international movement at the UN General Assembly in the fall of 1960, he sought cooperation among “non-bloc” or “neutralist” countries.1 Although these phrases defined conditions for membership in the soon-to-be-established movement, only the preparatory conference in Cairo in June 1961 defined common goals: first, the “exchange of views on the in- ternational situation”; second, taking measures for strengthening international peace in the spheres of decolonization, apartheid, disarmament, nuclear test- ing, and so on; and, third, problems of unequal economic development across the world.2 The first point is not programmatic and the third is outside this article’s focus; hence, only the second point is of interest here. With the exception of the Indochina war, decolonization was not a Cold War conflict, even if the superpowers had some impact on the course of various national liberation struggles. On the one hand, the world’s remaining colonizers in the 1960s (the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, and Portugal) were all Western countries whereas the Soviet Union supported decolonization movements, at least through propaganda. On the other hand, U.S. support for the colonizing states was inconsistent over the period from the late 1940s to the 1970s, and Soviet material support for leftist independence movements, even beyond formal decolonization, was not usually forthcoming until the latter half of the superpower conflict. Thus, decolonization itself is not a central concern of this article. Apart from the Indochina conflict, the focus here is on issues of international peace, including nuclear arms issues. Through international cooperation, the members of the Non-Aligned Movement, particularly the dominant large countries—Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia (initially), and India (later on)—wanted to increase their influ- ence in international affairs. The hope was that their joint influence would be greater than the sum of their individual, uncoordinated policies. But if the 1. “Tito Presses Bid for Neutral Bloc,” The New York Times, 27 September 1960, p. 19. 2. “No. 616,” 14 June 1961, in National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK), Foreign Office (FO) 371/161212, “Conferences of Non-Aligned States in Belgrade, Cairo and Anglo-US Policy Thereon,” pp. 1–2. 99 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00682 by guest on 30 September 2021 Luthi¨ Non-Aligned Movement was supposed to influence the international situa- tion, which was, to a great degree, the result of the superpower conflict, it had to engage with both the United States and the Soviet Union. Thus, the move- ment became automatically a part of the Cold War, even if its members did not want to be formally allied with one or the other superpower. This inherent contradiction of being neutral while being engaged caused great strains within the movement during its first dozen years. Only at the beginning of the 1970s did many of the conflicts, which either existed between the superpowers or were induced by their competition, began to be resolved through direct nego- tiations. Superpower detente´ thus removed an important raison d’etreˆ for the movement, which is why the 4th Non-Aligned Conference in 1973 in Algiers forms a natural endpoint. By the mid-1970s, economic development among the non-aligned had replaced many of their original goals. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the Cold War occurred in three forms: first, as the systemic Cold War in the form of the superpower conflict; second, as sub-systemic, or regional, Cold Wars in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East; and, third, as spinoff conflicts that emerged as a result of either or both of the above. Although the systemic Cold War was rooted in the ideological conflict between great powers with antagonistic visions of the future, its clearest manifestation was the nuclear arms race. What set the two superpowers apart from the all other countries, including the smaller nuclear-weapons states, was not only the possession of these weapons but also the sheer availability of large numbers of warheads and delivery systems that assured strategic overkill beyond limited deterrence. Yet, the possibility of a nuclear holocaust engulfing the whole world concerned all of the world’s countries, including those in the Non-Aligned Movement. Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East were the staging grounds of the main sub-systemic, or regional, Cold Wars. For the period under consideration here, the African and Latin American regional Cold Wars are less important.3 The main conflict in Europe was Germany, which emerged divided from World War II. Although the superpowers were ultimately responsible for the creation and the maintenance of that division, each of the two German states—allied with its respective superpower patron—fought a sub-systemic Cold War against the other. The attempt of both Germanys to impose this competition onto the international scene had an impact on the Non-Aligned Movement in its early years. In East Asia, the Indochina conflict turned from a decolonization struggle into a Cold War dispute through the engagement 3. Even Cuba, which caused a major crisis in 1962, was not a constant source of tension throughout the 1960s. 100 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_a_00682 by guest on 30 September 2021 The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War of the superpowers, or their respective allies, such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As the conflict dragged on, none of the regional actors was able to continue fighting without superpower assistance. The Communist nature of the dominant decolonization force—North Vietnam—lent this proxy conflict an additional ideological aspect. Finally, the main conflict in the Middle East to this day, the Arab-Israeli dispute, had its roots in the pre–Cold War period. After mid-1967, however, it had assumed the nature of a proxy conflict, similar to the one in Indochina, as both superpowers and their respective allies lined up and supported, in material terms, one side each. However, Egypt’s break with the Soviet Union in 1972 and the resulting process that led to the peace agreement with Israel seven years later blurred this clear line-up. Finally, spin-off conflicts emerged because the systemic or the sub-systemic Cold Wars produced the conditions or the means for their occurrence. For example, the nuclear arms race between China and India in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not a Cold War conflict in itself, since neither was closely allied with either superpower at the time. However, as the superpowers produced nuclear weapons and the resulting knowledge proliferated, the Sino-Indian nuclear competition spun off from the systematic Cold War. With the periodical framework from the first conference in Belgrade in 1961 to the fourth conference in Algiers in 1973 defined, this article focuses mainly but not exclusively, on Yugoslavia, Egypt, and India.