Introduction
“Long Presumed Dead, the Non-Aligned Movement Meets in Tehran”1 – de- clared an article in a German newspaper on 30 August 2012 with reference to the sixteenth non-aligned summit conference in the Iranian capital. There, under the chairmanship of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the heads of state and government and foreign ministers of virtually every Asian, Afri- can and Latin American state came together for an international confer- ence from 26 to 31 August 2012. Alongside Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and Zimbabwean pres- ident Robert Mugabe, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon also attended this meeting of 120 countries – despite heavy criticism from the West – to discuss issues and developments in international politics with the other delegates.2 Western observers and journalists clearly struggled to categorize and ex- plain this unusual political spectacle, this “relic of Cold War days”,3 as they perceived no common ground between the attendees. As they explained to their readers, the Non-Aligned Movement (nam) was established by Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Josip Broz Tito (Yugoslavia), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) and Sukarno (Indonesia) as a counterweight to the blocs of the Cold War. Since then, they went on, the nam had been led by politicians of highly variable reputation such as Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, Nelson Mandela and Hosni Mubarak. The most recent instantiation of the long- term process of networking between non-aligned states was the seven- teenth summit conference held in September 2016 on Margarita Island, Venezuela. The eighteenth non-aligned summit conference, to be held in Azerbaijan in 2019, has already been announced, despite what many Western observers regard as the near impossibility of reconciling these states’ interests. The nam includes such politically, economically and culturally different countries as the
1 Andreas Zumach, “Irans Isolierung wird zum Thema”, in: Tageszeitung (30.8.2012). 2 See
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004336131_002 2 Introduction rich, fully “developed” Singapore, “failed” states such as Somalia and Afghani- stan, pro-Western democracies such as the Philippines, communist states such as North Korea and, of course, Iran. Yet despite the tremendous divergences between its members and although the East-West conflict is long since over, the nam’s membership is growing steadily – as noted with astonishment time and again by numerous observers – and it still exercises an influence on the United Nations, albeit less than in the past.4 Over the course of the 20th century, despite opposition from the former European colonial powers and the superpowers of the East-West conflict, governments from different parts of the world, with contrasting political and economic systems, have banded together in the Non-Aligned Movement. As I contend in the present study, the nam has become a new actor in interna- tional politics. I demonstrate that it was institutionalized in the 1970s, played a significant role in both the North-South conflict and the development of South-South relations, and that it claimed and still claims to champion the interests of the “non-aligned”, the “Third World” or “developing countries”, or even the “global South”, on the international political stage. The movement brought about a permanent expansion in the ensemble of actors participating in international relations and, after the United Nations, represents one of the largest international organizations of our time.5
4 See Rainer Herman, “Treffen der Blockfreien. Ban Ki-moon in Teheran eingetroffen”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (29.8.2012). Bahman Nirumand, “Iran findet keine Un- terstützung”, in: Tageszeitung (31.8.2012). Simon Tisdall, “Egypt Underlines Iran’s Isolation at Non-Aligned Movement Summit”, in: The Guardian (30.8.2012). Shashi Tharoor, “View- point: Is the Non-Aligned Movement Relevant Today?”, in: BBC News India, at: