Whether the participants in the Colombo summit give a new direction to the non-aligned movement or not, there can be no question about the need for it. For, anti-imperialist slogans themselves no longer serve the interests of most of the member-countries, much less of the third world as a whole. These cannot even provide a rallying point.
It will be idle to pretend that anti-imperialism has not been an euphemism for a struggle against the West. Most non-aligned leaders, beginning with the principal promoter of the concept, Mr Nehru, have defined imperialism in terms which can apply only to the West. Thus despite all manner of pressures, the late Prime Minister steadfastly refused, and rightly so, to equate Soviet hegemony in Eastern and Central Europe with imperialism. Most other Asian and African leaders have taken the same line.
This stance has been quite understandable, for the Afro-Asian countries constituting the majority in the non-aligned group have been Western colonies and have therefore an intimate experience of dominance and exploitation by the West. Since they have had no similar experience of Russia, they cannot possibly nurse a sense of grievance against the Soviet Union and share the Western view of it as an expansionist power. Also as it happened in the ’fifties and the ’sixties when the concept of non-alignment developed, the Western bloc headed by the United States was economically and militarily so superior to the Soviet Union and its East European and Chinese allies that it almost instinctively thought not only in terms of establishing a cordon sanitaire around them but also of subordinating other countries to its will.
Critical
The international situation has greatly changed in the last decade, and not only because the Soviet Union has achieved parity with the United States in the field of nuclear weapons and promises to catch up with it in respect of naval strength as well. Indeed, as far as the non-aligned countries are concerned, equally pertinent are the twin facts that, with the liquidation of Portuguese rule in Mozambique and Angola last year, the decolonisation process is almost over and that for the third world as a whole social and economic problems have become far more critical than political issues.
This is by no means an altogether new development. In fact most former colonies had won their independence by the time the first non-aligned summit was held in Belgrade in 1961 so much so that Mr Nehru then took the stand that peace in the sense of nuclear disarmament and not anti-imperialism was the central issue of our times. Again, most of the newly independent countries, including India, have been preoccupied with socio-economic problems for over two decades.
Apart from these developments, a qualitative change has taken place in the world situation. Imperialism in the sense of physical occupation of Asian and African countries by the West has finally become a thing of the past. The United States has learnt a bitter lesson in Viet Nam and it is not likely ever again to intervene directly in strictly local conflicts. Again, countries like Egypt, which have been giving primacy to politics so far, are coming to recognise that economic development is the most important challenge they face and that their status in the world community, indeed their very survival as stable societies, will depend largely on their ability to meet it.
Glaring
The end of imperialism in the physical sense does not, of course, mean that all problems between the West on the one hand and Asia and Africa on the other are about to disappear. Far from it. The irritants remain, the three most glaring being the massive US military assistance to Israel while it remains in occupation of large chunks of Arab territory, the expansion of base facilities by Washington on Diego Garcia and the sale by it of enormous quantities of highly sophisticated military hardware to oil-rich countries in the Persian Gulf region. Above all, economic relations between the West and the third world remain distressingly unequal.
But the response to these problems has of necessity to be different now than in the past. Indeed, it is already changing. For instance, instead of continuing to denounce the United States for its support to Israel, Egypt, the country directly and in a sense most adversely affected, has come to depend on US goodwill to arrange an honourable settlement with Israel.
Similarly, the criticism of the United States on the Diego Garcia issue has been fairly muted, specially among the most directly concerned countries, the oil rich nations around the Gulf, for the obvious reason that privately their rulers regard the presence of the base as a check on Soviet ambitions in the region.
As for US military supplies to oil-rich countries and the influence that goes with it, only a few Asian leaders consider it even discreet to mention it. In fact the criticism of Washington on this score has been far sharper at home, specially in the US Congress, than in Asia, if the denunciation by the communists and the radicals is not taken into account.
Be that as it may, the basic issues facing the non-aligned summit are economic, as Mrs Bandaranaike has rightly said, and their solution calls for co-operation with, rather than antagonism towards, the West. For, apart from the oil-rich countries of the Gulf like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirate, it alone has the capacity, if it so wishes, to help the third world in a big enough way. The Soviet bloc of countries just do not have either the necessary resources or the institutional infrastructure in the shape of organisations like the World Bank to assist the developing nations as a whole on a significant scale. They have extended and will doubtless continue to extend a modicum of aid to select countries with which they have friendly relations.
The Western nations and Japan remain the dominant economic powers despite the recession and inflation of the last four years and the five-fold increase in the prices of oil which they have to import in large quantities to meet their energy needs. And there is no indication that this is likely to change in the foreseeable future. Indeed, it appears that the prosperity of the Soviet Union, its East European allies and China, too, has come to depend in no small measure on the economic health of the West and Japan. Unlike the members of the Comecon, Peking does not yet borrow from the West – the former have run up debts totalling $35 billion and this is expected to rise to $40 billion by the end of the year – but it will also need to import from the West and Japan machinery on a colossal scale and seek financial accommodation from them if it is to develop its oil resources quickly and modernise its economy. The implications of this state of affairs for the third world should be reasonably clear.
Rhetoric
All this is not to suggest that the non-aligned countries should either give up their opposition to foreign bases in their midst or allow interference in their internal affairs or accept the lack of fairness in their economic relations with the West, but that the old anti-imperialist rhetoric cannot meet their interests in the new international environment and that, at the very least, it needs to be supplemented by close cooperation between them and search for more useful avenues of co-operation with the West. Since it is only realistic to recognise that the relations of the oil-rich Arabs and Iranians with the West are going to be closer than with fellow Asians, the issue of dealing with the West just cannot be evaded.
Both individually and collectively, the non-aligned countries would have been in a much stronger bargaining position with the West if the Soviet Union and its allies had displayed greater dynamism and willingness and capacity to assist others. But as things are, the communist countries apart from China are borrowing much more from the West than they are lending to the developing nations and they do not even allow their other trading partners to use their surpluses with one of them to offset their deficits with another member of the group.
All in all, the third world cannot call in the second to redress its balances with the first. It has to deal with the latter directly on the best terms it can obtain.
The Times of India, 11 August 1976