There could be no greater tribute to the non-aligned world than the efforts made by Rumania, Portugal and the Philippines to get associated, however tenuously, with the recent Colombo summit. This demonstrated how a number of even aligned countries have come to look up to it for a measure of protection against the pressures of their powerful allies.
The three countries in question clearly do not face identical problems. Portugal, for instance, does not wish to weaken its ties with NATO as Rumania has been trying to do with the Warsaw Pact. Unlike either of them, the Philippines no longer belongs to an alliance system and as far as its bilateral security arrangements with the United States are concerned, there are good reasons to believe that it will succeed in negotiating new terms which will win for it sovereign control over the US bases on its territory, obliging Washington to secure its permission for using the facilities for purposes other than the defence of the Philippines and pay a mutually agreed amount as rent every year. But all of them share one common aim. They all wish to increase the area of autonomy in foreign affairs and they believe that association with the non-aligned movement will be helpful to them in this regard.
Implicit
In a sense President Tito, too, paid a similar tribute to the movement when he proposed that its co-ordinating bureau should meet in the event of an attack on any non-aligned country. For, implicit in his suggestion was the belief that the prospect of being condemned by non-aligned countries as a group would discourage a would-be aggressor to some extent, however small. The belief may or may not be unrealistic. But that is a different matter.
While all this is flattering to the non-aligned world, it will be disingenuous to ignore the twin facts that it was with great difficulty that disputes between member-countries were kept out of the discussions at Colombo and that the movement today has to reckon with a world which is significantly different from the one in which the concept of non-alignment was born. Both these facts are too pertinent to be brushed under the rug.
It is true that unlike the Organisation for African Unity or the Arab League or the Organisation of American States, the non-aligned movement has never attempted actively to discourage disputes or promote accords among its members. It has studiously kept out of all bilateral problems. Judging by the experience of others, this has perhaps been a wise approach. But it will be sheer make-believe to think that the sharp and recurring conflicts among the members do not to some extent undermine the effectiveness of the movement. After all, these disputes make it so much easier for outside powers to manipulate the non-aligned countries concerned in one way or other.
As for the second issue, it is hardly necessary either to recall that the concept of non-alignment was born at the height of the cold war or to underscore the fact that the detente between the two super-powers and the rival alliance systems has finally denied the major non-aligned countries not only the mediatory role which India, for instance, played in the early ’fifties in Korea and Indochina but also the leverage which the relatively unrestrained East-West contest had given them.
Some other points also merit attention in this context. The fight against the pactomania of Mr John Foster Dulles and the attempt to establish the Pax Americana implicit in it was, for instance, a straightforward affair. And since it was a continuation of the anti-imperialist struggle with which men like Mr Nehru and U Nu were familiar, it was relatively easy for them to fashion the appropriate strategy. The present objective of a new international economic order is an altogether different proposition. It calls for a contest with the West and co-operation with it at the same time. It is clearly much more difficult to manage this kind of complex relationship than to engage in a straight fight as in the ’fifties.
Similarly, while it is easy to talk of neo-colonialism and denounce it as the Leftists do all over the world, it is extremely difficult to define it in precise terms and evolve an effective strategy for coping with it, if for no other reason than that the developed countries are almost as big exporters of raw materials as they are importers. Indeed, they hold a virtual monopoly of food surpluses, with the result that the old simplistic distinction between the developed and developing is no longer adequate and a strategy based on it can at best have only limited utility.
It is not much of a simplification to suggest that when non-aligned leaders took up the Soviet formulation regarding neo-colonialism and the fight against it, they had only the vaguest idea about the complexity of the task of industrialising their countries – witness the talk of take-off in India in the ’fifties – and they thought that a modicum of assistance by the Soviet Union and the West was all that was required to overcome economic backwardness. Most people know better than that today, and though the propaganda battle against neo-colonialism goes on, not many claim to know of an easy solution to the problem.
Confounded
The confusion has become worse confounded on account of the fact that the Soviet Union itself has come to depend on the import of technology on a vast scale for the modernisation of its economy and on the export primarily of raw materials and gold for financing its imports. For it means that if it is to be judged by the Leninist yardstick, the Soviet Union itself can be said to have become subject to colonial exploitation.
All1 industrialized countries, of course, import technology from one another. In recent years, Japan has taken out at least four to five times as many patents as the Soviet Union from Western firms and the United States balances its current trade account with the help of food exports. But the Soviet Union is the only industrialised country to depend primarily on the export of raw materials for its foreign exchange earnings.
This must by itself limit the Kremlin’s effective role, as distinct from a propaganda role, in the struggle against neo-colonialism, however one may define it. As it happens, the Soviet Union has not felt strong enough to make its currency convertible even among members of the COMECON, and it has come to rely substantially on loans from Western banks for financing its imports of technology and food. It also appears that it will not be able to do without the import of either in the near future.
All this was not and could be foreseen in the ’fifties when Mr Nehru, President Nasser and President Tito, along with other leaders, evolved the concept of a non-aligned summit at Belgrade in 1961. And what to speak of that age of innocence, who could believe even at the time of President Nasser’s death in 1970 that his successor will of necessity have to turn to the much reviled United States for arranging a settlement with Israel or that Syria will play a role in Lebanon which will be fully acceptable to Tel Aviv? Similarly, who could have said at the time of the quadrupling of oil prices towards the end of 1973 that even this reverse, the biggest suffered by the West since Japan’s spectacular successes against Britain and the United States in 1941, will increase rather than decrease its power in relation to the third world?
Strength
There is, of course, strength in numbers. The West cannot therefore afford to ignore altogether the non-aligned and the third world countries which now effortlessly dominate the UN General Assembly and are able to articulate their demands from a variety of other platforms. But strange contradictions dominate the international scene.
Thus the West continues to be haunted by the spectre of inflation or stagnation or both, though it is well set on the path of economic recovery. Equally pertinently, the Soviet Union finds itself without its old influence in the critically important region of West Asia at a time when it has not only achieved military parity with the United States but also established a significant naval presence in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. And while no longer sure that industrialisation, whether a la the West or the Soviet Union, holds the key to future prosperity, the third world leaders are unable to chalk out a path of development more suited to their resources and immediate needs. At one time China was supposed to have discovered the correct mix. But not many people are all that sure any more.
The Colombo summit could not have either dispelled these uncertainties or resolved these contradictions. They are there to stay and cannot be wished away.
The Times of India, 25 August 1976