Bandung Conference
The 1955 meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African states that announced the arrival of the Third World as a bloc with its own agenda.
Between April 18 and 24, 1955, delegations from twenty-nine countries met in the Indonesian hill city of Bandung. Together they represented well over half of humanity and almost none of its military or industrial power. Almost all of them had been colonies within living memory, and several had been independent for less than a decade. No European state was present, and neither superpower was invited. That was the point. Bandung was the first large international conference of the modern era organized by the formerly colonized, on their own territory, with the agenda set by them.
Who was in the room
The conference was convened by five states, Indonesia, India, Burma, Ceylon, and Pakistan, and hosted by Indonesia's President Sukarno, who opened it by reminding the delegates that they were meeting on the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride and that theirs was the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in history. Jawaharlal Nehru of India was the intellectual force. Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, less than three years into power, arrived with little international standing and left as a figure of global stature. China sent Zhou Enlai, who spent the week being conspicuously reasonable, reassuring nervous neighbors that Beijing had no designs on them, and successfully presenting communist China as an Asian nation rather than a Soviet appendage.
The unity was thinner than the photographs suggested. Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and the Philippines were aligned with the West through the Baghdad Pact and SEATO and had no interest in a neutralist front. Ceylon's prime minister publicly demanded to know why Soviet control of Eastern Europe was not colonialism too. The final communique papered over these fights, which is why it was possible to sign.
What they agreed
The conference produced a ten-point declaration, the Dasasila Bandung, built on the UN Charter and on the five principles of peaceful coexistence India and China had negotiated in 1954. It affirmed sovereign equality regardless of size, respect for territorial integrity, non-interference in internal affairs, abstention from great-power military pacts serving outside interests, the settlement of disputes by peaceful means, and the right of every state to defend itself. It condemned colonialism in all its manifestations, a phrase carefully worded to let anti-Soviet delegates read it their way.
More lasting than the text was the practice. Bandung established that the newly independent states could caucus, that they could bargain as a group in the United Nations, and that non-alignment was a position rather than an absence of one. The Non-Aligned Movement was formally founded at Belgrade in 1961, with Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Tito, and Nkrumah as its architects. The Group of 77 followed in 1964 to press economic demands, and the campaign for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s came out of the same lineage.
The echo
Bandung's spirit outlived its coalition. Within a decade India and China had fought a border war, Sukarno had been overthrown in a mass killing of Indonesian communists, and Nkrumah had been deposed. Non-alignment in practice often meant taking aid from both sides rather than neither. The economic demands of the 1970s went nowhere.
What survived was the assumption. Before Bandung, the international system was something the small and poor entered on terms set elsewhere. After it, a bloc of states with no fleets and no bombs treated their numbers as a form of leverage, insisted that sovereignty was not graded by power, and forced decolonization onto the permanent agenda of world politics. Every subsequent grouping of the global South, from the G77 to the BRICS summits and today's arguments about a multipolar order, is working the same seam. The conference is still invoked by name in Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian diplomacy, usually by governments that would like to be seen as the ones who opened that door.