Vijay Prashad on the Bandung Conference's Legacy and the Global South

The Bandung Conference: A New Era for the Global South

• 🌏 In 1955, 29 nations from Asia and Africa convened in Bandung, Indonesia, for a historic anti-colonial conference.
• 💡 This gathering marked the arrival of peoples from the Global South on the world stage and the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War.
• 🤝 Leaders like Sukarno, Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou Enlai united despite religious and political differences, emphasizing unity and moral force over military might.

Anti-Colonial Struggles and Western Fears

• ✊ The conference emerged from an upsurge of political unrest and anti-colonial movements following World War II.
• ⚠️ Western powers, particularly the U.S. under John Foster Dulles, viewed the conference with suspicion, mischaracterizing it as pro-communist.
• 💥 The spirit of Bandung was later targeted by Western-backed coups d'état against progressive leaders like Lumumba, Goulart, and Sukarno, leading to widespread violence and destabilization.

The Bandung Spirit and Modern Global South

• 📉 While the Bandung Conference fostered high consciousness for change, the objective capabilities of these states were limited, leading to the collapse of Third World unity during the 1980s debt crisis.
• 📈 In recent years, large countries in the South, especially China, have developed manufacturing and technological capacity, shifting the world economy's center of gravity to Asia.
• ❓ Despite objective changes, a strong sense of political unity and consciousness akin to the Bandung spirit is not yet fully visible, with bodies like BRICS being primarily trade-focused.
• ⏳ The current global landscape suggests a waiting period for the revival of the Bandung spirit, with structures for a new world emerging but lacking the full confidence to build it.