Read the rest of the series at focusweb.org/tag/kaa70.
By Walden Bello and Shalmali Guttal*
To celebrate the spirit of Bandung is not simply to mark 70 years since the Asia-Africa Conference, but to affirm what being faithful to its principles and ideals means today.
The Bandung document was primarily an anti-colonial document, and it is heartening to note that so many governments and peoples in the Global South have rallied behind the people of Palestine as they fight genocide and settler-colonialism in Gaza and the West Bank. The role of South Africa in lodging and pursuing the charge of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice, with the formal support of 31 other governments, is exemplary in this regard.
Bandung and Vietnam
April 2025 , the 70th anniversary of Bandung, is also the 50th anniversary of the reunification of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The celebrations over the last few days in Ho Chi Minh City brought back images of that decisive defeat of the American empire—the iconic photos of a tank of the People’s Army smashing through the gate of the presidential palace in Saigon and the frenzied evacuation by helicopter of collaborators from the rooftop of the US Embassy. In retrospect, the defeat in Vietnam was the decisive blow dealt to American arms in the last century, one from which it never really recovered. True, the empire appeared to have a second wind in 2001 and 2003, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, but that illusion was shattered with the panicked, shameful exit of the US and its Afghan subordinates from Kabul in 2021, the images of which evoked the memories of the debacle in Saigon decades earlier.
The defeats in Vietnam and Afghanistan were the dramatic bookends of the military debacle of the empire, which had massive repercussions both globally and in the imperial heartland. Bandung underlined as key principles “Respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations” and “Non-intervention or non-interference into the internal affairs of another country.” It took unwavering resistance from the peoples of Vietnam, the Middle East, and other parts of the world to force the US and its allies to learn the consequences of violating these principles, but it was at the cost of millions of lives in the Global South. And it is by no means certain that the era of aggressive western interventionism has come to an end.
Ascent and Counterrevolution
The economic dimension of the struggle between the Global South and the Global North since Bandung might have been less dramatic but it was no less consequential. And it was equally tortuous. Bandung was followed by the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, the formation of the Group of 77, and the establishment of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This upward arc in this struggle of the Global South for structural change in the global economy climaxed with the call for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974.
Then the counterrevolution began. Taking advantage of the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980’s, structural adjustment was foisted on the Global South via the World Bank (Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (Fund), United Nations agencies like the UN Center for Transnational Corporations were either abolished or defanged, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) supplanted the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and sidelined UNCTAD. The so-called “jewel in the crown of multilateralism,” the WTO was meant to discipline the Global South not only with trade rules benefiting the Global North but also with anti-development regimes in intellectual property rights, investment, competition, and government procurement.
Instead of the promised “development decades” heralded by the rhetoric of the United Nations, Africa and Latin America experienced lost decades in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and in 1997, a massive regional financial crisis instigated by western speculative capital and austerity programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund ended the “Asian Economic Miracle.”
While most governments submitted to Bank-Fund structural adjustment programmes, some, like Argentina, Venezuela, and Thailand resisted successfully, backed by their citizens. But the main area of economic war between North and South was the WTO. A partnership between southern governments and international civil society frustrated the adoption of the so-called Seattle Round during the Third Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Seattle. Then during the Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun in 2003, developing country governments staged a dramatic walk out from which the WTO never recovered; indeed, it lost its usefulness as the North’s principal agency of global trade and economic liberalization.
Rise of China and the BRICS
It was the sense of common interest and working together to oppose northern initiatives at the WTO that formed the basis for the formation of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), which gradually emerged as an alternative pole to the US-dominated multilateral system in the second decade of the 21st century.
The anchor of the BRICS was China. A country that had beaten imperialism over five decades of struggle in the first half of the 20th century, the People’s Republic confidently entered into a devil’s bargain with the West: in return for offering cheap labor, it sought massive foreign investment and, most important, advanced technology. Western capital, seeking super profits by exploiting Chinese labor, agreed to the deal, but it was China that got the better end of the bargain, embarking on a crash industrialization process that made it the no 1 economy in the globe as of today (depending of course on which metric one uses). The Chinese ascent had major implications for the Global South. Not only did China provide massive resources for development, becoming, as one analyst put it, the “world’s largest development bank”; by reducing dependence on the western-dominated financial agencies and western creditors, but it also provided policy space for southern actors to make strategic choices.
The obverse of China’s super industrialization was deindustrialization in the US and Europe, and coupled with the global financial crisis of 2008, this led to a deep crisis of US hegemony, sparking the recent momentous developments, like Trump’s trade war against friends and foes alike, his attacks on traditional US allies that he accused of taking advantage of the United States, his abandonment of the WTO and indeed, of the whole US-dominated multilateral system, and his ongoing retrenchment and refocusing of US economic and military assets in the western hemisphere.
All these developments have contributed to the current fluid moment, where the balance in the struggle between the North and South is tipping towards the latter.
Rhetoric and Reality in the Global South Today
But living up to and promoting the spirit of Bandung involves more than tipping the geopolitical and geoeconomic balance towards the Global South. The very first principle of the Bandung Declaration urged “Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.” Nehru, Nasser, and Zhou En Lai played stellar roles in Bandung, but can it be said that the governments they represented have remained faithful to this principle? India today is ruled by a Hindu nationalist government that considers Muslim second-class citizens, the military regime in Egypt has engaged in egregious violations of human rights, Beijing is carrying out the forcible cultural assimilation of the Uygurs. It is difficult to see how such acts by these governments and others that initiated the historic conference, like Burma where a military junta is engaged in genocide, and Sri Lanka with decades of a violent civil war, can be seen as consistent with this principle.
Indeed, most states of the Global South are dominated by elites that, whether via authoritarian or liberal democratic regimes, keep their people down. The levels of poverty and inequality are shocking. The gini coefficient for Brazil is 0.53, making it one of the most unequal countries in the world. That for China, 0.47, also reflects tremendous inequality, despite remarkable successes in poverty reduction. In South Africa, the gini coefficient is an astounding 0.63, and 55.5 percent of the people live under the poverty line. In India, incomes have been polarising over the past three decades with a significant increase in bilionaires and other high net worth Individuals.
The vast masses of people throughout the Global South, including indigenous communities, workers, peasants, fisherfolk, nomadic communities and women are economically disenfranchised, and in liberal democracies, such as the Philippines, India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Africa and Kenya, their participation in democracy is often limited to casting votes in periodic, often meaningless, electoral exercises. South-South investment and cooperation models such as the Belt and Road Initiative and free trade agreements frequently entail the capture of land, forests, water and marine areas and extraction of natural wealth for the purposes of national development. Local populations – many of who are indigenous–are disposessed from their livelihoods, territories and ancestral domains with scant legal recourse and access to justice, invoking the spectre of home grown colonialism and counterrevolutions.
Bandung, as noted in the essay that inaugurated this dossier, institutionalized the nation-state as the principal vehicle for cross-border relationships among countries. Had global movements like the Pan-African movement, the women’s movement, the labour movement and the peasant movement been represented at the 1955 conference, the cross-border solidarities institutionalized in the post-Bandung world could perhaps have counteracted and mitigated, via lateral pressure, elite control of national governments. Those advocating for the self-determination of peoples, and for the redistribution of resources, opportunities and wealth within national boundaries, would perhaps not have been demonised and persecuted as subversives and threats to national interests.
During the time of global transition we are in now, as the old western-dominated multilateral system falls into irreversible decay, the new multipolar word will need new multilateral institutions. The challenge, especially for the big powers of the Global South, is not to create a replica of the old western-dominated system, where the dominant powers merely used the UN, WTO, and Bretton Woods institutions to indirectly impose their will and preferences on the vast majority of countries. Will the BRICS or any other alternative multilateral system be able to avoid replicating the old order of power and hierarchy? To be honest, the current political-economic regimes in the most powerful countries in the Global South do not inspire confidence.
Bandung and the Continuing Specter of Capitalism
At the time of the Bandung Conference, the political economy of the globe was more diverse. There was the communist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. There was China, with its push to move from national democracy to socialism. There were the neutralist states like India that were seeking a third way between the communism and capitalism. With decades of neoliberal transformation of both the Global North and the Global South, that diversity has vanished. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to a new, equitable global order is the fact that all countries remain embedded in a system of global capitalism, where the pursuit of profits remains the engine of economic expansion, both creating great inequalities and posing a threat to the planet. The dynamic centers of global capitalism may have moved, over the last 500 years, from the Mediterranean to Holland to Britain to the United States and now to the Asia Pacific, but capitalism continues to both penetrate the farthest reaches of the globe and deepen its entrenchment in areas it has subjugated. Capitalism continually melts all that is solid into thin air, to use an image from a famous manifesto, creating inequalities both within and among societies, and exacerbating the relationship between the planet and the human community.
Can we fulfill the aspirations of Bandung without bringing forth a post-capitalist system of economic, social, and political relations? A system where people in all their diversity and strengths can participate and benefit equally, free from the violence of bigotry, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism? That is the question– or rather that is the challenge. The ten principles that form the basis of the Bandung spirit are reflected in international human rights law, but have been cynically manipulated to serve particular geopolitical, geoeconomic, racialised and gendered interests. Being faithful to the spirit of Bandung in our era therefore, requires us to go beyond the limits of Bandung. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” declares a character in a famous novel. We may seem to be on the cusp of a new era, with its promise of a new global order, but the Global South still has to awaken from the nightmare of the last 500 years. It is not coincidental that the birth of capitalism also saw the beginning of the colonial subjugation of the Global South. Only with the coming of a post-capitalist global order will the nightmare truly end.
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*Walden Bello is chair of the Board of Focus on the Global South; Shalmali Guttal is Senior Analyst at Focus on the Global South.
