It was in the anti-colonial environment of a cold war and bipolarity in world affairs that the process of decolonisation gathered momentum. America traditionally had been opposed to colonialism, with the exception of the aberrant behaviour of the conquest of Spanish territories in Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890’s. America’s anti-colonialism has been demonstrated since their intervention on the world stage from the time of James Monroe in the 1820’s through the time of Woodrow Wilson to the time of F.D. Roosevelt. Their opposition to Franco-British intervention in the Suez Canal in 1956, during the presidency of the 34th president of United States, Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) was in tune with their opposition to propping up the old Empires of Britain and France. Throughout the Second World War American policy makers had left the British in no doubt that they would strenuously work for the dismantling of the old Empires. The existence of colonial empires, the Americans reasoned, contributed to the outbreak of wars. America also wanted to occupy the high moral ground in their titanic struggle with the Soviet Union. Both the United States and, ironically their foe, the Soviet Union were committed to a policy of decolonisation for different reasons. America was driven by anti-colonial idealism fundamental to the origin and evolution of the United States itself but for Soviet Russia, right from its foundation by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) anti-imperialism was an article of faith because Lenin believed that all wars were imperialistic wars fought for carving out the world into markets as a result of not knowing what to do with surplus production and primitive accumulation of capital in the highly industrialized countries. Whatever may be the reasons for support of the liquidation of the European Empires in Asia and Africa, the nationalist leaders of these areas exploited the situation to their countries’ advantage in the traditional European fashion of power politics and national interest.
By 1947, beginning in India and ending in the 1970s the Europeans lost their colonial empires in Africa and Asia and by 1990 the remnant of colonial empires in Africa notably Namibia was freed. The biggest prize, South Africa, has been freed from institutionalized policy of racial discrimination and apartheid. She has since joined the civilized world under a non-racial majoritarian democratic regime. This happy ending could never have been achieved but for the determined effort and struggle of independent African countries joined by other progressive forces in the world notably in the Socialist countries and the Scandinavia. The United States policy oscillated between support for justice, benign neglect and what in the Reagan years was called constructive engagement which was a euphemism for support of racist oppression in South Africa.
One can look at events during this period from reactive and active perspectives. the African saying that when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers guided the actions of many Afro-Asian and Latin American countries at this time. The point was that no developing country wanted to be caught in the middle of the struggle for hegemony between the Capitalist West and the Communist East. This was why many countries in this group embraced the policy of non-alignment. This was a policy based on self-interest. It was, of course, not a policy of neutrality in the traditional sense of steering clear at all times of political engagement.
Non-alignment meant that decision of which side to take would be based ideally on sovereign assessment and high moral principles and not on political expediency or ideological preference. This was the Theory. But in practice many of the non-aligned countries took pro-soviet positions in international politics. There were reasons for this. The stridently anti-colonial propaganda of the socialist countries was very alluring and attractive. In practical terms, the socialist countries demonstrated their support by supplying weapons and instructors for the various liberation movements particularly in Southern Africa. The socialist countries were also more prepared to offer financial and technical aid to independent African countries. The apparently great industrial strides made by the socialist countries, particularly the Soviet Union through the five-year development plans easily recommended itself to the African countries. Capitalist mode of development with emphasis on individual capital was regarded as inappropriate since indigenous individual capitalists were few and far between and the foreign capitalists were only interested in extractive industries rather than investing in consumer oriented labour intensive industries. Because the problem of youth unemployment was one of the greatest problems that the newly independent countries had to face, they found the ‘full employment’, characteristic of the commandist and centrally planned economies attractive. The example of India’s embrace of centralized planning based on five year programmes was copied by most African countries during their first decades of independence.
Furthermore, the will to be different from the brutal collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union and the free-for-all land alienation by a few in western countries underpinned the economic basis of non-alignment. Non-alignment was a policy based on high moral ground. Its founders Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) of India, Ahmed Sukarno (1901-1970) of Indonesia, Marshall Josip bros Tito (1892-1980) of Yugoslavia, General Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) of Ghana, cleverly assessed the international situation and decided that it would be unwise of them to allow their countries to get sucked into the life and death struggle for mastery of the world. Non-alignment gave these leaders the feeling of some relevance. Their friendship and support were courted and sought by the leaders of the West and the East.
In reality, all the great events of the 20th century have been resolved without the input of the non-aligned nations. We can recall, for example, the Berlin blockade of 1948, the Hungarian rebellion of 1956, the Berlin air lift of 1961 and, most importantly, the Cuban crisis of 1962. For the first time, since the advent of nuclear weapons, the United States and Soviet Russia faced each other over the America’s blockade of Cuba over Soviet Russia’s missiles in Cuba. The world stood at standstill until Soviet Russia’s premier Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971) blinked, when he realised his policy of adventurism and brinkmanship, left the young president John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) no alternative than to risk nuclear war. Other events in which the non-aligned nations were marginal include the spring revolution of Czchekoslovakia of 1968, the resolution of the Vietnam war, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the coming down of the Berlin wall, the collapse of communism in Russia itself, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa. In terms of Realpolitik the non-aligned movement has been rather tangential in the politics of the modern world.