Non-Alignment from New Delhi to Korea, 1949–1953

Abstract

Non-alignment was officially born at a conference in Brijuni, Croatia (then Yugoslavia), in 1956 and then formalized in Belgrade in 1961. Yet its origins go back to the independence struggle of Indonesia in 1945–1949 and especially to diplomacy around the Korean War in 1950–1953. During that conflict, United States unilateralism pushed India, Indonesia, and Burma (now Myanmar) into forming an Asian bloc aligned for diplomatic purposes in the goal of peace. The search for peace in turn formalized a bloc of Asian states that would initiate the Bandung Asian–African conference of 1955 and finally the Non-Aligned Movement. This article explores the emergence of non-alignment in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a conscious rejection of both Cold War alignment and earlier European concepts of neutralism in favour of an “active and independent” non-aligned diplomacy that would lead to the emergence of a bloc of non-aligned states.

1. Introduction

When United Nations peacekeeping opened in Gaza and other areas bordering Israel in 1948, the troop contributors came from the United States, Belgium, and France. In 2026, Indonesia is the country that has pledged to anchor peacekeeping forces in Gaza (UNTSO 2026; United Nations Security Council 1948; Antara 2026). Similarly, international historians have been forced to pay more attention to the Global South. As Westad (2012) argues, the Cold War was not merely a bipolar conflict, but rather a global one involving and affecting non-aligned countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the islands scattered throughout the world’s oceans.

The major response of countries in the “Third World” was non-alignment, including the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 (Lüthi 2016b; Edgars 2024). There has been a surge of interest and writing about the 1955 Bandung Asian–African conference, hosted by Indonesia, as marking the “birth of the Third World” (C. Lee 2010; Bandung+60 2015; Acharya and Tan 2008; Bandung Spirit 2025; Chakrabarty 2005; Khudori 2021; Slobodian 2013; Utama 2016). This article asks, in effect, “when is non-alignment?” It argues that non-alignment’s origins lie in the years 1949–1953, before Bandung, and that the Indonesian revolution and Korean War were especially formative. This paper concentrates on the Korean War diplomacy of India, Burma, and Indonesia, three states that formed “the hard core of the ‘area of peace’” (Thien 1963, p. 88) and “the core of Asian neutralism” (Chang 1960, p. 57). In 1949, all three appeared poised to follow policies broadly sympathetic to the Western powers in the Cold War. Events in 1949–1953 set each of them on the path to non-alignment.

Historians of non-alignment tend to portray it as inevitable for independent Asia and Africa. Indian writers have been especially active in creating this picture, viewing peace and detachment from blocs as inherent in their national character since the Emperor Asoka turned from expansionist warfare to Buddhist non-violence. This picture, however, is essentially an invented tradition (Ranger and Hobsbawm 1984).

The Korean War (1950–1953) locked Asia into a new bipolar order. The war also saw the formation of a new group of countries that reacted to bipolarity with an assertive refusal to be imprisoned in one bloc or the other. By the war’s end, there was a new cleavage, between Washington and a third group of unaligned states. Importantly, the new non-aligned states rejected comparisons to “neutrality”, as practiced by Sweden, Switzerland, and others. Instead, they insisted their policy was “independent and active,” as Indonesian vice-president Hatta (1953, p. 444) called it. Thus, it was expressed through active diplomacy aimed at affecting, not avoiding, international entanglements.

This article traces the diplomatic history of three Asian countries as they created a third camp in the early Asian Cold War, even while initially having no plans to do so. To make this case, the source emphasis is deliberately placed, more than is usual, on secondary sources generated in Asia in the mid-20th century. It is true that the “romance of economic development” (Engerman 2004) shaped Asian state goals and trajectories, as I have argued elsewhere with regard to the United Nations and Indonesia (Webster 2011). At the same time, geopolitics and the Cold War were foundational in shaping these states’ trajectories, even when it seemed less visible, as for instance in the case of sports (Webster 2016). The road to Bandung led through Indian, Indonesian, and Burmese state responses to U.S. Cold War policy, even though this was less visible at the time and has been less visible to historians. We can usefully conceptualize the pre-Bandung years, as Parker (2006) does, as a time in which a hostile United States drove away “Third World” countries that might otherwise have been sympathetic.

The literature on the Bandung conference surged briefly after the conference closed in April 1955, then endured a mix of silences and “politicized and inaccurate” work riddled with “myths” and errors (Lüthi 2016a; Vitalis 2013) before reviving in recent years (in addition to the works cited above, see Ampiah (2007), Fraser (2000), Jones (2005), C. Lee (2020), and Miskovic et al. (2014)). New contributions rightly revive Indian diplomat G. H. Jansen’s (1966) point that non-alignment and Asian–Africanism were different “projects” (Prashad 2007), often in contention with each other. In the late 1940s, however, emergent moves towards non-alignment and Asian assertion represented “two sides of the same coin—until the coin was sliced apart fifteen years later” in the 1960s (Lüthi 2016a, p. 214).

2. Asian Relations and Asian Anti-Communism

In 1945, Asian delegates to the founding conference of the United Nations planned an Asian Relations Conference, meant to be the expression of Asia’s resurgence. India gained independence in 1947, becoming the obvious host and presumptive leader of Asia’s new UN member-states. By the time the conference opened, Indonesia’s struggle for independence stood at centre stage. While India won independence through negotiation, Indonesian nationalists declared it unilaterally after Japan’s surrender in 1945, then fought to defend it against British Empire troops dispatched from India at the 1945 Battle of Surabaya. The battle is foundational in Indonesian nationalism, with famous short stories and speeches still redolent with the romance of revolution, one even zeroing in on the locomotive-black skin of the soldiers from British India (Idrus 1946; see also Ali 1979; Zara 2024; Frederick 1989; Kahin 1952; A. J. S. Reid 1986; Anderson 1972). When Dutch troops returned to Indonesia soon after, Indonesian nationalists fought them, too. A short-lived peace deal in 1946 accepted the Republic of Indonesia as a state within a projected future Indonesian Commonwealth. Thus, it sent delegates to the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947.

Ostensibly non-governmental, the conference was hosted by Nehru, soon to be prime minister of an independent India. India’s delegation was the largest, Indonesia’s second-largest, and Burma’s third in size. Nehru (1961, pp. 248–53) denied any hostile intent towards Europe. That was borne out by the proceedings, as one exchange demonstrated. When John Thivy of Malaya “suggested the formation of a neutrality bloc,” Nehru’s sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, U Raschid of Burma, and others blocked the idea (Jansen 1966, pp. 57–61). The conference was, however, very clear on its anti-colonial content. Nehru sent a plane to collect the Republic of Indonesia’s prime minister, Sutan Sjahrir, whose speech came as an anti-colonial “atom bomb” (Asian Relations Organization 1948; Thakur 2019). The template was set: no third non-aligned bloc, but a strong condemnation of colonialism that was rhetorically acceptable to both superpowers.

The deployment of British–Indian troops in Indonesia was already a sore spot for the Indian National Congress. Its founding meeting in 1885 deplored British India’s annexation of Burma (Jansen 1966, p. 24) and its main foreign policy concern became the use of Indian troops abroad. “On account of India,” Nehru declared at the 1927 founding meeting of the League Against Imperialism (Louro et al. 2020) in Brussels, “other lands have suffered and suffer still” from British Indian troops: “China, Egypt, Abyssinia, the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Syria, Tibet, Afghanistan and Burma … it is a horrifying list” (Jansen 1966, p. 30).

Nehru’s 1946 broadcast on foreign policy emphasized the need “to keep away from the power politics of groups, aligned against one another, which have led in the past to world wars and which may again lead to disasters on an even vaster scale” (Nehru 1961, p. 2). Numerous references to the need to stay out of blocs followed, but almost always in the context of leftist pressure to align with the Soviet Union. Mohammad Hatta spoke in the same context when he declared that Indonesia would not align with the USSR, but instead “navigate between two reefs” (Hatta 1972; Syailendra 2021). Burma, independent from 1948, also chose non-alignment as a way to avoid being too close to the Soviet Union (U. Nu 1975; Trager 1966). Leading cabinet minister U. Kyaw Nyein, who visited Belgrade on behalf of the Burmese government-in-waiting in 1947, declared a hope “to transform Burma into the Yugoslavia [of] Asia” and was soon heading a Socialist Party fightback against Burmese Communists (Čavoški 2010, p. 4). The main pro-Western motivation was economic. “Burma cannot do without international trade, foreign capital, and foreign technicians,” as Burmese economist Hla Myint (1944) wrote. Similarly, Sjahrir pictured Indonesia positioned within “the sphere of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and imperialism.” Thus, Indonesian governments asserted their “right to export” (Sjahrir [1944] 1968; Fakta 1947).

India’s non-alignment similarly inclined towards the United States. “When I say we should not align ourselves with any power blocs, obviously it does not mean that we should not be closer in our relations with some countries than with others,” Nehru (1961, p. 47) declared. This stance matched that of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who agreed that the “time was not ripe for a pact corresponding to the North Atlantic Treaty, owing to [Asian] conflicts.” Both India and the U.S. thus rejected Philippine efforts to set up a NATO-style Pacific Pact.

When India backed U.S. efforts to build up South Korea as an anti-Communist bastion, Ukrainian ambassador Dmitry Manuilsky accused it of creating “a new hotbed of discord, which will be fraught with grave consequences” (S. K. Gupta 1988, p. 71). “What is your interest in Korea and Greece?” Manuilsky asked Indian delegation leader Pandit. “To us these are vital areas for our defence. Why should India interest herself against our interest in these matters?” (Panikkar 1955, p. 10). Soviet delegates saw India as an adversary, not as a non-aligned state. Moscow condemned Nehru, U Nu, and Sukarno as imperialist lackeys. At the same time, domestic Communist parties moved to oppose all three governments. In 1949, several states banned the Communist Party of India (CPI) (Singh 1979, p. 160).

The CPI was probably not a great threat. Nor, as it turned out, was the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) able to challenge the Sukarno–Hatta government, although its rebuke to Hatta’s foreign policy prompted Indonesia’s first declaration of non-alignment. Burma’s normally mild prime minister U Nu, who later prayed over Stalin’s corpse to instill merit and spent a happy day at Bandung releasing trapped insects from carnivorous plants at a botanical garden, blamed “Mother-fornicating Russians” for Communist Party of Burma (CPB) uprisings (U. Nu 1975, p. 141) and rejected CPB calls for an alliance with Russia (T. Nu 1949, p. 117). All three countries issued statements of non-alignment as denials of communist-led calls to align with Moscow. In such a context, non-alignment really meant friendly relations with the West.

India joined with Britain, Australia, Pakistan, and Ceylon to send financial aid to Burma, adding military aid that U. Nu (1975, p. 227) believed saved his government from disaster. At the October 1948 Commonwealth prime ministers’ summit, the three Asian members supported NATO and asked for “close consultation in defence matters” (E. Reid 1981, p. 17). A year later, Nehru’s speech to the Canadian parliament declared “we are all partners in the same great undertaking” (Nehru 1961, p. 583; Gopal 1980, pp. 369–70). When Ceylon’s independence was accompanied by a defence pact with Britain, Moscow vetoed its application for UN membership on the grounds that there was no proof that the country was truly independent.

Closer Indian ties with the Commonwealth also meant closer ties to the United States. In April 1949, Nehru promised equal treatment of Indian and foreign businesses, with no restriction on repatriation of profits (Heimsath and Mansingh 1971, p. 369). This echoed Indonesian declarations of openness to foreign investment and a “right to export.” Nehru (1961, p. 591) won applause when he told a joint session of Congress: “Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot and shall not be neutral.” He even told the American ambassador to the UN that “India has lost all faith in Russia and in the dependability of Russia’s words” (FRUS 1949, vol. 6, pp. 1752–56). One American account of Nehru’s 1950 Southeast Asian tour, meanwhile, reported that “the theme of his speeches was a strong attack against Communism instead of the continued existence of European colonialism in Asia which it might so well have been… In speaking so frankly Nehru served our purposes admirably” (FRUS 1950, vol. 5, pp. 1446–48).

3. The Indonesian Revolution

Before Bandung could call for an “area of peace” standing apart from both blocs (Acharya and Tan 2008; Brands 1989; Indonesia 1955; Kahin 1955; C. Lee 2019; Romulo 1956; Wright 1956), debates over revolution in Indonesia and war in Korea created the pre-conditions for this clarion call against alignment.

India had been the keystone in the imperial arch, and its freedom meant European empires all over Asia would collapse, Nehru thought. “The old imperialisms are fading away,” he declared at the Asian Relations Conference. He was more upset still when the Netherlands attempted to recolonize Indonesia after the Second World War and the 1945 declaration of Indonesian independence. India’s new legislature censured the colonial government of India over its use of Indian troops at the Battle of Surabaya (Thien 1963, p. 89). Ceylon, India, and Pakistan all banned Dutch flights to Indonesia over their airspace. Ceylon’s ban was its first foreign policy action as an independent government (Nissanka 1984, p. 117).

The biggest tragedy of the Dutch in Indonesia, according to Nehru (1961, p. 48), was its destructive effects on European–Asian relations, which he had worked to maintain and enhance. Though Australia positioned itself as the leading partisan of Indonesian independence during the 1945–1949 revolution, Nehru seized the initiative by calling the New Delhi Conference on Indonesia in January 1949, where 20 governments gathered to form an action plan in support of Indonesian independence. In hosting the conference, he was responding to a proposal from (Fakta 1949, p. 116).

In his opening speech, Nehru cited two main problems. First, “the freedom of a sister country of ours has been imperiled and a dying colonialism of the past has raised its head again.” Second, resolutions by the UN had “been flouted, and its expressed will set at naught” (Nehru 1961, pp. 407–11). Most of the speeches breathed equal outrage at Dutch actions. “Those of us,” said Ceylon delegate Solomon Bandaranaike, “who believe in the democratic way of life and who wish therefore to establish close and friendly relations with other democratic countries, particularly of the West,—I should like to say and quite frankly,—have suffered a grievous disappointment” (Poplai 1959, pp. 660–81). Four months on, Nehru used the word “non-alignment” for the first time (Lüthi 2016a, p. 203).

Asian non-communist governments were joining in a common cause for perhaps the first time, born in disillusionment at the way U.S. anti-colonialism was taking a back seat to U.S. grand strategy in Europe. By the end of the Indonesian revolution, Asian ambassadors were holding regular meetings at the UN in New York, where a Republic of Indonesia Office worked well with counterparts from India and Burma in particular. Indonesia Office chief L.N. Palar, a former member of the Dutch parliament who would go on to become Indonesia’s UN ambassador after independence, worked closely with Burma’s ambassador to the UN, James Barrington, and his daughter married a man from India (Palar n.d.). The UN emerged as an important site where the ambassadors of 16 countries combined “to frustrate the dominance of the United States and its hemispheric allies” (Vitalis 2013, p. 271).

Still, the shift had its limits. The other question raised at the conference was whether to form an Asian bloc. General Carlos Romulo of the Philippines saw the gathering as meeting “to strengthen the forces of democracy, to prevent other ideologies from capturing the faith of Asia by default,” and producing “an Asian front against Communism” (Jansen 1966, p. 95). Moscow worried along the same lines. According to Pravda, the conference’s goal was “to create an anti-Communist bloc, which will serve as an instrument of an imperialist war against the USSR, against the new democracy of China and the freedom of Asiatic peoples” (S. K. Gupta 1988, p. 119).

No bloc resulted, not yet. The conference sought action through UN channels. However, the framework was in place for joint Asian action.

4. The UN’s Korean War, June–August 1950

Non-alignment “came with Korea,” according to controversial Indian diplomat and politician V.K. Krishna Menon (Brecher 1968, p. 9). Asian states, by and large, were one with the West when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel on 25 June 1950, seeing a clear case of aggression that had to be halted by UN action. U Nu told Burma’s parliament, “the United Nations was pledged to suppress aggression wherever it occurred and if Burma did not support it now, other member nations might take little interest in Burma, if she was ever faced with a similar situation” (Singh 1979, p. 165).

When the Security Council resolution called for aid to the South Korean government, India consulted Burma and Indonesia and then accepted the call, sending a medical unit—the same support given by Scandinavian countries. It also gave in-kind donations valued at $169,000. Indonesia would later pledge $100,000 in cash and Burma $49,934 (YUN 1950, p. 227; YUN 1953, pp. 216–17).

India’s parliament passed a unanimous resolution of support for UN resolutions in August 1950 (Stueck 1995, p. 80). The American reaction was jubilant. “India’s decision to accept the UN resolution calling for military support to South Korea will be received throughout the democratic world with profound satisfaction,” the New York Times rejoiced (Appadorai and Rajan 1985, p. 225). In the war’s early months, there was limited daylight between the Asian “neutrals” and the West’s Cold War leaders.

5. China and Nehru’s First Mediation Effort, July 1950

Nehru’s China policy caused the first crack in the facade of Asian–Western unity. On 7 July 1950, Nehru wrote to Stalin and Acheson appealing for a peace deal based on letting Communist China take its seat in the UN in order to “localize the conflict.” The letter stemmed from consultations between Indian Ambassador Sardar Panikkar and Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai and was sent on Nehru’s personal initiative (Panikkar 1955, p. 104; K. Gupta 1987, p. 107). It inspired some pro-Western dissent, with deputy prime minister Sardar Patel promising the U.S. ambassador that India would be “on the side of the free countries” in the event of Korea becoming a general war (Brands 1989, p. 44). Burma and Indonesia both recognized the People’s Republic, but did not yet take a lead in this area.

Panikkar and Nehru worried that war might spread to China, given American actions with regard to Taiwan (Foot 1985, p. 64). Panikkar (1955, p. 103) worried that “the United States had willy-nilly as a result of the Korean incident stepped directly into the Chinese civil war.”

Stalin, unsurprisingly, embraced Nehru’s peace initiative. Indeed, the Soviet–Indian exchange of letters was published on the front pages of Pravda and Izvestia on 18 July 1950 (S. K. Gupta 1988, p. 176). Acheson, however, sent a harsh rebuff (Vasudevan 1996, pp. 27–28). Nehru compared the UN failure to seat China to the attitude that doomed the League of Nations (Nehru 1961, p. 169). “I am convinced in my mind,” he told parliament in 1954, “that there would have been no Korean war if the People’s Government of China had been in the United Nations” (Reddy and Damadoran 1990, p. 68). Indian opinion saw Communist China as the expression of Chinese nationalism, rather than an existential challenge. Korea policy in New Delhi and Washington, as well as Commonwealth capitals, ran along parallel lines. Though all agreed that aggression had taken place, that it had to be stopped, and that the UN was the right arena, fissures were beginning to appear over policy towards China.

6. Taking the War North: Parallel Paths Diverge, August–October 1950

If the goal of the UN was to repel North Korean aggression, then U.S. armies would presumably have stopped on reaching the 38th parallel, mission accomplished. Instead, seeking total victory, they pressed on. Days after the Incheon landing, India was warning the United States not to cross the parallel for fear of provoking China (FRUS 1950, vol. 5, pp. 763, 791). UN delegate Benegal Rau proposed a committee of the temporary Security Council members to examine all resolutions on Korea in the hopes of bringing them together (FRUS 1950, vol. 5, pp. 590–92). The Security Council rejected his effort in favour of a U.S. resolution creating the UN Commission for the Unification and Reconstruction of Korea. Indonesia joined India and five others in abstention. This was by no means defection (the abstainers joined the majority in a 55–5 vote to renew the UNCOK mandate) but did show early signs of divergence (YUN 1950, pp. 264, 266).

Next came the Uniting for Peace resolution, designed to override the Soviet Security Council veto by devolving some security powers to the General Assembly. Concerned over the implications, Nehru said it “seemed like converting the UN into a larger edition of the Atlantic Pact and making it a war organization” (Heimsath and Mansingh 1971, p. 69). But Burma was an enthusiastic supporter (Johnstone 1963, p. 213) and thus included in the Collective Measures Committee established by Uniting for Peace.

In their own different ways, both India and Burma worried about China. A warlike China was India’s greatest nightmare, never more than in October 1950, when the People’s Liberation Army crossed the frontier into Tibet, British India’s vital buffer state. “At the present time when the international situation is so delicate, any move that is likely to be interpreted as a disturbance of peace may prejudice the position of China in the eyes of the world,” India warned in a diplomatic note (K. Gupta 1987, p. 131). In November, India noted alarm over Chinese sabre-rattling against Nepal, which, like Tibet, had owed suzerainty to the Qing empire (FRUS 1950, 130, vol. 7, p. 1094).

The solution to Chinese advances, in Nehru’s mind, was an “area of peace,” achieved by agreement with China in 1954. The peace area was not just a buffer zone, but also an effort to reconcile opposing great powers, like the United States and China. The problem with the peace area, from the U.S. perspective, was that it could also be viewed as a defection of a bloc of Asian powers from the “free world.” India’s search for security was leading it further from the American world order.

7. Formation of the Asian Bloc and the Aggressor Resolution, December 1950–January 1951

With Chinese troops pushing south in Korea, the United States moved to have the UN brand China as an aggressor. This was the antithesis of Indian hopes for peace. India consequently gathered the Asian ambassadors at the UN, reviving the informal group that had come together to support Indonesian independence. The group proposed a cease-fire to be followed by a political conference on Far Eastern issues (YUN 1950, p. 248). Since cease-fire was attractive to Commonwealth and European states, the United States agreed to support it, Acheson said, “in the fervent hope and belief that the Chinese would reject it (as they did) and that our allies would then return (as they did) to comparative sanity and join us in censuring the Chinese as aggressors” (S. K. Gupta 1988, p. 196).

The Asian ambassadors won praise in the West by issuing a united appeal to China not to cross the 38th parallel. Indian ambassador Benegal Rau noted that the “direct and sincere [appeal] had a powerful effect on public opinion here and elsewhere, and it gave the first indication to a distracted world that the countries of Asia had taken the initiative” (Jansen 1966, p. 106). But China was no more willing to halt its advance than the United States had been. “So far as the 38th parallel is concerned,” Zhou told Panikkar (1955, p. 118), “it is we, China and India, who wanted to uphold it. But [UN commander General Douglas] MacArthur has demolished it and it exists no longer.”

The cease-fire resolution passed 54–5 (the Soviet bloc opposing) with one abstention (the Republic of China, on Taiwan). It set up a three-man group of General Assembly president Entezam of Iran, Rau himself, and Canadian foreign minister Lester Pearson. These last two engaged in a flurry of lobbying: the Indians in Beijing and the Canadians in Washington. The result was an Asian group resolution for a peace conference, with a cease-fire as the conference’s first agenda item (YUN 1951, p. 216). However, this resolution was again passed over in favour of the American draft to brand China an aggressor, causing a major breach in US–India relations (FRUS 1951, vol. 7, pp. 140–42). Palar, now the UN delegate of independent Indonesia, joined the refusal to condemn China, arguing that “we sh[ou]ld not get into a second failure” (FRUS 1951, vol. 7, pp. 43–44).

Nehru believed he had an implicit deal with the Canadians to restrain the United States while India restrained China (DCER 1951, pp. 60–61). Canada broke that deal by announcing that it would abstain on the Asian draft, which it had helped to write, to instead support the U.S. resolution. That resolution then passed 44–7 with nine abstentions. India and Burma joined the Soviet bloc in opposition, while most of the other Asians abstained. An upset Rau went on record that “when the world was marching, in our view, towards disaster we—most of the Asian powers—did all we could to halt that march.” He blamed the Commonwealth and European delegations for the debacle, saying “United States pressure was too great for them, and they were unable to act independently and according to their own better judgment (Jansen 1966, p. 107). An Indian diplomat admitted to “a feeling in this part of the world that the growing issue is one of Asia against the rest, or the East versus the West” (Stueck 1995, p. 163). Asian peacemaking efforts ended in ashes and bitterness towards former friends.

The abortive peacemaking effort of December 1950 and January 1951 marked the end of India’s reliance on its Commonwealth bond. Its closest intimacy would now be with its neutralist neighbours. Nehru proclaimed that “the two countries closest to India in policy were Burma and Indonesia. They are far closer than our Commonwealth link” (Singh 1979, p. 180). Despite denials of a bloc, India also began training Indonesian army officers in 1951 and pilots in 1953 (when over 3000 pilots trained in India), with joint naval exercises following in 1958 (Heimsath and Mansingh 1971, p. 233). The Burmese and Indonesians were joining Nehru’s direction with enthusiasm.

8. Additional Measures: Asian Economic Dependence and the Embargo on China, May 1951

Influence stemmed in part from exports. Asian neutrals saw their power enhanced by the Korean War export boom. World trade rose 12% in 1950, while raw material prices rose 84.8%. India became the world’s top textile exporter (Karunakaran 1951, pp. 204–9). Burma’s rice sales boomed (Johnstone 1963, p. 61). The price spiral slowed in 1951 as the U.S. eased off on strategic stockpiling, then prices started falling in 1953. The boom had been within a U.S.-centred world trading system, in which Asian states were highly dependent on North American and European markets. Aid to India came almost exclusively from the U.S. and the Commonwealth. The U.S. supplied 70% and Canada 23% of grants, while investments remained dominated by Britain (Karunakaran 1951, p. 231). Indonesia and Burma relied on U.S. aid, though they were trying to make inroads into the Commonwealth Colombo aid plan (Adeleke 2003; Webster 2010).

The limits of Asian independence were demonstrated by the next U.S. move against China, a UN resolution calling for a trade embargo. The resolution that branded China as an aggressor also authorized the Collective Measures Committee to meet as a re-named Additional Measures Committee, which went on to recommend an embargo against China and North Korea on “arms, ammunition and implements of war, atomic energy materials, petroleum, transportation materials of strategic value, and items useful in the production of arms, ammunition and implements of war” (YUN 1951, p. 227). Burma declined to take its seat on the Additional Measures Committee, and eight countries including India, Burma, Indonesia, and Pakistan abstained, but none were willing to oppose the motion.

The most vulnerable country was probably Indonesia, heavily dependent on exports of rubber, a material seen as strategic by American planners. The Indonesian chargé d’affaires in Beijing noted that China could find its own rubber, but an embargo would lower prices and hurt Indonesia’s economy (Panikkar 1955, p. 140). Palar argued that an embargo “might create a situation liable to develop into world war and to precipitate the very thing that the United Nations was intended to avoid” (Appadorai and Rajan 1985, p. 475). None of this cut any ice with the U.S. State Department, which threatened Indonesian ambassador Ali Sastroamijoyo that any sales to China “will mean that Indonesia has moved away from its independent policy and will be considered by the United States to have chosen the Soviet bloc” (Ali 1979, p. 231).

The U.S. was equally tough on Ceylon, still barred from the UN by the Soviet veto. Ceylon had been selling rubber to China above market prices, and the U.S. refused to take China’s place in the arrangement. In September 1952, Ceylon sent a trade mission to China, agreeing on a rubber-for-rice swap. “The deal was one of sheer economic necessity,” wrote John Kotelawala, then a cabinet minister in the conservative United National Party government, “and the alternative to it would have been just plain starvation for Ceylon” (Kotelawala 1956, p. 138). The U.S. response was to suspend aid (Mendis 1983, p. 395).

U.S. pressure forced Asian governments to join the embargo, underlining their economic dependence. At the same time, it spurred resentment of the heavy-handed Americans.

9. The Japanese Peace Treaty and Rejection of the New Asian Security Order, 1951

American policy for eastern Asia rested increasingly on rebuilding Japan, both economically and as a military bastion. Thus, the U.S. government developed a proposed Japan peace treaty. Washington signed mutual security treaties with Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines to obtain their agreement to the treaty and added reparations to increase Asian support. India objected to the exclusion of the USSR and China and declined to attend the treaty-signing conference. Burma joined the boycott. This sparked U.S. fury. The New York Times called Nehru “one of the great disappointments of the postwar era” (Brands 1989, pp. 69–70). Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained that India “seemed to align itself with the Chinese Communist line, which is that there cannot be ‘Asia for the Asiatics’ unless all Westerners are rooted out of Asia” (S. K. Gupta 1988, p. 219).

Indonesia, on the other hand, proved helpful. The Indonesian cabinet, split between two main parties with opposing views on the treaty question, decided to attend the conference and seek amendments, using hesitancy in cabinet as a bargaining chip to extract further reparations from Japan. The Indonesian cabinet collapsed soon afterwards, however. The treaty was never ratified by parliament, and future Indonesian governments would no longer be viewed as U.S. clients. The new Japan-centred regional order, then, indirectly sent Indonesia into the camp of Asian dissenters led by India.

10. The Indian Resolution on POWs and Third Area Assertion, 1952

In 1952, the General Assembly met amidst armistice negotiations in Korea, which had been bogged down over a single question: the repatriation of Chinese and North Korean prisoners of war. The session marked increasing Asian assertion. By this point, India and others had made the break with the United States. On a Soviet motion to invite North as well as South Korea, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Burma voted on the Soviet side for the first time (YUN 1952, p. 180). When 21 powers (more than a third of the UN membership) backed the U.S. negotiating position, India’s Krishna Menon countered with a draft of his own, backed by the now-solid Asian UN group, which sought to compromise by releasing prisoners to a neutral body. “I think the Americans found I had broken the unity of the Western group,” Krishna Menon recalled (Brecher 1968, p. 38). Western unity survived when the USSR denounced the Indian resolution. The United States then accepted it, and it passed with the support of all UN members except the 5-vote Soviet bloc. British foreign minister Anthony Eden thought it “represented the beginning of an alignment of Asian opinion … on the side of the free world” (Bailey 1992, p. 122). Canadian prime minister St. Laurent saw the lopsided vote of support as “an encouraging demonstration of the strength and solidarity of democratic feeling throughout the world” (S. H. Lee 1995, p. 169). Commonwealth leaders were practicing wishful thinking, however. India had managed, for the first time, to head off a resolution that the United States desired. The Korean War signaled India’s arrival as the only country trusted enough by both sides to chair the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission.

11. Worlds Apart: Colombo and Geneva, 1954

Despite much jockeying and the support of a majority of UN members, India, Indonesia, Burma, and Pakistan were excluded from the 1954 Geneva peace conference on Korea. In response to this snub and to soaring U.S.–China tensions over offshore islands held by Taiwan, five Asian countries met at the same time as the Geneva conference. This Colombo conference of Ceylon, India, Pakistan, Burma, and Indonesia, “was going to demonstrate to the world that the people of Asia know what was good for them,” said the staunch anti-Communist prime minister Kotelawala (1956, p. 119) of Ceylon, pointing to some of the disillusion felt by pro-Western leaders. India and its neighbours wanted to extend the peace area just defined by the Panchsheel doctrine of co-existence and keep both China and the U.S. out. While “free Asia” set itself on the road to Bandung, the West was constructing a new Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the negation of the peace area concept. This divergence had always been a possibility, but was never inevitable. It happened gradually, against the background of Korean War diplomacy and the battle between India and the United States over how to treat China. Many factors led to the birth of the Asian–African conference and the Non-Aligned Movement, of course, but these early Cold War events in Indonesia and especially Korea made both developments more likely.

Reliably West-leaning states, with India as the biggest “prize” for the West, had, in the course of conflicts in Indonesia and Korea, turned into a coherent bloc, the “Colombo powers” as they would be dubbed. Even Western-allied Ceylon and Pakistan jumped on board with the non-aligned India, Indonesia, and Burma. Hopes by Canada and others that there could be an Asia–West “bridge” came to nought, partly as the result of perceived U.S. intransigence (Parker 2006). Simply put, Washington did not accept Asian peacemaking efforts, and it dragged its allies along with it. The three states that formed the “core” of Asian neutralism moved to unity in foreign policy—first at the UN among a group of ambassadors, then at Colombo. Bandung was the aftermath of Colombo and the development that came before it, “intended as a step forward, not the culmination” (Gettig 2015, p. 128). The “postcolonial spectacle” (C. Lee 2026) of Bandung was the public performance following the many years of building behind the scenes that are described in this article.

At Colombo, Ali Sastroamijoyo, invited home from the UN to become prime minister of Indonesia, made the proposal for the Bandung conference. He would host it and use Bandung as a springboard not only for a collection of new Asian–African states refusing Cold War alignment, but also as a platform for Indonesian leadership (Ali 1979; Kahin 1955). Nehru, contrary to some accounts, did not promote the conference. The Indian primacy described above faded from this point onwards. By the 1960s, Indonesia was opposing India’s stress on peacemaking and pushing instead for a global revolution of the “new emerging forces” against the Washington-led “old established forces.” This is one of the “after-lives” of Bandung (C. Lee 2013), which merits more research. This article has argued for a different understanding of what we might call the before-lives of Bandung, with Indonesia, Korea and the UN as the places where this played out. As with most events in international history, Bandung and the map to non-alignment it sketched was not inevitable. Rather, discreet policy decisions and debates before 1953 helped to create the conditions for Bandung and non-alignment.