Bandung's 1955 Asia-Africa Conference and Indonesia

Bandung's 1955 Asia-Africa Conference and Indonesia

Amitav Acharya, Singapore

Fifty years ago, the Asia-Africa Conference held in Bandung
represented the largest ever conclave to date of new states
entering the post-war international system. What were its major
implications for international and Asian regional order?

Six aspects of the legacy of Bandung are especially worth
remembering.

First, Bandung helped to contextualize, uphold and in some
cases extend principles of modern international relations. For
example, nonintervention in the European states-system permitted
great power intervention to restore the balance of power. The
idea of nonintervention that gained ground at Bandung permitted
no such exception.

Moreover, several participants at Bandung, such as Ceylon and
the PRC, were not yet members of the UN, hence the experience of
regional norm-setting gave them a sense of belonging to the club
of nations and offered an alternative framework for their
socialization into the system of states.

Bandung also advanced some new principles which clarified and
strengthened the meaning of sovereignty. First, differing
political systems and ideologies should not be the basis for
exclusion from international cooperation. Second, while every
nation had a right of individual or collective self-defense,
regional military pacts that served the narrow or particular
interests of the superpowers were an affront to the principle of
equality of states and ought to be discouraged.

A third normative outcome of Bandung was the recognition of
non-intrusive, informal and consensus-based diplomacy over
legalistic and formal organizations which might constrain state
sovereignty, an important consideration for countries which had
just gained sovereign statehood.

A second major contribution of the Bandung conference was the
introduction of the People's Republic of China to the Asian and
African community. It gave China an Asian platform which could be
a potential alternative to alignment with the Soviet Union. This
would sow the seeds of Sino-Soviet split later. Few today would
deny the fundamental idea that engaging China is likely to yield
more benefits in the long-term than isolating and containing it.

A third outcome of Bandung was the delegitimation of great
power-led military pacts. At the conference, there was a split.
On the one hand, a group of countries comprising India,
Indonesia, Ceylon, Burma and Egypt favored abstention from great
power military alliances, such as the SEATO and CENTO.

This proved quite controversial, with countries such as
Thailand, the Philippines, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Pakistan
defending their membership in such Pacts. The Bandung conference
accepted the right of individual or collective self-defense,
while at the same time calling for their "abstention from the use
of arrangements of collective defense to serve the particular
interests of any of the big powers."

To be sure, the principle of collective defense was accepted,
but not great power pacts of the type that legitimized great
power dominance. The Bandung conference exposed the weak
legitimacy of SEATO, in terms of its lack of regional
participation and representation.

Indeed, a fourth legacy of Bandung was its indirect
contribution to the rise of ASEAN. It made clear that neither
India nor China, the two big Asian powers, could or should
dominate an Asian regional organization. The aversion to regional
groupings under the hegemonic influence of major Western or Asian
powers paved the way for ASEAN, which offered a successful model
for relatively less powerful states getting together for mutual
benefit. While ASEAN was founded as a grouping of pro-Western
governments, it steadfastly refused to be a military bloc. The
norm against multilateral "arrangements for collective defense to
serve the particular interests of any of the big powers" has
endured in Southeast Asia, indeed the whole of Asia, to date.

Fifth, the procedures adopted at the Bandung conference marked
the birth of consensus diplomacy among Asian nations. The agenda
of the conference was kept as flexible as possible, contentious
issues that would divide the conference (such as India-Pakistan)
were generally avoided, and the procedure of consensus, rather
than majority voting, was adopted.

This bears striking similarities with the ASEAN Way, which
came to be known as a preference for informality, avoidance of
legalistic approaches and mechanisms found in Western
multilateral groups, avoidance of contentious bilateral disputes
from the multilateral agenda in the spirit of compromise, the
need for saving face, and above all, the emphasis on
consultations and consensus.

Last but not the least, the Bandung Conference would also go
down in history as a remarkable feat of organizational success of
a young independent nation: Indonesia. Participants and observers
(including Westerners), whether speaking privately or publicly,
commented favorably on the logistical and residential facilities
provided by the Indonesian hosts, not to mention the beautiful
physical surroundings of Bandung.

Not only was the idea of the conference proposed by Indonesia
(by Premier Ali Sastromiojojo, who was the chairman of the
Conference), Indonesian officials led all the committees,
including Roeslan Abdulghani who led the five-nation secretariat
which organized the conference. A secrete U.S. State Department
assessment praised the "efficiency and dispatch" with which the
Conference could arrive at a joint communique.

A particularly generous tribute to Indonesia was paid by
Jawaharlal Nehru, who has been seen in Indonesia as somewhat
arrogant. But Nehru was deeply impressed by Indonesian
organization. Upon his return from Bandung, wrote an impression
of the Conference to Lady Edwina Mountbatten: "Although there
were five sponsors of this Conference -- Burma, Ceylon,
Indonesia, Pakistan and India -- and we shared expenses and had a
Joint Secretariat, still a great burden of organizing it fell on
the Indonesian Government. They discharged this remarkably well.
I doubt if we could have provided the same amenities in Delhi.
Altogether, therefore, the Conference was a remarkable success. I
think all of us who were there came back a little wiser and
certainly with a better understanding of the other."

Amitav Acharya is Deputy Director and Head of Research at the
Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, Singapore. He is
working on a book about the historical legacy of the Bandung
Conference.