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.