New ideas needed for reviving Afro-Asian cooperation

Jamie Mackie, Canberra

Now that the celebrations of fifty years since the 1955 Asia- Africa Conference at Bandung are over, with a sensibly realistic agenda adopted for closer cooperation over the next few years as well as a time-table for regular AA Summit Meetings (something that did not eventuate after 1955, except in the very different form of the Non-Aligned Movement some years later), it is time to turn our minds from the past to the future.

We badly need some radically new ideas and new thinking out of Asia and Africa about what the next fifty years may hold in store for the people and nations of both continents -- and what that may mean for the vision splendid of Afro-Asian solidarity conjured up at Bandung in 1955, which was reinvigorated last month.

As globalization sweeps relentlessly across the world with effects both beneficial and pernicious, emanating mainly from the U.S., it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we are inexorably becoming parts of "One World" and that we are all following in the "flying geese" pattern of the socio-economic and political development of the world's wealthiest nations, led by the U.S., Japan, and the "Asian Tigers". Unless we can do better than that, most of us are probably doomed to stagnation and eventual disaster.

Diversity is, after all, one of the most striking features of all Asian countries today and of the great Asian civilizations of the past, as also of most parts of Africa. And whatever progress may be made towards social and economic liberation of either the impoverished masses or the cosy elites of those two continents over the next half-century, it cannot be expected that China, Japan and India will cease to be radically different civilizations with distinctive mindsets, traditions, folkways, societies and "cultures", or Nigeria, South Africa and Ethiopia.

Even if the Indian or Chinese equivalents of Silicon Valley succeed in creating flourishing IT industries in Bangalore and other cities, the impact beyond those enclaves seems likely to be small unless we can add something very constructive to the "ink- spot" or trickle-down models of development prevailing in the West.

Convergence towards essentially similar patterns of socio- economic development has been a dominant feature in most countries of the West over the last century or more. There are understandable reasons for that. But is convergence likely to be equally dominant amidst all that diversity in Asia and Africa through the years ahead? Must we assume it will have to be so? Or can diversity and the persistence of major cultural divergences be turned into an asset that can be built upon in the further growth of these societies? Japan's success in embracing modernity without losing her cultural identity shows that it can be done.

High hopes were raised at the Bandung Conference in 1955 that new ideas and new thinking about international affairs from the recently liberated ex-colonies of those continents would help to make the world a better place. That did happen to a slight extent on the narrowly political issues of decolonization and non- alignment.

The "winds of change" that were stirred up at Bandung resulted in the attainment of independence by more than thirty African nations during the following decade. Moreover, the Belgrade Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1961 gave rise to the NAM which has grown world-wide since then, although with less coherence and relevance as time has passed.

Those were substantial achievements in the frosty Cold War years. But in the realm of ideas not much has emerged since then from Asia or Africa that has helped to change the world. It could not be said that the AA nations have produced many great new thinkers or powerful new ideas to make the world a better place since 1955, or to curb the increasing hegemony of the glib slogans coming out of the U.S. and Europe.

The Bandung Spirit did not give rise to a new generation of leaders of the caliber of Gandhi and Nehru, or Sun Yat-sen, Mao Tse-tung and Sukarno (the latter two having been remarkable and persuasive ideologues, despite their many faults and excesses in both theory and practice), who had previously exerted great influence on the minds of the best and the brightest in their own countries, as well as across the globe.

It is hard to think of others who have made much of a mark on the world of ideas since 1955. Can we hope that in the next fifty years things may be different?

Apart from the admirable Nelson Mandela, Amartya Sen, Ghana's notable Kwame Appiah and Indonesia's Soedjatmoko, the first Rector of the UN University -- and perhaps even Lee Kuan Yew (if that is not too heretical a suggestion!) -- it is difficult to think of names worthy to be compared with their great predecessors. But let us hope the next few decades will redress the balance.

One great challenge for the AA nations over their second half- century will be to regain something of the intellectual vigor and ilan of the early years of struggle for Asian and African independence. How best to go about it is a question on which opinions are bound to differ widely.

And it is not fitting for an Australian to put forward his views as an outsider, even though I have long believed that my country must soon achieve a greater closeness of outlook with our Asian neighbors on those intellectual and political planes, as well as the geographical and strategic.

To expect that governments or bureaucratic organizations will be able to provide the answers we need would be a bad mistake. It will probably be from lonely mavericks and the latter-day equivalents of ancient ascetics in their mountain caves that the most fertile ideas will come, or men and women in the goals of repressive governments. (Will the devotees of Falun Gong prove to be among them?) And unless there is a lot more freedom of speech, argument and dissent about fundamental questions throughout both continents to allow the dissidents to speak out, not much that is good can be expected.

But we must keep hoping that some governments will create favorable conditions for such a renaissance of political thinking to begin, including Indonesia's. For it was Indonesia above all other countries that gave rise to the idea of nationalism as an emancipatory and socially liberating doctrine in Asia in the 1940s. Can we have more of that, please?

Jamie Mackie is a retired professor at the Australian National University and long-time Indonesia-watcher. He has recently published Bandung 1955. Non-Alignment and Afro-Asian Solidarity.

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