Nowadays, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is no longer much of a movement. Since the Cold War’s end, it has fractured into a far more heterodox grouping whose members range from leftist regimes, as in Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, to the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar. So it should be no surprise that ideological cacophony has severely diluted the group’s founding impulse of avoiding entanglement in the disputes of the world’s superpowers.
Thus, today’s NAM finds itself as a group in search of purpose and principle. Its sole comfort, it seems, is that it has not yet withered away. But, despite its diminished status, the recent NAM summit in Tehran was able to claim the world’s attention.
The dispute over the wisdom of holding the summit in Iran’s capital revived the core debate about what ‘non-aligned’ means in the post-Cold War world. Why keep such an anachronistic construct alive when the world is no longer frozen into two ideologically antagonistic blocs? Furthermore, given the proliferation of strategic partnerships that claim many NAM members (India, for example, has strategic partnerships with the US, Japan and Brazil), are the non-aligned really still non-aligned?
How can NAM help its members when nothing else unites them? According to Kanwal Sibal, a former head of India’s foreign service, “India’s own experience of NAM in areas of its core national interest has been most unsatisfactory, which is enough reason to shed any undue sentimental or ideological attachment to the movement.”
And yet India, like so many other countries, maintains its NAM membership, because NAM does provide an additional platform, which India needs and treats as one tool among others in its diplomatic toolkit. Occasionally, NAM provides a useful counterweight to western pressure — say, regarding Iran, with which India remains eager to build trade and energy relationships.
So, to be blunt, NAM survives because of America’s recent global domination and its efforts to impose its policies globally. And, with a rising China seeking to do much the same in its immediate neighbourhood (and perhaps farther afield in the future), the movement has a second reason for surviving as a check on the super-powerful.
In a recent article, Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace bemoans that, “India’s foreign-policy establishment is in the process of disinterring a long-dead grand strategy from its Cold War grave.” He cites a recent report titled Nonalignment 2.0 that promotes non-alignment — a “doctrine that calls upon India to refuse staunchly any strategic alliances with other actors” — in order to ensure the country’s “strategic autonomy”.
Non-alignment holds out the prospect that a people can chart its own path, free from external pressure — a particularly attractive proposition for countries that remain scarred by their colonial pasts. But how can these impulses be reconciled with the strategic partnerships? The answer is simple: International order does not adhere to a logically consistent code. In the harsh light of realpolitik, only power and influence matter. If NAM enhances a country’s power and influence, it will maintain its membership.
India’s participation in the Tehran summit should not strain its ties with the US. Just because the US continues to pursue its sterile policy of not speaking with Iran, India — with its own strategic, geopolitical, and energy-related interests to protect — does not need to tag along. Neither strategic partnership with the US, nor membership in NAM, will divert India from safeguarding those interests.
— Project Syndicate, 2012
Jaswant Singh, a former Indian minister who has handled the finance, foreign and defence portfolios, is the author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.