The Search for the ‘Bandung Spirit'

The Wire

04-06-2025

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While Bandung's call for political independence across the colonies has in fact been met, the economic independence and egalitarian development path it advocated are still substantially unrealised.
The plenary session during the historic Bandung Conference. Photo: Public domain.
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This April marked the 70th anniversary of the Bandung conference held in Indonesia in 1955, that brought together high-level representatives from 29 countries, most of which had won independence from colonial rule in the wave of decolonisation that accompanied the onset and advance of the Second World War.
The 1955 event that is a kind of milestone in global history since the middle of the 20th century was remarkable in many ways. Though a meeting of leaders rather than of people, it did appear to have the enthusiastic support and sanction of the populations that had won political freedom from imperialist domination. The proceedings and the outcome document had a strong anti-colonial flavour, reflected in the declaration that 'colonialism in all its manifestations is an evil which should speedily be brought to an end'. The reference to 'all manifestations' clearly implied that the challenge was not merely to root out the still present instances of colonial domination, but to stem the onset of neocolonial domination in the then Third World.
The conference reflected the mood in Afro-Asian nations. The prevailing sense was that it was imperative to keep imperialism at bay, for which these leaders together committed themselves to and demanded of others recognition of the equality of nations 'large and small', and respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty. Implicit in this case for the establishment of a democratic international order was the idea that the nation state was the entity that matters and the assertion that national governments were more representative of their peoples than any self-designated international rule-making authority.
Class character
There were of course differences in the perception regarding the potential and ability of the states in newly independent countries to pursue autonomous development that helped fortify political freedom with economic independence. One the one hand, there were those who held the position that in the post-war world the potential for the development of new autonomous capitalist societies was fundamentally limited even if countries won political independence. Their ability to have a transformative influence, depended on the class character of national governments that came to power at Independence. Only if those states were led by forces representing the interests of the peasantry and the formal and informal working class, as opposed to indigenous industrial capitalists and big landed interests in coalition, that the structural changes needed to create the conditions for more egalitarian development based on indigenous capabilities and domestic markets would be ensured.
The victory of Communist led forces in revolutionary wars in China and Vietnam, the continuation in power of governments with an avowedly pro-people development agendas (unlike in some other contexts), and the formation of an uneasy 'socialist bloc' along with the then Soviet Union, seemed to provide support for those advocating this form of transformation. It was not just the state that must be the bulwark against imperialism and the driver of autonomous development, but that state must in the interests of the hitherto exploited and marginalised lead a process of institutional change that attacks land monopoly and non-agricultural asset concentration.
But a majority of countries that won Independence during the decolonisation years that followed the Second World War, while coming to power on the basis of mass movements against colonial rule, represented a coalition of landed and industrial interests. Despite declaring intent to pursue a radical programme, they failed in practice to implement much needed land reforms that by breaking down land monopoly and releasing peasant energies, would have dismantled barriers to productivity increase in agriculture, raised mass incomes and raised consumption, and generated the wage goods surpluses needed to support economic diversification away from agriculture.
This failure, in ways which we cannot elaborate here, limited the growth of the domestic market and held back autonomous development, as well as left untouched the structural constraints leading to bouts of inflation and periodic balance of payments crises. This was true of countries from which some of the
inspiring leaders at Bandung – Indonesia's President Sukarno, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser for example – came. In time, with the failure of autonomous development in the form of 'import substituting industrialisation', these countries would all drop their progressive agendas and embrace neoliberalism, owning that agenda rather than opposing it as an imposition by neocolonial powers.
The core constraint
The Bandung cohort did realise that they had responsibilities to their peoples who fought for political freedom, installed them as leaders, and gave them the social sanction to advance the project of autonomous and independent development. The issue they faced was not just that of raising productivity and per capita income but of addressing the asset inequality that would deprive that majority of the benefits of post-independence development. That, in turn, would prevent the emergence of a domestic market needed to support a process of development that would be less dependent on international markets dominated by the developed countries and on the foreign investors whose support would be needed to obtain any foothold in those markets. In sum, the less developed countries would have to pursue more egalitarian strategies with a major or even dominant role for the State, as well as cooperate with each other to create combined markets and realise the scale needed to support the diversification of economic activity.
Seven decades after the Bandung conclave, its vision appears to have been only partially realised and does not seem to have the needed purchase among governments who are seen as central to breaking the shackles of global economic inequality. After a brief honeymoon with the ideals that were espoused at Bandung, States in most post-colonial countries lost the will to stand up to imperialism and push ahead with strategies that could have helped them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. They had failed to deliver on the promises based on which the mass upsurge against imperialism was mobilised, having gone too far to accommodate the demands of powerful, asset owning vested interests and their elite backers. This not only resulted in the persistence to different degrees of inequality, poverty and social deprivation, but also subverted the effort to pursue autonomous and successful development. The result was the loss of support from those advocating or aspiring for national development.
Also read: Unchallenged at Home and Abroad: Jawaharlal Nehru's Leadership With the Non-Aligned Movement
By the 1970s, governments in most less developed countries were faced with a development impasse. To resolve that, they turned to the surfeit of liquidity that flooded global markets following the rise to dominance of finance starting in the 1980s. Rather than stand up to foreign capital and influence, expand domestic markets, and build domestic capabilities, they embraced neoliberalism in the hope that they can leverage foreign investment and finance to restructure themselves as export engines growing on the basis of markets in countries they had promised to win economic independence from. The result has been heighted vulnerability, extreme volatility, and social retrogression.
The exceptions
However, the Bandung promise of a pushback against imperialism was kept alive and was rejuvenated by the revolutions in China and Vietnam. Victory in the Vietnam war, the 50th anniversary of which is being celebrated this year, highlighted a model form of the national liberation struggle in Vietnam and marked the completion of the Vietnamese revolution. The synchronisation of that important anniversary with the 70th anniversary of Bandung has partly strengthened the call for a revival of the Bandung spirit. It is true that China and Vietnam too embraced 'reform', expanded the space for private initiative and relied on external markets to accelerate growth. But their success along that path, despite its many adverse consequences, is in no small measure due to the strengths and resilience built during years of 'socialist' development.
The idea that the character of the leadership of the national liberation struggle was crucial has an interesting history. It originated in the view articulated at the Sixth Congress of the Communist international in 1928, in the 'Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in Colonial and Semi-colonial Countries'. That view had held that 'When the dominant imperialist power needs social support in the colonies it makes an alliance first and foremost with the dominant classes of the old pre-capitalist system, the feudal type commercial and moneylending bourgeoisie, against the majority of the people.' However, subsequent analyses did not either restrict that kind of alliance only to the colonial period or limit it to one between feudalism and imperialism. Rather, the possibility, especially after the October Revolution, that any attack on feudal land monopoly could develop into a movement against private property itself, was seen to necessitate a compromise between the 'national bourgeoisie' and feudal landlordism in the post-colonial period. As a result, the ability of the post-colonial state, constructed in part by an incipient capitalist class to sustain successful industrialisation, was also seen as limited.
What this position went on to argue was that the fall-out of this correlation of forces constrained industrialisation and capitalist development in three ways: (1) It sapped the ability of emerging elites in underdeveloped countries to radically transform agrarian relations, and thereby constrained growth of the domestic market and manoeuvrability of the State; (2) It transformed the underdeveloped countries into a sink for surpluses to finance that process of accumulation; and (3) It subordinated local production and markets to the needs of capital accumulation on a world scale, resulting in growing external vulnerability. The argument was not that capitalist development would not occur, but that such development would be characterised by extreme gradualism, its effects on wage earners and the salariat would be immiserising, and that at all times it would be characterised by the utmost external vulnerability making the pace of development dependent on the access of domestic elites to international capital.
The questionable alternative 'models'
This view was sought to be skirted subsequently by a very specific interpretation of the successful diffusion of capitalism into two countries with a special history. if we take the post-World War II period (and therefore treat Japan since the Meiji restoration separately), there have been only two countries that have made the developmental transition within a market economy framework, in the sense of having moved from backward to developed-country status: South Korea and Taiwan. Other countries that had made that transition were either part of the Soviet Union and not market economies in any meaningful sense, and China and Vietnam which show some promise of making that transition have a very specific non-market, pre-'market-economy', history. In sum, South Korea and Taiwan are more exceptions rather than the rule.
There are some telling similarities between these two that make them exceptional. Externally, South Korea and Taiwan were countries that became 'independent' after having been liberated from Japanese imperialism by the United States, that placed them under occupation. That resulted in a special, even if subordinate relationship with the US and them, strengthened by the fact that these were frontier states in a geopolitics marked by Cold War conflicts. They also served as important rest, recuperation and refuelling bases for American troops during the Vietnam war.
Not surprisingly, despite being geographically not too large, as of September 2022 South Korea was host to 73 US military bases. This special relation not only gave the country easier access and special privileges in the markets of the US and its allies, but special access to private international capital markets at a time when developing countries were being shunned by international banks. South Korea was a 'semi-core' rather than 'peripheral' country. It was the periphery of metropolitan capitalism, rather being a peripheral country in global capitalism. The State here mattered not because it was a bulwark against imperialism, but because it was the instrument through which imperialism consciously facilitated their development to establish them as 'frontier states'.
Contemporary relevance
It is in this background that we must assess the relevance of the Bandung agenda today, when international inequality and the push of capital from the North to the South have locked many less developed countries in a debt trap; when the developed nations refuse to recognise their prime responsibility for redressing the effects of past carbon emissions that triggered the current climate crisis; and, when developed countries turn inward and seek to resolve their domestic problems by shutting out the less developed from presence in their markets. The
global majority countries are once again recognising that they need to stand on their own feet, shape autonomous development strategies, and cooperate to strengthen each other. But to pursue that agenda they need to break out of the grip of neoliberalism, enhance domestic policy space and reverse and unravel asset and income inequality to grow local markets.
That requires social pressure and transformation. This possibly explains why, though 'Bandung' was a landmark that received popular support in Afro-Asian nations, the 70th anniversary passed with scattered celebrations that were little more than a token recognition of the importance of the occasion. Underlying this absence of the Bandung spirit is the reality that, while Bandung's call for political independence across the colonies has in fact been met, the economic independence and egalitarian development path it advocated are still substantially unrealised. But that makes a case not for dropping the Bandung agenda, but for recognising that there are prerequisite for reviving the Bandung spirit, which has gained a new relevance. However, the changed circumstances also pose new challenges.
What the embrace of neoliberalism did was that it set off competition among these poorer countries to win larger shares of the limited world market open to them. Wages were kept down, foreign investors were wooed and developed country governments appeased in order to emerge the winner. Few did, but even when they did the outcome was not adequate to ensure coveted membership of the rich nations club. The result largely was greater dependence, excessive external debt, subordination and extreme vulnerability. Meanwhile, whatever growth occurred largely bypassed the poor. And when the US administration under Trump decided to weaponise tariffs and held out the threat of being shut out of the American markets, governments in even the more 'successful' countries, had to rush to negotiate and offer concessions that are likely to set back development and hurt most those who have been marginal beneficiaries of whatever development has occurred.
That weakness explains the muted response to attempts to recall Bandung. It poses a challenge to democratic forces and civil society actors when seeking to revive the spirit of Bandung and realise its ambitions. They must struggle to put in place truly representative governments committed to pursuing the goals that inspired national liberation struggles the world over.
C.P. Chandrasekhar is the Global Research Director at International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs). He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was engaged in teaching and research at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University for more than 30 years.
In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, IDEAs, Yukthi and Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies have organised a two-day conference in Colombo, Srilanka on June 2 and 3 at the historic venue of the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall, which was the site of the 5th Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. Read more about it here.
This article was originally published on the IDEAs website.
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