Bandung Conference

For a week in April 1955, delegations from twenty-nine Asian and African countries, most of them recently independent, gathered in the Indonesian city of Bandung. Formally the Asian–African Conference, it met from 18 to 24 April and brought together states representing some 1.5 billion people, more than half of humanity at the time. Its condemnation of colonialism and its call for cooperation outside the rival Cold War blocs made it a landmark in the history of decolonisation and a forerunner of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The idea grew out of earlier gatherings of newly independent states, among them the Asian Relations Conference, which India hosted in March 1947. At a meeting of the so-called Colombo Powers in April 1954, Indonesia proposed a wider gathering, and in late December 1954 the heads of government of Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon gathered at Bogor in West Java, where they agreed to hold it the following April. Indonesia's President Sukarno and India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru were the leading figures. The conference was coordinated by Ruslan Abdulgani of the Indonesian foreign ministry.

The organisers wanted to promote economic and cultural cooperation among Asian and African states, to confront problems such as racism and colonialism, and to give their nations a louder voice in a world dominated by the superpowers. Many felt that the Western powers made decisions about Asia without consulting them, amid the tensions of the Cold War. They were concerned in particular about the confrontation between the United States and the People's Republic of China and about French rule in North Africa, while Sukarno also hoped to win support for Indonesia's claim to West New Guinea, still held by the Netherlands.

The fiercest dispute was whether Moscow's grip on Eastern Europe and Central Asia ought to be denounced in the same breath as Western colonialism. The delegates eventually agreed to denounce "colonialism in all of its manifestations", a formula that, without naming names, took in the West and the Soviet Union alike. China's premier, Zhou Enlai, who had escaped an assassination attempt on the way, struck a moderate tone, played down revolution and accepted each nation's right to choose its own system, which reassured many anti-communist delegates. He also signed a dual nationality agreement with Indonesia. Nehru, who argued for non-alignment and against military pacts with either bloc, was received less warmly than he had hoped.

The final communiqué included a ten-point declaration on world peace and cooperation, known in Indonesia as Dasasila Bandung. Drawing on the United Nations Charter and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, it called for respect for human rights, sovereignty and territorial integrity, for the equality of all races and nations, for non-interference in other countries' internal affairs and for the peaceful settlement of disputes. It also warned against collective defence arrangements that served the interests of the great powers. The communiqué urged developing countries to reduce their economic dependence on industrialised nations by sharing expertise and technical assistance.

Pressed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the United States stayed away officially, fearing that the meeting would increase Chinese influence, and it ran a propaganda effort to warn participants about communist aims. The congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. attended independently, as did the writer Richard Wright, whose report on the meeting was published as The Color Curtain.

During the conference Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser discussed obtaining Soviet weapons with Zhou, and later in 1955 Egypt received Soviet arms through Czechoslovakia. Bandung led on to the Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Conference in Cairo in 1957 and the Belgrade summit of 1961, which founded the Non-Aligned Movement. A second Bandung conference planned for Algiers in the 1960s never took place. Anniversary summits were held in Bandung and Jakarta in 2005 and 2015.

Our 1945 map shows much of Asia and Africa still under colonial rule, and our 1960 map shows the wave of new states that took part in or followed the Bandung meeting.