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From 18 to 24 April 1955, delegations from twenty-nine Asian and African countries met at the Gedung Merdeka in Bandung, West Java. Together they represented more than half of the world’s population. Most had been colonies within living memory, and some, such as Ghana (then the Gold Coast) and Sudan, were not yet fully independent. President Sukarno opened the conference by calling it “the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind”.
For decades, the Asian-African Conference was remembered mainly as a symbol, a high point of solidarity among newly independent states that faded quickly. More recent scholarship takes it more seriously, as a place where postcolonial states shaped international norms rather than simply accepting them. This essay reviews both views.
Who convened it, and why
The conference was sponsored by the five “Colombo Powers”: Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon. Indonesia’s Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo pushed for the idea, and Indonesia hosted it. Its motives were partly international and partly domestic. The young republic was still in dispute with the Netherlands over West New Guinea, its parliamentary democracy was unstable, and a successful international meeting increased its prestige.
The participants were very diverse. Pro-Western states such as Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey, Iraq and Thailand sat with neutralists such as India, Indonesia and Burma, and with the People’s Republic of China. China’s Premier Zhou Enlai became a central figure. His moderate, conciliatory approach reassured anti-communist delegates and was a diplomatic success for Beijing.
What Bandung produced
The Final Communiqué covered economic and cultural cooperation, human rights and self-determination, the problems of “dependent peoples” and the promotion of world peace. Its best-known section set out ten principles (Dasasila Bandung). These included respect for fundamental human rights and the UN Charter; respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations; the equality of all races and nations; non-intervention in internal affairs; the right of each nation to defend itself individually or collectively in accordance with the UN Charter; refraining from collective defence arrangements that serve the interests of the great powers; and settling disputes by peaceful means.
The text reflected hard compromises. The right to collective self-defence was included to satisfy members of Western alliances such as SEATO, while the clause on avoiding great-power defence arrangements answered the neutralists. Colonialism “in all its manifestations” was condemned. This wording allowed some delegates to include Soviet control of Eastern Europe as well as Western empires.
Interpretations: symbol or source of norms?
The traditional view, influenced by George McTurnan Kahin’s eyewitness account (1956), presents Bandung as an important but limited moment. It expressed anti-colonial solidarity, but deep divisions among the participants meant that it produced no lasting institution. A planned second conference in Algiers in 1965 was cancelled. The Non-Aligned Movement, founded in Belgrade in 1961 under Tito, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah and Sukarno, is often treated as Bandung’s real successor, but it had a narrower membership and a different purpose.
The revisionist view, developed in the volume edited by See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (2008) and in Acharya’s later work on “Global IR”, argues that Bandung was a site of norm-making. Acharya argues that postcolonial states did not just adopt European ideas of sovereignty and non-intervention. They reinterpreted those ideas as protection against great-power intervention, and gave them priority. Bandung’s principles can be traced into the Non-Aligned Movement, the UN’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, and, importantly for this region, into ASEAN’s 1976 Treaty of Amity and Cooperation and its principle of non-interference.
Critical and cultural historians, represented in Christopher J. Lee’s edited volume Making a World after Empire (2010) and in Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations (2007), emphasise what they call the “Bandung spirit” as a political imagination: a hope for a world order based on racial equality and economic justice. Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain (1956), written after he attended the conference, is still a revealing first-hand account of how the event was seen from outside.
Bandung and the Cold War
Bandung also needs to be read alongside the history of the Cold War. Washington was wary of it. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles regarded neutralism as morally suspect, and the conference contributed to US suspicion of Sukarno. Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War (2005) shows how the superpowers’ competition for influence in the “Third World” increased after the mid-1950s, often through intervention. That made Bandung’s principle of non-intervention more urgent and also harder to uphold.
Questions for seminar discussion
- Did Bandung create new international norms, or did it reinterpret existing European ones? Does the distinction matter?
- Why did Bandung’s solidarity fail to produce a lasting institution, while the European Economic Community, founded two years later, succeeded?
- How far does ASEAN’s “non-interference” reflect Bandung, and how far does it reflect the specific security fears of Southeast Asian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s?
References and further reading
- Acharya, A. (2016). Studying the Bandung conference from a Global IR perspective. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 70(4), 342–357.
- Kahin, G. McT. (1956). The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955. Cornell University Press.
- Lee, C. J. (Ed.). (2010). Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Ohio University Press.
- Prashad, V. (2007). The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. The New Press.
- Tan, S. S., & Acharya, A. (Eds.). (2008). Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order. NUS Press.
- Westad, O. A. (2005). The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times. Cambridge University Press.
- Wright, R. (1956). The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. World Publishing.
- Ampiah, K. (2007). The Political and Moral Imperatives of the Bandung Conference of 1955: The Reactions of the US, UK and Japan. Global Oriental.
