In the early 60s, in our international relations courses, the most “in vogue” concept was “non-alignment” and the most popular international construction was the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM). I think it still breathes in some obscure corridors in the United Nations skyscraper in New York City. According to Wikipedia, the bottomless pit of information, 120 countries are still members. NAM was created in 1961 through an initiative lead by Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesian President Sukarno.
The origin of this initiative goes five years further back, to the first large-scale Asian-African or Afro-Asian conference known as the Bandung Conference. Twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African states had gotten together in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. They represented half of the world's population. The conference's aim was to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation while opposing the colonialism and neocolonialism of capitalistic Western nations. However, if you were to state your aim as simply as that, no matter how altruistic it may be, you risked offending the nations who controlled the fountainheads of the global credit mechanism that you needed for economic development, therefore, it took almost five years to organize these ideas into an international movement. Finally, Indian Prime Minister Nehru suggested the term “non-alignment” for the name of the organization. As a matter of fact, the idea was actually developed by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai as a condition for Chinese-Indian relations: neither country should have binding alignments with any bloc.
In any case, this Sino-Indian joint development assistance program provided a perfect example for other Bandung countries first, and later to the 25 countries at the Belgrade Conference from Sept. 1 to Sept. 6, 1961 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
That was how the Non-Aligned Movement was born. Some people called it the “Third World's Yalta” in reference to the 1945 Yalta Conference between the two poles that would become the East and the West. However, President Tito couldn’t succeed in bringing all the non-Western and non-Eastern nations together. The countries of both the East and West, specifically the United States and the Soviet Union, were pressuring other countries to remain in their respective camps. Many countries in Latin America and Africa could not resist the heavy pressure from the U.S., which wanted to preserve its role in the Western Hemisphere. On the European side, many nations were anxious about getting on Uncle Stalin's bad side. After all, not every nation had Tito as its president.
Yet, Tito, Nehru and Nasser were very careful in their opening speeches and simply emphasized their founding principles. These principles were listed as mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in domestic affairs; mutual benefit and, lastly, peaceful coexistence. They did not utter one negative word about the Eastern and Western blocs.
But one thing was very pronounced in all their speeches: the participants’ collective pledge to remain neutral in the Cold War. “We are not against you, nor with you in geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.” There was no direct fighting between the two superpowers, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars. The NAM countries pledged no alliance to either side: they were not with either side, however, they had no animosity toward either bloc.
There were hundreds of thousands of books and doctoral theses and endless research projects about the inner workings of non-alignment. There are still 120 countries that consider themselves members of the movement. With the dissolution of the Eastern bloc, having no alignment to either side lost its meaning. Furthermore, thanks to President George W. Bush, who in an address to a joint session of U.S. Congress in 2001 said, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” almost no nation could now be considered non-aligned.
But, and this is a big “but” here, several countries are being pushed to take sides in the geopolitical tension created by the strategic road maps the U.S. has been publishing since April 2014, following Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. Before that move, NATO and Russia used the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) as a mechanism for consultation, consensus-building, cooperation, joint decision making and joint action. However, perhaps because of his vast background in intelligence services, Russian President Vladimir Putin, without benefiting from the mechanisms provided by the NRC forum, first occupied and later after a referendum, annexed the Crimean Peninsula into the Russian Federation. This move has never been recognized by any country other than Cuba. At that point in time, the alliance suspended all practical cooperation between NATO and Russia; and allies agreed that Russia was the most significant and direct threat to their security and to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area. However, the alliance agreed to keep channels of communication open in the NRC and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council at the ambassadorial level and above, to allow the exchange of views.
Despite the fact that NRC channels were kept open with Russia, the U.S. officials declared that if Ukraine would like to join NATO, the alliance would gladly accept it as a member. Within the NRC, the alliance and Russian ambassadors have met 11 times, with Ukraine being the first item on the agenda. Three meetings took place in 2016, three in 2017, two in 2018 and two in 2019. The most recent meeting of the NRC took place in January 2022.
Fast forward to Sept. 19, 2022, we now focus our attention on President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's interview with the U.S. television channel PBS in New York. The president said, “Türkiye is part of the world; neither East nor West.”
No, this is not the beginning of a new non-alignment movement.
But to understand what it is, we need to go back to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting in 2013. Erdoğan addressed the 74th UNGA meeting and said that in its existing configuration, the U.N. cannot solve any international problems or generate solutions to humanity’s problems.
Moreover, Erdoğan wrote a book titled “A Fairer World Is Possible” to explain what he means by his now slogan-like phrase, “the world is bigger than five.” My colleague at Ibn Haldun University and fellow columnist at Daily Sabah, Burhanettin Duran, recently deciphered this message here:
“Speaking on Sunday at the graduation ceremony of Ibn Haldun University, where I serve as a faculty member, Erdoğan clearly explained Türkiye’s diplomatic approach and how it chooses to take initiative depending on the circumstances in this multipolar world: ‘Some of our friends say that they do not understand us. They say we fight as well as mediate, asking how that is possible. In truth, that is the key. The whole point is to make friends, not enemies ... We have never disappointed those communities and nations, our friends and brethren, that trusted us by standing with them in difficult times. We compelled anyone that had adopted a hostile policy toward Türkiye to reconsider that policy and to look for ways to reconcile (with us). We demonstrated that we could preserve our regional and global relationships without making concessions regarding our political, economic and military interests.'”
In these two sentences, Erdoğan summarizes what we should call “alignment with a principle.” Nehru and his colleagues claimed that they would not be aligned with any nation or group of nations. Erdoğan says we are living in a communal world; you should see yourself as a part of it. Like any good design in art: when multiple objects are placed, their edges or centers should line up in a common position.
Erdoğan and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres proved the above principle to be true in real life when they successfully facilitated the creation of a "grain corridor" in the Black Sea. Türkiye has never recognized the Russian moves violating Ukraine's territorial integrity but never turned a deaf ear to the Russian worries either. Nehru and his colleagues at NAM had refused to listen to what both sides were trying to say during the Korean War. They had said that drawing on the principles agreed at the Bandung Conference in 1955, NAM would not get involved in that war. "Getting involved in a war” does not necessarily mean neighbors joining the fighting on one side. We are living in a design in which there are multiple objects on our left and right and we have to line both them and ourselves up in a common position.
The most common principle that the U.N. – as a forum for a continuously changing world – should recognize is this new concept of alignment: Not non-involvement but the role of honest intermediaries. As the sole forum of nations, the U.N. has been forced to redefine itself and reinvent its purpose in the current world system as NAM had done.
Türkiye has been a member of NATO for 70 years now and has been seeking to be a full member of the European Union for 60 years. This shouldn’t (and doesn’t) make it blindly follow Washington’s or Brussels' policies. If nations accept that the U.N. is the only mechanism we have in this perilous world, then sharing the responsibility that those five nations with veto power hold at the Security Council based on regional neighborhoods of nations, the unintended (or long prepared and calculated) military conflicts could be solved.
If we adopt what Erdoğan says for his country: “We are part of the world; neither East nor West,” we begin acting as a body responsible for its own health today and in the future.
Tito, Nehru and Nasser’s five principles are very much alive today as they had guided several nations for many years. We have also learned that alignments, alliances and the fear they create are also very much real. We have to see that the U.N. unites us under its roof. All we need is to get it working to create a fairer world.
