At the beginning was the Bandung Conference. For those who were there at the creation – Nehru, Cho-en-Lai, Sukarno, Nasser, among others – it was a defining moment; a moment of self-awareness and recognition that they were the witnesses and agents of the advent of a new and potentially potent force on the world scene.
The Bandung Conference heralded the birth of a coalition of variable geometry and shifting focus over time. It started as the Afro-Asian Movement (basically newly independent nations of non-European stock and culture); leading, in the early 1960s, to “the Non-Aligned Movement” (including a European state, Yugoslavia, and focusing on an independent posture in the Cold War); then, in 1964 at the first UNCTAD, to the “Group of 77” (adjoining the Latin American states who share the same economic predicament and political sensitivity – a group of more than 130 members at present).
These different movements or groups have kept formally their separate existence. But they are in fact concentric (or intersecting) circles, with the same hard-core but varying at the margins. They represent, at the intergovernmental level, what is currently referred to in the literature as the Third World or Global South. Their members share by and large the same grievances and claims: the grievance of colonial past and exploitation, and of actual marginalization; and a claim for greater equality and equity, as well as for effective participation in global decision-making.
Their choice arenas for voicing these grievances and claims have been those of international organizations, particularly the UN family, where the rules of parliamentary diplomacy provided them with an ideal forum and allowed them to draw the advantage of their numbers. The dialectics they triggered in those arenas and beyond, over the rules of the game (i.e., the rules of international law that govern international relations) as well as on the substantive issues that constitute the objects of these relations (economic, political, cultural, or otherwise), are sometimes referred to as the North-South confrontation. A confrontation that can be portrayed as a psychodrama that is still being written, its successive acts and scenes continuously shifting focus and venue with the eruption of international crises and the emergence of new sources of tension or concern in the international public consciousness.Footnote 1
1 For an exposition of this “psychodrama” about the content and horizons of international law that followed Bandung, see Georges Abi-Saab, “The Third World Intellectual in Praxis: Confrontation, Participation, or Operation behind Enemy Lines?” (2016) 37 Third World Quarterly 1957.
