On May 5, 1980, after a grave illness that lasted almost four months, President Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia died. He is remembered for his forceful statesmanship and the reforms he brought to his country. In 1948 he stood against Joseph Stalin and became the first communist leader to break away from the Soviet bloc.
Tito poured much of his energy into the non-aligned movement, which he helped to found in 1961. Today the movement involves almost 100 nations committed to remain neutral in resistance to Soviet and U.S. power struggles. One of Tito's last efforts was to oppose the pro-Soviet stance of Fidel Castro at the movement's most recent conference, held in Havana, Cuba, in 1979.--The Editors
With the death of Yugoslav President Tito, world attention has turned again to one of his crowning achievements, the founding of the non-aligned movement. Amid the renewed polarization in international relations, this movement continues to offer a vital alternative to the false dilemmas into which the big power blocs plunge humankind at regular intervals. Western Christians who struggle to maintain a critical awareness of the tension between their own interests and the interests of the rest of the world's population would do well to pay closer attention to the principled stances taken by these nations in the self-interest of the majority of humankind.
Long gone are the days when a U.S. secretary of state denounced the very concept of non-alignment for being not only infeasible but also immoral. Yet today, as in the days of Secretary Dulles, the Cold War is waged in some quarters with the self-justifying overtones of a holy crusade. But both East and West, each for its own reasons, profess respect for the contribution which the non-aligned nations are making to the resolution of world crises both acute and long-term.
In his words of welcome to the first Conference of the Non-Aligned Countries in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, President Tito set forth the movement's founding principles. He noted the "pressing need for states which do not belong to any blocs to set out their views on the problems that are leading the whole world to the brink of a catastrophe, the greatest in their history, in a unified manner and in clear and unambiguous terms, through their highest ranking representatives." The intervening decades have seen important non-aligned initiatives on détente, disarmament, and a new international economic order, often in the framework of the United Nations, where their number is now greater than that of the bloc countries.
Membership in the movement has grown phenomenally, from 25 countries at the Belgrade Conference, 47 in Cairo, Egypt (1964), 54 in Lusaka, Zambia (1970), 75 in Algiers, Algeria (1973), and 86 in Colombo, Sri Lanka (1976). At the most recent in Havana, 96 members participated and an additional number of observers, guests, and representatives from liberation movements attended.
Robert Mugabe, upon his election as first prime minister of the newly independent Zimbabwe, surprised nobody with his announced intention to lead the new nation into the non-aligned movement. Almost without exception, former colonies during the past two decades have found a home in the movement. The natural foreign policy of their hard-won independence echoes the resolute resistance which non-alignment signals to those who would carve up the globe into "spheres of influence" and "zones of interest." Such forms of economic and political dominance differ very little from the colonialism from which the new nations have just spent decades trying to free themselves.
Throughout its development, the movement has reaffirmed its commitment to principles of basic human equality, self-determination, sovereignty, disarmament, peaceful co-existence, and support for the United Nations. At the same time, it has been forcibly confronted with the dangers of racism, imperialism, military interventions across sovereign borders, escalation of the arms race to an annual cost of $400 billion, the chilling of détente, and the subjection of the U.N. processes to big-power rivalries.
The non-aligned nations continue to be vulnerable to the machinations of the "geo-political strategists." In times of international crisis, bloc hostilities are waged often by proxy, with the deliberate destabilization of whole regions. It is the peoples of the non-aligned countries whose homelands often become testing grounds for the latest weapons systems, whose internal tensions are exploited for others' strategic ends, and whose fragile economies are shattered by protectionism and economic adversity which limit profits to the outsiders as normal trade relations are interrupted.
Leading theoreticians of non-alignment have from the outset been concerned to develop the kind of democratic internal relations which would exemplify the orderly interaction for which they strive on the international scene. To this end, the movement has intentionally spanned a broad diversity of ideological orientations. The decision-making process requires special patience and discernment of mutual interests, for no member is in a position to dominate. A pattern of consensus which has distinct advantages over a system of straightforward votes and vetoes has evolved. Members are then responsible to find their own ways of implementing the decisions.
Theirs is the unity of a voluntary association, not one imposed by a senior partner or a first among allies. There are no negative sanctions available to force individual countries into line if in their view such decisions do not prove to be in their interest; being a community of interests, the non-aligned nations have not given up their own particular priorities. However, there is room for legitimate criticism when certain members of the movement have departed from the fundamental principles of non-alignment. The depth of cooperation between members has been rising, and the fruits are evident not only in United Nations initiatives, but also in concrete decisions taken by member nations resisting bloc pressures to join one side against the other.
Perhaps the most recent example of this dynamic is the series of responses to the massive Soviet armed intervention begun last year in Afghanistan, itself non-aligned. First the non-aligned countries initiated and overwhelmingly supported a condemnation of the action at the U.N. In the aftermath of heightened tensions between the blocs,
neighboring Pakistan's commitment to non-alignment is cited as a decisive factor in its refusal of $400 million in military and economic aid from the United States. A small and vulnerable nation thus demonstrated to the world that its security would not be enhanced by arming to fight a proxy battle between the big powers.
A basic contention of the non-aligned position is that the spheres of bloc activity must be steadily reduced, and zones of peace established. The resources which these nations bring to the task are neither military nor monolithic; the nations speak for more than two-thirds of the world's population, and theirs is the force of moral suasion. This is no beggar's plea of the weak and disadvantaged. It is the reasoned and principled stance of leading states-persons who are struggling for a future free of costly and dangerous antagonisms, which are fostered and exacerbated by the division of the world into military and political blocs. Détente is not simply a two-way street, disarmament not merely a bilateral issue.
We must give serious attention to this authentic alternative in foreign affairs. But in trying to take note of the non-aligned movement, we face a difficulty, which has recently been addressed by the movement and the U.N. As information consumers, we are served by news packagers, themselves blinded by the bloc perspective on world affairs. Only special efforts can free us from this filtering process, because the means of communication are virtually incapable of putting us in the shoes of the others, the ones whose interests are completely ignored when the superpowers divide the world into Us and Them. Such efforts will put us in a position to wrestle with the structures nearest us, to push to make these issues our own nation's agenda—before the rest of humankind in wrath and desperation abandons the approach of principle and moral suasion and forces that agenda upon us.
N. Gerald Shenk studied philosophy and sociology at the University of Sarajevo in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia when this article appeared.
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