70 Years Later, the Bandung Conference Is More Relevant Than Ever

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23-04-2025

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the Asian-African Conference, when 29 Asian and African leaders whose countries had recently freed themselves from colonial oppression met in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss their common legacies and challenges, as well as how to escape Cold War-era great power confrontation and advance mutual cooperation. Today, the threat of colonialism is back with a vengeance, as Russia seeks to conquer Ukraine and the U.S. advances territorial claims on Canada, Greenland and Panama. As a result, rediscovering the principles and the spirit of Bandung, and reinterpreting them for today's challenges, is as important as ever.
Back in 1955, the Bandung Conference—as it became known—enunciated 10 principles, including respect for human rights, national sovereignty, territorial integrity and the equality of all races and countries; the right to self-defense individually or collectively in line with the United Nations Charter; and a commitment to the resolution of conflicts through peaceful means. The conference also rejected aggression and the use of force for territorial conquest; collective defense arrangements aimed primarily at serving the interests of the great powers; and interference in internal affairs.
The systematic violation of these principles by Russia in Ukraine, combined with U.S. President Donald Trump's expansionist rhetoric, make them as relevant as ever, while also offering an opportunity for the post-American 'Rest of the West.' The Western liberal democracies would do well now to embrace the Bandung Principles as a means of building bridges with the Global South, even if they are more comfortable with some of them than with others.
In principle, Western liberal democracies would subscribe wholeheartedly to respect for human rights, sovereignty, territorial integrity, equality, non-aggression, self-defense and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. They would also agree to the idea that collective defense, notably through NATO, should be understood as an extension and application of self-defense, rather than as a means of serving great power interests.
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However, they would struggle more with the notion of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, given the tension between respecting every country's right to freely choose the nature of its political system and the international community's 'responsibility to protect' human rights, which they feel under certain circumstances could trigger a response by all. There's also a blurry line separating rule-of-law conditionality embedded internally in voluntary groupings like the European Union and the belief that political conditionality should guide trade, development or security relationships externally.
But few would dispute that the states of the liberal West can no longer preach democracy to the rest of the world as they once did, both because they often violate rights and freedoms at home and back partner states that do so; and because the West no longer wields the influence it once did abroad. The days of external coercion aimed at shaping other countries' political systems—all the way to bombing them into democracy, as during the United States' post-9/11 wars in the Middle East—can now be seen as both wrong and gone.
For their part, countries in the Global South generally subscribe to the Bandung Principles as much today as they did in 1955. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, for instance, they have upheld the renewed value of non-alignment. However, it seems they struggle to rediscover the more elusive yet just as important idea of the Bandung Spirit, which aimed at conveying a sense of collective agency and strategic autonomy in the pursuit of the principles that the participating states agreed on back in 1955. Today, in fact, much of that spirit is lost. Underpinning the present-day variant of non-alignment, often referred to as multi-alignment, is a sense of opportunism, with each country seeking to promote its self-interest, while avoiding making any commitments to anything or anyone greater than themselves, let alone sticking their neck out for it.
This doesn't mean that countries in the Global South refuse to take principled stances. At the U.N. General Assembly, many of them consistently do so, not only when it fits their worldview, such as condemning Israel's violations of international law, but also when it means taking uncomfortable positions, like denouncing Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine. In this respect, many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are less guilty of hypocrisy and double standards than some countries in the West.
However, where they have fallen short is on consistent action. Countries in the Global South—often with good reason—are critical of unilateral sanctions and military aid as foreign policy tools, presenting them as the antithesis of diplomacy, rather than as instruments that can act in support of diplomacy. Backing their argument, they can point to alternative forms of foreign policy action that function within multilateral institutions, such as South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. However, they have shied away from purposeful action, be it multilateral sanctions or recourse to international tribunals, when the target in question is a friend or partner like Russia. In this respect, countries in the Global South have fallen into the same double-standards trap they rightly criticize the West for, with both tending to act on the mistaken assumption that crimes are always committed by adversaries, never by friends.
The Global South's critique of the West would be far more powerful if it were backed by alternative and consistent forms of foreign policy action in support of the Bandung Principles, which the countries comprising the Global South ostensibly still subscribe to. Without action, the idea of non-aligned solidarity becomes empty. At best it becomes a contradiction in terms; at worst, it can end up in appeasement and complicity. It is only by rediscovering the positive and purposeful connotations of the negative notion of non-alignment that the Bandung Spirit can be reborn and inspire the world.
The Rest of the West, too, would do well to look in the mirror and apply some of its criticisms of the Global South to its own behavior. The U.S. disavowal under Trump of the tenets of the liberal international order has created a leadership vacuum, one that can be filled not by hypocritical preaching, but rather by mutual respect and solidarity.
Nathalie Tocci is director of the Istituto Affari Internazionali, part-time professor at the School of Transnational Governance (European University Institute) and honorary professor at the University of Tubingen. She has been special adviser to the EU high representative. Her WPR column appears monthly.
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