VASHNA JAGARNATH: Building solidarity across the Global South

US President Donald Trump is rapidly upending the established rules of diplomacy and geopolitics. None of us can be certain how SA should negotiate this unstable situation, one that carries evident risks. 

Some pragmatism is clearly required, grounded in an astute reading of the balance of forces. As everyone who was once a child on a school playground knows, there is no point in recklessly antagonising bullies. But principles also matter, as does the vision of a more just global order.

We cannot abandon the commitment to achieving fairer representation in, and outcomes from, the various international and multilateral organisations that have so much influence on the global economy. 

There is no formula for finding the sweet spot between pragmatism, principle and wider strategic objectives. There will have to be much thinking on our feet. But as we confront Trump’s astonishing attack on SA there are important lessons from the past. One of these is the history of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in its heyday. 

The NAM emerged from the crucible of African and Asian anticolonial struggles, becoming one of the most significant attempts to forge an independent path in global politics. The deep roots of the idea of collective nonalignment lie in the Pan-African conferences of the 1940s and early 1950s, particularly the transformative 1945 Manchester Congress. 

There, future leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, alongside figures such as WEB Du Bois of the US and George Padmore of Trinidad, developed a comprehensive vision of African liberation that rejected Western and Soviet domination. These conferences articulated principles that would become central to NAM: positive neutrality, sovereign equality and solidarity among formerly colonised peoples. 

The 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia brought 29 Asian and African nations together to articulate a shared vision of global politics beyond the Cold War binary. Though many African nations were still under colonial rule and couldn’t attend, Sukarno — Indonesia’s first president after Dutch colonial rule — hosted leaders such as Zhou Enlai of China, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Jawaharlal Nehru of India.

The conference produced the seminal “Bandung Principles”, which emphasised sovereign equality, territorial integrity and noninterference in domestic affairs. These principles, particularly the rejection of Cold War military pacts, laid the groundwork for what would become the NAM. 

The 1961 Belgrade Conference, convened by Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, transformed the spirit of Bandung into a formal movement. This first official NAM summit brought together 25 member states, with African participation now far stronger due to the wave of independence that had swept the continent since Bandung. Leaders such as Nkrumah, Nasser and Sékou Touré of Guinea played central roles in defining the movement’s structure and objectives. 

The Belgrade Declaration crystallised nonalignment as an active political position rather than mere neutrality, emphasising that member states had the right and duty to challenge global inequities. The conference established the NAM’s organisational framework and committed the movement to supporting ongoing liberation struggles, particularly in Africa, where several countries remained under colonial control. 

The NAM faced problems, of course, including repression, such as the US- and Belgian-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, months before the launch of the UN, and the US-backed coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. These problems were not all externally imposed. One of its founding figures, Touré, eventually became a paranoid and vicious dictator. But its achievements were remarkable. 

Through collective diplomatic pressure NAM countries successfully pushed for the UN Declaration on Decolonisation (Resolution 1514) in 1960 that delegitimised colonialism on the global stage. The movement was instrumental in supporting liberation struggles across Africa, providing diplomatic, material and moral support to independence movements in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and SA. On the economic front, NAM’s persistent advocacy led to the creation of the UN Conference on Trade & Development in 1964 that became a key platform for addressing global economic inequities. 

The movement also played a crucial role in advancing nuclear disarmament efforts, with initiatives such as the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which established Latin America as a nuclear-weapon-free zone. 

The year 1973, remembered in SA for the Durban strikes that led to the development of a powerful black trade union movement, was critically important for the NAM. In that year, NAM members in oil cartel Opec demonstrated the potential power of
co-ordinated action by Global South nations. Through sustained pressure at the UN, NAM countries secured recognition of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, challenging the exploitive concession agreements of the colonial era. 

This was also the year in which the New International Economic Order (NIEO), an ambitious attempt to restructure global economic relations in favour of the Global South, was proposed at the NAM summit in Algiers and then adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974. 

The movement’s unity regarding NIEO demands was impressive, with member states co-ordinating their positions in international forums and using their collective leverage, particularly through Opec’s oil power, to push for change. While the NIEO ultimately failed to achieve its most ambitious goals in the face of fierce resistance from Western powers and the rise of neoliberal economics in the 1980s, it represented the high point of NAM’s challenge to global economic structures. Its demands for economic justice and equitable development continue to resonate in contemporary debates about trade, debt and climate finance. 

The NAM succeeded in carving out a political space beyond the Cold War binary, proving that newly independent nations could exercise meaningful autonomy in international affairs despite pressure from both superpowers. It also gave countries in the Global South, with intellectuals, artists, trade unions and so on, self-confidence, a sense of a wider political identity, and the protection that comes from not being isolated. 

The NAM still exists, but it is a shadow of itself. The Brics bloc, which includes countries across the political spectrum from left to right, is a quite different organisation to the NAM in its heyday, but does have the power to challenge aspects of the global economic order in the interests of the South. 

Despite US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s tantrum, SA’s Group of 20 presidency remains a huge opportunity for the country to act in concert with other nations to build broad international coalitions and push for meaningful reforms. There is a real possibility that Rubio’s petulance could, in fact, engender a new sense of shared interests among many of the other states as they confront the alarming and reckless behaviour of the US under the Trump presidency. 

There seems to be little doubt that Trump’s blistering attack on SA was motivated to a large extent by the temerity shown by SA when it took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). However, 14 countries have now joined the SA action, and many more have expressed support for it, with organisations such as the AU, Arab League, Organisation of Islamic Co-operation and the NAM. SA is not isolated. 

Moreover, on January 31 The Hague Group was officially announced as a coalition of nations committed to upholding the rulings of the ICJ and the International Criminal Court regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Convened by the Progressive International, the group, which includes SA and eight other countries, is committed to
co-ordinating diplomatic and legal efforts to enforce ICJ rulings, strengthen international mechanisms for accountability, and prevent the transfer of arms, munitions and related equipment to Israel in situations in which there is a clear risk that such items might be used to commit or facilitate violations of humanitarian law, human rights law or genocide. 

While it is important to sustain ongoing dialogue with Western countries, the NAM experience shows that building international solidarity and maintaining principled positions often strengthens rather than weakens a country’s international standing in the long run. 

*Dr Jagarnath sits on the council of the Progressive International.