“During the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement tried to become a ‘Third Force’ in world politics, but failed because it was too large and unwieldy.” Discuss. (2023, 20 Marks)
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), launched at Belgrade in September 1961 by Jawaharlal Nehru, Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Sukarno and Kwame Nkrumah, grew from 25 members to more than ninety by the Havana summit of 1979. The statement is half right. Size magnified the movement’s weakness, but the roots lay in heterogeneity, the absence of material capability and dependence on bipolarity. Whether NAM even “tried” to be a third force also needs qualifying.
Did NAM seek to be a third force?
- Nehru resisted the idea. As C. Raja Mohan recounts (2016), Nehru doubted the sense of building a third bloc while objecting to blocs as such; at Belgrade he put ending the arms race ahead of Sukarno’s call to mobilise the “new emerging forces” against the old.
- Hence a movement, not an organisation: no charter, no secretariat, no common defence. Peter Willetts (1978) described what it became, a diplomatic Third World alliance rather than a military pole.
| Meaning of “third force” | Outcome |
|---|---|
| A third military bloc | Never sought; excluded by design |
| A bargaining coalition at the UN | Won on decolonisation and apartheid, lost on the economic order |
| A moral voice | Real, but weakened by selectivity |
| A balancer between the poles | Only soft balancing |
The case for “too large and unwieldy”
- Loose entry: the 1961 preparatory criteria admitted states merely showing a trend towards an independent policy, so members with foreign bases or bloc ties came in.
- Consensus without machinery: every text settled at the lowest common denominator, and declarations grew longer as they grew weaker.
- Havana 1979: Fidel Castro, as chair, called the socialist camp the movement’s “natural ally”, while Tito fought for equidistance, a body visibly pulled apart.
- Raja Mohan’s verdict: harmonising the interests of so many states was never possible, and the movement was dysfunctional well before 1991.
Why size is not the main cause
- Heterogeneity, not headcount. Failures clustered where members’ interests collided: India–China in 1962, India–Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, Iran–Iraq from 1980, oil exporters against importers after 1973. On decolonisation and apartheid, where no member stood on the other side, the large movement won.
- No capability. Even 25 united states could not stop the Soviet Union resuming nuclear tests as Belgrade met. For Kenneth N. Waltz (Theory of International Politics, 1979), structure follows great-power capabilities; weak states cannot balance them.
- Members’ own alignments. T. V. Paul (2018) notes that key members, India included, lost interest by the 1970s as they leaned on one superpower against neighbours, as in the Indo-Soviet Treaty of August 1971.
- Selectivity. Suez was condemned and Hungary handled gently in 1956. In January 1980 the General Assembly demanded Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by 104–18–18, largely on non-aligned votes, yet NAM’s own texts avoided naming Moscow.
What it did achieve
Paul reads NAM as soft balancing: naming and shaming in the UN to delegitimise superpower excess. The record supports him on norms. Resolution 1514 (1960, 89–0–9) made self-determination a right; non-aligned pressure fed the Partial Test Ban Treaty (1963) and the norm against nuclear use; and much of the new world refused enrolment in either camp.
Conclusion
NAM failed as a third force chiefly because it was never built to be one and had no power to back its numbers; size amplified the heterogeneity that consensus could not bridge. Hans Köchler observes that its purpose lost salience, for a time, when bipolarity ended. Kampala in January 2024, attended by 93 of some 120 members, showed the same pattern: convening power without bargaining power.