Why Does Solidarity Fail?

By Swapna Kona Nayudu, Author of The Nehru Years – An International History of Indian Non-Alignment (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

There are different ways in which international political solidarity occupies our imaginations and subsequent political theorisation. We may think of cosmopolitan and non-governmental initiatives, but we tend to focus on bilateral and multilateral diplomacy as well as international organisation-led arbitration and conflict resolution. The study of collective diplomacy at the UN has been at the centre of envisioning solidarity from its founding period, which overlapped with a period of intense decolonisation. When it comes to African and Asian states, or Global South ones more widely, there was a peak period when they were mobilised at the UN. Anxieties around forming and sustaining solidarity movements today, particularly in response to events such as the conflict in Palestine, can be assuaged through the study of previous attempts at such mobilisation. There is deep anguish today with a perceived ending of Bandung-style internationalism, but there already was a decline in Third World solidarity from the 1960s. A deeper exploration of what Afro-Asian diplomacy meant, and of its rise and fall, offers lessons for renewed attempts at collective action, such as for a reformed UN that privileges the specificities of local contexts.

Gaza has increased interest in solidarity movements unlike any other recent international conflict, due to the lack of action against Israel at the UN and other multilateral forums. The Global South has been criticised for abandoning anticolonial internationalism. There was an assumption that a state-led response, and also a people-led critique not dissimilar to the agitation from the 1960s, would happen after the Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 turned into a war in Gaza, with the number of casualties exceeding the total from all the wars fought previously between Israel and Palestine. What is the source of this assumption? Why should Gaza have precipitated fellowship among states that have only moved away from consensus in the 80 years of the UN’s existence?

More than the historical or contemporary crises in, say, Afghanistan, DR Congo or East Timor, Palestine has always been a site of confluence for multiple kinds of solidarity mobilisation. Anticolonial, socialist, feminist and internationalist agendas overlap there, and the politics of aspiration that once drove the integration of Africa and Asia in world politics are still applicable to Palestine as the largest unsettled political question of our times. The waves of decolonisation from the 1950s led to state- and nation-building in the Global South in a manner now simply unimaginable for Palestine. Consumed by their politico-economic integration in a system dominated by the Global North, the Global South countries neglected the Palestine question, to the extent that it has become a flashpoint that exposes the weaknesses of solidarity movements, whether South-South or between the Global South and the Global North.

While the Third World and the Bandung Spirit projected solidarity, they never translated this into a robust mandate on the Palestine question. Gaza represents a particularly dismal failing of international cooperation over the better part of the last century – one that is more cumulative than exceptional. Since the 1960s, Global South states have moved away from earlier versions of their anticolonial nationalism. Once large-scale decolonisation had been achieved and concretised through nationbuilding, there was an inevitable turn to the domestic strengthening of the state. An insular approach followed due to the political and economic exigencies of maintaining the sovereignty of new nationstates. Thus, the anticolonial model on which nations function when they are more nebulous in form fades away as they become states that are international political actors in their own right. The Global South fell short on addressing the Palestine question even at the Bandung Conference in 1955.

It should come as no surprise that it has historically mobilised selectively for particular objectives and within specific contexts, not all of which were internationalist. It is thus useful to study the Global South’s solidarity-making and conduct during the early Cold War.

To craft an alternative and modern approach to internationalist solidarity, one can look to an earlier time when disparate movements coalesced. Afro-Asian diplomacy at the UN was a riposte to a Western idea of the liberal international order. But what exactly does Afro-Asianism at the organisation mean? Attempts to define how African and Asian countries have conducted multilateral diplomacy focus on decolonisation and their membership of the UN. An exploration of the meteoric rise of Afro-Asian diplomacy there up to its concretisation into the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 must begin with a discussion of the intellectual motivations and normative commitments of Afro-Asian collectiveness at the UN.

For India, liberal internationalism, especially in its institutionalised form at the UN, became associated with specific characteristics. Through decolonisation and non-alignment, New Delhi sought to widen and strengthen the post-war political order on which these were premised, contrary to the belief in the West that it would seek to overturn that order. In the early years of its UN membership, which coincided with the tenure of Jawaharlal Nehru as its first prime minister and most prominent architect of foreign policy, India pushed for decolonisation and non-alignment with the superpowers. The movement for Afro-Asian collectiveness at the UN represented the peak of India’s response to liberal internationalism and the crises from which a radical, critical new vision for world order emerged, including to the Cold War.

The imperialist foundations of the UN have been well analysed. Within a decade of its founding, it had veered from its promised internationalism. Some claimed that the weight of European history had come to bear so mightily on the post-war structure of international politics that there would be no escaping it. In particular, Americans were of the view that they had revised and updated Europe as an idea for the Third World to apply to their own political contexts as some sort of standard of civilisation. As decolonisation spread after the 1940s, the Western monopoly over global order became endangered and calls for change were met with consistent Western radicalised attacks from the Anglosphere, including on Nehruvian India’s proposed vision for a broader engagement with international politics through Global South solidarity. The activities of the UN’s new members from the Afro-Asian bloc led to growing fear in the West, which found the UN changing dramatically as seen in the large number of anticolonial resolutions.

The Second World (the Soviet Union and its socialist allies) extended its own brand of internationalism to decolonising Africa and Asia through material aid and ideological support. For Nehru and India, the UN was a space in which to calibrate Indian policies in line with those of other African and Asian nations, and to guard against the narcissistic triumphalism that would inevitably follow the British Empire. Furthermore, this new internationalist politics built on justice and peace was intended to broaden the scope of India’s diplomacy. Asia and Afro-Asia represented Nehru’s two modes of thinking. The struggle to give form and meaning to Asia had achieved immense significance in his mind, a struggle shared by other thinkers and peoples. India was to play a central role in the unmaking of the old Asianism and the making of the new Afro-Asianism. This took place at events such as the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 in New Delhi and the Bandung Conference in 1955. Afro-Asianism, as a composite of India’s Asianist principles and Third World solidarities, sanctioned an internationalist politics that could be built on the critique of the UN’s big powers.

But the anticolonialism that had comprised the foundation of this internationalist thought weakened with the transitions from Indian nationalism to Asian regionalism and from Asian regionalism to Afro-Asian internationalism. Mostly this was due to an unclear perspective in New Delhi on the extent of India’s participation in Afro-Asian collectiveness. When it found itself unable to commit more fully to an expansive internationalist politics, India fell back into a more limited and comfortable Asianism, as noted in the retrospective observation of the Indian diplomat and leader Krishna Menon that for India Bandung was largely an Asian enterprise. This failure at coalition politics is largely the consequence of India’s positionality as an Asian state bound by the constraints of its statehood and under constant territorial siege following independence. This led to the decline of the expansive intel­lectual roots of the pre-independence internationalist era. By the end of the 1950s, and with the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement, institutionalised allyship turned out to be a poor substitute for the webs of solidarity. The UN represented the promise of fellowship, yet membership of the UN had not translated to a more transnational cosmopolitanism.

The view from New Delhi was that recusing itself from alliances would give India a place in the world while allowing it to take on internationalist commitments beyond its own national interests.

This non-alignment was a way of grappling with contemporary politics, but also of thinking about world-making. Unfortunately, non-alignment has mostly faded into the background of nationalist politics. Musings on non-alignment for the present age often try to think of linkages with that of the 1950s or 1960s because its legacy and that of Bandung is steeped in nostalgia. This may be blinding us to the politics of the Global South today. Furthermore, even though a new wave of attention to non-alignment may come from the Global South, it is arguably the UN that needs non-aligned solidarity. Afro-Asian non-aligned politics once rescued the UN from becoming an instrument of continued colonialism by other means. Non-alignment can rescue the UN again because it can offer a non-homogeneous, non-hierarchical, difference-based solidarity. States collaborate with whomever they choose to, in whichever capacity they want to. Could this influence how the Global South approaches intentional politics today? Historically, the most influential forms in which the Global South has exerted itself have been through mediatory diplomacy. What can we learn from the successes of Afro-Asian caucusing from the 1950s and 1960s? With states limiting their commitments to the UN, the ways in which the Global South bolstered it when it was in crisis earlier are useful to revisit.

There is much to be learnt from the diplomacy of African and Asian states in the mid 20th century. Notably, one way to influence a remodelling of the UN is to look outside institutional frameworks of international cooperation. Global South webs of interconnectedness were forged in spaces that were fluid, not controlled by states and created by the interplay of local political traditions. Institutionalising these often led to their demise. Counterintuitively, one can imagine a diffused, ideational UN – one that privileges the specificities of local context. There have been calls for the regionalisation of conflict resolution, but a further project might be to sculpt a vision for a highly localised form of diplomacy – in small spaces, in small gatherings – that allows for more lateral movement between humanistic approaches to world politics and high-power realpolitik.