Non-Alignment from New Delhi to Korea, 1949-53

Non-alignment was officially born at a conference in Brijuni, Croatia (then Yugoslavia) in 1956 and then formalized in Belgrade in 1961. Yet its origins go back to the independence struggle of Indonesia in 1945-49 and especially to diplomacy around the Korean War in 1950-53. During that conflict, United States unilateralism pushed India, Indonesia and Burma (now Myanmar) into forming an Asian bloc aligned for diplomatic purposes in the goal of peace. The search for peace in turn formalized a bloc of Asian states that would initiate the Bandung Asian-African conference of 1955 and finally the Non-Aligned Movement. This article explores the emergence of non-alignment in the alte 1940s and early 1950s as a conscious rejection of both Cold War alignment, and earlier European concepts of neutralism in favour of an “active and independent” non-aligned diplomacy that would lead to the emergence of a bloc of non-aligned states.