Ideology, race and nonalignment in US cold war foreign relations: Or, How the cold war racialized neutralism without neutralizing race Chapter uri icon

abstract

  • In an irony that would likely have both surprised and gratified its founders, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) has outlived the bipolar Cold War alignments that inspired its creation in the first place. It has come to be seen as synonymous with the so-called Third World, another entity which the superpower conflict helped to create. As such, the persuasion that NAM champions originally dubbed neutralism but purposefully renamed nonalignment by its founders has historically been perceived as race- (and class-) inflected; as being the de facto collective stance of the non-European developing-nations of the global South.1 This membership was not, or not entirely, a grouping imposed by the Western camp. Although it was a French demographer who coined the term Third World, there was always most critically in the rhetoric of many global-South actors themselves a racial dimension to the concept and the neutralist-nonaligned ideology that accompanied it. As a consequence, for contemporaries and scholars, NAM seemed by extension to equal non-white as well. But it is important to remember that neutralism-nonalignment, as a response to the Cold War, didnt start out that way. Race, broadly understood, shaped its conceptual and linguistic evolution in important ways. This historical relationship between Cold War neutralism-nonalignment an ideological position that could be adopted by movements of various stripes and race a complex subject central to the postwar age of decolonization and civil rights raises fascinating questions.

author list (cited authors)

  • Parker, J.

citation count

  • 2

Book Title

  • Challenging US Foreign Policy: America and the World in the Long Twentieth Century

publication date

  • January 2011