Postwar Development Strategies and Their Crises

As dozens of African and Asian colonies gained independence in the two decades following World War II, their leaders sought to avoid alignment with either the capitalist West or the Soviet-led East. This impulse crystallized at the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, attended by representatives of 29 states including Indonesia's Sukarno, India's Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and China's Zhou Enlai, which condemned colonialism and articulated principles of peaceful coexistence. This spirit led to the formal founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) at a summit in Belgrade in September 1961, convened by Yugoslavia's Josip Broz Tito together with Nehru, Nasser, and Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. The NAM, which had grown to over 120 member states, sought not only geopolitical neutrality but also economic solidarity among what came to be called the "Third World," a term coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952 by analogy with France's pre-revolutionary Third Estate. This solidarity found economic expression in calls for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), formally proposed at the UN General Assembly in 1974, demanding fairer terms of trade, technology transfer, and sovereignty over natural resources — an ambitious agenda that ultimately achieved little structural change before losing momentum amid the debt crises of the 1980s.