中文
By Hafijur Rahman
"I've never quite understood what it is they would be nonaligned against at this point." This is how the then U.S. Secretary of States Condoleezza Rice dismissed the relevance of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 2006. But the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has resurfaced the movement with reinvigorated vision strikingly different from that of the Cold War one, with an underlying message to be embraced seriously by the so-called liberal globalists.
A number of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America- known collectively as the Global South with a population totaling more than half of the world, refused to be goaded into toeing the Western lines on the Ukraine conflict. When it came to sanctioning Russia, the number is even more, including American longtime allies and clients. They have rather preferred toeing neutral lines to queuing up behind the U.S.-led proxy war or Russian "special military operation" in Ukraine. Now the questions are: why has much of the world advertently become disillusioned with the much-touted Western "liberal-globalist" model and what does this emerging "neutrality" of the 21st century mean today?
Neutrality under the NAM
The Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s was not all about neutrality – a kind of non-activist midpoint stance between the then two superpowers. Rather it has a host of affirmative visions around the concept of "third-worldism" with aims to re-balance between blocs and push their own agenda into the world stage. The eventual goal was to promote global peace and justice.
The non-alignment during the Cold War was not unhindered at all, faced persistent undermining obstacles the West placed on its way forward. Non-aligned countries at that time were frequently victims of aggression, assassination, coup, invasion, and economic embargo orchestrated by the West. As in the past, neutral states today have had to face similar suppressive forces from the West, only for their neutrality being defined as adversity toward them as it doesn't serve the West's envisioned hegemony. Lithuania's cancellation of a shipment of COVID-19 vaccines to Bangladesh for its neutral stance on the Ukraine conflict at the UN and secondary sanctions imposed frequently by the U.S. on the countries that refused to toe its lines are just some of this typical Western suppression against neutrality.
Neutrality in the coming age of multi-polarity
Unlike the non-alignment of the 1960s, today's growing surge of neutrality across much of the world, particularly in the Global South, implies something subtly-explicit - an invocation of their long-standing accumulated indignation toward Western hypocrisy, double standards, and collective disapproval of their so-called unilateral rules-based order.
Countries in the Global South, despite having their sizeable stakes in the world, are too often overlooked by the West, with their interests trashed aside. While pointing to Western negligence to and the systemic disenfranchisement of the global southern majority, Mark Nieman, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, says, "It's not just the Biden administration. This is kind of an outgrowth of a long-running U.S. foreign policy of either ignoring Global South concerns, showing outright indifference, or acting in ways that seem to violate what those rules of international law are."
The Western unilateral sanction regime against Russia has further reinforced the collective indignation toward the West among the developing countries in the Global South and brazenly exposed the Western indifference to the interests of those countries. The U.S.-led "coalition of willing" has imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia without a second thought to the devastating spillovers the developing countries have been going through since the war has broken out. In an ironic show of negligence to the developing and poor countries' miseries, the United States seems to have been more concerned about its allies in Europe than about the real victims of the crisis.
Answer blowing in the wind
The overwhelming scale of divergent views is collective disapproval of the American-engineered unipolar-liberal-globalist model, at the same time, a signal to the West to recalibrate its current course and the international system leaned substantially in their favor. In the coming age of multi-polarity, the West needs to acknowledge the global diversity of economic, historical, cultural, and socio-political models, and admit the sovereign right of countries irrespective of their economic standing or domestic political system to choose national paths, not necessarily by what the West deems right.
In addition to its ongoing strategic proxy war against Russia, the United States is unilaterally steering up a disastrous Cold War-like strategic competition against China, continuously squeezing the political space of developing countries to pick a side against their will. Given the current regional crisis in Ukraine and its ever-growing fallouts across every spectrum, the world could presciently comprehend the catastrophic consequences once the current China-U.S. rivalry boiled over into grand tragedy. How to avert the answer is just blowing in the wind. The West just needs to lend its ear to that.
Hafijur Rahman is a columnist and Security and Strategic analyst, working in a prominent Strategic Studies Center in Bangladesh.
