The Anti-Communist Third World: Carlos Romulo and the Other Bandung

Abstract

For many, Third Worldism simply an opposition to Western colonialism, which is hardly surprising. Most of the countries that gathered at the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Indonesia, were former colonies of the West; and many of the leading lights of that event, Indonesia's Sukarno to Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser, were prominent critics of Western colonialism and neocolonialism.1) However, it is inadequate to focus only on the anti-Western rhetoric of Third Worldism, for the concept involved the charting of a road independent of two systems: Western imperialism and Soviet Communism. Despite this, contemporary historiography largely ignores Third Worldism's challenge to the Communist World-a tendency pronounced in both general twentieth-century histories and contemporary revaluations of Bandung. Bandung philosophy, writes the conservative twentieth-century historian Paul Johnson (2000, 489-490), was for the new nations to create their own industrial bases as fast as possible, making themselves independent of 'imperialism,' which, for Johnson, is a negation of the West. The progressive historian of Marxism David Priestland (2009, 374) acknowledges that the Bandung participants saw themselves as independent of the Western First World and the Communist Second World, but ultimately concludes that conference agreed on the need to escape economic dependence on the First World. .In a volume examining the legacies of Christopher J. Lee (2010, 10) writes that the Bandung participants based their solidarity on a shared history of Western aggression. In a chapter the same volume, Michael Adas (2010) views Bandung's Afro-Asia solidarity as an on the West's civilizing mission. Elsewhere, Lee (2009, 82) notes, historical importance of Bandung is that it points to the interconnected world created by western imperialism and anti-colonial resistance. . In these studies, the Second World, if mentioned at all, is a mere afterthought. It is thus unsurprising for Roland Burke (2006, 949) to observe that in Bandung historiography, few studies devote much attention to those aspects of the conference outside the categories of colonialism, the politics of Afro-Asian solidarity, and the evolution of nonaligned movement [sic].While anti-Western interpretations of Bandung are not entirely incorrect, they are also incomplete, revealing how contemporary postcolonial theory may create a tunnel vision that places Third Worldism in a binary relationship with Western colonialism.2) In contrast to these one-sided studies, Pang Yang Huei (2009, 83) posits a fractured approach to the history of emphasizing that the success of the conference lay in preventing both the United States and Russia from creating monolithic blocs. From this perspective, the conference curbed the power of both systems by creating independent geopolitical solidarities. The political threads competing in Bandung were multifaceted; thus, the conference cannot be reduced to singular narratives, such as its being an assault on the West.Certainly the critique of Western imperialism more refined in Bandung as this had been-and still is-the primary locus of postcolonial nationalism. However, I hope to show that anti-Communism, the other Bandung, an incipient and radical discourse that cannot be ignored, especially if one wants to capture the textured Third Worldism that began to emerge in Bandung. Third Worldism's twin negation of the First World and the Second World not mere rhetoric. The Third World in many the first of the many third ways of the twentieth century, much like the resurgent European Social Democracy of the immediate postwar period, which both anti-fascist and anti-Soviet. There is, as such, a need to grapple with a hitherto unacknowledged ideological current that informed the rhetoric of the Third World: anti-Communism (which I define, narrowly, as opposition to Leninist Bolshevism). …