The Asian-African Conference (Bandung) and Pan-Africanism: the challenge of reconciling continental solidarity with national sovereignty

Abstract

The 1955 Asian-African Conference (Bandung) has been hailed as a turning point in the emergence of the Global South solidarity movement and a pivotal moment in southerners’ collective quest both to liberate themselves from colonialism and to reforge the international order on more inclusive and emancipatory foundations. In this article, the author demonstrates how, in Africa, these aspirations were undermined by nationalist ambitions that privileged self-contained sovereign statehood over potentially more progressive continental solidarity under the Pan-African spirit. The author does so by analysing how the absorption of the Bandung spirit within the Pan-African movement reinforced opportunities for the pursuit of national interests, the affirmation of colonial geographies and economies, and the intensification of forms of solidarities built on the imagined fruits of independence at the expense of a shared history of colonialism. For many African countries, the enduring lessons of the Bandung spirit reside in the challenges of resolving the tensions over the appropriate context for pursuing self-determination and transforming the international order. Thus, while the Bandung spirit delivered the means for newly independent states to engage in international politics through interstate solidarities, it also helped to accelerate the foreclosure of alternative possibilities for intervening in and reshaping the prevailing international order.