Abstract

What Bandung Achieved: A Setting for Asian Unity

What were the accomplishments of the Asian-African Conference which met in April at Bandung, Indonesia? This question can best be answered by recalling the hopes and purposes which brought the twenty-nine participating nations together. It is clear that a conference which included nations like Communist China on the one hand and Turkey on the other cannot have been expected to produce any agreed conclusions on the problem which seems to the Western world to be all important, that of the cold war and its chances of becoming hot. The fact that twenty-nine Asian and African independent countries could find other problems which seemed to them of real significance is in itself notable. The conference was expected to adopt resolutions condemning colonialism and racial discrimination, and the West was rather inclined to shrug this of as obvious and irrelevant.