5 The anticolonial theory of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization

The Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) has been somewhat neglected in the historiography of Third World internationalism. Established in 1957 and headquartered in Cairo, the organisation brought together anti-imperialist, socialist currents from 75 Asian and African nations and national liberation struggles (see chapter by Camacho Padilla and Schmiedecke in this volume). It was one of the key non-state actors involved in campaigns to transform politics and economics on the scale of the world, including campaigns for demilitarisation and against nuclear buildup, and the movement for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). It actively organised towards a world free of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism until the 1990s, after which its activities slowed down.

Much more has been written about the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia in 1955, which set the stage for solidarity amongst postcolonial states during an era in which the spark of decolonisation flamed through Asia and Africa. Bandung precipitated the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a group of states that chose the path of formal neutrality in the context of the Cold War. Egyptian writer and statesman Youssef El-Sabai, who played a leading role within AAPSO, described the organisation as following in the spirit of Bandung by establishing ‘solidarity at [the] people’s level,’ a revolutionary internationalism that would ‘turn the concept of solidarity into a massive demand and objective’ (El-Sabai, 1977).

Part of the reason for the neglect of AAPSO in the historiography of the era might be its explicit socialist orientation and its close ties with the Soviet Union, which was AAPSO’s primary funder, and with the People’s Republic of China, an active member. It is possible that the organisation’s socialist politics, and its sustained criticism of Western neocolonialism, have prevented it from receiving canonical status on the same level as Bandung, whose formally neutral spirit might be somewhat more palatable for a Western academic and activist audience that continues to regard the Soviet Union with a degree of discomfort. The prevailing narrative about the Third World’s experience of the Cold War—that it was a battleground between two imperial powers—does not map all too well onto the history of decolonisation: the Soviet Union provided strategic, military, and economic support to struggles for decolonisation across Asia and Africa, while U.S. imperialism was seen as ‘the No. 1 enemy of Afro-Asian Peoples,’ as the report of AAPSO’s eighth conference, held in 1967 in Cyprus, declared (AAPSO, 1967).

When I arrived at the International Institute of Social History (IISG) in Amsterdam in 2022, my knowledge about AAPSO was quite limited. The literary magazine it published between 1968 and the early 1990s, Lotus, is primarily what it is known for, and I had read about it in that context (Nabolsy, 2021; Desai and Ziadah, 2022). Given AAPSO’s peripheral place in the scholarly history of the Third World, I was surprised when, at the IISG, I found a vast archive of AAPSO materials that revealed its centrality to the political terrain of the time. These archives included several copies of two AAPSO journals: Solidarity and Development and Socio-Economic Progress (hereafter Development). Solidarity was a monthly magazine and Development, which was first published in 1977, was a quarterly journal. The two periodicals were similar in content, both publishing reflections on colonial and neocolonial machinations and on struggles for sovereignty. But Development was more like an anti-imperialist academic journal, if you will, publishing longer pieces often based on original empirical research. I found four issues of the journal from the 1980s at IISG, and when I returned to the U.S., I made the happy discovery of a number of issues from the 1970s and 80s in the libraries at the University of California in Los Angeles, where I am currently a graduate student.

I had entered the archives with the intention to collect materials that might help me understand how the questions of agrarian transformation and food self-sufficiency were conceived in internationalist and anti-imperialist politics in the era of decolonisation. I was curious as to how agrarian politics dovetailed with the politics of both national sovereignty and internationalism prior to the emergence of the vocabulary and politics of food sovereignty in the 1990s, which is now the unifying rallying call for agrarian and food justice movements internationally. Development proved to be an important and serendipitous find. Colonialism had, without exception, left behind societies grappling with high levels of hunger and impaired food producing capacities. The question of food self-sufficiency, I found, was given serious and extensive consideration in Development, whose editors described, in the first issue in 1977, the need for an overhaul of the world system so as to address the ‘vast hunger belt of global-continental dimensions [created] through long colonial plunder’ (Editorial, 1977, page 1).

The journal was set up just a few years after the United Nations adopted the ‘Declaration for the Establishment of a New International Economic Order’ in 1974, following a set of proposals from developing countries to overhaul the global economic system so as to redress the cost of underdevelopment and enable postcolonial states to embark on sovereign developmental paths. The journal seems to have been launched in some part to provide empirical, theoretical, and political strength to the movement for the NIEO. Its editors described the envisioned purpose of the journal in the first issue: to ‘express the problems and aspirations of the peoples of the developing countries, and become a new weapon added to the arsenal of our peoples, in their struggle for establishing a new international economic order based on justice, equality, and free will…’ (Editorial, 1977, page 4).

Importantly, contributors to the journal also frequently stressed the possible limitations of a movement for a new international order that is led and shaped primarily by the bourgeoisies of postcolonial states, whose interests were fundamentally tied to imperialism. True sovereignty, they argued, necessitated both the establishment of a new order on the international scale and deep-rooted social transformation at the national scale, such that the producing classes—and not the bourgeoisie—could be in charge of development priorities and trajectories.

The story of AAPSO offers a sense of the geographical scope of anti-imperialist and internationalist organising that was underway in those decades, the kind of sustained labour—and commitment—that such organising must have entailed, and the kind of infrastructures of anti-imperialist solidarity that were built and that we might, in examining their archives, be able to rescue and revive for the twentieth century (see also chapters by Alice Corble, Mariano Zarowsky, and Fernando Camacho Padilla &  Natália Schmiedecke in this volume). The sustained commitment to internationalism in particular is striking. It speaks to a dialectical relationship between national liberation and international solidarity that questions the fixity of territorial boundaries while maintaining an understanding of the importance of the sovereignty of the state, and the radical possibilities for social and economic transformation contained in that institution.

AAPSO to OSPAAL

The Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966, which led to the formation of OSPAAAL, was essentially an expansion of AAPSO: a recognition of the experience of neocolonialism that Asia, Africa, and Latin America all shared, whose confrontation moreover required solidarity amassed on the largest and most organised scale possible. The expansion was realised in large part due to the efforts of Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan revolutionary who was Executive Secretary of AAPSO’s Permanent Committee in its early years.

From the beginning, AAPSO members had discussed expanding the organisation’s scope to Latin America. Following the third Afro-Asian People’s Conference in 1963, at which Ben Barka made a speech underscoring the case for a Tricontinental organisation, a preparatory committee was set up, composed of representatives of six countries from each of the three continents, with Ben Barka as chair. It was decided at the fourth Afro-Asian People’s Conference, held in Ghana in 1965, that Havana would host the Tricontinental Conference the following year. Ben Barka, who planned the entire conference, would unfortunately not be present at that historic occasion: he was disappeared and assassinated shortly before, in an operation likely jointly orchestrated by French and Israeli operatives.

Latin America’s historical timeline, and the particular form that decolonisation took there, set it somewhat apart from much of Asia and Africa. Latin American countries had shed ties, for the most part, with Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers over a century prior, though they remained within the web of British, and subsequently American, imperialism through much of the twentieth century. The move to incorporate Latin America reflects AAPSO’s understanding of imperialism as a spatial organisation of power that had planetary dimensions, with the majority of the world under the thumb of what Samir Amin called the imperialism of the ‘triad’—the United States, Western Europe, and Japan—and the international financial institutions created to serve their interests (Amin, 2010).

The usefulness of the anticolonial archive

The demise of the NIEO is commonly attributed to the onset of the Third World debt crisis in the early 1980s and the subsequent spread of neoliberal orthodoxy. But that counter-revolution did not quite stamp out the dream of a new order. Development continued to be published into the 1990s, well after the onset of the debt crisis and the hollowing out of the NIEO. In these later issues, writers continued to articulate a vision for development that dovetailed with the dismantling of the global infrastructure of imperialism. Central to this vision was the demand for the cancellation of Third World debt. These archival materials show that until the very end of the 1980s, and in spite of the devastation of liberalisation and debt, there was a movement for an alternate structuring of the world economy, and moreover a theory that backed it. They also challenge the idea that the NIEO—and Third World internationalism more generally—was a project of states and state leaders (see chapter by Paul Gilbert in this volume). The pages of this journal point to a different story, showing that there was broad consensus behind the NIEO, and that a range of actors struggled on the international stage for its materialisation.

The scattered nature of the archive is an obstacle to researchers interested in the politics of this era. It poses practical challenges, such as the fact that one needs financial assistance in order to, say, travel to Amsterdam to visit the IISG. This is obviously a particularly significant hurdle for students and researchers located in the Global South, who have fewer resources and grant opportunities that enable international travel. It certainly is possible to obtain copies of some materials remotely, by speaking with librarians and archivists managing the materials one is interested in. But if and when it is possible, it really is worthwhile to be able to visit an archive in person and spend some time there, because it always throws up surprises: things you weren’t looking for or didn’t know you were looking for but that are exciting and relevant, and promise to take your research in interesting new directions.

In the last few years, Western university settings have seen a great deal of discussion on the topic of decolonisation. Recent years have been marked by sharpened contradictions in the racial politics of settler societies such as the United States and South Africa and of erstwhile colonial powers such as Britain and France. The archives of organisations such as AAPSO and OSPAAL are, to my mind, exceedingly valuable in this context, for they tell important stories about the actuality of anticolonial struggle at several scales and on multiple fronts (see chapter by Alice Corble in this volume). They illustrate the experience of the Cold War from the perspective of the peoples and nations of the Third World, highlight the solidarities that transcended Cold War binaries, offer insight into how imperialism touched down on the lives of ordinary people, and offer a revolutionary anticolonial theory forged in the crucible of the struggle against neocolonialism.

References

AAPSO. (1967). General declaration. The eighth session of the Council of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization: A brief report. Nicosia, Cyprus. https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/periodicals/aa-bulletin/aapso-67.pdf

Amin, S. (2010). The law of worldwide value. NYU Press.

Desai, C., & Ziadah, R. (2022). Lotus and its afterlives: Memory, pedagogy and anticolonial solidarity. Curriculum Inquiry, 52(3), 289-301. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2022.2072670

Editorial (1977). Triangle of economic cooperation. Development and Socio-Economic Progress, 1, 4.

El-Sabai, Y. (1977). This magazine. Development and Socio-Economic Progress, 1.

Nabolsy, Z. el. (2020). Lotus and the self-representation of Afro-Asian writers as the vanguard of modernity. Interventions, 23(4), 596-620. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1784021