The Commonwealth and the Cold War,Neutralism, and Non-Alignment

In the Cold War era, the Commonwealth represented a global sub-system which both permitted and enabled multiple identities. Between 1949 and 1990, as a direct product of British decolonisation, the Commonwealth came to include forty-nine members of varying size with very different agenda and developmental needs to those larger members from the global ‘North’. Its heterogeneous membership included: NATO countries; ANZUS; the Non-Aligned Movement; the OAU; CARICOM; and the Organisation of East Caribbean States. As a ‘unique sovereign regime’, the Commonwealth defied ideological typecasting. It possessed organisational structure and bureaucratic support; it combined economic, financial, technical, and scientific association, and privileged the role of diplomacy through the latitude permitted to its Secretary-General. The Commonwealth's two sustained ‘grand strategies’ were the pursuit of racial justice (in Rhodesia, South West Africa/South Africa) and social justice through the promotion of development, focusing on the principal preoccupations of newly independent states and their nation/state-building projects. These intersected with, but were by no means defined by, the Cold War, and represented a collaboration of West/South, rather than the confrontation of East/West.     

A Post-Imperial Cold War Paradox: The Anglo-Nigerian Defence Agreement 1958–62

As the recent and current French military interventions in West Africa have illustrated, France succeeded in establishing long-lasting security relationships with its former colonies during the transfer of power. In Britain’s case, by contrast, decolonisation was largely followed by military withdrawal. This was not, however, for lack of trying. The episode of the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Agreement clearly illustrates that Britain, driven by its global cold war military strategy, wanted to secure its long-term interests in sub-Saharan Africa. The agreement was first welcomed by the Nigerian elite, which was not only anglophile and anti-communist, but also wanted British military assistance for the build-up of its armed forces. Yet, in Nigeria, the defence pact was faced with mounting opposition, and decried as a neo-colonial scheme. Whereas this first allowed the Nigerian leaders to extract strategic, material and financial concessions from Britain, it eventually led to the abrogation of the agreement. Paradoxically, Britain’s cold war grand strategy created not only the need for the agreement, but also to abrogate it. In the increasingly global East-West struggle, the agreement was strategically desirable, but politically counterproductive.     

Collective Trauma and the Evolution of Nehru's Worldview: Uncovering the Roots of Nehruvian Non-Alignment

ABSTRACT

Scholarship on Nehruvian non-alignment often assumes an artificial continuity between Jawaharlal Nehru's pre-independence thinking and post-independence decision, as India's prime minister, to pursue a policy of rejecting any international blocs or military alliances. This article demonstrates that, in fact, the ideas that constituted Nehruvian non-alignment were largely absent from Nehru's pre-independence thought – during the decades before India's independence Nehru articulated a strong willingness to cede India's sovereignty to international groupings for idealistic aims. To explain Nehru's shift from idealistic internationalist to professed internationalist but de facto isolationist with regard to alliances and blocs, I advocate a first-image, constructivist approach which considers the impact of collective trauma on Nehru's worldview. Drawing upon a novel, synthesized approach to theorizing collective trauma's impact on national identity, this article argues that the collective trauma Nehru witnessed and experienced during the decades before Indian independence profoundly impacted his trust in international institutions and views on representational diplomacy. In turn, this trauma affected his interpretation of various ideational and strategic considerations, contributing to the formulation of Nehruvian non-alignment.     

The Making of a Non-Aligned Nuclear Power: India's Proliferation Drift, 1964–8

The article examines the strategic circumstances leading to non-aligned India's safeguard of its nuclear option during a crucial period in its proliferation trajectory, when it was one of the states closest to nuclear-weapons development, and faced US pressures to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that was being negotiated at the time. Based on Indian, US, and French primary sources, this paper demonstrates that India's regional strategic insecurities and bilateral tensions with the United States were too great for it to sign the NPT. Yet, New Delhi's capability to successfully reprocess weapons-grade plutonium permitted the developing country substantial leverage that it exploited through advancing on a slow dual-use nuclear programme.