At a time when much of what passes for international commentary has the depth and nuance of a tweet, Geoff Raby’s Great Game On is something of a relief. The former Australian Ambassador to China keeps his politics largely to himself, but doesn’t have much time for mainstream Western (read “American” for the most part) views, which he finds simplistic.
Geopolitics
In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the US nor the Soviet Union.
Pakistan’s politics is so complicated that it can be hard to determine either a trajectory or even a throughline. If Tahir Kamran’s enormously-detailed Chequered Past, Uncertain Future is any indication, this is not due to any failure of imagination. Kamran is focused mostly on the country’s often fraught relationship with democracy, but leaves one with much the same impression about foreign and domestic policy and issues of Pakistani identity.
It can come as a surprise that the largest Muslim (or perhaps more accurately, Muslim-majority) country is Indonesia, far from the religion’s origins in the Middle East. It is—probably as a result—not always included, or at least not centrally, in discourse about Islam. James M Dorsey, on the other hand, puts the country front and center in his new book The Battle for the Soul of Islam.
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Johnson dismissed the group as a collection of moral poseurs “adept at words, but not much else”. Andrea Benvenuti, an associate professor of international relations at the University of South Wales, is not as dismissive about Bandung and its organizers as Johnson was, but he, too, concludes that Bandung failed to bring about its professed goal of “Afro-Asian solidarity”.
There is much about the way international relations is framed—from the so-called rules-based order to the nation-state itself—that has its origins in the Western history, philosophy and experience. It stands to reason that the traditional view might not map very well onto two non-Western countries an order of magnitude larger than almost any other in the original dataset. In his new book Civilization-States of China and India, Ravi Dutt Bajpai posits that India and China are something other than “nation states”.
In December 1948, a panel of 12 judges sentenced 23 Japanese officials for war crimes. Seven, including former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. The sentencing ended the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, an over-two-year-long trial over Imperial Japan’s atrocities in China and its decision to attack the US.