Interview: Bandung Spirit remains vibrant in 21st century: British expert

The founding principles of the Bandung Conference in 1955 remain alive and vibrant in the 21st century, a London-based expert has said.

The Bandung Conference in 1955, which saw non-aligned and newly-emergent nations gather to agree on a set of core principles in international relations, is celebrated this week with a new conference being convened in Bandung, Indonesia.

Harsh Pant, professor of international relations in the Defense Studies Department at King's College in London, told Xinhua that the Bandung Spirit still has potency in the new century.

"I think the spirit of the Bandung Conference remains the same as it was in 1955, which is about South-South cooperation, which is also about having a greater cultural and political engagement between the countries of Asia and Africa."

"It is about building a relationship between these two continents and allows countries which are not part of the traditional Western sphere of influence to carve out an influence in global politics and economics and that remains the spirit that these countries will be striving for."

Pant said that the survival of the non-aligned movement is one of the most important examples of the Bandung Spirit living on in the world today.

"What you see is an attempt by third world and developing countries to carve out a response to global problems on their own through the medium of the non-aligned movement and also outside."

Today, African and Asian nations still try to gain solidarity through the principles set out 60 years ago.

"You do see, for example, in global trade or climate change negotiations, a very strong voice of the third world, of South-South cooperation, which has emerged from time to time to bring the Western world and other powers to an understanding of what these big decisions imply for developing countries," Pant said.

The 1955 conference took place against the backdrop of the Cold War and of African and Asian countries having just shaken off the shackles of colonization by Western powers. A total of 29 nations from across Africa and Asia took part in it.

The Bandung Spirit, containing the Ten Principles of Bandung on handling state-to-state relations and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, became a widely recognized set of norms for international relations.

Those principles represented a just call for independence, dignity and equality from oppressed nations, serving as a guiding principle for countries with the same or different social systems to build and grow friendly relations.

The principles also made historic contributions to the solidarity and cooperation among Asian and African countries. Endi