The Soviet Union and the Strategy of Non-Alignment in the Third World

304 Pages·1989·5.74 MB·English

by  Roy Allison

Ford/Southampton Studies in North/South Security Relations
Managing editor: Dr JOHN SIMPSON
Executive editor: Dr PHIL WILLIAMS
The Soviet Union and the strategy
of non-alignment in the
Third World
Ford Foundation Research Project 'North/South Security Relations',
University of Southampton
Principal Researchers:
Professor p. A. R. CALVERT
Dr j. SIMPSON
Dr c. A. THOMAS
Dr..P.. WILLIAMS
Dr R. ALLISON
While the Ford Foundation has supported this study financially, it does not
necessarily endorse the findings. Opinions expressed are the responsibility of the
author.
The Soviet Union and the
strategy of non-alignment
in the Third World
ROY ALLISON
Lecturer, Centre for Russian and East European Studies
University of Birmingham
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© Cambridge University Press 1988
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permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1988
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Allison, Roy
The Soviet Union and the strategy of non-alignment in the Third World/Roy Allison.
p. cm.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-521-35511-7
1. Soviet Union - Foreign relations - Developing countries.
2. Developing countries - Foreign relations - Soviet Union.
3. Nonalignment. I. Title.
JX1555.Z7D443 1988
327.47 01724- -de 19 88-10230 CIP
ISBN 978-0-521-35511-7 hardback
Transferred to digital printing 2008
Contents
Acknowledgements page vi
Introduction i
The strategy of non-alignment i
The Soviet view of neutrality 7
The Soviet view of non-alignment in the international order 21
The concept of Third World neutralism 21
The concept of non-alignment and the Non-Aligned
Movement 31
Non-alignment and the socialist system 41
Non-alignment as an option for small socialist states 59
The Soviet Union and the search for international security by
the non-aligned states 79
Superpower conflict prevention 79
Disarmament 94
A new international economic order 111
Soviet policy and neutralisation in the Third World 126
The neutralisation of Southeast Asia 132
The neutralisation of the Persian Gulf and the
Mediterranean Sea 147
The neutralisation of Afghanistan 161
Soviet policy and military alignment in the Third World 180
Alliances and pacts 182
Bases and military facilities 197
Friendship, cooperation and assistance treaties 214
Conclusion 242
Notes 253
Select bibliography 276
Index 289
Acknowledgements
This book was researched and written at St Antony's College, Oxford and
the Department of Politics, the University of Southampton. I am
particularly grateful for the support received from both these institutions.
St Antony's College provided a most congenial intellectual environment
for broad research on Soviet foreign policy. I remain endebted to the Centre
of Russian Studies for the use of its facilities during my attachment to the
College as a post-doctoral research fellow. Many fellows and students
helped motivate my research in different ways; Mr A. Brown and Professor
E. A. Roberts are to be thanked in particular. The Department of Politics at
Southampton University also provided me with excellent facilities for the
completion of the manuscript and generously offered me a senior research
fellowship for 1986-87, which was attached to the Ford Foundation
project on North/South Security Relations. I am very grateful to all the
project members for their consistent encouragement and assistance, Dr
J. Simpson, the project coordinator, deserves special thanks.
I am also beholden to the Law Faculty of Moscow State University for
making me welcome during a productive six week visit under an exchange
scheme arranged by the British Council. Various Soviet academic institutes
were helpful during this visit, including IMEMO and the Institute of State
and Law. I am thankful in addition to the academics I met in the
Jawaharlal Nehru University and to numerous Indian diplomats and
officials who were interviewed during a research visit to New Delhi. Mrs
S. Morphet offered very useful comments on the early chapters of the
manuscript. Caroline Kennedy assisted greatly in checking the script.
I thankfully acknowledge the financial support I received from the
ESRC, which provided for my fellowship at Oxford, and from the Ford
Foundation for my period of research in Southampton.
VI
Introduction
THE STRATEGY OF NON-ALIGNMENT
Western analysts are in general agreement that since the mid 1950s the
Soviet Union has made strenuous attempts to capture the middle ground
between the Eastern and Western alliance systems. Soviet leaders have
had little interest in sustaining the intermediate position of states between
the primary military structures for its own sake, but they have accepted
the tactical necessity of supporting and promoting such independence as
part of a broader competition with the West. Soviet officials made it
abundantly clear in the 1950s and 1960s, however, that their view of
international affairs is premised on an underlying struggle between two
opposing and irreconcilable socio-economic systems. The emergence of a
considerable number of new states which ideologically and politically were
committed to neither East nor West did not shake this Soviet postulate.
The non-bloc states became an established and numerically significant
component of the international order, which Soviet leaders were among
the first to acknowledge. But Soviet officials have remained circumspect
about their broader strategic designs for such militarily 'uncommitted'
states. This warrants a systematic examination of how successive Soviet
leaders have sought to coordinate their policies with the 'Non-Aligned
World' and how Soviet policy-makers have employed the idea of military
non-alignment as a specific strategic device in the Third World.
The focus of Western studies of Soviet political and military involvement
in the Third World has tended to reflect the primary concern of Western
statesmen - the assertive Soviet use of direct military and political
instruments in pursuit of unilateral gains in Third World regions.
Particular attention has been paid to Soviet conduct in regional crises or
conflict, Soviet power projection capabilities and Soviet arms transfers.
Introduction
Soviet force projection and the provision of military supplies undeniably
are significant instruments enabling the Soviet Union to enhance and
sustain political influence for periods in specific countries or regions. But
such military links as the Soviet Union has cultivated have arisen
generally on an ad hoc basis and have been of uncertain duration. For most
of the post-war period they have been rather negligible as countermeasures
to Western-sponsored or Western-oriented alliance structures and bilateral
military agreements in the Third World. Throughout the 1950s and
1960s Soviet doctrine predisposed Soviet leaders to expect that their
military position in the Third World would eventually improve in the wake
of revolutionary structural socio-economic changes which, they believed,
would orient the policies of the majority of developing countries firmly
against the West. It was apparent by the 1970s that such economic
determinism could not be relied on to develop Soviet political influence or
military capabilities in the Third World. To be sure, Soviet support for a
number of new revolutionary regimes developed into close bilateral
military relationships, but these by no means offset Western military and
political preponderance in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The underlying
Soviet strategy, in this situation of comparative disadvantage, has been
one of military denial to the Western powers, of impeding Western access
to military assets in Third World regions.
The Soviet strategy of military denial in the Third World was originally
intended to hamper the creation of new alliance systems by the West in the
1950s and to retard military links between the newly independent states
and the Western powers. This design, to deny the territories of Third World
states for Western military purposes, to anticipate and decry ensuing forms
of political and economic dependency, was congruent in many respects
with the anti-bloc impulse which governed the emergent policies of
neutralism and non-alignment among an increasing number of developing
states in the 1950s and 1960s. Soviet leaders sought both to dissuade
countries from entering Western-dominated alliances and pacts and to
encourage those already within them to resist integrative influences. Third
World tendencies towards military abstention in the Cold War contest
could be realised in the creation of' zones of peace' free of Western military
ties. The states in such regions were expected, however, to be sympathetic
to Soviet initiatives on international security issues. These military
objectives did not appear over-ambitious in view of the strong anti-colonial
and by extension anti-Western sentiments of many newly independent
states. From the Soviet perspective a strategy of non-alignment could
combine military denial of * third areas' to the West with the propagation
The strategy of non-alignment
among them of broad Soviet initiatives on regional security and
disarmament.
Moscow regarded neutralism and non-alignment, therefore, as an
integral component of the competitive struggle between East and West,
rather than a disengaged influence on this struggle. This assessment was
reinforced by the Soviet doctrinal outlook which assumed that the policy
of non-alignment actually pursued by states is linked to their socio-
economic formation. Consequently, both neutralism and non-alignment
were conceived as transitional and developmental drawing their character
from changes in the domestic and international environments. Soviet
spokesmen believed that the global ' correlation of forces' would shift in
favour of the 'socialist system of states'. They characterised the policy of
non-alignment, therefore, as a process which over the passage of time
should orient the states led by its principles towards ever closer political
and military association with the Soviet led group of states. Non-alignment
in their view could not be conceived as a static condition of political
equidistance. In this sense Soviet officials, at least until the late 1970s,
considered non-alignment ideally as a policy of short-term military and
political denial to the West which prefigured a longer-term tendency
common to the Third World as a whole of increasing political and possibly
military integration with the Eastern system of states.
At this point it should be emphasised that such a conception of non-
alignment diverges substantially from the notion which Third World and
Yugoslav statesmen originally elaborated more than a quarter of a century
ago. Non-alignment and its precursor neutralism were conceived as an
independent approach to foreign policy, as a means for the new African
and Asian states to avoid becoming drawn into the Cold War competition
of the superpowers. The key requirement was non-participation in
entangling Great Power alliances. Neutralism in essence constituted a
rejection of the East-West rivalry represented by the Cold War and a
wholesale renunciation of the value system engendered by this contest.
Since the late 1940s numerous decolonised states professed this outlook
which, contrary to the Eurocentric and international legal status of
neutrality, had no legal substance and embraced a wide range of
diplomatic behaviour.
In the 1960s influential leaders of the non-bloc states who wished to
assume a more active role in mediating East-West conflict and to project
their own demands on the North-South agenda cultivated the notion of
non-alignment. This displaced the more passive and isolationist policy of
neutralism. Neutralism anyway had a confusing character since the term
Introduction
had been employed in the 1950s in the context of debate over the military
aspects of East-West relations within Europe. It has surfaced periodically
also as a term to convey resistance to the military integration of the
Western alliance from within that structure itself.
Non-alignment has never been a concept which applies exclusively to
the conduct of Third World states. Yugoslavia had a formative influence
on the character of non-alignment and played an influential role in its
gradual institutionalisation into the Non-Aligned Movement of states. Tito
of Yugoslavia, Nasser of Egypt and Nehru of India were the primary figures
behind the convention of the first summit of non-aligned states in Belgrade
in 1961. Nevertheless, the political programme which became associated
with non-alignment contains a Third World rather than European ethos.
Non-alignment has become somewhat of a misnomer therefore when used
to refer to the non-bloc aspects of European neutral countries such as
Sweden. The term is still used occasionally in the context of neutrality in
Europe but this should be distinguished from the foreign policy approach
promoted by the Non-Aligned Movement.
As far back as 1947 Prime Minister Nehru of India explained the
difference between neutrality and the Indian policy of non-alignment. He
noted that India would not attach itself to any particular group in the Cold
War contest but regarded this as unrelated to neutrality or passivity. While
it would be rather difficult to remain neutral in world war, Nehru stated
that 'we are not going to join a war if we can help it; and we are going
to join the side which is to our interest when the choice comes to it'.1 This
understanding was developed at a conference of the Uncommitted
Countries held in Cairo in June 1961 in preparation for the Belgrade
Conference held later that year.
The Cairo participants formulated certain criteria of non-alignment
which did not preclude membership in all multilateral/bilateral alliances
and regional defence arrangements, but only those conceived in the
context of the Cold War, of 'Great Power conflicts'. The concession of
military bases by non-aligned states was prohibited also only within this
context. These provisions were directed against military alignment in the
Cold War, conceived as full membership in non-regional multilateral pacts,
and as such expressed a neutralist impulse. Their qualified character
reflected the fact, however, that nine of the Belgrade participants had
strong military ties, outside of the main Cold War alliances, with the
United States or Great Britain.2 It should be emphasised that such military
ties and the receipt of large quantities of military aid and supplies (even by
belligerent states backed by rival superpower patrons) have continued to