(a) Describe the launching of Non-Alignment Movement. Why the small nations wanted to remain aloof from the powerful nations ?…

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the emergence of newly sovereign states striving to overcome historical subjugation and preserve their autonomy amid Cold War geopolitical tensions.

The Launch of Non-Alignment Movement and Small-Nation Aloofness

The ideological foundations of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) were laid at the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference, culminating in its formal launch at the 1961 Belgrade Summit. Spearheaded by the core pentarchy—Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Sukarno of Indonesia, and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana—the movement evolved from regional Afro-Asian solidarity into a wider Third Worldism. NAM distinguished itself from passive neutralism by practicing 'positive neutralism'—an active, principled engagement in world affairs guided by the five principles of Panchsheel to reduce international conflict.

Small nations sought aloofness from the superpower rivalry due to acute post-colonial vulnerabilities. Having recently emerged from European colonial rule, these states faced immense bipolar pressure to join rival military alliances such as SEATO and CENTO, which threatened to compromise their hard-won sovereignty. Pervasive economic dependency and the urgent need for autonomous, domestic socio-economic development led small nations to reject alignment, seeking instead to avoid becoming Cold War proxies and to maintain sovereign control over foreign policy and natural resources.

Genesis and Features of Apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid was formally introduced by the Afrikaner-led National Party following its 1948 electoral victory. Its structural origins lay in the late-nineteenth-century mineral revolution (1867 diamonds, 1886 gold) and British imperial competition, which created institutional demand for cheap, regimented African labor. This was codified by the foundational 1913 Natives Land Act, which dispossessed Africans of over ninety percent of their ancestral land. Ideologically, apartheid drew upon entrenched colonial segregationist policies, radical Afrikaner nationalism forged in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War, and Cold War anti-communism, which the state utilized to delegitimize liberation movements.

Apartheid functioned through two interconnected mechanisms. Petty apartheid enforced social segregation in daily life through the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) and draconian Pass Laws that strictly controlled the movement of Black Africans in urban areas. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified all citizens by racial categories, while the Group Areas Act (1950) enforced strict residential segregation through forced removals. Grand apartheid engineered long-term territorial segregation by stripping Black South Africans of their citizenship and relegating them to impoverished, nominally independent Bantustans (Homelands). Under the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), the regime suppressed domestic political dissent by equating calls for racial equality with communist subversion.

Latin America: Subjugation, Intervention, and Neo-Colonialism

Although Latin American nations achieved formal independence from Spain and Portugal by the 1820s under leaders like Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, economic subjugation persisted throughout the nineteenth century under British financial hegemony. Following the 1898 Spanish-American War, the United States established hemispheric dominance through Dollar Diplomacy and interventionist doctrines.

Despite the temporary non-interventionist stance of the 1933 Good Neighbor Policy, the Cold War witnessed direct and covert US interventions to protect corporate interests and prevent socialist governance. Key instances included the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, and the 1973 covert intervention that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile. In the 1980s, catastrophic debt crises forced Latin American economies into IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs, severely constraining national policy space. Although the early twenty-first century "Pink Tide" governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador reasserted national sovereignty over resources, overcoming subjugation remained partial; economic neo-colonialism endured, alongside new vectors of external intervention focused on migration and the war on drugs.

Ultimately, the development of the Non-Aligned Movement, the rise of South African apartheid, and Latin America's recurring foreign interventions illustrate the enduring tension between formal decolonisation and the structural constraints of Cold War neo-colonialism.