Brioni Declaration

Background: From Bandung to Brioni

The Bandung Conference of April 1955 was the first large-scale gathering of the Third World, bringing together 29 Asian and African states to declare principles of anti-colonialism and peaceful coexistence. Yugoslavia, however, was not invited; its identity as a European socialist state excluded it. For Tito this absence was critical. Yugoslavia, having broken with the Soviet Union, was building a foreign policy that belonged to neither bloc, and the Bandung spirit was the international expression closest to that course.

In May of the same year, Khrushchev's visit to Belgrade normalised Soviet-Yugoslav relations and gave Yugoslavia the room to formalise its 'active peaceful coexistence' line, equidistant from both blocs. Tito invited Nehru and Nasser, the two central figures of Bandung, to Brioni in July 1956. The three leaders approached non-alignment from different angles. Nehru had rejected Cold War logic since India's independence; Nasser, locked in conflict with Britain over the Baghdad Pact and the Suez Canal, was searching for a way past the pressure to join the Western bloc.

The Meeting and the Declaration

The conference on 18–19 July 1956 drew 120 Yugoslav and foreign journalists. Nehru considered it a mere 'friendly call' and later acknowledged that he himself had proposed issuing a joint communiqué. Indeed, for the next four years Nehru consistently opposed the proposals Tito and Nasser repeatedly made for a larger conference of non-aligned states. Even so, the Brioni Declaration reaffirmed the ten Bandung principles in a multilateral document and stated that 'peace cannot be achieved via division, but via striving for collective security on the global scale.' Subtitled the 'Declaration on a Joint Anti-Bloc Policy,' it posited the ending of domination of one country over another and the expansion of the area of freedom as conditions for peace.

Significance

The Brioni Declaration was the first step in translating the Bandung spirit into an institutional framework: the Non-Aligned Movement. Tito used the meeting as a springboard to convene the first Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade in 1961, and the movement grew into the largest inter-state consultative body after the UN General Assembly throughout the Cold War. Less than three months after the declaration was signed, the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising erupted simultaneously, exposing the imperial logic of both blocs and paradoxically strengthening the case for non-alignment. The Non-Aligned Movement survives the Cold War, today counting 120 member states.