Международная научная конференция ЮВА в СПбГУ-65

Международная научная конференция, посвященная 65-й годовщине начала изучения языков ЮВА в нашей стране 338 P. Charoenpacharaporn in the forum in which India played a prominent role during the early years of the Cold War. This paper will commence by looking at the Bandung Conference with a focus on India and Thailand and its aftermath will follow, arguing that the Bandung Conference marked a watershed in the Thai foreign policy that led to a rapprochement with the PRC in the framework of Panchsheel pioneered by Nehru. Keywords: Cold War, Global South, Bandung Conference, Indo- Thai Relations. Circumventing the Cold War divisions: Thailand and India in the South-to-South Diplomatic Space As the Cold War intensified in the late 1940s and early 1950s, tensions between theWestern camp, led by the United States and Britain, and the Soviets increasingly dominated international relations. Countries in Asia began to be pressured to identify their positions in the Cold War. India, Burma, Sri Lanka and Indonesia decided to be non-aligned. Thailand, in contrast, aligned itself with the United States and other Western powers, even though the Soviet Union did not block Thailand from United Nations membership in December 1946 and opened an embassy in Bangkok in 1948. These ideological divisions inevitably put constraints on the normal channel of diplomatic communications as different countries found themselves part of exclusive blocs. This paper considers the question of how non-aligned India and US-leaning Thailand used the Bandung Conference to circumvent the divisions of the Cold War. This paper is inspired by the ongoing revival of academic interest in the ThirdWorld and in actors’optimism in a moment when postcolonial futures were being imagined during the 1950s, as embodied especially at the Bandung Conference in 1955. Following the fiftieth anniversary of the Bandung Conference in 2005, Vijay Prasad traced the genealogy of the Third World and argued that the Third World was a project of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America who battled against colonialism and dreamed of a better world. [Prasad 2007; See also Mackie 2005; Aydin 2007; Lee 2010; Wood 2011] In his view, the