Международная научная конференция ЮВА в СПбГУ-65

Международная научная конференция, посвященная 65-й годовщине начала изучения языков ЮВА в нашей стране Circumventing the ColdWar divisions:Thailand and India in the South-to-South Diplomatic Space 341 Yemen. Only four were from sub-SaharanAfrica. These were Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Sudan, and Liberia. These twenty-nine countries shared the experience of colonialism. Although Japan and Thailand (previously Siam) might stand out at first glance as these two states had never been formally colonized, both had certainly suffered at one time or another from the possibility of Western domination. The threat of foreign domination led Japan to the policy of isolationism until the United States finally forced it to open with gunboat diplomacy in 1854. In the nineteenth century, Thailand only narrowly escaped foreign domination by sacrificing its protectorates east of the Mekong river to France and those to the south to Britain, as well as compromising its sovereignty by allowing extraterritorial rights for British and French subjects. This fraternity of the non-white peoples can be seen as a solidarity of the Third World. The term was coined by the French historian Alfred Sauvy in an article published by L’Observateur in August 1952. Sauvy used the analogy of the Third Estate during the French Revolution, which consisted of the commoners in France who had been ‘ignored, exploited, and despised’ by the First Estate (the clergy) and the Second Estate (the nobility) [Sauvy 1952: 14]. In this sense, the Third World referred to former colonies or semi- colonial countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that had been subject to European domination. The vision of non-alignment embodied by the Bandung Conference was a brainchild of Nehru, Josip Tito, Nu and Sukarno. Nehru had constantly promoted his version of non-alignment from the beginning of India’s independence to stay out of the two blocs and to pursue an independent foreign policy in the Cold War. Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s the concept of non-alignment as a political force was in the air. In short, it was part of the zeitgeist. There were several countries that aspired to be the third power between the two superpowers. Ernest Bevin, British foreign minister in the postwar Labour cabinet, and General Charles de Gaulle, President of France, possessed their own versions of leading an independent third bloc. Nevertheless, Bevin gave up the idea of Third Force Europe (TFE),