A Better Alignment

The standard hissy fits that Ban Ki-moon is to attend the Tehran Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, which encompasses 120 of the 188 member-states of the United Nations. "Appeasement of Iran", blah blah blah. You cannot appease yourself. Iran is a member of the UN, as is each of the other 119.

It is important to be reminded that the Non-Aligned Movement still exists, and that the Secretary-General of the UN rightly regards it as more important than America, never mind Israel. The NAM celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last September in Belgrade. Very much Tito's baby, it gave Yugoslavia an enormous global reach, to the extent that Tito's funeral in 1980 was at the time the largest ever gathering of world leaders. In good ways and in bad, the NAM was very much an extension of the Yugoslav project.

But it should never have fallen to Tito to play that role. The Commonwealth centred on Britain's post-War and largely pre-War social democracy, the Francophonie centred on a France organised economically along the lines preferred from de Gaulle to Mitterrand and now again under Hollande, the vision of Italian Christian Democrats that their country would implement Catholic Social Teaching by emulating the Attlee Government domestically but be a beacon for peace between East and West outside both NATO and the Soviet Bloc, the same vision for a United Germany on the part of Jakob Kaiser, the Netherlands of the Rooms-Rood Coalitions and then of Coalitions led by the Catholic People's Party (in, take note, a country with a Protestant monarchy and, at that time, a Protestant Established Church), the Portugal of Lusotropicalism and of the Estado Novo that successfully held the line both against the Communists and against the National Syndicalists: those ought to have been at the core of the Non-Aligned Movement as Western Europe steered a path between the USA and the USSR while the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese Empires were becoming something else. Even as it is, it includes numerous Commonwealth countries, among them over half of the Queen's Realms.

There would and could have been no Indonesian occupation of East Timor, to cite only one among almost endless examples of the wrongs that would have been avoided. Consider a Libya or a Somalia which had grown into full membership of this family under the tutelage of an Italy like that. When Salazar, still The Greatest Portuguese according to that country's television viewers,  had given way, then he would have done so naturally, peacefully, and not to Maoists, still less to Maoists who went on to become rabidly neoliberal and neoconservative Presidents of the European Commission. No serious person would question the unity of Canada, or of the United Kingdom. There would be no threat to the unity of French-speaking, Dutch-speaking, Social Catholic, Anglophile Belgium. Nor to a Yugoslavia still multiethnic, still left-wing but not least because Social Catholic, and still Anglophile, yet very different from the one that all too many people experienced.