7 - The War and the Fate of Anti-Imperialist Internationalism

Summary

This concluding chapter accounts for the demise of anti-imperialist comradeship in two acts. First, it moves away from Nehru’s story and considers the circumstances leading to the Second World War that irreversibly closed the possibilities for “blending” communism and non-communism. In particular, it traces the closing of the LAI and IPC, as we as the last days of Münzenberg and Chatto, neither of whom lived to see the end of the Second World War. Second, it returns to Nehru’s history and considers how the achievement of India’s independence served not as a step toward global anti-imperialism as he had imagined, but rather became the primary obstacle in creating internationalist solidarities with the wider world after 1947. It focuses on Nehru’s participation in the Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955, a conference widely considered to be the sequel of the Brussels Congress. Instead, it argues that the Bandung Conference marked the triumph of the nation-state and interstate relations in the arena of Afro-Asian politics, and it stood in contradistinction to the anti-imperialist internationalism of the interwar years.