Bernd Greiner
Roads Not Taken
“We must not overestimate our own importance,” Jawaharlal Nehru said at Belgrade in 1961, the year in which he was being hailed as the founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. This is a good epigram for the fate of Bandung as a set of ideas, and says much about the issues discussed at Bandung that have disappeared from subsequent discussions of the conference. Here, we discuss a number of such issues surrounding the Cold War, Bandung, and the legacy of non-alignment.
Bernd Greiner is a historian and political scientist, and a professor at Ham-burg University. He was a long-term member of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung, and the director of the Berlin Center for Cold War Studies. His work focuses on 20th-century U.S. history with a particular emphasis on the Cold War, relations between the military and civil society since 1900, German-American relations, German images of America, and the theory of violence and international relations in the 20th century. Among his many books is an acclaimed history of the Vietnam War, Krieg ohne Fronten: Die USA in Vietnam (2007), which was translated into several languages. In 2020, he published a biography of Henry Kissinger.