The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is an international organization (group of countries) who do not want to be officially aligned(friends) with or against any major power bloc (group of countries). In 2018, the movement had 125 members and 25 observer countries.
The group was started in Belgrade in 1961. It was created by Yugoslavia’s President, Josip Broz Tito, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Egypt’s second President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah, and Indonesia’s first President, Sukarno. All five leaders believed that developing countries should not help either the Western or Eastern blocs in the Cold War. They also believed that developing countries should not be capitalist or communist, but should try to find a different way to help their people.
The Havana Declaration of 1979 said that the purpose of the organization is to help countries keep their “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics.” This means that they wanted to govern their countries without the main capitalist powers nor the major socialist states telling them how.
The countries of the non-aligned movement are nearly two-thirds of the United Nations’s members and 55% of the world population.
