Ghana_and_the_Non-Aligned_Movement
Ghana has been a member state of the Non-Aligned Movement since the time of the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 in Belgrade. As the first decolonized country in Sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana actively participated in earliest efforts to initiate Pan-African and Non-Aligned cooperation. Ghana, together with SFR Yugoslavia, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, was one of the five countries that initiated the establishment of the movement.[1]
The first President of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, together with some other prominent African leaders at the time such as Julius Nyerere from Tanzania and Gamal Abdel Nasser from Egypt, joined hands with non-African leaders from countries beyond Cold War bloc divides like Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia, Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Sukarno of Indonesia in building what will became known as the Non-Aligned Movement.[2] The country believed that the Non-Aligned framework may help in shielding Africa from becoming directly involved into destructive Cold War United States-Soviet Union rivalries while providing enough space for collective activist foreign policy aimed at supporting anticolonial liberation movements and African unity.[2] In this respect, some scholars compared the Ghanaian approach towards the Non-Alignement with the Monroe Doctrine stressing how Ghanaian leadership aimed to create African Monroe Doctrine that would protect the continent from external powers.[3]
The foreign policy of Ghana was deeply shaped by the principles of Non-Alignment in belief that they alone may the reliable route towards African unity.[3] During the 1st Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961 in Belgrade president Nkrumah called upon other participants to end colonialism, work on the reform of the United Nations and to act as a ‘moral force’ to avoid war between Eastern and Western Bloc.[3] Ghanaian principled Non-Aligned position at the conference was perceived as remarkable in the light of the concurrent Congo Crisis and the murder of Patrice Lumumba that was expected to trigger potentially stronger anti-western reactions.[3] This expectation was exacerbate by the fact that Ghana was a part of the more radical and African nationalist Casablanca Group, contrary to Brazzaville Group, with only countries from the first group attending the Belgrade conference.[4]