neutralism, in international relations, the peacetime policy of avoiding political or ideological affiliations with major power blocs. The policy was pursued by such countries as India, Yugoslavia, and many of the new states of Asia and Africa during the period of the Cold War (1945–90). These countries refused, for the most part, to align themselves with either the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, or the Western bloc, led by the United States. Though neutralist in this sense, they were not neutral or isolationist, for they participated actively in international affairs and took positions on international issues.
Neutralism must also be distinguished from neutrality, which is a term in international law referring to the rules that states are obliged to follow during a legal state of war in which they are not belligerents.
The widespread espousal of neutralism as a distinct policy was a post-World War II phenomenon, but similar policies were followed, though to a lesser extent, prior to that period. The so-called isolationist policy and the avoidance of entangling alliances, advocated for the United States by presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and pursued during the European wars between France and Great Britain following the French Revolution and for a century after the peace of 1815, were analogous to the 20th-century policy of neutralism.
In the second half of the 20th century, many nations took up the position of neutralism. With the meeting at the Bandung Conference (1955) of 29 countries for the purpose of, among other issues, establishing their neutralism, the Nonaligned Movement was conceived. The first meeting of the nonaligned nations was in Belgrade in 1961. A growing number of neutral nations met again in 1964, 1970, and roughly every three years thereafter. The some 100 states that eventually became involved in this movement justified their position on a number of grounds. They declined to assume that the United States, the Soviet Union, or any other country necessarily intended to embark upon aggressive action designed to violate their territorial integrity, and therefore they refused to enter into alliances or collective defense arrangements directed against particular states. The new nations of Asia and Africa, which made up the largest group of neutralist states, were mostly former colonies of the western European powers. These new nations were, on the one hand, wary of permanent and close alignments with these powers in the Western bloc for fear of being drawn into a newer form of dependence; on the other hand, though generally attracted by offers of economic assistance from (and often the anti-Western rhetoric of) various communist countries, they feared that intimate ties with the Soviet Union could also threaten their independence. As a practical matter, a neutralist policy often enabled them to get much-needed economic assistance from both power blocs.
The Nonaligned Movement experienced considerable difficulty in establishing a unified policy on many issues in international affairs. Many of the member nations were enemies (such as Iran and Iraq), and true nonalignment proved an elusive goal. With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union (1991), neutralism lost much of its usefulness as a guiding principle in many nations’ foreign relations.