Ceylon Hosts Commonwealth Colombo Summit

Colombo Plan a counterpoint to communism

There is no such thing as a free lunch – be it in business, politics or geopolitics. So while there’s little if any doubt that the newly independent nation of Ceylon benefitted a great deal from being a part of the Commonwealth of Nations, it was also slowly but surely drawn into a web of countries being aligned in an emerging world where old alliances were fading away…

Ceylon’s hosting of the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in 1950 was a keystone event that helped define how the island nation, and its sister states in the region, would engage with and participate in the global dynamics at play.

The January conference, which is widely known as the summit meeting that gave rise to the Colombo Plan, was one of the Commonwealth’s chief responses to the emergence of communism in China, cemented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) victories in the mainland as well as a communist insurgency in the then Malaya.

These developments thrust Asia into the limelight as a stage where forces of the Western world – still recovering from the staggering costs of World War II – would face off against the rising tide of communism.

In a changing geopolitical balance where the sun was setting on the British Empire, the Commonwealth led by new contenders for leadership such as Australia met in Colombo – for the first time on Asian soil – and mooted the eponymous programme for economic development in Southeast Asia.

This included the freshly formed nations of India and Pakistan, as well as the host country Ceylon.

Colombo’s role in and assimilation into the programme – one that still bears its name as much as enjoys its benefits up to today – definitively set the future Sri Lanka on a geopolitical course… from Commonwealth led rebuttals of communism through Ceylon’s later shift to nonalignment, along which it navigates with trepidation and tactical dexterity to this day.

The January conference, which is widely known as the summit meeting that gave rise to the Colombo Plan, was one of the Commonwealth’s chief responses to the emergence of communism