Did a 1955 meeting in Indonesia give the newly independent nations a voice?

In large part, yes. In April 1955, twenty-nine Asian and African countries, most of them newly independent, met at Bandung in Indonesia. They represented 1.5 billion people, 54 percent of the world's population. The conference's stated aims were to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation.

It mattered because the Cold War was pulling everyone in. Many of the participants were countries the United States and the Soviet Union wanted to influence, so they sought a unified non-aligned identity and political solidarity independent of both Western and Soviet influence. Indonesia's President Sukarno and India's Prime Minister Nehru were key organizers. The conference agreed on a ten-point declaration of world peace and cooperation, adopted unanimously.

Agreement did not come easily. The delegates debated whether Soviet policies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia should be censured along with Western colonialism, and agreed to condemn colonialism in all of its manifestations, which implicitly censured the Soviet Union as well as the West. Nehru argued for non-alignment and warned against joining military alliances. Zhou Enlai of China took a moderate tone, endorsing every nation's right to choose its own system.

The conference was followed in 1961 by the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, drawing on Bandung's principles. The United States had shunned Bandung and sent no official delegation, and the conference put it in a bind: to win favour in the new nations it had to oppose colonialism, but its European allies were colonial powers.