The Intellectual Decline of the
United Nations
Riad Tabbarah[1]
I wish to speak in this essay about the intellectual decline
of the United Nations during the 70 years of its life, that is, from 1945 to this
day. Scores of books and articles have been written on the decline of the UN
from various angles: about the UN’s growing inefficiency in dealing with
emergencies and peace keeping, from its costly hesitancy in the Rwanda crisis
in 1994 that ended up in the slaughter of some 800,000 Hutu tribesmen, to its
mishandling of the Bosnian crisis in 1995 that led to the massacre of 8000 Bosnian
Muslims in Srebrenica which an internal UN report called: "the tragedy [that]
will haunt our history forever"; about the internal scandals including the
oil for food program which was termed “the largest financial fraud in modern
times” and, according to several investigations, involved, among others, the
son of the Secretary-General; about the documented sexual misconduct of UN
peace keepers, most recently in the Ivory Coast, but earlier in Congo, Cambodia, Haiti and elsewhere,
including child abuse[2];
about the more subtle criticisms of the UN system’s mishandling of global
development through erroneous policies, as described in Nobel Laureate John
Stiglitz’s 2002 book entitled
“Globalization and its Discontents”[3] or
through its incompetent bureaucracy, as described in the 2013 book by the old
UN hand and well known development economist William Easterly, entitled “The
Tyranny of Experts[4].”
Instead, my criticism today will deal with the intellectual
leadership of the United Nations which, I will argue, has fallen, during these
seventy years, from a very a high global level to virtual insignificance.
My story begins in the spring of 1945 at the Conference in
San Francisco which drafted the Charter of the United Nations. 50 independent
countries participated in this event: 850 official delegates and their advisors,
3000 in all. As we all know, or should know, 19 of the delegates were graduates
or former students of AUB, the most represented institution of higher learning
at the Conference that actually established the United Nations. Five of those
AUBites were among the 50 signatories of the Charter.
There was great excitement at that Conference, not only
because AUB was so well represented, but mainly because the delegates to the
Conference were establishing the United Nations, to promote peace and
prosperity on earth, so that the 50 million people who died in the Second World
War would not have died in vain. This idealism was apparent in the rush to
create this world institution. The Conference started almost one month before
the fall of Germany and 5 months before the surrender of Japan and the official
end of the war. But this idealism was clearest in the speeches of the delegates
at the Conference one of whom described the meeting as “a milestone in the long
march of man to a better future.” The most important speech was, perhaps, that
of the U.S. President Harry Truman: “If we should pay merely lip service to the
inspiring ideals and then later do violence to simple justice,” he said, “we
should draw down upon us the bitter wrath of generations yet unborn….If we seek
to use [the United Nations] selfishly – for the advantage of any one nation or
any small group of nations—we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal.”
Two years later, Truman, against the advice of his most
respected advisers, pushed the United Nations to create the State of Israel,
displacing millions of Palestinians, for what most of his biographers and
associates agree were basically electoral reasons[5]. The
decline of post-war idealism had already started, at least among some of the
world political leadership.
In these early years, there was confusion as to what the
role of the Secretary-General and his Secretariat actually was in the decision
making process of the UN. The first Secretary-General, the Norwegian Trygve Lie,
was appointed in 1946. Lie interpreted the provision of the Charter (article
99) that gives the Secretary General the responsibility of bringing “to the
attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten
the maintenance of international peace and security,” as allowing him a
pro-active role in pushing his ideas forcefully. He passionately supported the
creation of Israel which led him to the passing of military and diplomatic
secrets to Israeli officials and brought on him the ire of the Arab delegations
and others. He also attracted the ire of the Soviet Union when he gathered
support among delegates for the intervention of the United Nations in the
defense of South Korea when it was invaded by the North in 1950. He fought
against the acceptance of Franco’s Spain to the UN. He finally lost the crucial support of the
United States when Joseph McCarthy accused him of hiring Americans with
communist leanings. Among those was his advisor and close friend, Abe Filler,
who succumbed to McCarthy’s pressure and committed suicide. In grief,[6] he
resigned his position in 1952.
After toying around for several months with a Soviet idea of
a troika of Secretaries General, one from each of the West, the Eastern Block,
and the developing countries, the major powers agreed that the best solution is
to have someone without a strong personality, or an independent mind. And the
consensus fell on the Chief of the Swedish Mission at the UN, the young Dag
Hammarskjold. In the words of Sir Brian Urquhart, who was part of the UN senior
staff in the office of the Secretary General at the time: “it was
assumed … by most people in the Security Council who didn’t know Hammarskjöld –
that they’d elected a nice, competent Swedish civil servant who wouldn’t rock
the boat and wouldn’t be very independent and wouldn’t create trouble[7].” They
were to regret this choice for the next eight years.
Hammarskjold built an intellectually outstanding
secretariat of some 3000 staff members (it has at present around 17000 civilian
staff and close to 110,000 armed personnel). He based it on the principles
enunciated in Articles 100 and 101 of the Charter, namely, that the staff
members should possess the “highest standards of efficiency, competence, and
integrity” and that they should answer only to the organization. Member States
should not interfere with the work of the members of the Secretariat and “not
to seek to influence them in the discharge of their responsibilities.” He
mollified the major powers by appointing two under-secretaries for political
affairs: one American and one Russian. The American turned out to be a
remarkable intellectual and a most efficient individual and soon became
Hammarskjold’s right arm for the duration of his term. His name was Ralph
Bunche, the first black person to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace (1950).
The Secretariat that Hammarskjold established was one
replete with outstanding scholars and remarkable diplomats. I had my first
professional encounter with the UN Secretariat in the last year of
Hammarskjold’s tenure, in 1961. I was writing a demographic manual for the
field experts of the US Agency for International Development. At the time, the
only manuals of demography, except one, were the three volumes produced by the
Population Division of the United Nations. The Director of the Division was
John Durand, one of the pioneers of demography. His assistant was Jean
Bourgeois-Pichat, a leading mathematical demographer of the time. The Population
Division, which I joined the next year, eventually also produced the basic
concepts and literature of demography: In addition to the three manuals on
demographic estimates and projections just mentioned, it produced the first
model life tables, the methodology of stable population models, the first and
last volume on the history of population thought[8] and a score
of similar publications that established the basics of demography and that resulted
in the creation of departments of demography in the leading universities in the
U.S. and the world.
But the most important intellectual contribution of the
UN at that time was, in my opinion, in the field of economic development. I
shall give one example of what I mean: During the period 1953-1971, the golden
age of the United Nations, some 40 African and other developing countries in
Latin America and Asia joined the Organization. The main topic at the UN at the
time was, naturally, how to help these countries develop. The dominant theory
concerning the trade relationship between countries was basically Ricardo’s
“comparative advantage” which, at the risk of some oversimplification, advocated
that each country should produce what it has economic advantage in producing
and trade the surplus with other countries who would do the same. Applied to
the field, this theory meant that developing countries, which at the time
produced generally raw material and agricultural products, should concentrate
its economic activities on this type of production and trade the surplus with
the basically industrial outputs of the developed countries. The international
institution in charge of facilitating this exchange was the GATT (i.e. the
General Agreement for Tariffs and Trade) whose stated policy was to open
international markets and end all measures of tariff protection.
At this point a new school of thought appeared on the
economic scene, developed independently by two economists: Hans Singer and Raul
Prebisch, who happened to be both senior staff of the United Nations. Singer
was senior economist at the Economic Department of the UN and Prebisch was the
Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America. The so-called
Singer-Prebisch thesis showed that free trade between the developing countries
and the developed countries, that is, between the primary goods of the first
and the industrial goods of the latter, would lead to worsening terms of trade for
the developing countries leading towards their marginalization. The developing
countries needed, therefore, to industrialize but could not compete off hand
with the developed countries that had a long history of industrialization,
unless they had a protective tariffs policy for a certain period of time, until
their industries were able to compete internationally. This protectionism went,
of course, against the ideas and policies of the GATT that was created and supported
by the economic powers at the United Nations.
Armed with a credible thesis emanating from a credible UN
Secretariat, the developing countries at the UN demanded and obtained the
organization of a world conference in Geneva in 1964 on Trade and Development.
At this Conference a new organization was born, built on the ideas of Singer
and Prebisch, under the name of UNCTAD (the UN Conference on Trade and
Development), that later became a Specialized Agency. The Conference also saw
the birth of the first grouping of developing countries, “the Group of 77” (now
includes134 countries) whose aim was to protect the economic interests of
developing countries and improve their negotiating position within the United
Nations. The first Director-General of UNCTAD was non-other than Raul Prebisch.
Hans singer became the head of UNIDO (the United Nations Industrial Development
Organization).
This was indeed the intellectual golden age of the United
Nations. But Dag Hammarskjold had already irritated the major powers by the
independence of the Secretariat from political influence and by the prestige he
and it gained globally. Most world opinion sided with Hammarskjold and his
Secretariat whenever his position contradicted that of the two superpowers. But
his demise came mostly as a result of his relentless drive for decolonization,
specifically for the unity and independence of the Congo in 1960 and 1961(until
1960 a colony of Belgium) crossing red lines set by the major and colonial
powers, and by the white regime of Northern Rhodesia (now independent Zambia),
a British protectorate at the time. In September 1961 his plane was shot down
by another plane over Northern Rhodesia but a British enquiry that year, rubber
stamped by a further enquiry by a United Nations committee, concluded that the
crash was due to pilot error. It was not until 50 years later, that a dedicated
British scholar, Susan Williams, published a book[9] in 2011,
entitled “Who Killed Hammarskjold?”, the result of 2 years of relentless
investigation in Africa and elsewhere, which provided evidence that the death
of Hammarskjold was plain murder, covered up by the major powers and the white
supremacists in the southern part of Africa, which forced the United Nations to
open a new investigation in 2012. The report of the UN Committee came out in
2013 much in the direction of Williams’ book. As a result, the Secretary-General
Ban Ki Moon decided earlier this month to reopen a full investigation. The US,
Britain, and other powers involved at the time, have so far refused to
declassify documents relating to the crash…and the plot thickens.
After another bout toying with the idea of a Troika of
Secretaries-General, Mr. U Thant was elected to succeed Hammarskjold. A quiet
Buddhist who did not rock the boat but tried to maintain the independence of
the UN Secretariat, ran the Organization for 10 years and until 1971, but some
cracks in the system began to appear during this period. Nevertheless the
complete loss of independence and the politicization of the Secretariat came
with the next Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, and was institutionalized since
then. Appointments became political, from the under-secretary level to the
plain secretary level and many key positions became earmarked for specific
nationalities. The professional staff members who once felt allegiance to their
respective professions were gradually replaced by staff members who answered to
the call of the political influences that gave them their jobs in the first
place. Names like Ralph Bunche, Hans Singer, Raul Prebish, John Durand, Jean
Bourgeois Pichat, and many other greats of the intellectual golden age of the
UN were largely replaced by unknowns and the global intellectual leadership of
the UN Secretariat virtually disappeared. The secretary-general who thought
that he had a pro-active role in solving global problems was replaced by the
secretary-general who is basically an observer of global problems. It has been recently
calculated, for example, that Mr. Ban Ki Moon, since becoming secretary-general
in 2007, has already expressed his “concern”, and at times “deep concern,” some
140 times, 40 of which were in relation to the situation in Yemen. This is
practically all that the Secretary-General can do nowadays.
The United Nations was established on the principle of
hegemony of the major powers who gave themselves the right of veto in the
Security Council, the majority vote in the global economic and monetary
institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, the dominance in the choice of
the Secretary-General, and the lion’s share in filling key positions in the
Secretariat. In fact, the United Nations today is exactly what the major powers,
the winners of World War II, wanted it to be in the first place. The
Hammarskjold/U Thant era was obviously an anomaly, a period of confusion at the
creation, but it represented, nevertheless, the intellectual golden age of the United
Nations.
[1]
Speech at meeting on “The UN Then and Now: 70 Years later” at the American
University of Beirut 25 July, 2015.
[2] See, for example, Nile Gardiner. October 13 2006. “The
Decline and Fall of the United nations: Why the UN. Has failed and How it Can
Be Reformed.” Heritage Foundation Lecture. http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-united-nations-why-the-un-has-failed-and-how-it-can-be-reformed
[3]
www. Norton
[4]
Basic Books.
[5]
See for example, Michael T. Benson. 1997. Harry S. Truman and the Founding
of Israel. Praeger. Pp: 175-177.
[6]
Trygve Lie. 1954. In The Cause of Peace: Seven Years with the United Nations
.Macmillan.
[7]
UN News Center. 22 September 2011. Interview with Brian Urquhart, former
Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, on Dag Hammarskjöld. www.un.org/apps/news/newsmakers.asp?NewsID=42
[8]
United Nations.1973. The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends.
Volumes 1 and 2. New York.
[9]
Susan Williams.2011. Who Killed Hammarskjold: The UN, The Cold War, And
White Supremacy in Africa. Columbia University Press. It should be noted
that a young Swede serving in the region with the Swedish International
Development Agency (SIDA) also undertook his own investigation almost
simultaneously with Williams and reached similar conclusions. See Julian
Borger.17 August 2011. “Dag Hammarskjold: evidence suggests UN chief’s plane
was shot down.” The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/17/dag-hammarskjold-un-secretary-general-crash
