The intellectual leadership of the United Nations has
declined
Riad Tabbarah
Aug. 31, 2015
This year the United Nations is
celebrating its 70th anniversary. Criticism of the organization has come from
all directions. Disapproval has been directed at the U.N.’s failed peacekeeping
activities, as during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, as well as at its many
financial scandals, including the “oil for food” scandal of 1990-2003, dubbed
“the Swindle of the Century. There has also been more subtle criticism of U.N.
development assistance by prominent individuals such as Nobel laureate Joseph
Stiglitz and the development economist William Easterly in his 2014 book
expressively titled, “The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the
Forgotten Rights of the Poor.”
But criticism rarely raised about the
U.N. involves the decline of the intellectual leadership of the organization. I
believe this has fallen to virtual insignificance during these 70 years.
In the early years of the U.N. there
was confusion as to what the role of the secretary-general and his secretariat
actually were in the international decision-making process. The first
secretary-general, the Norwegian Trygve Lie, who was appointed in 1946,
believed that the U.N. Charter (Article 99) gave him a proactive role in the
process. He attracted the ire of the Soviet Union for supporting U.N. involvement
in the Korean war. He later lost the crucial support of the United States when
Senator Joseph McCarthy accused him of hiring Americans with communist
leanings. Among these was his adviser and close friend Abe Filler, who
succumbed to McCarthy’s pressure and committed suicide. In grief, Lie resigned
his position in 1952.
After toying around for months with a
Soviet idea to have a troika of secretaries general, one from each of the West,
the Eastern Bloc, and the developing countries, the major powers agreed that
the best solution was to have someone without a strong personality or
independence of mind. The consensus fell on the chief of the Swedish mission,
Dag Hammarskjold.
In the words of Brian Urquhart, who was
part of the U.N. 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 Hammarskjold 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. Well, I must say that was quite a surprise, the next eight years,
because he actually turned out to be anything but that!”
Hammarskjold built an intellectually
outstanding secretariat of some 3,000 staff members. He based it on the
principles enunciated in the Charter (Articles 100 and 101) that the staff
should answer only to the organization, and that member states should not
interfere with its work. 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-hand man for the duration of
his term. His name was Ralph Bunche, in 1950 the first black person to receive
the Nobel Prize for Peace.
The secretariat that Hammarskjold
established was one packed with outstanding scholars in addition to remarkable
diplomats. The Population Division, for example, produced the first manuals of
demography, the first model life tables, the methodology of stable population
models, the first study on the history of population thought and a score of
other contributions. Together, these established the basics of the field of
demography and resulted in the creation of departments of demography and
population studies in leading universities in the United States and the world.
But the most important intellectual
contribution of the U.N. at that time was probably in the field of economic
development. One example suffices: During the period 1953-1971, the
intellectual golden age of the United Nations, some 40 developing countries
joined the organization. The main topic at the U.N. at the time was how to help
these countries develop. The dominant theory of international trade relationships
was David Ricardo’s theory of “comparative advantage.” It advocated that each
country should produce what it had an economic advantage in producing and
exchange the surplus with other countries who would do the same.
Applied to reality, this theory meant
that developing countries, which at the time generally produced raw materials
and agricultural products, should concentrate their economic activities on this
type of production and trade the surplus with the industrial outputs of the
developed countries. The international institution in charge of facilitating
this exchange was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
established in 1947 (the precursor of the present International Trade
Organization). Its 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 both happened to be senior staff members of the
United Nations. The so-called Singer-Prebisch thesis showed that free trade
between the developing and 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, provoking further
marginalization. The developing countries needed, therefore, to industrialize
but could not compete with developed countries that had a long history of
industrialization. That’s why they needed a protective tariffs policy for a
certain period of time until their industries became competitive. This
protectionism went against the policies of GATT, created and supported by the
economic powers at the United Nations.
Armed with a credible thesis emanating
from a credible U.N. secretariat, the developing countries at the U.N. 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, based on the
ideas of Singer and Prebisch, under the name of the U.N. Conference on Trade
and Development (UNCTAD), now a U.N. specialized agency. The conference also
saw the birth of the first group of developing countries, the Group of 77 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 none other than Raul Prebisch. Hans Singer
became the head of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.
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 had gained globally. But his
demise came mostly as a result of his drive for decolonization, specifically
for the unity and independence of the Congo (until 1960 a colony of Belgium).
In this way he crossed red lines set by the major powers and the colonial
powers, as well as by the white regime of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), a
British protectorate at the time.
In September 1961 Hammarskjold’s plane
was shot down by another plane over Northern Rhodesia, but a British inquiry
that year, rubber stamped by a further inquiry by a United Nations committee,
concluded the crash was due to pilot error.
It was not until 2011 that a dedicated
British scholar, Susan Williams, published a book titled “Who Killed
Hammarskjold?” the result of years of relentless investigation in Africa and
elsewhere. The book provided evidence that the death of Hammarskjold was
murder, covered up by the major powers and the white supremacists in the
southern part of Africa. This forced the United Nations to open a new
investigation in 2012. The report of the U.N. Committee came out in 2013, much
of it echoing Williams’ book, at least concerning the shooting down of the
secretary-general’s plane. As a result, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
decided last July to reopen a full investigation. The United States, the United
Kingdom and other powers involved at the time have so far refused to declassify
documents relating to the crash.
After Hammarskjold’s death, and another
bout of toying with the idea of a Troika of secretaries-general, U Thant was
elected secretary-general. He did not rock the boat but succeeded, largely, in
maintaining the independence of the U.N. secretariat.
The complete loss of independence and
the politicization of the secretariat came with the next secretary-general,
Kurt Waldheim elected in 1972. Appointments soon became largely political, from
the under-secretary level to the secretary level, and many key positions became
earmarked for specific nationalities. The professional staff members, who once
felt allegiance to their respective professions, were largely replaced by
persons who answered to the call of the political forces that gave them their
jobs in the first place. The secretary-general who thought that he had a
proactive role in resolving global problems was replaced by a secretary-general
who was basically an observer of global problems.
The United Nations was effectively
established on a principle of hegemony of the major powers. These powers gave
themselves the right of veto in the Security Council, a majority vote in the
global economic and monetary institutions such as the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, 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 and U Thant eras were obviously an anomaly, a
period of confusion at the creation. Nevertheless they also represented the
U.N.’s intellectual golden age.
Riad Tabbarah is a former ambassador of
Lebanon to the United States.
A version of this article appeared in
the print edition of The Daily Star on August 31, 2015, on page 7.
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