Foreign Affairs
The Next Secretary-General: How to Fill a Job With No Description
Brian Urquhart
Summary: The UN's top job is one of the hardest, and least defined, in the world. Canny officeholders have managed to turn it into an open-ended diplomatic and humanitarian post, but much depends on personality. So when the UN picks a new chief this year, it should focus on character; that, not experience, is the key to success.
Brian Urquhart was Undersecretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1986. His most recent book is "Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey."
World War II ended in Europe in May 1945 and in the Pacific three months later. At almost the same time -- the high point of Allied triumph and cooperation -- diplomats meeting in San Francisco produced the United Nations Charter. This blueprint for keeping the peace in the future was based, not surprisingly, on the alliance that had just won the war. The drafters of the charter assumed that the Allies would stick together and become the backbone of the new world organization.
Things, however, did not work out that way. Growing U.S.-Soviet tensions soon fractured the alliance, and for the next 40 years the UN had to improvise other means of maintaining international peace and security. An important part of that improvisation was the expansion of the role of the secretary-general.
During the UN's planning stage, President Franklin Roosevelt suggested that the top UN official might be called the "moderator" (which also happens to be the title of the head of the Church of Scotland). The charter, however, simply described the secretary-general as the organization's "chief administrative officer." It also made just one provision for independent political action by the secretary-general: under Article 99, he was given the power to "bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security."
As for how long the secretary-general would serve, the kind of person needed, or the best procedure for finding such a person, the charter gave no guidance. As Adlai Stevenson, one of the U.S. negotiators at San Francisco, wrote to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius in September 1945, the United States favored "the choice of an outstandingly qualified individual, preferably a figure who has attained some international position and preferably a national of a small or middle power." This splendidly vague description reflected the general uncertainty about who should be chosen as the executive head of the new organization. As the time for the appointment drew near, in December 1945, the State Department, in an internal memo, mused, "A more common acceptance of the qualifications required for the Secretary-General would be helpful in arriving at a decision."
About the only thing clear from the start was that the office of the secretary-general would be an extremely important one. True to the optimism of the moment, the Western media tossed around all sorts of impressive candidates -- Allied commander Dwight Eisenhower, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, and the Canadian diplomat Lester Pearson. But when the question came to the Security Council in January 1946, Soviet vetoes forced the council to nominate a far less well-known figure: Trygve Lie, the wartime foreign minister of Norway's government in exile. He was appointed on February 1, 1946.
LEAVE IT TO DAG
At first, the new secretary-general was not encouraged by the UN's 50 members to take any political initiative; if anything, the member states seemed nostalgic for the almost obsessive discretion of Sir Eric Drummond, the longtime British secretary-general of the League of Nations. Article . . .