So, having taken you through the essential provisions in the articles of the charter,
what i'd like to do now is to move to the practice.
And there's no better place to test these opportunities for leadership,
there's no better place to test,
than with some of the experience of the second Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold,
who is largely considered by many people
to have been the greatest of the Secretary Generals.
So, what is it that makes Dag Hammarskjold's leadership so interesting?
Why is it the kind of classic subject for discussion on UN leadership?
And I think the only way to look at that is to give you a couple of
very concrete examples of let's say Dag Hammarskjold as the ultimate creator of space.
Of how he manages to create space in situations which you
just wouldn't think there would be any room to be able to use much more.
That there would be no room left to create value.
And let me start with the example of his intervention in the case
of the U.S. airmen shot down over Chinese air space in 1954.
And this led to a very,
very tense situation between the U.S. on the one side and China on the other,
at a time when you need to recall,
they didn't have official relationships and where
China was not a member of the United Nations.
So, at the time of that plane coming down,
there was a resolution from the General Assembly
which encouraged the UN
to try and provide mediation services.
This was never going to fly with the Chinese authorities.
Why on earth with China which was not even represented in the UN,
which had been refused entry into the UN,
why would the Chinese authorities accept some kind of UN intervention in a matter
which also by the way obviously related to an aircraft encroaching on their airspace?
Hammarskjold decided that the way to do this was not to go to the Chinese
with a request to come and provide his services on the basis of
the General Assembly or on the basis of the Security Council as such.
But to do it on the basis of his own standing and
the standing of the secretariat as provided for under Article seven.
So, he was putting himself forward as a entity so to speak,
within the charter that had the power of initiative on his own, of himself.
And this was relayed to the then Prime Minister Zhou Enlai who understood fully well,
the nuance between an intervention
by the Secretary General which was in a sense in his personal capacity,
and an intervention which was
an official representation by a body that had spurned so to speak, China.
And it's quite fascinating that
the General Assembly in then putting forward an invitation from
Hammarskjold asked him and
I'm going to read the exact words because they make interesting reading.
They ask him to make efforts to secure
relevance by the means most appropriate to his judgment.
Talk about giving an open authority and
subcontracting the entire risk of the operation to the UN.
Then look at this wording,
"He was allowed to go ahead by the means most appropriate to his judgment".
Quite extraordinary if you stop and think about
what that means in terms of space that we talked about.
Hammarskjold has intermediaries with Zhou Enlai,
Zhou Enlai appreciates the imagination behind this effort,
he welcomes Hammarskjold to Beijing and it's a long story from
there but the end of the story is a good one and it gets resolved.
This to me is an absolutely classic exercise in creating space
where there was absolutely none and shows the value of that kind of leadership.
The difference that it can make.
Let me go to a second example,
which is that you may or may not know that the concept of peacekeeping,
which probably many of you are familiar with,
as it's evolved in the UN over several decades.
The concept of peacekeeping is not to be found in the charter of the UN,
it was never created by the Charter of the UN.
It is actually the creation again of Dag Hammarskjold,
people around him, the then Canadian Foreign Minister Lester Pearson.
And it was an extraordinary again exercise
in the creation of space at a time where you would think that there was no space at all.
What do I mean by that?
We're talking about the highlight of the cold war,
we're talking about one of the most tense moments in the cold war and Hammarskjold
puts in this concept of the thin blue line of peace observers in the Suez.
And he does it in exactly the contrary way to what the founders of the UN had in mind.
Because the founders the UN in creating the Security Council had in
mind that the great powers would consult,
would get together and would enforce some kind of law
and order or whatever however you want to describe that, in the world.
It was a concept of great powers working together to ensure security and peace.
This thin little blue line of troops in Suez,
the one thing that they were not were the great powers.
Because they all agreed that great powers should not be represented in
the composition of the troop force because that would only create larger problems.
So we go from the great power concept to the introduction of
UN peacekeeping using anything but the great powers.
Again, it's a long story we don't have time to go into the details now.
But to me an extraordinary example of creating space and of leadership.
A third example is the case of the Congo.
Where the UN was invited to come into the Congo,
some of you may know the history, it was very,
very contested at that time in the 50s and 60s.
There was secessionist movement going on.
There was a split government.
The great powers were lined up between
different factions and Hammarskjold was asked to come
in where it was absolutely clear
that the authorizing environment was completely fractured, was completely split.
if you go back to the choices that we looked at in the previous segment,
then it's very interesting to see how Hammarskjold dealt with that situation,
because when confronted with this request,
he could have said,
"The authorizing environment is fractured.
There is actually no agreement for the UN to go in and I'm going to
send this back to the Security Council to get a clear decision,
so that I'm protected so that my risks are less."
He could have done that.
He could also have said,"No.
This is not a serious request.
I can't do it. I'm just not going to do anything."
A response which many secretary generals have
done over many different situations over many decades.
But what he chose to do was to say,
"We must respond to the situation on the Congo.
This is an issue where people are looking to the UN for a response.
Yes. The authorizing environment is fractured.
Yes, I'm not getting any real authority to do this.
No, I will not succumb to that,
and therefore, do nothing.
And what I shall therefore do is I shall announce to you,
I shall tell you that I'm going in.
I'm going to tell you exactly how I'm going in.
I'm going to tell you the measures and the principles that I'm following.
And if you stop me from doing it,
I will stop doing it,
but you will have to stop me.
I'm going to do what I think is right."
And he proceeded.
And this was an act of extraordinary,
again leadership because what he was doing is,
he was saying the authorizing environment is incapable of yielding a solution.
We in the UN have a duty to try and yield that solution.
So, we are going to try and
change the onus of responsibility from us being authorized to do it,
to you having to exercise your responsibility to stopping us from doing it.
And he went ahead, and of course,
the story is cut short by his tragic death in an airplane crash.
But it's a very,
very interesting case because most probably in taking that decision,
he probably was beginning to exceed
the boundaries of what the authorizing environment circle was going to make possible,
was going to allow him to do,
and many historians and many others think that if he had survived,
his tenure as secretary general might not have gone
on for that much longer because he was coming under extreme pressure,
both in particular from the Russians and actually also from
the French who both had very particular interests in the Congo.
That takes me to the last part of what I'd like to say in this segment.
And it relates to my last example that I'd like to use about Hammarskjold.
And if there's nothing else you ever read about the United Nations,
if you never take any further interest in it,
at least read this one article by Dag Hammarskjold called
"The Concept of the International Civil Service",
which he delivered at Oxford University in May of 1961.
And this was Hammarskjold's response,
his intellectual conceptual response to
the attacks that he was subjected to as a result of what he did in the Congo.
And the attacks came principally,
again this could be another long session,
but I just want to give you the core of what makes this interesting.
And the core of it is that he was attacked first by the Russians,
by the Prime Minister Khrushchev who
argued that with the Cold War,
it was no longer possible to have in practice a
neutral or an independent or an objective secretary general,
that everybody was either aligned to
the non-aligned movement or they were part of
the socialist bloc or they were part of the western bloc.
So, this figment of
an international community that has been created in
the wake of the Second World War no longer existed.
And he formally proposed that the UN be reconstituted as
a tripartite organization representing the non-aligned,
the socialist bloc, and the West,
and that there would be three secretary generals that would concurrently lead this
organization,each not representing some global interests
but representing the particular interest of their constituency.
And that extreme view was not that far from what the French view was,
and they were the not to be forgotten words of [inaudible]
who when invited by Hammarskjold to the UN responded more or less,
this is not a direct quote,
but more or less saying,
"What is it that I've been invited to " [inaudible] "
or something to that effect which means," What is this thing that invited me?
What did he mean by that? What he meant was he could
go to the General Assembly which was an assembly of member states,
he could go and meet with member states but since
the General Assembly was not meeting, who is there to meet?
In other words, he was completely
dismissing the idea that the Secretary General had any role,
had any authority with somebody in his own person that was worth meeting.
And Hammarskjold responds to this in the speech at Oxford with
extremely carefully worded arguments that makes the case
for the International Civil Service and why that other concept was the wrong way to go.
He describes it as it would be
the Munich moment for the concept of international cooperation to go back to
that concept of a group of people and countries that
are representing strictly their own constituencies.
It's a remarkably argued article and I can think of no better way to
end a segment on how to
understand the way the UN thinks of and understands the concept of leadership.
Gilbert ProbstProfessor, Organization and Management
Sebastian BuckupVisiting professor
Bruce JenksVisiting professor
Stephan MergenthalerVisiting professor
Cassandra QuintanillaTeaching and research assistant
Lea StadtlerResearch Fellow
Claudia Gonzalez RomoVisiting professor
Julian FleetVisiting professor
Tina AmbosAcademic Director of the International Organizations MBA
