Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Now for all of us who are frightened by the anarchy of sovereign states, the cold war, the armaments race and so on, this is an exceedingly attractive concept, and it has enlisted the loyalty of many able and admirable men and women throughout the world. As I now propose to subject this concept to some criticism, I should perhaps say first that I believe it tends in the right direction, that is to say that the strengthening of a genuine focus of international authority is obviously in the common interest. I do not believe, however, that we are helping the tendency in that direction by pretending that we have already reached a stage which we have not in fact reached: a stage where the Secretary-General and the Secretariat can be implicitly relied on as an impartial instrument in the service of the international community as a whole, influenced by no national policies. I believe that the role of the Secretariat, from the foundation of the organization up to now, has to be seen in relation, not directly to the international community in the rather mystical manner imagined by Hammarskjöld, but in relation to its own immediate and real environment: those buildings on the East River, in which the Security Council, the General Assembly and the other organs work. In that environment, the influence of the United States was, as I have suggested, once supreme, and is now conditionally predominant. In the Secretariat also—that is to say in the executive service of these American-led organs—American influence was once supreme, and is still predominant. The powerful personality of Hammarskjöld partly disguised and to a lesser extent deflected the reality of American pressure on the Secretariat. For a clear view of the basic situation it is therefore well to go back to the days of Trygve Lie.

  Trygve Lie possessed neither Hammarskjöld’s ability nor his obliquity, and his book In the Cause of Peace, so much more candid than anything Hammarskjöld is known to have left us, is still in many ways a better guide to United Nations realities than are Hammarskjöld’s speeches or most textbooks. As regards the Secretariat, Lie tells us that he was “especially concerned about American recruitment.” “The trouble was,” he says, “that so great a proportion of the staff were of United States nationality, and the United States Government”—he is here referring to pre-McCarthy days—“gave so little help towards choosing among the applicants.” Towards the end of Mr. Lie’s tenure in 1952–53, the then American Government turned its attention to this problem, and began to comb out, with Mr. Lie’s help, any Americans in the Secretariat who could be suspected of being soft on communism. Lie, having pointed out that nothing in the Charter or the staff regulations bars a Communist from being a member of the Secretariat, and that every Secretariat member has full freedom for his personal, political and religious convictions, nonetheless goes on to say that “if there was even one American Communist in the Secretariat, I wished to get rid of him. I would do it quietly and in accordance with the Staff Regulations.”‡‡ He refers, a few pages later, without apparently being conscious of any inconsistency and even with some pride, to the fact that he declined to discharge, as the Russians demanded, White Russians employed in the Secretariat, and refused to consider sacking Czechs and Slovaks disapproved of by Prague.§§ On the other front, the McCarthyite outcry in the United States continued, and Mr. Lie tells us: “On the one hand, the sweeping attacks upon the standing and integrity of the Secretariat were vicious and distorted and out of all proportion to the facts. On the other hand, there was no question in my mind that the cases involving the Fifth Amendment ought to go, as a matter of sound policy entirely divorced from the public hue and cry.”¶¶ This meant in practice that Mr. Lie, who was able to stand up against the pressure of the Russians and their friends—and indeed could not have afforded to give in to it—yielded to the much more powerful pressure of the United States. The F.B.I, installed a kind of inquisition in the Secretariat building; the Fifth Amendment cases, and others, did go, and Mr. Lie’s trusted friend and legal counsel, an American citizen, Abraham Feller, jumped out of a twelfth-story window.

  The Secretariat inherited by Hammarskjöld was therefore one which contained not only a large number of American citizens, but a particular body of such citizens, a body which had been purged of all who, in the McCarthy time, could be shown to have deviated in some degree from the then very stringent norms of loyalty to the United States. The American survivors of this system would, it could reasonably be assumed, have a distinct tendency to identify loyalty to the international community with conformity to United States policy, since the penalty for radical noncomformity with United States policy had been shown to be dismissal from the service of the international community. These survivors included the most important people in the Secretariat next to Hammarskjöld—and it was a closer “next” than the public generally were in a position to see. Hammarskjöld himself, with greater diplomatic resources and cooler judgment than Lie, managed to conduct relations with the State Department with a greater degree of international decorum than Lie had achieved, but the reality of a sort of right of oversight by the State Department over the American Secretariat members—and probably indirectly over other Western members—continued. So, and rigidly, of course, did Soviet control over Soviet citizens in the Secretariat. The difference was that the Americans, under the more supple, but perhaps no less strong, rein of the State Department, remained at the centre, where political decisions were taken, while the Russians, although occupying high-ranking posts, were kept out in the political cold in ignorance of what was really going on. This practice may have originated with the Korean War—that it did prevail then Mr. Lie has recorded—I saw it myself in operation in relation to the Congo, and I believe it is still in force. In Hammarskjöld’s time, his closest associates and advisers were all Americans—Cordier, Bunche and (for Congo matters at least) Wieschhoff—and they were all Americans who had the approval—although, in one case, against a background of Congressional criticism—of the State Department. This state of affairs was quite a faithful reflection of the situation in the other organs—the Security Council with its safe (though constitutionally limited) American majority, and the General Assembly with its less safe, but still conditionally reliable, American majority. All this, in turn, reflected the realities of a world in which the United States was the most powerful and the wealthiest country, the greatest in trade and finance, and in diplomatic influence, and of course the greatest contributor to the United Nations. It was entirely natural and quite unavoidable that this influence should permeate also the United Nations Secretariat, which is a service belonging not to some Rousseau-like disembodied general will of the international community, but to the real world, with its real balance of forces.

  Hammarskjöld’s subtle mind, although quite at home in this real world, conceived the idea that, working through contradictions and ambiguities, in the instructions coming to him from Council and Assembly, he might still make the Secretariat somehow, despite its composition, and its conditions of working, into an instrument genuinely serving the international community in some higher sense. It was a heroic endeavour, and a sincere one, but I am not sure that it was successful. Save for the lonely and transitional issue of the Lebanon, and perhaps the case of Laos—though that is much less certain—it would be hard to think of an issue on which the Secretariat differed to any significant extent from United States policy and succeeded in carrying its point. On what might be called the McCarthy issue, Hammarskjöld bowed, more gracefully and inconspicuously than Trygve Lie, but bowed none the less, to prevailing American opinion. On Suez, naturally enough, and perhaps with more questionable propriety on Hungary, Hammarskjöld worked with the United States, and the services of the Secretariat may not have been without importance in enabling the explosive Hungarian issue to be buried. It may be urged, and with truth, that the interests of world peace were involved here, but if the United States had decided to protect Hungary, I think it likely that the United Nations, including the Secretariat, would have asserted that in Hungary, as in Korea, peace could only be defended by resisting aggression.

  On
the Congo issue, the United Nations was from the beginning and still is generally responsive to American policy. There were some partial or apparent exceptions, which are themselves significant. Thus, when the Republican Administration wanted to seat a Kasavubu delegation as representative of the Congo, at a time when there was no recognized legal government, the Secretariat used its influence against this move. Similarly, when the United States, in concert with Great Britain, wanted to get rid of M. Dayal, the United Nations representative in the Congo, the Secretary-General for a time demurred. Two things, both important, have to be noticed about these exceptions. The first is that it was the United States Government, not the Secretariat, which, in both cases, carried its point; the Kasavubu delegation was seated and Dayal was dropped. The second point is that these happened to be cases on which the Republican Administration acted with relatively little deference to Afro-Asian opinion. It could, I think, be said with truth that when the United States unconditionally controlled the General Assembly, the Secretariat served the United States, and that now that the United States, working in concert with a sizeable section of Afro-Asian opinion, controls the Assembly, so also the Secretariat works for an American-Afro-Asian consensus—with the emphasis still, as it is in the General Assembly, in favour of the United States. The relation of countries like Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other to this situation is important but intermittent and peripheral. In certain conditions, in particular if United States policy is hesitant and United States public opinion divided, British and French policy may inflect the United States attitude and also and simultaneously that of the Secretariat. Similarly the Soviet Union strives, with less success, to influence the policies of the Afro-Asian nationalists.*** The vacillations of United Nations policy in the Congo were mainly due to American hesitations under conflicting Anglo-French and Afro-Asian pressures. When the United States finally makes up its mind to go ahead, however, the United Nations goes ahead also. Thus Andrew Cordier, a senior American on the Secretariat, helped the United States Ambassador to break Lumumba in September 1960. A change in United States policy produced another kind of firm action in Katanga, especially following the despatch of the American Military Mission to Elisabethville and the use of American aircraft to transport United Nations military equipment. The settlement in the Congo—to the degree that we can regard the Congo as being settled—was one determined on in Washington—“Thant Plan” and all—and implemented by the Secretariat through the forces supplied by neutral member nations. The achievement of the United Nations, which may, or may not, have prevented the Congo from becoming the focus of general war, was a rather equivocal success for international action, a partial success for Afro-Asian opinion in relation to the Katanga fraud, a partial defeat for Great Britain, at the very least a major tactical defeat for the Soviet Union, and a triumph—at this moment apparently unqualified—for United States diplomacy. We see therefore that the difference between Senator Taft’s concept of the United Nations as a diplomatic weapon for the United States and Hammarskjöld’s concept of a dynamic instrument in the hands of the international community is less wide in practice than in theory.

  The most hopeful element in all this—the point of growth—is the element of the conditional. United States policy—working through the United Nations—cannot simply dictate, but must bargain for support. This need—combined with the diplomatic competition between the great power blocs in Asia and in Africa—gives to the smaller and weaker countries an influence which they would otherwise not possess. This influence is felt not only in the Assembly but in the Security Council, for any potential veto-wielder fears, as Mr. Andrew Boyd has rightly pointed out, “the sword of Damocles” of the “Uniting for Peace” procedure, and thus the Council has, in Mr. Boyd’s words, “been revived by the Assembly.”††† The form of this revival has operated to the benefit of the smaller and weaker countries. The influence of these countries—mainly Afro-Asian—tends both towards the mitigation of the cold war, and towards other unexpected ends—for example, towards a rapid growth in racial equality and therefore in human freedom on a very large scale throughout the world. The part which the United Nations plays in obliging the great powers to carry out their professions regarding racial equality is one of the organization’s greatest contributions. The world, on the whole, is both a safer and a better place than it would be without the United Nations. That, however, is no reason for pretending that the world is already safer and better than it has, in fact, become, or that the United Nations has attained, or is likely soon to attain, a sphere of detached and impartial virtue, remote from the real political environment in which, by many curious and often questionable expedients, we are contriving to live together on this planet.

  * Mr. Andrew Boyd (United Nations: Piety, Myth and Truth, p. 16) holds the following two assumptions to be “oversimplified”: “that throughout the UN’s first ten years there was an automatic Assembly majority at the disposal of America, and that there is now one controlled by the Afro-Asian members.” The second assumption is indeed oversimplified, if only because it ignores the fact that the Afro-Asian members seldom act as a united group. I cannot see, however, that the first assumption is oversimplified in any serious way. Mr. Geoffrey L. Goodwin, writing of these same ten years, observed that “the attitude of the U.S. is usually decisive” (Britain and the United Nations, p. 218). Mr. Boyd gives only one example to show the limitations on American influence in the period he names. The example given—the case of Palestine (November 1947)—is hardly convincing, since the American administration got its way in that matter, though not without, as Mr. Boyd says, “exceptional pressure.” United Nations: Piety, Myth and Truth is the best introduction to the United Nations which exists, and one of the very few works which give any clear idea of how that institution functions in practice. The only serious weakness of this valuable book is an apparent tendency to underestimate, as here, the importance of American influence in the United Nations, both in the past and now. One of the most realistic comments I have seen on United States influence and attitudes at the United Nations comes from a Canadian observer, K. A. MacKirdy: “The nation which pays a third of the budget, like the boy who owns the football, wants the game played his way or he will go home” (Queen’s Quarterly, winter 1961).

  † Professor Benjamin V. Cohen, an eminent legal authority, tells us that the effectiveness of a request addressed to the General Assembly under the “Uniting for Peace” procedure “depends primarily upon the extent to which the request expresses the reasoned will and elicits the support of an alert and aroused world-wide conscience” (Cohen, The United Nations, Constitutional Development, Growth and Possibilities, p. 19). “Primarily” this may in some sense be true; “secondarily,” however, such a proposition needs to have State Department support, without which it is certain to fail in the Assembly.

  ‡ The Soviet Union, being in a minority, was less impressed by the moral authority of the General Assembly. “And it might in fairness be admitted that if the roles were reversed a not dissimilar attitude would probably be taken by a minority West” (Geoffrey L. Goodwin, Britain and the United Nations, p. 214).

  § Senator Taft, for once in agreement with a Soviet view, questioned the legality of the United Nations position on Korea, “because Article 27 of the Charter clearly provides that decisions by the Security Council on all matters shall be made by an affirmative vote of seven members including the permanent members. There was no concurring vote by Russia, but we overrode this objection without considering how it might be used against us in the future” (Congressional Record, January 5, 1951). In the same speech Taft, with great prescience, declared that it would be “most unwise” to build up the power for actions of Assembly, adding that “we should only have one vote among 60 which sometime in the future, even in the very near future, may be inconvenient for us” (ibid.). Similar, but more lively and even better founded, apprehensions were entertained by the British Government, which foresaw
the growing anti-colonial tendencies of the Assembly (Goodwin, Britain and the United Nations, p. 229).

  ¶ Not only of the wider public, and not only in Britain and France. Professor Benjamin V. Cohen believes that the “irresponsible exercise of voting power by the small and relatively weak states may threaten the future of the United Nations” (The United Nations, Constitutional Development, Growth and Possibilities, p. 94). This fear prevailed in the League of Nations also. “The great powers,” according to Lord Robert Cecil, “were obsessed with the wholly unreal danger that the small powers might band together and vote them down” (quoted in Andrew Boyd, United Nations: Piety, Myth and Truth, p. 27).