The UN After Annan
Shashi Tharoor, UN
Who will succeed Kofi Annan as
UN Secretary General is a hot
question among diplomats.
Shashi Tharoor, UN Undersecretary
General, explores what the job involves.
«THE most impossible job on earth» was
how the first United Nations Secretary
General, Trygve Lie, described the post to
his successor, Dag Hammarskjold, in 1953.
Time has not made the job any easier.
The framers of the UN Charter gave the
Secretary General two distinct functions: «chief administrative officer of the Organisation » and also an independent official
whom the General Assembly and Security
Council can entrust with certain unspecified
(but implicitly political) tasks.
Each holder of the office must demonstrate
whether he is more Secretary than
General.
Paradoxes abound.
The Secretary General is expected to
enjoy the backing of governments, especially
the five Permanent Members of the
Security Council, but be above partiality to
any of them.
He establishes his credentials by bureaucratic
or diplomatic service, but, once elected,
must transcend his past and serve as a
voice of the world, even a «secular Pope.»
The Secretary General is entrusted with
assisting Member States to make sound and
well-informed decisions, which he is then
obliged to execute, but he is also authorised
to influence their work and even to propose
actions that they should undertake.
He administers a complex organisation
and serves as head of the UN agencies, but
must exercise this role within budgetary
and regulatory constraints imposed by the
member governments.
True, the Secretary General has an
unparalleled agenda-shaping authority.
But he does not have the power to execute
all his ideas, and he articulates a vision
that only governments can fulfil.
He moves the world, but he cannot direct it.
It was Hammarskjold who, at the height of
the Cold War, first argued that an impartial
civil servant could be «politically celibate»
without being «politically virgin.»
The Secretary General could play a
political role without losing his impartiality,
provided he hewed faithfully to the
Charter and to international law.
With the Cold War’s end, Kofi Annan
has gone further than his predecessors
in using the «bully pulpit» of his office.
He boldly raised the question of the
morality of intervention and the duty of
the individual to follow his conscience,
and he challenged Member States to
resolve the tensions between state sovereignty
and their responsibility to protect
ordinary people.
Often, a Secretary General can raise an
awkward question but not dictate the
appropriate answer; Annan’s historic
speech to the General Assembly in 1999 on
intervention set a thousand flowers blooming
at think-tanks and among op-ed columnists,
but it has not led to a single military
intervention to protect the oppressed.
The UN is often seen embodying international
legitimacy, yet the Secretary
General’s pronouncements often have less
impact on the conduct of Member States
than the Pope’s strictures on birth control.
The Secretary General knows that he
can accomplish little without the support
of members whose inaction on one
issue or another he might otherwise
want to denounce.
He cannot afford to allow frustration on any
one issue to affect his ability to elicit cooperation
from governments on a range of others.
Annan once made the point by citing an
old Ghanaian proverb: «Never hit a man on
the head when you have your fingers
between his teeth.»
Today’s single-superpower world also
means that the Secretary General must
manage a relationship that is vital to the
UN’s survival without mortgaging his own
integrity and independence.
The insistent demands of some in the
US that the UN prove its utility to America – demands that could not have been
made in the same terms during the Cold
War – oblige a Secretary General to walk
a tightrope between heeding US priorities
and the preferences of the membership
as a whole.
Paradoxically, he can be most useful to
the US when he demonstrates his independence
from it.
Member States’ increasing micro-management
of budgets has also weakened the
Secretary General’s authority.
Both Annan and his predecessor,
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, embarked on
ambitious administrative reforms, but
were unable to address the far greater
levels of procedural and regulatory inertia
in areas under the authority of the
member states.
No Secretary General has enjoyed real
independence from governments: the
UN operates without embassies or intelligence
services, and Member States
resist any attempt to acquire such capabilities.
A Secretary General’s reach thus cannot
exceed his grasp, and his grasp cannot
extend across the Member States’ frontiers – or their pocketbooks.
Indeed, today the Secretary General
commands great diplomatic legitimacy,
and even greater media visibility, but less
political power than the language of the
UN Charter suggests.
To be effective, he must be skilled at
managing staff and budgets, gifted at public
diplomacy (and its behind-the-scenes
variant), and able to engage the loyalties of
a wide array of external actors, including
non-governmental organisations, business
groups and journalists.
He also must convince the nations of
the poor and conflict-ridden South that
their interests are uppermost in his
mind while ensuring that he can work
effectively with the wealthy and powerful
North.
He must recognise the power and the
prerogatives of the Security Council, especially
its five Permanent Members, while
staying attentive to the priorities and passions
of the General Assembly.
And he must prese Member States with
politically achievable proposals and
implement his mandates within the means
they provide him.
Above all, the Secretary General needs a
vision of the higher purpose of his office
and an awareness of its potential and limitations.
In other words, to be successful, he must
conceive and project a vision of the UN as
it should be, while administering and
defending the organisation as it is.
Truly an impossible job.
Project Syndicate * Shashi Tharoor is
UN Undersecretary General and the author,
most
recently, of a collection of literary essays,
‘Bookless in Baghdad’.
Extract from The Namibian open edition, 28/04/2006.
© 2006 UN Special |