The United Nations Secretariat
A Political History
“The degree to which the objectives of the Charter can be realized will be largely determined by the manner in which the Secretariat performs its tasks”.
So wrote the Preparatory Commission of the newborn United Nations (UN), meeting in London in 1946. After the devastation of WWII, the Organization’s framers left no doubt about the importance they attached to the international civil service (ICS), a body of competitively recruited officials who are required by the Charter to pursue the UN’s—rather than their own countries’—interests and objectives.
Although the daring experiment of the international civil service had begun shortly after the Second World War with the League of Nations (LON), the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United Nations substantially expanded it, in the belief that an institution with such a broad remit and global mandate needed international civil servants, rather than ‘national’ officials temporarily ‘loaned’ by member states. The rationale for this conscious—albeit contested—decision was provided by the Commission itself: “The Secretariat cannot successfully perform its tasks unless it enjoys the confidence of all member states” (emphasis added). Such confidence rested on the belief that states are best served by international officials who are able to perform their duties without fear or favor, regardless of their nationality or their country’s foreign policies.
Two aspects are noteworthy here, both of which run through this project and are symptomatic of the divide between the expectations that accompanied the ‘birth’ of the Secretariat, on the one hand, and its institutional ‘life’ to date, on the other. The first is academic neglect: despite being identified by the UN Charter as a ‘Principal Organ’, the Secretariat remains one of the Organization’s least researched institutions. As I note below, only recently have the UN and IR literatures begun to take a closer look at the UN bureaucracy, so the contrast between the centrality of the Secretariat in the Commission’s intentions and its peripheral place in the literature remains striking. The second aspect partly explains the first one and comes down to a well-established tendency to conflate Secretary-General (SG) and Secretariat, with the former seen as the personification or embodiment of the latter (and this, despite the fact that Chapter XV of the UN Charter is titled ‘The Secretariat’, rather than ‘The Secretary-General’).
A reassessment of the historical record, fresh sources—including declassified documents, a new private archive, and several ‘elite’ interviews—alongside this author’s professional experience in New York, cast doubt on this assumption. As anybody who has worked at UN Headquarters knows, there is a considerable degree of dissociation between the UN bureaucracy and its nominal boss, the SG. While students of bureaucratic decision-making will find this unsurprising, such disconnect goes well beyond bureaucratic opportunism, for in New York certain departments have historically been closer to—and more firmly under the ‘control’ of—the SG than others. The book asks whether (and why) this has been the case across time by considering the interactions of UN bureaucrats with SGs as well as with state representatives. In tracing the contours of an institutional history of the UN bureaucracy, my project aims to tackle the mentioned scholarly neglect by looking at the Secretariat as a discreet actor that is distinct from—though by no means independent of—the other UN organs, including the SG.
It is an actor that matters on multiple fronts: the world’s largest (if not the only ‘universal’) bureaucracy, with a staggering array of roles and competences; an incubator of norms and practices across several fields; a crossroad of major IR players (states, SGs, NGOs); a barometer of international cooperation; and—as we shall see—a theater of Great Power rivalries. As its subtitle indicates, my book suggests that the Secretariat ought to be seen not simply as an outgrowth of a ‘political’ community, as most bureaucracies tend to be, but as a maker of it—a distinctive player with its own agendas and with constructive as well as obstructing potential that, by its very existence and growth, can strengthen that community but also weaken it. The UN bureaucracy reflects the vagaries of international politics, but it is more than a mirror of IR.
This book project is under contract with
