Fate or Destiny may have determined that I was never meant to work for the United Nations. In early 1994 while at the verge of completing my doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, I had a job offer to work as a Political Affairs Officer in the Rwandan capital of Kigali. As I was going through the practicalities of taking up the job, Rwanda imploded into a cauldron of genocide and unbelievable bloodshed. The job offer had to be cancelled. More than a decade later, in 2008, I was headhunted, out of the blues, for the post of Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary-General. It is supposedly one of the most influential posts in the UN system, carrying with it the exalted title of Assistant Secretary-General. When I arrived New York Kennedy Airport late in the evening, I discovered that my luggage could not be found. Whether my luggage was lost due to an accident or someone had deliberately ensured it would never leave Abuja, I will never know. The interview was scheduled for 8.00 am the following morning. Meanwhile, the shops had closed and I did not know of anywhere in Manhattan where I could buy a new suit and shirt at that time of the night. Turning up the following morning very casually dressed in jeans and blazers in that high-octane ambience, it was clear that the interview panel were not listening to anything I said.
My personal experiences aside, I have always regarded the UN as one of the most important institutions ever invented by mankind. It is a good employer. You get to travel to different parts of the world and even to hobnob with kings and queens. Working for an organization of that world importance should never be about money. Rather, it should be about mission and purpose – about the future of our inseparable humanity.
“We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind; and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person; in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small; and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained; and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom….”
These are the glorious opening lines of the United Nations Charter, a document which was signed by 50 nations in San Francisco on 26 June 1945. It came into force as an internationally binding treaty on 24 October of the same year. Thepreceding month of October 2015 marks seventy years since the founding of the universal body.
It has been said that if the UN did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent it. It is perhaps the most important experiment in collective security known in the annals of the human family of nations; a testament to the ideals and the hopes that have inspired visionary. In another seventy years humanity would know whether the experiment has succeeded in saving mankind from the scourge of war as its founding fathers had hoped or in turning swords into ploughsharesas Old Testament Prophet Isaiah had dreamt. Or perhaps it might end up as just another Utopian dream; an elaborate hoax that camouflages the ambitions of the great powers, that allows, to echo the Greek historian Thucydides, the powerful to do as they please and the weak to grant what they must.
On Saturday 24th October, barely three weeks ago, more than 350 iconic landmarks around the world were lit in blue, the colour of the United Nations, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the universal world organization aptly described by one commentator as “The Parliament of Man”. To mark the occasion UN scribe Ban Ki-Moon called on the 193 member states to unite their strength so as to better serve “we the people”. In his words:“National flags are a mark of pride and patriotism in every country around the world. But there is only one flag that belongs to all of us. That blue flag of the United Nations was a banner of hope for me growing up in wartime Korea. Seven decades after its founding, the United Nations remains a beacon for all humanity.”
The quest for a great and universal peace has been part of humanity’s most cherished dreams. From the ancient Chinese Bamboo Annals dating back to about 1,000 BC to the Egyptian peace treaties signed between the Pharaohs and the Persians; men have sought in vain for a banner that will enable them to build a permanent tabernacle to the Temple of human brotherhood. The Peace of Westphalia 1648 that ended the so-called Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, signaled the emergence of the modern sovereign territorial state as we know it today. The war had claimed over 10 million lives and was ghastly in its savagery. The eighteenth century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant in Prussia dreamt of a Perpetual Peace, of world united by ethical norms and governed by the force of morality and law; a civilized community of nations united by commitment to peace and international social justice. Thinkers like Kant were building on the thought of the medieval Spanish jurists of Salamanca such as Bartolomé de las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria who taught about the universal dignity of all human being regardless of race. There was also the work of the great Italian jurist Alberico Gentili which was along similar lines.
It is universally agreed that it was Hugo Grotius of Holland who laid the foundations for the law of nations. Hugo Grotius wrote the first textbook in International Law, De jure belli ac pacis libri (On the Law of War and Peace),as early as 1625. An Ambassador to the Court of Louis XIV at the mere age of sixteen, Grotius was far ahead of his times and probably next to Leibniz and Isaac Newton, one of the greatest geniuses humanity has ever known.
The Congress of Vienna 1815 marked the end of the Napoleonic wars and the tumult they had spread all over benighted Europe. What emerged was a concert system based on the balance of power diplomacy. It was to guarantee peace for a century. The young Henry Alfred Kissinger completed his Harvard doctoral dissertation, A World Restored, on that particular theme; examining the role of the balance of power in securing peace in the Old Continent, focusing on the role of key statesmen such as Metternich in Germany and Castlereagh in Britain.
In 1914, Europe exploded once more into flames. It was an imperial war for conquest and hegemony centred on Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one hand and France and Britain on the other.
At the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles 1919, President Woodrow Wilson of America championed the idea of a League of Nations to secure the common peace and to establish a new amity among. The young John Maynard Keynes was an adviser to the British delegation in Paris. He was horrified by the outcome of the Conference which had imposed punitive and humiliating reparations on the defeated powers, especially Germany. Having just come down from Cambridge and barely in his late twenties, Keynes was a worldly-wise intellectual who was to become the most influential economist of the twentieth century and probably of all time. He saw clearly that Versailles was merely going to sow the seeds of another global catastrophe. His book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, made him a celebrity at a very young age.
Sadly, Keynes was dead right. The beggar-thy-neighbour trade and financial policies led to the mutual ruination of the most advanced economies. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 led to the Great Depression. Economic woes, on their part, preceded political upheavals, leading to extremist ideologies such as fascism and aggressive nationalism in Germany, Austria, and Japan. Japan was to occupy Manchuria, a considerable portion of China. The infamous Rape of Nanking perpetrated by the Japanese in China was one of the most shameful episodes in the annals of human crime. Italy was to occupy Abyssinia in 1935. Emperor Haile Selassie went into exile in Jerusalem, and later, Britain. In his famous address to the League of Nations in June 1936, he prophetically declared that failure to protect weaker nations would lead to catastrophe for the entire world: “Apart from the Kingdom of the Lord there is not on this earth any nation that is superior to any other. Should it happen that a strong Government finds it may with impunity destroy a weak people, then the hour strikes for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.”
Amidst rude heckling by Italian fascists, Emperor Haile Selassie’s impassioned appeals fell on deaf ears. Britain and France behaved with their characteristic hypocrisy, double standards and prevarication. The lights were going out all over the world, but the League was powerless to do anything about it. America, which had long championed the League idea, was not a member, because Congress had determined that it was not in the interest of the United States to belong to such a world body with binding moral and legal obligations. Evidently, a system of collective security without its most powerful member was, quite simply, a non-starter. Some historians believe that President Wilson, one of the most renowned political scientists, might have died of a broken heart on the 4thof March 1921, having seen all his dreams about the League evaporate into thin air.
The League had a few achievements to its name. It was influential in setting up the International Labour Organisation as well as the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) at The Hague, which was to metamorphose into the International Court of Justice (ICJ). But it suffered from severe limitations. The League of Nations was essentially a club of European powers which excluded more than a half of humanity, most of them denizens of colonial dependencies. The League’ Council had operated on the basis of unanimity. Every country had a veto. It was a rather cumbersome arrangement. Hitler and the Nazis had noisily withdrawn Germany from the League. So did the Japanese under Emperor Hirohito. At the best of times, very little happened at the League’s inner sanctums in Geneva; at the worst, everything was immobilized by gridlock.
It was in light of the serious defects of the League that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as early as 1939, instructed his Secretary of State Cordell Hull to set up a committee to work on a new post-war international architecture. Cordell Hull delegated the task to one of his advisers, the brilliant young Russian émigré analyst by the name of Leo Pasvolsky. A team was set up in the State Department to plan a successor organization to the League. During the San FranciscoConference Cordell Hull and Pasvolsky brought with them an American vision for the new United Nations. Brilliant young men such as Adlai Stevenson and Averell Harriman who were in the American delegation, were later to be influential players in their nation’s international diplomacy. The Soviet Union had the likes of Viacheslav Molotov and Andrei Gromyko on their team. Jan Smuts, the brilliant South African Prime Minister,was one of the leading lights at San Francisco. He enunciated the vision of a new liberal internationalism which he believes ought to guide the new organisation: “For the human race, the hour has struck. Mankind has arrived at the crisis of its fate, the fate of its future as a civilized world.
Next week we shall conclude our reflections on the UN by looking at achievements and failings of the organisation in course of its remarkable evolution over the last seventy years.
Obadiah Mailafia
