Objective, impartial—neutral? (2)

Time, Place

We began to engage in last week’s edition with a spectrum of values—objectivity, impartiality, neutrality—that mattered enormously to Dag Hammarskjöld as secretary-general, and always matter in political processes where force and influence compete with facts. This week’s edition looks further into Hammarskjöld’s understanding of these terms and their place in politics and diplomacy. ‘The Secretary-General,’ he said in 1954, ‘must not only be impartial, he must appear to be impartial. That means that situations may develop in which he has to move with considerable caution.’ At that time, many such situations lay ahead.

A note to friends of this site: owing to travel, the next edition will appear in early February.

Dag Hammarskjöld returned often to this topic. It was a responsibility of his office to keep key values of the United Nations in front of the public, but he doesn’t seem to have been simply meeting a responsibility: he was deeply interested and always learning more. Here are several of his returns:

Is it not the duty of the Secretary-General, to all the extent that he can, and it is difficult sometimes, to be objective—not impartial, for that is a kind of rather sterile and neutral word. And being objective means necessarily to try and explain the viewpoints as well as one can and as deeply as you can understand them, and to explain them in all directions.
(PP II, 5 May 1955, 483)

We are coming very quickly to, so to say, the free-lance part of the press conference. That is all right. For my own part, I think that neutrality may be moral, that neutrality may be immoral, that lack of neutrality may be moral, that lack of neutrality may be immoral—it all depends on factors which are not strictly linked to the definition.
(PP III, 22 June 1956, 170)

At a press conference this morning I was asked—by the way, by a very famous journalist—a question which, frankly, was outside the framework of a press conference. He asked me what we would do about the underlying differences in the hearts and in the souls of men. He said, ‘It is all right what you are doing in the political field, but what does it matter if back of it all there is deterioration of this type?’ My reply was the only possible one. It was that I felt that he should, as far as the Secretary-General was concerned, make a distinction between the officer of the Organization and the man. The officer of the Organization should not and could not be a preacher of moralism. The man had the duty of every man to fight against those very tendencies the journalist had in mind, but in doing so, he did it as a man and not as a functionary of the Organization.
(PP III, 19 June 1957, 622)

Whether a certain action is justified as self-defense or not is something which under United Nations legislation can only be decided by the Security Council. I may have my views on the concrete cases, but they would not be binding on anybody. They would just be my private views, and from that point of view they may be of interest but not of significance.
(PP III, 7 June 1956, 133)

In his periodic, often harsh encounters with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, Hammarskjöld once managed to use a witty toast to make the point that as secretary-general he served the United Nations and its member nations without bias toward one or another. The incident is well told by Joseph Lash, a UN journalist and Hammarskjöld’s first biographer:

With characteristic agility, Hammarskjold lifted his glass. He drew a comparison with Soviet Russia’s ‘famous Sputnik,’ observing: ‘True, I was launched in Sweden, but once in orbit I do not come close to any country.’
(Lash, 167)

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Objective, impartial—neutral? (1)

Time, Place

‘While there are neutral countries, there are no neutral men…. We cannot have another Hammarskjöld, no matter where he comes from among the neutral countries.’ So said Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, in a series of interviews (April 1961) with the American journalist, Walter Lippmann. Khrushchev had Dag Hammarskjöld in his sights: he had called for his resignation, blamed him for every step and inevitable misstep in the Congo crisis which had explosively begun nine months earlier. Neutrality is an attitude and practice that Hammarskjöld carefully separated off from indifference. Neutrality can be useful, indifference never. On the other hand, he valued objectivity and impartiality without qualification. This week, and for several weeks to come, why not explore this spectrum of values? They matter in every mediation, every negotiation, at all levels from international affairs to friendships.

The fall 1960 session of the UN General Assembly was attended by many heads of state, notably Nikita Khrushchev, who took the occasion to attack Dag Hammarskjöld’s management of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo. In the October 3rd session, he launched his notion that there are no neutral men, to which he returned a half-year later with Walter Lippmann. Here is Khrushchev speaking:

The responsibility for interpreting and executing all the decisions of the General Assembly and the Security Council at present falls upon one man. But there is an old saying there are not, and never were, any saints on earth. Let those who believe in saints hold to their opinion; we do not credit such tales. So this one man—at the present time, Mr. Hammarskjöld—has to interpret and execute the decisions of the General Assembly and the Security Council, bearing in mind the interests of the monopoly-capitalist countries as well as those of the socialist countries and of the neutral countries. But this is not possible. Everyone has heard how vigorously the imperialist countries defend Mr. Hammarskjold’s position. Is it not clear then, in whose interest he interprets and executes those decisions, whose ‘saint’ he is?
(UN General Assembly, 882nd session, 3 October 1960, 318-21)

This is just a sample of the language of the time. Hammarskjöld ably defended the United Nations, the office and role of the secretary-general, and his own person through the months to come. But he was listening. At a press conference in June, he still had Khrushchev’s line of attack in mind:

It may be true that in a very deep, human sense there is no neutral individual, because…everyone, if he is worth anything, has to have his ideas and ideals—things which are dear to him, and so on. But what I do claim is that even a man who is in that sense not neutral can very well undertake and carry through neutral actions, because that is an act of integrity. That is to say, I would say there is no neutral man, but there is, if you have integrity, neutral action by the right kind of man. And ‘neutrality’—may develop, after all, into a kind of jeu de mots. I am not neutral as regards the Charter; I am not neutral as regards facts. But that is not what we mean. What is meant by ‘neutrality’ in this kind of debate is, of course, neutrality in relation to interests; and there I do claim that there is no insurmountable difficulty for anybody with the proper kind of guiding principles in carrying through such neutrality one hundred percent.
(PP V, 12 June 1961, 492)

From an early stage in his years of service at the UN, Hammarskjöld had been reflecting about the challenges facing the UN Secretariat, which was by design a politically neutral international civil service and, as he put it, a ‘radical innovation in international life’. In December 1953, speaking with UN staff members at Geneva, he said:

The weight we carry is not determined by physical force or the number of people who form the constituency. It is based solely on trust in our impartiality, our experience and knowledge, our maturity of judgment. Those qualities are our weapons, in no way secret weapons, but as difficult to forge as guns and bombs.
(PP II, 4 December 1953, 193)

Clearly a topic to be continued next week!

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The main requirements

Time, Place

A reporter from the internal newsletter of the United Nations Secretariat rather diffidently approached Dag Hammarskjöld in January, 1958, to interview him. It was a first. In all the years Hammarskjöld had served as secretary-general, no in-house journalist had taken the lift to the 38th floor to record a conversation. As reported in Secretariat News for February 14th of that year, the exchange was wide-ranging and engaging. Just at the end, a question so compelled Hammarskjöld’s interest that he returned to it a few days later in a private letter to a trusted Swedish friend. To open this new year’s exploration of his political wisdom, you’ll find below both the interview and Hammarskjöld’s later comment.

Reporter: One last question, Mr. Hammarskjöld: What, in your opinion, are the main qualities that an international official should possess?

DH: Well, that is a difficult question to answer straight away. You should give me a little while to think about it. First off, however, I would say that a heightened awareness combined with an inner quiet are among these qualities. Also, a certain humility, which helps you to see things through the other person’s eye, to reconstruct his case, without losing yourself, without being a chameleon, if you see what I mean. Take men like Flaubert and Malraux, whom I mentioned before. They force you to see with their eyes, but also to exercise your own mind.
(Secretariat News, Feb. 14, 1958, 3-4)

A little later, Hammarskjöld revisited the question in a private letter:

The other day I was forced by a journalist to try to formulate my views on the main requirements of somebody who wishes to contribute to the development of peace and reason. I found no better formulation than this: ‘He must push his awareness to the utmost limit without losing his inner quiet, he must be able to see with the eyes of the others from within their personality without losing his own.’
(DH to the author and 1974 Nobel Laureate, Eyvind Johnson, Jan. 31, 1958)

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