Rethinking Humanitarianism | The UN’s 20th-century diplomacy for 21st-century problems

SPEAKERS

Tammam Aloudat, Thant Myint-U

Thant Myint-U  00:00

Don't forget about peace. For people to live in a war is probably the worst possible thing, and I think we should be really, really fearful that we don't sleepwalk back into another great war and a nuclear catastrophe.

 

Tammam Aloudat  00:18

Welcome to Rethinking Humanitarianism, a show that explores the future of aid in a world of rising crises. I am your host, Tammam Aloudat, CEO of The New Humanitarian.

 

Tammam Aloudat  00:38

We are at a pivotal time in terms of our international liberal order and multilateral institutions like the United Nations. There is a funding crisis brought about by the Trump administration's dismantling of US foreign assistance. There is a widespread global liberal backsliding that has infected nearly every aspect of life and war, genocide and famine continue to go on unchecked. As we approach the 80th UN General Assembly, it is clear that the systems of the past are not meeting the needs of the present. In a world of 21st Century problems, the UN's 20th century multilateral diplomacy just isn't cutting it. In hopes of illuminating our present, we are digging into the past and to help us with that, we are joined by historian and writer Thant Myint-U. His latest book, “Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World”, is a look at the history of the 1960s told through the life of his grandfather, U Thant, the first UN Secretary-General of colour. If you have any questions or comments, stick around for the credits to learn about how to reach us here at Rethinking Humanitarianism.

 

Tammam Aloudat  02:02

Thant, thank you for being here with us today on Rethinking Humanitarianism.

 

Thant Myint-U  02:07

Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

 

Tammam Aloudat  02:09

Your newest book, “Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Just World”, is a look at the history of the 1960s told through the life of your grandfather, U Thant, the first UN Secretary-General of colour. Can you talk about why you felt it is particularly important to write this book now,

 

Thant Myint-U  02:30

I mean, I knew about him, I knew the broad outlines of his life, but it wasn't really something I'd researched, even though I've written many history books about other subjects, and I started looking through his archives, which have been declassified over the past many years and digitised over the COVID period by the UN and I started to see things that I had never really read anywhere. And so I began to dig deeper into the archives, stories like the Cuban Missile Crisis, like the Six Day War, and then compare them with a lot of books that were in the library, in the bookshop, and I realised that in the archive there were stories, or a broad story, that really had never been told. And so that was the beginning of my journey to really try to understand what he actually did as UN Secretary General in the 60s, why he did it, and how it connected with other things in his life as well.

 

Tammam Aloudat  03:19

I mean, as you said, plenty of stuff happened in the 60s during his tenure that were, in themselves, major political upheavals. But you also talk about an arc of the story. What is the arc that his story and that of the UN have revolved around in that period.

 

Thant Myint-U  03:38

When we think, or people think in the West about the UN and the history of that period, they think of it as the Cold War period, and they tend to think of the 20th century as the history of World War One, World War Two, then the Cold War then the post Cold War period that may be ending now. But for most people in the world, in Asia and Africa especially, I mean, the history of the 20th century is actually the history of empire and post-empire, and the UN was an essential part of framing of that transition, in large part, a peaceful transition, but also a fought-after transition to a post-imperial world. And the late 1950s which is when my book begins, when my grandfather moves to New York and becomes the Burmese ambassador to the UN, was a time when many of these newly independent states were coming into the UN and were changing it in a fundamental way. And so the arc of the story is, is the story of how these Afro Asians, as they call themselves, with my grandfather as Secretary General for much of that period, tried to remake the UN and deal with the world as it was then, and deal with all these different crises. And so it's a story of success in the beginning, at least, and it's a story of great challenges. And how you look at the ending, I think, depends on your perspective, both of the world that came after and also of what was happening at that time as well.

Tammam Aloudat  04:59

Yeah. The elevator pitch story of creating the UN is: Everybody was nice and benevolent, and just after the Second World War, they sat together, wrote a charter, voted it in. You go into more nuance than that, and you talk about the victors of the war, and then that transition, you mentioned, from empire to post-empire, and it's not a straightforward story, as you know the reading the back of the leaflet. So can you tell me a little about that transition from empire to post-empire?

 

Thant Myint-U  05:34

The word United Nations was first coined by Franklin Roosevelt, together with Winston Churchill to really mean the wartime alliance. So if you go back to newspapers in those days in 1942- 43 they often refer to the United Nations instead of the allies. So they would say the United Nations is invading. This country has taken over. This part of Italy has moved into northern France and everything else. But then Roosevelt also thought, for the end of the war, they have to start planning what's going to come. And it shouldn't be an America that retreats back into isolation, but should be, in some way, an America that's part of the bigger world and a kind of an American empire that wouldn't be called an empire. But at the same time, I think the feeling was that most Americans wouldn't accept an American empire. America was built on this idea of no sort of entanglements with the old world. And so they came up with this UN Framework, which, in the end, America, together with the other victors of World War Two, would dominate, and then on the side, there would be this opportunity for global cooperation on economic and social issues as well. So the underlying assumption of all of this was that that wartime alliance between the US, UK and the Soviets in particular, was going to carry forward, and that these countries were going to enforce a peace, keeping down Germany and Japan, keeping at bay any new aggressive powers that might emerge to challenge them, and then with smaller states, they would try to work on different economic and other issues, because they thought it was economic problems that fueled the path to World War Two in the 1930s but that vision of the UN never happened, because even by the time the UN was founded in the summer of 1945 the Cold War was unfolding, and that assumption that Roosevelt had of Moscow Washington Alliance was falling apart. And so for a time, people thought maybe the UN wouldn't survive. Maybe it was already outdated by 1946 and it kind of lurched from one sort of attempt to remake itself to another, until the late 1970s when these new countries in a very unexpected way. This is something that Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill certainly didn't foresee, was that all of these countries their fight for independence would win out, and that they would become a majority at the UN and then try to remake it themselves in terms of what they wanted for the future of the world.

 

Tammam Aloudat  07:56

I had a discussion a while ago with a British colleague, and she was saying, “When we created the multilateral order”, and I said, “Sorry, I come from Syria. When you created the multilateral order, we were a colony. We didn't have a part in that creation or in that vision”. But you're saying here that those countries, and you mentioned, particularly the Afro Asian, but also with other countries that were seen as neutral, like Ireland, for example, that there has been a true transformation. What did it actually do in practice?

 

Thant Myint-U  08:26

Well, it's a couple of things. I mean, one is that these countries, once they had become independent, they wanted to make sure that their nominal independence, so the British or the French or the Dutch or whoever else granting them independence actually meant independence, and they knew that that couldn't just happen in isolation, that it was only possible as part of a global framework in which they could become an independent state on equal terms with other states, including the ex colonial powers. So in a way, membership of the UN, being an equal state of the UN was part of kind of making the international system that we had today. It wasn't just going to be a world of the British Commonwealth, the French equivalent, other things, dominions. It was going to be a world of equal state. So they fought for that, and they won, and they embraced many of the parts of the UN Charter that really were kind of not focused on, especially including human rights. And in the late 1950s they wanted to make sure that anti racism, in particular, but also the still incomplete fight for decolonisation, was at the heart of what the UN was going to do. They made sure in 1960 under heavy pressure, the West relented, that the UN would pass a historic declaration on the need to move as quickly as possible to the independence of all parts of the world that still remained under colonial rule. So the UN, by the 1960s became this place that was as much a kind of north south battleground over ideas as east to west. But at its core, the UN became this idea that really emerged from Bandung. Think from many of these Afro Asian meetings and networks and conferences that the world should be not only UN-centred, but should be a peaceful world, not a world that was divided into cold war camps, that was their vision above all, and a world in which that kind of global cooperation, which people had talked about in ‘45 but never really did very much about would also be at the heart of the organisation.

 

Tammam Aloudat  10:23

When you talk about Bandung, that is the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955 where about 30 Afro Asian states came together in defiance of the imperialism colonialism in Bandung, that was a very big mark, and you talk about them having succeeded, is the success only political, or does it actually translate into a real difference? 

 

Thant Myint-U  10:49

For decades already, certainly from the 1920s there had been these contacts, meetings, conferences, networks of people from Egypt, from India, from Indonesia, from elsewhere, really trying to see how best to work together, not just in terms of fighting colonialism in their own countries, but really thinking about what the world of the future should be like. And so these networks existed, some of them were connected also with the struggle for civil rights in America as well, and with many prominent Black American leaders there and 55 Bandung was, to some extent, an active defiance, but it was also an act of celebration. It was when these countries really felt that they were finally coming into their own. As you mentioned, they were under this charismatic leadership that was very popular, at least at that time. And they included, you know, monarchies, they included republics, they included communist countries. They included anti-communist countries. But I think the thing that they all had in common was they had this shared sense of a humiliating colonial experience that they felt was finally coming to an end. And they were very optimistic that working through the UN this vessel, or this entity that was there and had been created in 1945 that they could sort of merge into it and use it as their own vehicle to complete decolonization and to and to make this new world so that Bandung sort of spirit, the idea that there can be a peaceful resolution of all disputes. There's no need for another war. There's no need for further colonialism. This was that optimistic, almost impatient kind of sense that came out of Bandung, but that really influenced a whole generation of people, both in their own countries, but also coming to New York at the UN at that time.

 

Tammam Aloudat  12:29

And if we come to your grandfather U Thant, he was the Secretary General of the UN between 1961 and 1971 and he came to New York First as a Burmese ambassador. How did it happen that he became that figure that led the UN for 10 years, and particularly, the first person of colour, the first person who's not, I believe, even Scandinavian, then became the UN Secretary General. How did that happen?

 

Thant Myint-U  13:00

It's in many ways, a really remarkable story. I mean, it's even more remarkable because just 10 years, or less than 10 years, actually about eight or nine years before coming to New York to be Burmese ambassador, he was a headmaster school teacher in a small town in Burma, living in a little wooden house, administering a school down this dirt path, a place with no electricity, running water, but he was really interested in the rest of the world. And when he was 38, 39 he decided he was going to make a midlife career change and went to Rangoon, the capital of the newly independent country. And within 10 years, he was the ambassador to the UN and living in the middle of Manhattan and engaging with all these people like Nehru and Nasser and the others post-Bandung in trying to remake the world. And in 1961 when his predecessor Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden was killed in a still, sort of mysterious plane crash, there was already the sense that one of the Afro Asians, one of the non-aligned movement countries, should be the ones to produce the next Secretary General. They themselves thought that very strongly, it shouldn't be a Westerner. It shouldn't be someone from Europe. And he had developed the reputation over those few years in New York that he'd already been there, of the person who had all these third world credentials. He had been at Bandung, he had been at Belgrade, but still got along with everyone, and that he himself wanted to be a bridge between these newly independent countries and the West. And he had many friends from the UK, from American friends and others. And so I think it was that combination of Burma being a neutral country, the non aligned and Afro Asian countries wanting one of their own in that job, and then he himself being seen to have the right personality and temperament for that role. But he was only given that job on probation. He was made Acting Secretary General for a year because, I think especially the Soviets, wanted to know what he was really all about.

 

Tammam Aloudat  14:52

In the last episode of this podcast, I asked the guests whether they thought the personality of the Secretary General really makes a difference for the outcomes of the UN. Can you tell me about U Thant and what of his personality fitted that? 

 

Thant Myint-U  15:07

Well, I think in a way, he was very sure of what he thought was right and wrong, of morality, ethics and international relations were important to him. But at the same time, I think he saw himself as a pragmatist, and he never lost sight of what the UN actually was as an intergovernmental organisation and the actual power and influence that he had and didn't have. So I think he was always trying to balance this sense of an ethical view of what should be done, needed to be done, with a pragmatic sort of sense of what his office actually was, and not getting too carried away beyond what he could actually do. So I think there was always that calculation. But I think in terms of temperament, one of the more interesting things that I saw in my research was a person who knew both Hammarskjöld and U Thant, and who said, you know and Hammarskjöld was almost literally electrifying. You were electrified in his presence. He was a very dynamic individual, and you really felt like you could, you know, almost do anything, whereas with U Thant, you immediately sort of relaxed and calmed down and thought that almost any problem could be solved through compromise. So he was a very reassuring but also relaxing presence. So I think that he was someone who liked to joke a lot, who liked to put people at ease, who was very friendly in person, and so I think that kind of aspect of his personality doesn't come out in his official kind of statements and things, but in all the records over those 10 years, that's what people from John F Kennedy all the way to George Bush, who was the last American ambassador, and all his friends from the Afro Asian movement, they all wrote more or less the same thing about the kind of person he was.

 

Tammam Aloudat  16:41

That means who people are is actually consequential, even in a position like Secretary General of the UN and it feels now UN Secretary General, all they do in public, at least, I'm sure they do much more, is be concerned and alarmed and put statements now on Twitter, instead of press releases about how concerned and alarmed they are about all kinds of stuff. Did the position of the UN Secretary General, in your opinion, become less relevant or less powerful, less influential now than it used to be at those times?

 

Thant Myint-U  17:15

Yes, absolutely. I think, through no fault of any particular Secretary General, I think there's been a downward trajectory for a long time, partly because it's very difficult as Secretary General to sort of take credit for anything. And even successful Secretaries General, or people who've been successful in different crises, it's difficult for them to take credit because it's in their interest, or it's their job, in a way, to let others and governments take credit for having made the compromise or signed the peace deal, or whatever it is. And you had this huge initial investment by the Americans, by the British, even by the Soviets in 1945 into the organisation, but no subsequent investment, or very little. And so, you know, when Hammarskjöld first carved out this position of the Secretary General as sort of the mediator of the world, the UN was still flying high in many capitals, it wasn't just governments, but publics really expected a lot, and so when he took the stage and became very active, it really raised the prestige of that office, the power and the position of that office. And my grandfather tried to continue that in many different ways, especially through the early 60s, early to mid 60s, but I think by the 70s and 80s, the West had turned away from the UN, and the UN faced a whole series of different problems. But I think it would have really surprised my grandfather this idea that the UN Secretary General has to be concerned and make statements on every issue, because I think he would have thought that the main job is trying quietly, first to see what is possible, what compromises could be made before saying anything publicly. I think Pérez de Cuéllar told his spokesman, in the early 80s, never say that he is concerned about anything, because that's what should be assumed. And you know, there's no need to say that. I think there are many other differences as well in terms of the kinds of personal diplomacy that may have been possible in the 60s that I think are very difficult to do now as well.

 

Tammam Aloudat  19:05

So the listeners understand the stakes that were at hand during U Thant’s tenure, just a year after there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then a whole slew of other things you mentioned, the Six Day War and others. Can you give us a quick walk through this turbulent decade.

 

Thant Myint-U  19:26

When he became Secretary General in November 1961 I mean, we talk often about, and we talk now about the crisis of the UN and the funding crisis and everything today, but think about 1961 or the late part of 1961, I mean, the Secretary General had been killed just then, the UN was absolutely broke. It had no money. It was in deep financial crisis. It couldn't pay its arrears. It couldn't pay for its peacekeeping operation. It had 20,000 plus troops in the Congo that didn't really know what to do next, and the Soviets, incredibly powerful at that time, were not thinking of pulling out of the organisation, but were. Thinking of undermining that organisation in a pretty fatal way, and saying they aren't sure if they actually want another UN Secretary General. So the whole world, at a time when, you know, the two superpowers were facing off with nuclear weapons and in Berlin and everything else, the world was in crisis, and the UN was in crisis. So his number one task was to pull the organisation back from the brink and to stabilise it and do that in the right way. And so for him, it meant really nurturing the best possible ties with President Kennedy and Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev, but also at the same time to take a super tough approach to what was happening in the Congo. So he took a much tougher approach than Dag Hammarskjöld, and eventually unleashed the UN peacekeeping force on the white supremacist mercenaries in Katanga, which is a secessionist province in the Congo. Within nine months of taking office, he mediated an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. He mediated a number of other conflicts, like the Dutch Indonesian conflict, for example, Cyprus in 1964 the beginning of the peacekeeping force there. And for most of his time, though, his main focus was trying to stop the war and the American intervention in Vietnam. And we sometimes forget, you know, 50 years on, 60 years on, how central Vietnam was, the war there, to everything that was happening internationally. So that was probably his most important focus, and then the later part of his time, so from 67 till 71 that was complemented by probably an almost equal focus on the Middle East, the Six Day War, its aftermath, the Israeli occupation of different territories and the attempt to find some sort of peace deal acceptable to Tel Aviv and Cairo and Amman.

 

Tammam Aloudat  22:02

So here we have a Secretary General of the UN in a time where it was difficult for the organisation and difficult in the world. What drove him, in your opinion? Why did he want to do that? I mean, it's taking up a punishing job that has very little chance of success.

 

Thant Myint-U  22:21

Why? I just think he was one of those people, and he wasn't the only one who really came into maturity at the height of sort of late colonialism, born into a kind of multicultural context, forced to understand many different worlds at the same time, speak different languages. And I think in the 1950s with independence, everything sort of accelerated. And I think they all had this real sense. And I think he had this real sense that the world was at an inflection point, and they could make a big difference. So I think he never underestimated the importance of the time he was living in, and the importance of trying to make the UN work. I mean, one of the things he said at the very end in an interview, actually, after he retired, was that when he was a young man in his 20s or 30s in the early 20th century, he would never have imagined that Burma would become independent as quickly as it did, and that within 25 years, it would be an equal member with the British sitting at the same table with the British and the French in this beautiful building on the East River in New York, sending off peacekeeping missions and talking about outer space treaties and everything else. And if we manage to do that in 25 years, imagine what else would be possible in another 25 years. So I think they were driven by this optimism that they had to have as well in the 1960s despite all of these crises and terrible wars at that time.

 

Tammam Aloudat  23:46

I mean, U Thant sort of blazed the way in the idea of someone coming from the other side of the world, from the south, from the newly independent countries, becoming that leader of the organisation. Since then, there have been a few others. I'd like to ask you about, taking from my own context in the 50s and 60s, my father's generation in Syria, everybody was ideologically bent somewhere, from being an Islamist to being a communist and everything in between. What were his ideological affinities?

 

Thant Myint-U  24:20

I think this is important to who he was, because I think when he was, you know, at university and and afterwards, as a school teacher who's writing a lot of op eds and essays and books and things, I think he saw himself as a sort of social democrat, you know, Fabian socialist. He was attracted to the left. He would have certainly seen himself as a man of the left, but not a radical. And I think he disliked the radical politicians that he saw in his own country who he thought offered easy solutions to what could end colonialism and what could come afterwards. So I think he saw himself as pragmatic in that way as well. And as I mentioned before, I think he'd like to see himself as a bridge between that ex-colonial world and the European or Western world as well. But I think you know, one thing that was really important to him was this idea that for all of these countries, the Afro Asian countries, whatever you want to call them, the Global South countries, that we would see it now, cementing this new international system, post-empire, was the most important thing. And I think he never really lost sight of that. And in a way, he was almost the last Bandung man standing in the 1960s you had to choose, and if you didn't choose sides, the Americans made you choose. And people like Ho Chi Minh or Fidel Castro were pushed into a kind of radical corner. Others did then embrace the Americans in different ways. Others who tried to straddle the fence were faced with military coup d'etat. Some like Lumumba were killed. Some radicalised themselves, you know, so by the time he left in 71 in a way, because he was UN Secretary General and staying in New York, he was a survivor of the spirit of that time and that optimism of the time in the mid 50s that had kind of passed over in many other parts of the world.

 

Tammam Aloudat  26:05

You mentioned that the West has turned away from the UN in the 70s. What happened after?

 

Thant Myint-U  26:12

You can read it in two ways. I mean, one way is to read it as by the late 60s, because of Vietnam, because of the positions that he took, increasingly, on Vietnam and became a real thorn in the side of the Lyndon Johnson administration, first and then to to an extent with with the Nixon administration after the Americans went from thinking that the UN was an instrument they could use as they wanted to something that could be a real problem for them, and even the Secretary General-ship could be something that could cause them political problems at home, because he was very popular in America for a time. He was voted the sixth, I think, most popular man in the country, according to a Gallup poll. So the Americans increasingly marginalised the UN especially under Nixon and Kissinger by the early 70s, and then you had this ideological backlash within the US with Reagan, with others who came in by the late 70s, who saw the UN principally as a hotbed of Third World radicalism and something that the US should try at least to manage, if not to kind of move away from as much as possible. So in that way, it's quite a tragic story, but that's an American perspective. That's a Washington perspective, I think, from the perspective of the rest of the world. I mean, their principal goal of creating an international system in which the whole world decolonized could be a part. That was a success. And it was a success that their issues and ideas became integral to the first world body that humanity has ever known. And then it depends a little bit on how one sees the past 50 years that, yes, we've had many wars and everything, but we've also had this unparalleled period of peace and prosperity in many parts of the world. And I think some of that is not because of the UN specifically, in terms of bureaucracies and everything. I think it's part of this international system that was cemented together as much by these newly decolonised countries as by the original founders in 1945.

 

Tammam Aloudat  28:07

I will propose a distinction that I would like you to help tell me if I'm right. One is that the UN is not a single thing, or at least is not seen as a single thing. There is a political UN that plays to the interests of its members. There is a political UN that is concerned with preventing conflict. Then there is the whole other UN that is operational agencies that provide aid. And of course, there's also the peacekeeping operations. There are logistical operations. Those are not the same things. And I bring that because in a recent article you've had in The Economist, you are talking about what is called UN80. We're coming to the UN General Assembly very soon. At the time of this recording, there is a need to reform, and it's because of money, lack of money, the cuts to the budget and others. But also it’s because of what people say, lack of efficiency or bloating or so on. You had a very particular point of, how should it go forward? Can you elaborate that?

 

Thant Myint-U  29:11

The main purpose of the UN when it was founded, was to prevent another great war, and it was at a time when, you know, 80 million people had been killed in the Second World War, and when the first atomic bombs were about to be exploded. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that, that threat is still there, that we could have another great war, that we could have a nuclear war. And I think the UN is the only universal body dedicated to peace that we have. We should make sure that we're making it the best possible instrument for war prevention as well as for terminating wars as well. So I think there's a peacemaking role of the UN that really should be front and centre of thinking about what the UN should be in the future. I think we can think about the Security Council in terms of its membership. The permanent membership is very dated as pretty much everyone would agree. But the Security Council has never really worked as it was meant to work. It's almost never been an enforcement body. It's possible to pass resolutions in countries to ignore it. So it's not clear to me that, even if we had better membership, that that would automatically help in terms of ending or even preventing it. I think in that political space, again, it's been successive Secretaries General, some more than others, who've really filled that peacemaking space unintended by the charter. So I think that's something that we have to think about, especially when we think about who could be or who should be Secretary General next year, when a new one is going to be selected. You're right. I mean, there are other, so many other parts of the UN system, so many other UN bureaucracies. The only thing I would say to that is obviously, there are many areas where the UN is really indispensable, does a lot of great work. There are a lot of amazing people who work in the UN. There's also, I'm sure, a lot of waste and inefficiency in different parts of the system as well. But I think that in the 1990s and 2000s not necessarily in a conspiratorial way, but maybe through a lot of good faith efforts, the UN kind of started to take a turn that's been negative in some ways, which is that rather than being funded by the main budget, it's been funded by voluntary contributions, which means more and more of the UN is funded by a few Western governments. And again, people in those governments may have intended the best things in terms of wanting simply to give more aid or more assistance or help with a peacekeeping operation. But it changed the nature of the UN system, and those parts of the UN system that then grew, and so a lot of the UN system became more of a donor delivery mechanism than the genuine multilateral organisation that was intended and that existed before. So I think when we think about the future of the UN, I think that part of it, the donor delivery mechanism, is in some ways the least important, because maybe others can do it. Donors can give money through other organisations. I think the two most important parts that we need to think about and preserve is the UN as that global forum where all of the world has a voice in some way that's one, and sets norms and promotes agendas. And second is that role of the Secretary General as a peacemaker, supported if possible, by a more broad based and more legitimate UN Security Council.

 

Tammam Aloudat  32:15

And to clarify the difference here the voluntary contributions, as opposed to the core budget, which comes from states paying their statutory contribution to the UN. So this is unearmarked and unallocated money that then the UN can allocate, as opposed to money that comes with a very specific purpose. And hence donors can decide what goes and what doesn't go, even if indirectly through their money. You mentioned that the creation of the UN was in, you know, the immediate post war, where people just didn't want to have another war, and the growth of it happened in the decolonisation and post-empire. There's also now another parallel line that I want to explore with you for a second, which is liberalism is a word that everybody uses for something different, but let's say the liberalism as existence of sovereignty of state, human rights, individual rights and open markets has been accepted in a way in the 50s and 60s and even part of the 70s, the Canadian welfare state, and then in the 70s and 80s, the neoliberalism and the sort of deregulation, open market and the aggressive, exploitive direction that Thatcher and Reagan took the world into. Do you think the economics of the world has interacted with its politics and changed the fate of the UN or was part of why this formula, which worked for a while and worked effectively, not necessarily efficiently, has stopped being able to work?

 

Thant Myint-U  33:40

Yeah, I think the economic story is really key. And I think it's, in some ways, it's regrettable that when people think of, you know, sort of economic issues at the UN, they think of aid issues and aid being given from North to South, whereas the ambition used to be much bigger. So, you know, going back to 1945 I'd mentioned before that the framers, the founders of the UN thought that a more prosperous world was the way in which you would help to prevent war. And so there was that idea at the very centre, that economic and social issues had to be integral to what the organisation did. But when the Afro Asians, the third world majority, came in by the late 50s, early 60s, I mean, their idea, again, was we cannot be independent as long as the economic system remains the way it is, as long as the world economy is in the hands of a few rich countries and their companies, what is our independence really mean? And so I think they wanted a much more equitable international economic system, and that's why 1964 there was a UN Conference on Trade and Development, because the idea was not just, “We need more aid”. The idea was, “Let's change the entire global trading system to make it more fair, to make it possible for us to grow really quickly and to industrialise and modernise our economies. What is independence if we're just going to be poor and second-rate countries in this international system?”. And so for a long time at the UN you know, through the 60s and 70s, a central fight was this fight, North-South fight over what was going to be the international economic system going forward. And for many of these poorer countries, the idea of forming cartels, for example, was extremely attractive. They saw what OPEC was doing. They thought maybe something similar would be possible with other resources that would give them the capital the boost to really modernise their economies. But this was a direct threat to the international economic order as it was, and so there was a pushback. The sort of neoliberal agenda of the late 1970s and 80s unleashed a lot of market forces that were really good for many people. Some specific countries took advantage of that and grew very quickly, like South Korea, for example, or Singapore, but for many others, the inequalities remained, and they were never able to catch up in a way that they wanted to in the 60s. And then by the 90s and 2000s that debate kind of was pushed to the side and replaced much more with the UN being this mechanism for peacekeeping interventions when there was conflict and aid structures and donor funded aid in other places as well.

 

Tammam Aloudat  36:13

We are talking about the politics above the table, the UN, although some of the UN politics happen under the table, but this is the politics of people who wear suits and go to meetings. Recently, I was reading a book by Mahmood Mamdani called “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim”. And part of it is he's saying two of the major problems we're facing now – terrorism and the drug proliferation – are in many ways, a direct result of the CIA having done like Laos, then Angola, Tanzania, Guatemala, and then finally, capitalising in Afghanistan, there has always been a Cold War and proxy wars and intelligence operations and so on. And the CIA is only one of them, and they have used drugs and drug smuggling and supporting drug laws as part of pushing for an anti-Soviet action in many countries. How can a UN function when you said there's no enforcement mechanism, there is no place, there is no ability to force countries to do so, and countries seem, or you know, at least, powerful countries, seem to choose to do things that are significantly unproductive and sometimes quite destructive. When was it successful for the UN to function within this sort of almost lawless world?

 

Thant Myint-U  37:31

I think the thing is, you know, in 1945, there was never a decision to create a world government, even the most idealistic planners who might have wanted a world government in 1945 – Americans, others – didn't think that publics, politicians, governments were ready for anything like that. And so, you know, at the centre of the UN's DNA is still this idea that the big powers are going to hold sway and that whatever happens, they themselves will not be directly challenged by the UN and this is why they have vetoes in the Security Council. They may be challenged in some ways by General Assembly decisions and other things, but when it comes to enforcement, it's not an organisation that's going to take on any of the nuclear armed countries then and now. So we shouldn't be thinking along those lines. I mean, if we want to move towards world government, that's a different kind of track, that's a different kind of campaign, that's a different kind of struggle, that's different from the UN that we actually have, and what it's actually been able to do over these past 60-70, years, and again, a lot of that in the political space. I mean, leaving aside all the development issues and humanitarian assistance and everything else in the political space, it's meant a largely deadlocked Security Council, but it has meant at the best of times, a secretary-general who's had the weight and prestige and shrewdness to know how to develop build up his political capital to mediate and deal with and manage smaller conflicts, and then to use that sometimes, to be able to put pressure even on the bigger countries, and at the right time even to stand up to those bigger countries as well. There's no easy answer, but I think the Secretary Generals who've been successful have had this balance, but it's always meant understanding what the UN is and isn't, but actually trying to push the margins as much as possible in terms of the political role in space that the Secretary General has often that means risk taking. It means sometimes taking on the big powers. But it cannot only mean taking on the big powers all the time.

 

Tammam Aloudat  39:33

It seems we were doing multilateral diplomacy in a 20th-century way, still that goes from how we think about it all the way to the way the resolutions are written, the archaic language and process, the trying to make things absolutely precise and then making them vague and washed down. There's a lot of that. What does a multilateral diplomacy look like that actually addresses the problems and concerns of our time, and here I'm talking from AI to misinformation and disinformation to the dismantling of international law to the scary as hell, apparent descent into far right and potentially worse. How does it look like?

 

Thant Myint-U  40:17

I think some of these issues are also issues – you know, whether it's about extremism in different countries – that really have to be thought about and managed and addressed at a local level, not just even at a national level, but at a local level as well. I think when we get to the global, sort of international stage, I think there's a danger of things becoming too complicated, that even if they're sort of semi successful, it becomes so detached and so far away from the ordinary person that, especially in some countries, people just feel these are elites that are deciding things in conferences very far away. I think there must be different ways in which people can get together, different governments can get together, whether it's on the challenge of AI, whether it's on climate change, pandemic, the UN could be part of the framing, and it has been at times. But I don't think the UN has to be the answer to everything. And I think we should be open to different combinations, different ways of trying to work, whether it's government, civil society, others, and tackling this whole range of issues. I think to put everything on the UN and to say, “How is the UN gonna solve A, B, C, D, all the way down”, I think that's a disaster for the UN. And I think a UN that tries to be everything to everyone is almost bound to fail.

 

Tammam Aloudat  41:19

I can't resist now to ask you this, because, isn't it the UN that’s putting the solving of everything on itself? I mean, if you look at the Millennium Development Goals, which were reasonable, and then come to the Sustainable Development Goals, which aren't going to be achieved, even if everybody tried, and they cover everything and everyone, isn't it the UN that is saying, give us what we want and we'll solve the world problems. Are they guilty of creating that expectation as well?

 

Thant Myint-U  41:49

Yeah, I think then it depends on, you know what we mean now, when we say the UN, and I think, you know, the UN sometimes takes credit when things go well, and then when things don't go well, they say, “Oh, it's just the member states”, or “We're just the sum of the parts”, right? But actually, the UN of course, is intergovernmental. It cannot go beyond the governments that make it up and fund it. But it's also a culture. It's a set of institutions that has its own culture. It has its own history. It has its own way of doing things. So if governments get together in a UN setting, they may produce something that's different than if they got together in a non UN setting or a non UN framework, right? So the UN is also its own institution, with its own way of working and its own culture. And cultures can change, but you know, it's not easy often, if these are cultures that go back decades in terms of the way in which they've evolved, I think you mentioned resolution. So, yes, resolutions are really long. They're really full of jargon and everything else. They weren't always like that. If you go back to Dag Hammarskjöld’s resolution when he set up the Congo operation in 1960 – like a few sentences, very simple. Security Council used to never meet until they actually had something that they could decide. When they met on the eve of the Six Day War, it was the first time they met that entire year. And so, you know, things change, and things can change if there's leadership in the right direction as well. So I mean, these things are tough. When you take any institution as complex as the UN and you want to change ways of working that have developed over many decades, it's not easy.

 

Tammam Aloudat  43:31

We're coming in September 2025, towards what is known as UN80 – 80 years of the UN – and there's a lot of talk about what needs to be done, particularly with the shockwaves of the major budget cuts that the US has imposed. But obviously it's not only the US, others have cut the attention and the support and the money for the UN there are all kinds of conversations about what will emerge out of this General Assembly. What do you think will happen? And what would you like to happen? What do we do under the circumstances, for this multilateral peace-enforcing, peace-building – hopefully – body, to actually do well?

 

Thant Myint-U  44:14

It's hard to be optimistic, not just because of the way in which UN systems work, but just because of the world that we live in and the lack of attention, I think for many people around the world, they might be supportive of the UN up to a point, but very few people really think about it, and very few governments have the space or the political capital that they want to spend on remaking the UN or strengthening the UN. So it's hard to be optimistic, but I think if we had to focus on a few things, I would say, in no particular order, I think one is to really take seriously the selection of the new Secretary General in 2026 I think if we have the wrong choice, it's very difficult to see how the organisation will be able to do anything in the future, and we may well have even a far weaker UN just a couple of years down the road. If we have the right person, I still believe in individual people with the right leadership, I think things might be possible. So I think the selection of Secretary General is important. I think one thing that's never really talked about when we talk about UN reform is the reform of Human Resources personnel. Who actually do we want to have work in the UN – not just the Secretary General? What kind of top team? Is it possible that the big powers can actually be persuaded not to grab onto every single senior post at the UN and compete over that, simply for the sake of competing over it? Because oftentimes it's not the average man in the street in the UK or France who cares about you know who the senior official is, or else it just becomes the instinct of ministries and missions that they feel they have to get this job or that job. It's incredibly top heavy with so many people at the Under Secretary General, Assistant Secretary General level as well. So I think a radical overhaul of the way in which people are recruited, promoted, managed, incentivised, all of that, I think, shouldn't be impossible. And then lastly, I think a big part of the UN is engaging the public. And I think in this day and age of so many new types of media, I think how the UN does that, how even things like the General Assembly sessions can be something, again, that ordinary people might want to tune into and listen to. If it's a world of set-piece speeches, I don't think we should be surprised that people tune out and don't really pay attention to anything the UN does.

 

Tammam Aloudat  46:26

And I want to comment here about what you mentioned, about the people. I mean, I don't know that, everybody knows that there are positions at the top tier of the UN that are all but reserved to certain countries. The World Food Programme has been an American since 1961. OCHA is always a British. IMF is French. I mean, the WHO is left for election because it is member-state lED. And it feels like from a point of view of someone who wants to trust the UN all those things are very difficult to come to terms with, that on the one hand, and here I'm talking about myself, as a person who knows the system – haven't worked in the UN, but somewhat knows the system. The UN pays exorbitant salaries to staff, and I know the argument very well. It is: [it] should be the highest possible comparable to the highest civil servant pay in the world so it wouldn't repel anyone, right? People stay in the UN not only because of what they do for it, but also because of what it does for them. And this is away from all the political reshaping and, you know, rebuilding and so on. If someone stays 25 years in the UN, in any position just because they won't find a salary like that, or wouldn't live in New York or Geneva or have a magnificent mansion in Nairobi. How do we change that? Is that even feasible – this human… change the building blocks of the UN.

 

Thant Myint-U  47:55

I don't think it will be easy. I think it's not always been the case that different jobs have gone to different parts of the world or to different governments. It's an incremental thing, which is, over the decades, it's become more and more sort set that the British will get this job or the Americans will get that job. And I think Secretary Generals sometimes haven't been able to or haven't been willing to push back hard enough on some of these things, different ones have done it in different ways. In my grandfather's time. I mean, he had a more or less free hand in terms of choosing his top aides. His top aides were Egyptian, African-American was his deputy, Indian, Guatemalan. It was a mix of people. They weren't people from the big powers. The French came to him and said, “We want you to accept a French person as Chef de Cabinet”. And he said, “Well, you can veto me in the council when I'm selected, if you want, but I'm not going to take direction in terms of who I appoint”. So I think it will be difficult for all the obvious reasons. But if we think of the big picture, of all the things that we want to see changed in the world to bring about peace, in terms of US policy, Russian policy, China, if we think of all the ways in which the governments kind of interact, and how difficult it will be to see something different, the easier part should be to appoint at least the right Secretary General – at least an okay Secretary General – and give him or her a free hand in choosing a top team of his or her choice. It's not easy, but compared to the big picture political stuff, this should be doable. It's about the re-management of a couple of hundred people. I think you're right about the civil service being seen in a very old fashioned way as something that you join in your 20s and leave at retirement, and that's it. All these things should be rethought about in a creative way. I think if you have the right leadership, the right top team. There's so many young people who for, you know, I think very little conversation would be happy to work for that organisation. So again, it's about thinking imaginatively about what we actually need and how to attract and recruit the best possible people in the world.

 

Tammam Aloudat  49:54

What from history we may have lost or not do any more would work today? I mean, in other words, what would U Thant have done had he been the Secretary General of the UN today?

 

Thant Myint-U  50:08

I think the big difference between then and now was that, because the UN was, in a way, much smaller, much simpler, and the Secretary General was so much more focused on his peacemaking role, that whenever there was a war or conflict, or the possibility of a war or conflict, he himself, and this is true of Hammarskjöld as well, would be the one to jump on the plane and go off for a week, two weeks, sometimes even longer, to try to mediate a solution. And today, when in many ways, the relevance of the UN in these conflicts is less. Sometimes, you know, the Secretary General, through no fault of his own, is buried in so many other processes and functions. In a way, I think we need to go back to that time, perhaps in many conflicts, where it wasn't through a special envoy or a special representative, but the Secretary General himself. Remember Hammarskjöld flew into Katanga, not the time he was killed, but before at the lead of a Swedish battalion to land the peacekeeping force there, my grandfather went to Havana, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, spoke to Castro in a way that I think only he could have done at that time, he flew into both Pakistan and India at the height of the Indo-Pakistan war, 1965, to gain the trust and the confidence of the leadership of both sides, so he knew exactly what role the UN could play in facilitating a cease fire. So I think it's that hands-on role of the Secretary General directly in these conflicts as the world's diplomatic last resort, as a neutral arbiter that's missing, and that's what we need to reclaim.

 

Tammam Aloudat  51:41

And that goes back to you, having said repeatedly, the mediator person being a good mediator.

Thant Myint-U  51:48

It's that neutral point of reference. I mean, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the key was that he was an Afro Asian, he was an unaligned person. He was the Secretary General of the UN so he was the only possible neutral point of reference that both Khrushchev and Castro and Kennedy could use for a face-saving sort of climb down from that nuclear brink. And so we have to ask ourselves, if we have another nuclear confrontation in the not too distant future, in the western Pacific, in the Middle East, in Europe, somewhere else, who is going to be that neutral point of reference, if not the UN Secretary-General.

 

Tammam Aloudat  52:21

Usually, we close up by asking, what actionable things can people who listen to us, people who are in policy-making or in the humanitarian sector, or even lay persons who are interested, what can they do? And I have one for now. I would encourage people to read your book “Peacemaker”, about U Thant and the forgotten quest for a just world. It is a really good read, and it reveals a lot of what you wouldn't get from the generalised histories, and it teaches us a few lessons that we need today. Do you have anything else to tell the listeners about what they can engage in and do in this transformative period where we are going towards reform – you know, again – but importantly, as you mentioned, the selection of a new Secretary General.

 

Thant Myint-U  53:11

I would say, you know, for the UN when it was at its height and most dynamic, it was really important to have those non-aligned states, those other neutral states like Ireland and Sweden really pushing for it. It was really important that it was still this time when the Americans still felt invested and couldn't just ignore what the UN was doing. But it was also really important that there were civil society movements – publics on both sides of the Atlantic and around the world – who looked towards the UN for leadership to do its job. And I think that's what needs to be revived, that spirit of internationalism, this sense that we do have to work across borders, in all of these things, I think that's waning. And I think when we think about internationalism, when we think about what civil society, ordinary people, can focus on, yes, there are many issues, whether it's climate, whether it's AI, whether it's protecting human rights in different countries around the world, but I would say number one: Don't forget about peace. For people to live in a war is probably the worst possible thing, and I think we should be really, really fearful that we don't sleepwalk back into another great war and a nuclear catastrophe. And, you know, when you think about the UN, when you discuss the UN, to really put that front and centre. How [are] we going to prevent another world war? What is the role that the UN can play, and how can civil society help in making sure that government leaders, political leaders, also help in moving in that direction. And choosing the right Secretary General next time around as well.

 

Tammam Aloudat  54:41

I know in choosing him, I think U Thant had blazed the trail on having a non-European, non-Northern, be the Secretary General. I will just say that of what nine or 10 Secretary Generals now, all of them have been men. Maybe it would be part of the smart move to actually say that this is not acceptable anymore. We are sitting in a place where we're told “you shouldn't sit in a panel – absolutely rightly – that is only men”. We shouldn't have men talk on behalf of everybody else. Yet, in 80 years of the UN there hasn't been a woman Secretary General. Is that something you think would happen?

 

Thant Myint-U  55:20

I don't know what will happen. And you look at the people who will have to make the final decisions, the leaders of the permanent five, including Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and who knows what they will think when the issue comes across their desk. I would be really happy if it was a woman. I'd be really happy if it was a younger woman. I'd be really happy if it was someone who's has firsthand experience of living through a war, I would be really happy if it was someone with experience in mediation and peacekeeping and showing respect to people across cultures, and someone who's willing to take risks. I think a mix of all of those different qualities as well as being an experienced mediator, would be great if it was possible. And we'll see. I think, you know, it's a year out, so we have time, I think – public civil society – to really try to raise the bar on this issue.

 

Tammam Aloudat  56:03

Thank you very much for being with us today, and much appreciated. 

 

Thant Myint-U  56:09

Thank you.

 

Tammam Aloudat  56:20

Thank you for listening to Rethinking Humanitarianism. Our show is produced, edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe. Editorial oversight provided by Irwin Loy, Eric Reidy, and Freddie Boswell. If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected] please rate and subscribe to our show, wherever you get your podcasts. Also consider becoming a member of The New Humanitarian to help us continue reporting from the heart of crises. Go to www.thenewhumanitarian.org to find out more.