UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice

Introduction

Introduction The United Nations Intellectual History Project was born because after nearly sixty years, it was high time to trace the economic and social ideas that have been launched or nurtured by the UN system. Many of the individuals who have struggled for the cause of multilateral cooperation have had largely undocumented careers and experiences that are essential for the historical record of the twentieth century. And perhaps just as important for the future of multilateralism,our intention is to introduce the world to the organization’s human dimension by making more accessible the people who animate the United Nations. Outsiders—and especially the next generation of students and scholars— rarely experience the UN firsthand; they usually do so only through newsclips and op-eds,Web sites and textbooks.The world organization thus seems more a collection of boring bureaucrats than a creative center of gravity for international problem-solving. The book presents a different view. It gives the stories of seventy-three individuals, all of whom have spent a substantial part of their professional lives in UN affairs and who have helped shape the organization’s thinking about development and social justice over the last six decades. Their human stories, qualities, and commitments reveal a picture—not of tired bureaucrats but rather of a focused and highly experienced group of professionals with an extraordinary range of past and present involvements in national and international life. There are secretaries-general and presidents, ministers and professors, social workers and field workers as well as diplomats and executive heads of UN agencies—men and women from countries all over the world. The voices resonating here are inevitably a small and very incomplete sample of those found in the United Nations—and even among the seventy-three included, we have space only for a small selection of their experiences.We can do little more than remind readers that there are thousands of others who contribute and have contributed to the international struggle for a better world but whose voices are unheard. 1 2 Introduction We have employed the oral narrative to do what it does best, namely to give life, color, and imagination to the experiences of individuals and to extract the meanings that each attaches to them. Our voices reflect the expectations , events, and efforts of the second half of the twentieth century that contributed to the economic and social record of the UN’s life and activities. Whether it was the idealism of the early years of the UN, the anguish of the Cold War, or the initial euphoria and then the uncertainties of the post–Cold War era, our participants recall how their perceptions of events evolved over time, how tumultuous experiences forced themselves into public consciousness , and how they themselves changed perspectives through knowledge, exposure , experience, and the passage of time. Who are the persons whose memories form the heart of this volume? A little over half of them served directly in the international civil service. They come from thirty-five countries, covering all of the world’s regions and most of the UN’s major language groups.A third of those interviewed spent part or all of their careers in academia and a quarter or so in government service in their own countries. A fifth are women, in part a reflection of the paucity of women in positions of influence in and around the UN until recently. Most have advanced degrees, and about half studied economics, undoubtedly re- flecting our focus on issues of economic and social development. A little over half trace their family origins from the industrialized“North,” and nearly half from developing countries (Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and LatinAmerica) in the“Global South.”Ten percent come from the former“Eastern bloc,” and forty percent from the “West.” Nearly one-quarter of them experienced the dislocation that comes with growing up a refugee of war or in political exile. Many share strong recollections of their families’ experiences during the Great Depression and World War II. And virtually all of them express powerfully the importance of international cooperation in improving the lot of the have-nots. Brief biographies are found in Appendix 1. Most of the interviews were conducted in English, although a handful were not (six were in French and one was in Spanish); English translations of the extracted interviews appear here and the appendix indicates the language in which the interview took place. Our choice of persons to interview was inevitably...