The UN’s next secretary general has apparently been chosen. Once confirmed as Ban Ki-Moon’s successor, António Guterres will take the helm of one of the world’s great institutions – albeit one that’s constantly maligned, belittled, and misunderstood.
A lot of this negativity will fall to him to deal with. Debates about the UN and its future usually revolve around the Security Council and the secretary general. That’s where the power is, so that’s where change is needed, runs the argument.
So it went during the process by which Guterres was selected, as a chorus of former insiders appealed for the appointment of a tough, liberated new leader. These critics argued that the UN was in danger of collapsing into diplomatic irrelevance and irretrievable internal dysfunction.
Some believe a reformed UN leadership could perhaps impose a ceasefire in Syria, and even protect civilians globally against the self-interest of the great powers, or the abuses of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers.
Coming from frustrated veterans of the fusty inner sanctums of the UN, the calls for sunlight and change are understandable. Yes, the UN needs reform. But as we, together with many colleagues, suggest in a forthcoming book, this reform has to start from an accurate sense of what the UN actually is – and critically, where it began.
The UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations, is often misremembered as an irrelevant, hapless victim of realpolitik. But thanks to British diplomats such as its first secretary general, Sir Eric Drummond, its secretariat came into being as an internationalist body organised by area of expertise, not by national delegation.
After it was opened in 1920, the league became a vibrant forum for the internationalisation of world politics, and its Geneva headquarters gave non-state actors from Palestine to the Pacific a forum for protest. Its secretariat regularly hauled the world’s great powers over the diplomatic coals while the global press took notes.
The opening of the League of Nations in 1920. National Library of Norway/Wikimedia Commons
In the 1930s, the league’s international political role famously declined and collapsed in the face of fascism. But its legacy lives on. Its technical bodies developed the expertise and capacity in health and economics that was later transferred to the UN, and in updated and much-changed versions – from the International Labour Organisation to the International Court of Justice and the World Health Organisation – these institutions underpin our systems of global governance
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