Louis Emmerij, United Nations Intellectual History Project
Louis Emmerij founded the United Nations Intellectual History Project together with Richard Jolly and Thomas G. Weiss in 1999. He was President of the OECD Development Center in Paris, Rector of the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, and Special Advisor to the President of the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. He was also the Director of the ILO World Employment Programme in Geneva during the 1970s.
1. What is the purpose behind the UN Intellectual
History Project?
The
United Nations is seen by many as a rigid bureaucracy without sparkle, wit, or
creativity. The general public - graciously stimulated by the mass media - sees a
traveling circus, a talk shop, and paper-pushing. On and off there are tales of
corruption. This is, we submit, a very
uneven view of the world organization.
An intellectual history did not
exist for the United Nations. Attention mostly concentrated on the UN's
political and security side and not on its activities in economic and social
development. Our original purpose was to complete the record. Ideas are at
least as important for this area as for international peace and security.
In
1999 we (Emmerij, Jolly and Weiss) decided to fill this gap- as best we could
with available resources and within a decade-with the United Nations
Intellectual History Project (UNIHP) as an independent endeavor. We benefited
from the confidence and financial support of both governments and foundations
that, like us, could not believe that this history had not yet been written. We structured
UNIHP as a diptych, or a painting with two panels. The first consists of a
series of sixteen books while the second panel is concerned with oral history
and offers one of our volumes with excerpts from the oral histories as well as
the complete transcripts.
2. What insight does the project offer into the development of the UN?
Outsiders - and especially the next generation
of students and scholars - rarely experience the UN first-hand but usually only
through news clips and op-eds, websites and textbooks. The authors of the
series of volumes have used the oral histories to give life, color, and
imagination to the experiences of individuals and to extract the meanings that
each attaches to them. 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 oral histories recall how their
perceptions of events evolved, how tumultuous experiences forced themselves
into public consciousness, and how they themselves changed perspectives through
knowledge, exposure, experience, and the passage of time. Oral history, with all its difficulties,
gives fascinating insights, both into the person and into what makes the UN a
creative organization.
The oral histories come from thirty-five countries, covering all of the
world's regions and most of the UN's major language groups. A fifth of those
interviewed are women, in part a reflection of the paucity of women in
positions of influence in and around the UN until recently. In terms of
geographic distribution, a little over half trace their family origins from the
industrialized "North," and nearly half from developing countries in the global
"South." The choice of persons
to interview inevitably involved subjectivity. 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
consequential even if inaudible.
3. What are the greatest challenges for the UN in the 21st century?
A new look at the mandates, operations, and
representativeness of global institutions is required. Global stability,
long-run sustainability, much greater equity and serious attention to human
rights need to be built into the mandates and operations of all international
organizations. If this seems too visionary, one needs to remember and take
courage from earlier experience. The proposals presented to the Bretton Woods
conference in 1944 were bold and intellectually brilliant, drawing on the best
minds of the times and going far beyond the conventional analysis and wisdom of
the day. So also were the ideas and recommendations of the three major UN
economic reports issued over 1949-51 directed towards full employment, economic
development and international economic stability. All these were driven by the
fears of repeating the 1930s and the confident hopes of building a new post-war
world.
Today, the world is more complicated and so
are the challenges. And urgency is added to the present challenge by both the
depths of the current economic and financial depression and the growing
realization that planetary survival requires finding ways to tackle a broader
range of major challenges ahead, over the medium to longer run. The final
chapters of UN Ideas That Changed the
World (the final synthesis volume of the United Nations Intellectual
History Project) identify several major challenges among which the following
stand out:
- global warming and climate change;
- global governance for a multi-polar world;
- support for fragile states;
- moderating inequalities in global development;
- bridging international divides of culture and identities;
- rebalancing the security challenge from state sovereignty to the protection of individuals;
- strengthening concern for culture and human rights in development.
4. What role can the Atlantic alliance play in making the UN more effective?
We
have distinguished three UNs in our work: the UN of Governments, the UN of the
Secretariat, and the UN of the NGOs, Committees, and experts. It is quite clear
that the first UN (of the Governments) is the biggest obstacle to an effective
and efficient United Nations. To give just one example: in the midst of the
present global depression, global governance (our second challenge above) is of
the essence. The whole world is engulfed in the economic and financial meltdown,
yet coordinated international action plans have not even started. The planned
meeting of the G20 leaves out more than 170 nations. The UN has an obvious role
here. We have shown in our work how important and farseeing many past ideas and
policy proposals of the UN have been.
The
Atlantic Alliance could draw attention to these facts and give to the UN the
role that it deserves as the one global player in a world that appears to give
once again an important role to the State. A global private sector needs global
governance and eventually a global government.
For more information,
see UNIHP's website
