Sir Brian Urquhart: required reading for diplomats and leaders
Blog by Ben Donaldson and Fred Carver, both of the United Nations Association — UK (UNA-UK)
From the tributes that poured in for Sir Brian Urquhart’s 100th birthday recently, it’s clear he isn’t just known for his prodigious contribution to the establishment and development of the UN, but also for inspiring a generation of diplomats along the way.
Throughout his four decades on the front line of global diplomacy Sir Brian seemed to embody the spirit of international public service. He was driven by the conviction that pragmatism need not come at the expense of principle.
While it is beyond a short blog post to convey the wisdom of Sir Brian and his unique insight into the United Nations, we humbly hope that by sharing some of his eloquent writings on themes that crop up time and again in his published works, that we can contribute to the debate on strengthening multilateralism that is becoming an ever more frequent and necessary conversation at the UN and beyond.
Big powers need multilateral organisations
In the epilogue of his 1987 autobiography A Life in Peace and War, Sir Brian writes “we have created unprecedented possibilities for both progress and disaster on our planet without yet assuming the collective responsibility that both those possibilities demand.” Sir Brian spent a career pointing out this overlap between national and global interest and championing a multilateral system that would deliver for states big and small.
Sir Brian had a ringside seat to the work the UN did to prevent a nuclear war, particularly under third Secretary-General U Thant. It “provided a face-saving mechanism, a ladder down which the two superpowers could, and eventually did, descend from their potentially catastrophic confrontation.” To this day it remains the venue for global powers to discuss their differences without resorting to a potentially civilization ending use of force. “The U.N.,’’ he said, ‘’is the only place the U.S. can turn to in time of crisis, when there’s the risk of a serious confrontation between the nuclear powers.” The same could equally be said of the USSR.
He saw the UN’s 1980s financial crisis caused by a US administration withholding a large chunk of its assessed contribution as “mutually destructive,” and hoped the antipathy would be short-lived, writing “a global power like the US needs the multilateral machinery…and the international community needs the constructive participation of the world’s most powerful democracy.” His phrase “the sooner the faults and misconceptions on both sides are remedied, the better for world peace” remains relevant to those inclined to see international organisations as a threat to sovereignty rather than as a means to deliver benefits to their citizens.
The facts are not enough
As a young intelligence officer in World War Two, Sir Brian was due to be part of a vanguard parachuting behind enemy lines to hold a bridge until reinforced by the allied advance. The plan, part of the wider Operation Market Garden, was in Sir Brian’s words an “unmitigated disaster.” It has become known for the folly of ignoring the evidence and going “a bridge too far” because of planning skewed by hubris and ambition.
Late in the preparations, Sir Brian sounded the alarm based on intelligence of an unexpected German military presence near Arnhem, received from the Dutch resistance and which he managed to corroborate through aerial reconnaissance. For pointing out this inconvenient truth Sir Brian was ordered to take sick leave while Operation Market Garden went ahead as planned. Almost three quarters of 1st Airborne division’s 9000 men were killed, missing or captured. Hopes of an early allied victory were thwarted.
Reflecting on the episode’s effect on his approach to life, Sir Brian said that following Arnhem he became “deeply skeptical about the behaviour of leaders.” Beyond the conviction that it’s never too late, the cynical lesson Sir Brian learnt is depressingly relevant to today’s crop of political egos: “I never again could quite be convinced that wisdom and principle were a match for vanity and ambition.” He added ‘’The worst way to make an argument is by reason and good information. You must appeal to people’s emotions and to their fears of being made to look ridiculous. I also learned that if you happen, by some chance, to get something right, you become extremely unpopular.’’
Peacekeeping is essential and must stay true to Brian’s vision
The invention of peacekeeping has been credited to many individuals, including the Canadian Prime Minister and UN stalwart Lester B. Pearson, and the Second Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Sir Brian himself credited his friend the American UN official & Nobel Laureate Ralph Bunche. But as so many of the tributes have shown, UN Peacekeeping wouldn’t be what it is today without Sir Brian.
As one of the only senior officials of the early UN with military experience, it was invariably Sir Brian who was tasked with the logistics and practicalities of early peacekeeping missions. It was Sir Brian who had the idea of painting regulation helmets blue and giving them to peacekeepers so they would be easily distinguished from combatants. It was Sir Brian who, as assistant to Ralph Bunche, was tasked with establishing the UN Peacekeeping Mission to Congo (ONUC) which was several orders of magnitude larger than any previous mission the UN had attempted. And it was Sir Brian who, as Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, oversaw peacekeeping for 17 years and developed that department into what it became, the Department for Peacekeeping Operations (now the Department for Peace Operations).
Sir Brian therefore had a considerable input into the creation of the rules of engagement for peacekeeping. Certainly ONUC were not afraid to use force when the occasion demanded it — debunking the notion that “robust” peacekeeping is a novel phenomenon. In one a Gurkha peacekeeper, Gurbachan Singh Salaria, received India’s highest medal of valour but lost his life while leading an extraordinary assault against a roadblock, and in another an Irish company fought off twenty times their number for five days.
Nevertheless, Sir Brian was adamant that the purpose of peacekeeping was not to fight wars but to prevent them. Peacekeepers must be a tool for de escalating conflict, not exacerbating it, and so every occasion on which force had to be used should be viewed as a regrettable setback. As he said of his attempts to persuade two particularly trigger-happy contingents of this, “They simply did not want to understand either the principle involved or the bottomless morass into which they would sink if they descended from the high ground of the non-violent international peace keeping force. The moment the UN starts killing people it becomes part of the conflict it is supposed to be controlling and therefore part of the problem. It loses one quality which distinguishes it from and sets it above people it is dealing with.” He made the same point more poetically later in his memoirs.
In recent years the debate about what peacekeeping is or should be has reopened, with many pushing for force to be used more readily or robustly. Sir Brian’s words make a compelling argument for why peacekeeping will cease to be peacekeeping, and thus cease to be effective, if it goes too far down this road.
There is no substitute for good leadership
“If governments make indifferent choices of executive heads, no amount of reform will compensate for the lack of leadership” — an incisive criticism on the UN’s politicised and wildly varied recruitment standards taken from Sir Brian and Erskine Childers’ seminal blueprint for UN reform, published in 1996.
Recruiting the best person for the job could hardly be more important than for the UN’s leader. When Sir Brian decided in 1945 that he wanted to dedicate his life to the UN, he realised early on that it would mean accepting the “unforeseeable quality of future Secretaries-General,” adding that “we either had to give up our vocation or make the best of whomever came along.”
Sir Brian’s difficult relationship with the UN’s (and Brian’s) fourth Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, put this to the test. He rose to the challenge refusing to let “some transient Secretary-General” deter him from carrying on “the tradition of international service created by Dag Hammarskjold and Ralph Bunche.”
On reaching the position of Under Secretary-General he said “I was proud to have got to the top in the Secretariat under my own steam, instead of being a political appointee as most of my senior colleagues had been.”
After leaving the UN Sir Brian worked hard to fix the legitimacy and effectivity drain caused by politicised, unmeritocratic senior appointments. His writings on overhauling the Secretary-General recruitment “process,” including during the 2006 race, provided much of the inspiration for the successful 1 for 7 Billion campaign which UNA-UK co-founded in 2014:
“It is hardly a process at all. It is more like a lottery. It has become a rather squalid competition with no set procedure, shrouded in Big Power secrecy. They don’t even interview the candidates.”
Thanks in part to Sir Brian, we now have a UN Secretary-General selected through a comparatively transparent process with candidate vision statements, public scrutiny, a role for the wider UN membership and a much better chance of finding the best person for the job.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
Sir Brian committed early to a career in the UN but with his eyes wide open. His autobiography reminds us that the word “United” in United Nations comes from the birth of the UN in the 1941 Atlantic Charter and relates to countries “united in war, not in peace.” He described the drafters of the UN Charter’s “stunning lack of political realism” that the victorious powers would remain united in supervising world peace and points out “like the city of San Francisco in which it was born, the UN rested on a permanent fault. In our case the fault was political.”
The UN’s inherent flaws provide easy fodder for critics, but do not amount to an argument that the UN is dispensable. As Sir Brian said, “while a perfect international organisation was impossible, an imperfect one was a great deal better than nothing and might well be an indispensable factor in avoiding a nuclear war.”
It is precisely because our world is not united that the United Nations is needed. Sir Brian endorsed Gladwyn Jebb’s rationale:
“In order that mankind should not destroy itself totally in its struggles, it is essential to have some place…for ending [conflicts] in accordance with certain generally accepted rules. We must not despair if these rules are often violated, or, more frequently, ignored, or if the Super Powers sometimes fail to make use of the machinery altogether. The great thing is that it should be there. And when the abyss really yawns before them…it is to the United Nations that the nations will turn.”
In retirement Sir Brian worked tirelessly to strengthen multilateralism. With Childers he wrote “It is seldom possible to use the word ‘new’ about proposals for reorganization or better coordination in the UN system. They are almost always repetitions from an earlier round.” That insight, and Sir Brian’s understanding of the “permanent fault” at the heart of the United Nations, remind us of the perennial stumbling blocks that frustrate attempts at reforming global governance. Attempts that try to reinvent the wheel and simply succeed in returning to the same impasse, or attempts that ignore the political substance of those problems, believing them to be a symptom of the system as opposed to a symptom of the world in which the system has to operate, seem sure to fail.
We all need to work to strengthen global governance in the 21st century
We hope our Together First campaign can learn from Sir Brian’s lessons and insights. In 1987 he warned that “there are tremendous opportunities in the next century. There are also tremendous possibilities for disaster, and the great thing to do is to work in some field where you’ll make sure that the opportunities are realized and the disasters are minimized.” Together First is designed to try to minimise those risks, by melding pragmatism and principle, and working with, not papering over or disregarding, the political fault at the heart of our global system.
Between now and the proposed UN 75th anniversary conference in autumn 2020, we will champion realistic ideas to make the multilateral apparatus better geared towards reducing the risk of humanity “destroying itself totally in its struggles,” as Jebb put it. Success will depend on mobilising the growing population of globally aware citizens with their own civic calling in the service of global problem-solving on issues like climate change and nuclear weapons, working together to demand better global institutions. Tactically, we take inspiration from Sir Brian’s clear-eyed understanding that pragmatism and principle are not opposites but one a means and the other the ends.
In Sir Brian’s own words, he was “a pragmatic optimist and a idealistic realist.” He went on to say “idealism is the only form of realism because unless you’re idealistic to some extent, you don’t have anything to look forward to, you don’t have anywhere to go.” If we remember one thing from Sir Brian Urquhart’s insights into UN affairs then perhaps it should be that choosing between idealism and realism is a mugs game. Progress needs both.
Try to see the funny side!
In a high-pressure job surrounded by egos and up against a never-ending raft of international crises, a sense of humour is surely indispensable. As UN watchers from around the world took to social media to recognise Sir Brian’s 100th birthday, few missed the opportunity to point out his sense of humour, which, together with his mastery of the English language was a potent combination.
Click on the links below to read three classic Sir Brian Urquhart anecdotes in his own voice:
How a goat helped win Congolese respect for the United Nations
An awkward demonstration of Britain’s military prowess for Churchill and Eisenhower
About Sir Brian Urquhart
After serving in the British Army during World War II, Sir Brian’s first civilian job was private secretary to Gladwyn Jebb who was at that time charged with the task of building from scratch the world organisation that the UN Charter envisaged. With the horrors of war fresh in his mind, Sir Brian Urquhart said “to work for peace was a dream fulfilled.”
Over the next 40 years as an employee of the UN, he played a critical role in the direction of peacekeeping operations — notably in the Middle East, Cyprus, Kashmir, Lebanon and the Congo — and in the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency. After an early role as personal assistant to Trygvie Lie, the first Secretary-General of the UN, Sir Brian rose up the ranks, eventually retiring in 1986 at the rank of Under-Secretary-General, having taken over as head of Special Political Affairs in 1972.
In retirement Sir Brian continued to dedicate himself to the organisation and the cause of international cooperation, becoming deeply involved in reform efforts among other things. Sir Brian celebrated his 100th birthday on 28 February 2019.
Each year, UNA-UK presents the Sir Brian Urquhart Award for Distinguished Service to the UN. Established in 2011, the Award celebrates Sir Brian’s unparalleled contribution to the UN, and is presented to individuals whose work reflects Sir Brian’s own dedication and endeavour. A list of recipients can be found on UNA-UK’s website.
Further reading and viewing:
This blog is no substitute for Sir Brian’s own words. Here are some useful links:
A Life in Peace and War — Sir Brian Urquhart’s 1987 autobiography which current Secretary-General Antonio Guterres describes as “required reading for all who work for the United Nations and for all who wish to understand the Organization’s work.”
Character Sketches — Sir Brian’s masterful vignettes of different personalities he worked with across his career.
Renewing the United Nations System — The seminal 1994 vision for UN reform co-authored with Erskine Childers and based on consultations with “hard-headed practical” UN experts remains highly relevant to this day. Published by the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.
Further Dag Hammarskjold Foundation publications — Sir Brian edited several issues of Development Dialogue — a Dag Hammarskjold Foundation publication. There are also other useful links to his works on this page.
Interview with former UN official Brian Urquhart (Part 1) — The first instalment of a two-part UN News spotlights feature on the experiences and views of Sir Brian leading up to the creation of the United Nations.
Interview with former UN official Brian Urquhart (Part 2) — The second instalment of a two-part UN News spotlights feature on the experiences and views of Sir Brian throughout his decades of service with the world.
Hammarskjold — Sir Brian’s biography of Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary General from 1953–1961.
Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey — Sir Brian’s 1988 biography of close friend, colleague and fellow UN legend: Ralph Bunch.
