Introduction

Today the UN secretary-general is widely considered to be a ‘norm entrepreneur’ or an ‘advocate’ for global issues. The UN website describes the secretary-general as ‘a spokesperson for the interests of the world’s peoples, in particular the poor and vulnerable among them’, while the civil society campaign ‘1 for 7 billion’ argues that ‘as the UN’s top official, the Secretary-General embodies the high values of the Charter and represents the hopes and concerns of the world’s seven billion people’. This highly visible, politically and symbolically important role has developed over time, but the foundations for this public role were set up while Trygve Lie was in office. Lie himself described this part of his role as ‘a spokesman for the world interest’. As previous chapters have shown, Lie frequently sought to enlist the public and the media in his efforts to put pressure on states to act the way he wanted them to. This chapter examines Lie’s most high-profile and ambitious attempt at acting the norm entrepreneur or advocate: his 1950 proposal for a 20-year peace programme.

In 1950 the hardening fronts of the Cold War caused trouble for the UN. Protesting the Western states’ refusal to allow the communist Chinese government to assume the Chinese seat in the UN, the Soviet Union boycotted the Security Council and other UN organs from January 1950. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, while in January 1950 President Truman announced that the US would develop the more powerful ‘H-bomb’, thus signalling a new phase of the arms race between East and West. And within the UN, negotiations in the Military Staff Committee and the Atomic Energy Commission had completely stalled.