Introduction

Trygve Lie had barely held the office of UN secretary-general for a month, when Winston Churchill, Britain’s wartime prime minister, declared the descent of the ‘iron curtain’ from Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. The conflict between the US and the Soviet Union and their respective allies – commonly known as the ‘Cold War’ – was to become the defining feature of international politics for the next four decades. The Security Council held its first meeting on 17 January 1946 in London and come February it was already embroiled in heated debates over the slow withdrawal of Soviet troops from Iran and the presence of British troops in Greece. In Lie’s own words: ‘The hard realities of world politics intruded. Like gusts of wind warning of future storms to come, they blew in the door of the new-built house of peace before the workmen had finished.’ But what was the newly elected UN secretary-general to do in such a situation? How did the emerging superpower conflict impede or facilitate the development of the secretary-general’s political role?

Within scholarship on the UN secretary-general a common observation is that the end of the Cold War opened new opportunities, allowing Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan to play more active roles than their Cold War predecessors, particularly in the area of norm entrepreneurship. Yet despite the constraints imposed by the Cold War, other scholars have also highlighted the way the Cold War paradoxically provided opportunities for the secretary-general, because it made Security Council agreement more elusive and allowed the secretary-general to balance the superpowers against each other. Although this literature recognizes that the Cold War could be both constraining and empowering, few have undertaken in-depth studies of the mechanism behind this development.