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1 - Setting the Stage: The Creation of the UN and Expectations for the Role of the UN Secretary-General

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2024

Ellen J. Ravndal
Affiliation:
Universitet i Stavanger, Norway
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Summary

The Secretary-General, more than anyone else, will stand for the United Nations as a whole. In the eyes of the world, no less than in the eyes of his own staff, he must embody the principles and ideals of the Charter to which the Organization seeks to give effect.

Report of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations (December 1945)

Introduction

On 2 February 1946 Trygve Lie, up until then the foreign minister of Norway, was sworn in as the first secretary-general of the UN. He took on the role of secretary-general in a brand-new organization. The UN Charter had been signed just seven months earlier in San Francisco on 26 June 1945, and the first General Assembly opened in London on 10 January 1946. As the first secretary-general, to some extent Lie had to make up his own role as he went along. But he was not completely free to do whatever he desired. This chapter examines what expectations for the role of the UN secretary-general existed before Lie took office. The following chapters will then examine what Lie did with these expectations and how the role developed beyond the baseline from 1946.

In canvassing early government and public expectations of the role of the UN secretary-general, the first point of reference is the minimalist description as the ‘chief administrative officer of the Organization’ in article 97 of the UN Charter. This would indicate that the secretary-general was expected to play a primarily administrative role. Brian Urquhart, who worked in the Secretariat from the start and later published extensively on the office of the secretary-general, confirmed this when he wrote that

the general concept of the position and functions of the Secretary-General in 1946 bear little relation to the office’s responsibilities today. There [was] then … a highly restrictive and conservative view of the functions, let alone the independence, of the world’s top international civil servant. He was considered, especially by the Europeans, to be an almost exclusively administrative official, and efforts by Lie to assist in political matters were often resented or ignored.

Type
Chapter
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In the Beginning
Secretary-General Trygve Lie and the Establishment of the United Nations
, pp. 11 - 28
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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