DEFEAT OF AN IDEAL: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations

by Shirley Hazzard ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 1973

Almost everyone who still thinks about it -- admittedly it's not a priority item anymore -- agrees that the United Nations as currently constituted is a pipsqueak organization. Even the liberals among us who used to take defensive comfort in the platitude about how good it is to have an international padded cell where belligerents can shout rather than shoot at one another have lost faith in the 97-pound World Body. Shirley Hazzard, who has observed the UN from close inside as a longtime member of the Secretariat, reinforces these notions in this unique and extraordinarily forceful study of how and why the UN has failed -- a scholarly follow-up to her 1967 stories, People in Glass Houses. From the start the organization has suffered not only from the lack of delegated authority but also -- and this is Hazzard's central theme -- from a ""withholding of quality."" Member nations, she charges, especially the more powerful ones, have ensured from the beginning that the UN ""would never unpleasantly surprise them by a show of character, tenacity and principle that would bind them to their own public declarations"" by appointing representatives of mediocre quality. This ""self-defeating"" stratagem has worked to perfection: Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General, a ""weak"" and undistinguished man, unwittingly laid the groundwork for the UN's ""moral collapse"" as early as the late '40's by entering into a secret agreement with the United States government -- an unequivocal violation of the Charter -- which sanctioned an FBI presence in UN headquarters in order to screen American personnel, then comprising two-thirds of the ""international"" Secretariat. Even Dag Hammarskjold, the only individual Hazzard has anything good to say about, was sucked into these invidious doings (though privately he expressed his ""disgust""). Now the ""multitudinous chickens have come home to roost""; the legacy of ""endemic timidity has seeped down from the top, it is in everything."" A very honest and angry accounting of the UN's failed stewardship which offers no easy solutions -- only more sad stones for that fragile, perhaps shattered ideal which once long ago stood between the hopes and fears of all mankind.

Pub Date: March 5, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown--A.M.P.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION