Dag Hammarskjöld

Swedish diplomat

• Born: July 29, 1905
• Birthplace: Jönköping, Sweden
• Died: September 18, 1961
• Place of death: Near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia)

As United Nations secretary-general, Hammarskjöld vastly increased both the influence and the prestige of the agency. He oversaw the explosive growth of the organization among developing world nations, prevented the U.N. from becoming a pawn of the major Cold War rivals, and initiated the U.N.’s peacekeeping role.

Early Life

Dag Hammarskjöld (dahk HAHM-ahr-shohld) grew up in a home dominated by the ideals of public service and faith in one’s own convictions. The youngest of four sons, he watched his father, a former prime minister of Sweden, sacrifice his political career by defending Sweden’s neutrality during World War I. Certainly his father’s subsequent devotion to the principles of the League of Nations, the world’s first genuine collective-security organization, influenced the young Hammarskjöld’s later career. His mother’s influence was less apparent, although her skepticism of rational thought can be discerned in his later poetry and religious writings.

Educated at the University in Uppsala, Hammarskjöld first studied social philosophy and French literature, later turning to the fields of economics and political economy, in which he did exceedingly well. In 1927, he studied at the University of Cambridge under the great English economistJohn Maynard Keynes, receiving his degree the following year and a doctorate in economics from the University of Stockholm in 1933. After teaching for a year, he went into government service. First employed on the staff of the National Bank of Sweden, he then became permanent undersecretary of Sweden’s ministry of finance. During World War II, he combined this latter post with service as board chair of the Swedish National Bank, retaining that position until 1948.

When the war ended in 1945, Hammarskjöld left the ministry of finance for the cabinet, in which he served as an adviser on financial issues. This was an exciting period for a young economist, for the Swedish government was breaking new ground in shaping a socialist economy. Hammarskjöld thrived in an atmosphere in which he could emphasize practical measures rather than economic theory and soon achieved a genuinely national reputation.

It was shortly after the war that he entered the field of diplomacy. As a cabinet adviser, he helped to shape many of Sweden’s trade and financial policies in negotiation with foreign governments. In 1949, he became the Swedish delegate to the Organization of European Economic Cooperation and served on its executive committee, a post that launched his work in the field of international organization.

Life’s Work

Hammarskjöld’s reputation would be forged in the world of diplomacy, not economics. Between 1947 and 1953, however, the future secretary-general of the United Nations straddled both the economic and the diplomatic worlds. Becoming undersecretary for economic affairs in the Foreign Ministry in 1947, Hammarskjöld supervised Sweden’s role in discussions leading to the Marshall Plan for the economic reconstruction of Europe. Two years later, he became secretary-general of the Foreign Office, and, in 1951, he received a cabinet appointment as minister without portfolio in which he specialized in economic matters. Characteristically, Hammarskjöld thought of himself as a civil servant and not as a politician. Even after he entered the cabinet, he refused to join a political party, believing that his only real loyalty other than to Sweden should be to the ideal of public service. In this he shared the attitude of many men in the professional foreign services. The principle of public service also proved to be central to the United Nations, chartered in June, 1945, to keep the world from again fighting a world war.

When Trygve Lie of Norway, the first secretary-general of the United Nations, found himself crippled in office by Soviet opposition to his support for the U.N.’s role in the Korean War, and by anticommunist American supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who denounced the United Nations as a hotbed of communist activity, he announced his retirement. The Security Council in a compromise vote then selected Hammarskjöld as his successor. The new secretary-general was still not well known outside economic circles, his U.N. experience limited to once having served as head of Sweden’s U.N. delegation. Nevertheless, neither his lack of reputation nor his inexperience interfered with his desire to reinvigorate the United Nations secretariat. Retaining the best of Lie’s aides, he surrounded himself with an exceptionally able group of subordinates and quickly addressed issues that affected the morale of U.N. employees. He asserted successfully the independence of the United Nations as an international civil service when he protected American employees against efforts to subject them to political tests by the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. In the process, Hammarskjöld would gain the respect of the previously demoralized secretariat, increasing both his prestige and his authority.

After addressing internal U.N. matters, Hammarskjöld turned to the more complex rivalries among the great powers. It was there that the relatively unknown Swede first displayed his extraordinary negotiating skills. After months of frustrating effort, he helped gain the release in August, 1955, of seventeen American flyers held prisoner by the new Communist government in China. Having proved himself to skeptical officials in both power blocs, he thereafter became a major factor in international diplomacy.

In 1956, Hammarskjöld encountered two of his three most challenging crises as secretary-general. The emotional and historic rivalries in the Middle East pitting Israelis against their Arab neighbors erupted in full-scale war in November, a situation complicated when British and French paratroopers wrested control of the Suez Canal from Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had recently nationalized that international waterway. The crisis combined colonial politics with ethnic hatreds. Reestablishing peace between Israel and Egypt would have tested Hammarskjöld’s talents in the best of times. With both Great Britain and France possessing a permanent veto on the Security Council, a peaceful settlement looked all the more remote. Taking advantage, however, of the opposition of both the United States and the Soviet Union to the Suez invasion and skillfully implementing the proposal of Canada’s Lester Pearson for the creation of an international peacekeeping force (the U.N. Emergency Force), Hammarskjöld not only helped to resolve the crisis but placed the United Nations in a much more active and creative role than its founders had ever anticipated.

Unfortunately, Hammarskjöld was much less successful when seeking to moderate the effects of a Soviet invasion of Hungary that occurred at the same time. A revolutionary anti-Soviet government in Budapest sought to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet security system in Eastern Europe, and the Russians responded by sending in their tanks. The Hungarian situation exposed the real limits of U.N. action, for there was no possibility of challenging a superpower squarely within its own geographical sphere of influence. Moreover, the General Assembly’s action appeared to make Hammarskjöld personally responsible for the failure of the organization’s efforts. As observers credited him with the Suez success, so he had to absorb criticism (most of it unjustified) for the Hungarian failure.

From 1957 to 1960, Hammarskjöld’s tenure as secretary-general witnessed a number of lesser successes (as in Lebanon, where he succeeded in using the United Nations to minimize the intrusion of foreign powers) and failures (as in Laos where a civil war introduced great power rivalries). However, his greatest challenge came after the Congo received its independence from Belgium in the summer of 1960. There he extended the authority of his office far beyond its original parameters, conveying to observers the creative possibilities as well as the dangers of U.N. initiative. His efforts helped to stabilize an extremely dangerous situation that threatened to convert central Africa into a Cold War minefield, but he paid a high price. The Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev called for Hammarskjöld’s resignation and demanded a “troika” system to weaken the secretary-general (it would have effectively allowed an East-West veto of the secretary-general’s action), while France’s president Charles de Gaulle joined the Soviet Union in refusing to pay its U.N. assessment. More important, it was during the Congo Crisis that Hammarskjöld tragically died in a plane crash when seeking to end the secession of mineral-rich Katanga province in September, 1961. He was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize of 1961.

Significance

Although the U.N. Charter made the secretary-general’s office nonpolitical, Hammarskjöld after 1953 converted it into a dynamic and highly political instrument. In the process, he injected new life and controversy into a United Nations seriously weakened by the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The timing was right, for he took advantage of the diplomatic thaw that followed the death of Joseph Stalin and the end of the Korean War. By the same token, he made the most of his extraordinary intellect, his great confidence, and his phenomenal endurance. Hammarskjöld came to symbolize unusual integrity, single-mindedly devoting his energies to the United Nations. Even his harshest political critics, such as Khrushchev and Israel’s David Ben-Gurion, personally held him in high esteem. Virtually all observers understood that his imaginative use of both his own office and the United Nations in general by creating U.N. peacekeeping forces and a U.N. “presence” in trouble spots made the organization into a major factor in international political life.

Bibliography

Ask, Sten, and Anna Mark-Jungkvist, eds. The Adventure of Peace: Dag Hammarskjöld and the Future of the U.N. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Collection of essays by researchers, diplomats, and United Nations’ employees evaluating Hammarskjöld’s life, accomplishments, and the impact of his political legacy on the United Nations.

Cordier, Andrew, and Wilder Foote, eds. The Quest for Peace: The Dag Hammarskjöld Memorial Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Essays by many of the leading personalities at the U.N. Contains much rhetoric but much useful information as well.

Cruise O’Brien, Conor. The United Nations: Sacred Drama. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968. An insightful and somewhat controversial history of the United Nations by an Irish official deeply involved in the Congo operation. Highly critical of Hammarskjöld’s political activity.

Hammarskjöld, Dag. Markings. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964. A meditative, even religious, work that provides great insight into the author’s mind, though offering no direct comment about his political activity.

Jordan, Robert S., ed. Dag Hammarskjöld Revisited: The U.N. Secretary-General as a Force in World Politics. Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1983. A scholarly work on the secretary-general, including an excellent bibliographical article by B. L. S. Tractenberg.

Kelen, Emery. Hammarskjöld. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966. Organized topically rather than chronologically, Kelen’s book is lively though sometimes inaccurate. The author headed television services for the U.N.

Kille, Kent J. From Manager to Visionary: The Secretary-General of the United Nations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Examines how the leadership abilities of seven secretary-generals, including Hammarskjöld, affected the United Nations’ efforts to address threats to peace and security.

Lash, Joseph P. Dag Hammarskjöld: Custodian of the Brushfire Peace. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Based mainly on published sources, this is an admiring though superficial biography.

Urquhart, Brian. Hammarskjöld. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. The most important study of Hammarskjöld, written by his undersecretary-general for Special Political Affairs. Sympathetic yet not uncritical.

Zacher, Mark W. Dag Hammarskjöld’s United Nations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. A bit dull, but plenty of good analysis of Hammarskjöld’s strategy and tactics for settling disputes.