Dag Hammarskjold's approach to the United Nations and international law.

• Author: Bring, Ove
• Position: Documentos - Biograf

Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, had a flexible approach to international law. On the one hand, he strongly relied on the principles of the UN Charter and general international law, on the other, he used a flexible and balanced ad hoc technique, taking into account values and policy factors whenever possible, to resolve concrete problems. Hammarskjö1d had a tendency to express basic principles in terms of opposing tendencies, to apply a discourse of polarity or dualism, stressing for example that the observance of human rights was balanced by the concept of non-intervention, or the concept of intervention by national sovereignty, and recognizing that principles and precepts could not provide automatic answers in concrete cases. Rather, such norms would serve > (1). Very often it worked.

Dag Hammarskjö1d has gone to history as an inspiring international personality, injecting a dose of moral leadership and personal integrity into a world of power politics. He succeeded Trygve Lie as Secretary-General in April 1953, in the midst of the Cold War, and in addition to East-West rivalry he was confronted with Third World problems and the agonizing birth of the new Republic of Congo, a tumultuous crisis through which be lost his life in the Ndola air crash in September 1961.

INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND AND PERSONAL PHILOSOPHY

Dag Hammarskjö1d was born in 1905 in a small town in middle Sweden where his father at the time was President of the District Court of Appeal. His father, Hjalmar Hammarskjö1d, was later, between 1914 and 1917, Prime Minister of Sweden. Dag's elder brother Åke became in 1920 a member of the League of Nations secretariat. Between 1922 and 1936 Åke was Registrar of the Permanent Court of International Justice in the Hague. At the time of his premature death, in 1937, Åke was appointed to serve as a Judge in the Hague Court. The father and his sons were groomed in a typical Swedish civil service tradition where the concepts of > and > reflected time-honored values. It has been said of Dag Hammarskjö1d that he had a manifest pride in his family's legal background and that he >. (2) Nevertheless, he was a professional economist. Although he studied law at Uppsala University he later produced a doctoral thesis in economics.

Dag had a very dose relationship to his mother Agnes, a religious and pious woman, and from her he inherited a simple wish to > in concrete cases. Already as a young man he was interested in medieval religious thinking. His early correspondence includes references to mystics like Meister Echart (d. 1327) and Thomas a Kempis (d. 1471). He had received Thomas a Kempis' De imitatione Christi from his mother Agnes in 1921 and kept the book for the rest of his life. Later he also referred to Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), the more empiric and realist philosopher who tried to combine Christian doctrine with Aristotelian thinking, and St. John of the Cross (d. 1591), who combined Christian mysticism with religious reformism and poetry. What these thinkers had in common was a focus on meditation and seclusion, a stress on the importance of a man's inner life in relation to God in preparation for individual choices and individual action. Hammarskjö1d was through his life attracted to this personal approach to moral decision-making. It also connected to then societal values of > conveyed by his father and pious-moral influence exerted by his mother. (3)

Hammarskjöld also had an intense relationship to world literature. He used the works of Joseph Conrad, Herman Hesse, Fjodor Dostojevskij and others for personal reflection in situations where decisions needed to be taken. It was manifest from his correspondence and diary that these and other authors played a significant role in his world of ideas. Dostojevskij's The Brothers Karamazov includes references to each individual's universal responsibility for other individuals, to the ideas of > and >, and to individual action >. Hammarskjö1d was much attracted to the idea of moral individual action. He also felt that Joseph Conrad's book Lord Jim and Herman Melville's Moby Dick caught the dilemmas of strong-willed individuals who pursued their chosen path of life in constant uphill battles.

Hammarskjö1d was not afraid of uphill battles. He saw the appointment as Secretary-General to the UN as a challenge and a chance to be of real service to the international community. He was much influenced by the ethics of Albert Schweitzer and his emphasis on the sanctity of human life. At last Hammarskjö1d was himself in a position to put into action the ideal of service to man.

IN THE UNITED NATIONS

Already some time after Hammarskjöld's appointment as Secretary-General in 1953 it became clear that he had an innovative approach to the possibilities of the United Nations. He was not a formalist, he wanted to go forward and act in line with the purposes of the UN Charter. The purposes of the Charter were fixed and binding, but the working methods of the Organization must be flexible and innovative. He did not want to feel fettered by concrete provisions of the Charter that did not explicitly provide for things he wanted to do, options he wanted to test in his capacity as Secretary-General. If he felt that the purposes of the UN made it possible, he would envision a mandate flowing from the Charter to act in accordance with his conscience as an international civil servant.

Hammarskjöld set out his views on the role of the UN Organization and his approach to the UN Charter in the Annual reports to the General Assembly. In this context he developed a doctrine on the independence of the international civil servant, including an active role for the Secretary-General under an expansive interpretation of Articles 97-100 of the Charter. He introduced new mechanisms for a UN presence in conflict areas, for example the...