Dag Hammarskjold and United Nations peacekeeping.

• Author: Bildt, Carl
• Position: Essay

United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold arrived in Gaza on 23 December 1958 to spend Christmas with the troops of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF). At left is Lt.Col. J.C. Ruy, Commander of the Brazilian Battalion, and at centre, 2nd row, is UNEF Commander, Lt.Gen. E.LM. Burns, who accompanied the Secretary-General.

When Dag Hammarskjold was appointed Secretary-General of the United Nations on 7 April 1953, there was a full-scale war on the Korean peninsula, the Organization was deeply divided between East and West, and the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council over the refusal of the United Nations to give the now communist Chinese regime a seat on the Council. It was by no means a safe bet that the United Nations was going to be more successful than its predecessor, the League of Nations, in preventing an outbreak of a new world war.

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The man who took on this mission, however, had a firm belief in the United Nations role as an international peacekeeping body and protector of the interests and integrity of less powerful nations. He was also a strong believer in the power of diplomacy. He knew that even the most intense conflicts must reach a political solution, and that it was the task of international diplomacy to pave the way towards that end.

One would not necessarily expect a person of vision and principle to also be a pragmatic and creative person. That is why Dag Hammarskjold, fifty years after his death, continues to fascinate and inspire people from all over the world. Hammarskjold combined these seemingly antithetical virtues remarkably well. His often quoted ambition that the United Nations should be a dynamic instrument for its Member States essentially cast pragmatism as vision, for Hammarskjold understood that the Organization's relevance lay in its ability to constantly adapt to new challenges.

Peacekeeping is perhaps the most prominent example of that adaptation. When the Suez Crisis erupted in 1956, the United Nations Charter did not contain any provisions for using impartial and armed UN forces to stabilize fragile situations. It still does not--but neither has it ever barred such arrangements. For Hammarskjold, this void was an opportunity rather than a constraint. On the basis of a suggestion from Canada's Foreign Minister, Lester Pearson, he devised the concept of peacekeeping in a few days, and managed to assemble the United Nations Emergency...