“Indeed, ideas of internationality, independence, and loyalty were recognized as crucial cornerstones when the first professional international civil service was established 100 years ago with the creation of the League of Nations,” writes KAREN GRAM-SKJOLDAGER in ‘From the League of Nations to the United Nations: Milestones for the International Civil Service’, a report published by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation as part of a series commemorating 100 years of the international civil service.
The League of Nations was founded as part of the Versailles Peace Treaty in June 1919, which also saw the creation of the International Labour Office and the Permanent Court of International Justice. “However, the statesmen and diplomats who created these new international organizations had given little thought to the form and function of the largest administration of this new multilateral system: the League Secretariat,” the author states. Article 6 of the League’s founding document, the Covenant, merely stated that a secretariat should be created comprising ‘a Secretary-General and such secretaries and staff as may be required’.
While the creation of the League Secretariat itself marked a critically important initial milestone in the development of a modern international civil service, the first Secretary-General of the organization, former British senior diplomat Sir Eric Drummond, more or less had a free hand to organize the Secretariat the way he saw fit. Working out of small office in Cumberland House in London with a staff of just three, Drummond started designing his new administration. The humble beginning of the Secretariat stood in stark contrast to Drummond’s ambitious vision, which would have an impact on the role of international civil servants over the decades to come.
The core principles of the modern international civil service – multinational staffing, institutional independence and undivided institutional loyalty – came into being in an incomplete and improvised form and developed gradually through the inter-war years. “With the creation of the United Nations, the experiments and experiences of the League were transformed into fully-fledged, formalized concepts and principles and lifted to the highest legal level enshrined in the UN Charter and other multilateral treaties,” GRAM-SKJOLDAGER states.
The new and enhanced legal status of the international civil servant was substantiated by the creation of a new UN Standard of Conduct for international civil servants. In 1949, the International Civil Service Advisory Board was set up to develop a standard of conduct for international civil servants. Here too, the continuities from the League, are clear.
The 1954 ‘Report on Standards of Conduct in the International Civil Service’ became a handbook for international civil servants. The report confirmed and developed the principles of multinationality, independence and loyalty from the League but with a somewhat stronger emphasis on the rules and procedures that enhanced the institutional autonomy of the international civil service. Thus, it confirmed the principle that the Secretary-General (and the Executive Heads of the specialized agencies) had the sole authority in appointing staff, now highlighting how this needed to be ‘maintained in practice as well as in theory’.
When addressing the issue of multinationality, the board also made it clear that while a broad geographical representation was desirable, the Secretariat leadership should be accorded a high degree of flexibility and room for maneuver. The board thus expressed the ‘firm conviction that the fixing of any rigid quota for geographical distribution would be extremely harmful to an international secretariat’, recommending ‘a regional approach to geographical distribution’ and that ‘corrections’ to imbalances should be made gradually and without rigid scrutiny. The ‘Standards of Conduct’ remained relatively unchanged until 2001, getting its last major update in 2013. It is still an important document for international civil servants today.
The new and robust legal framework for the international civil service was reflexive of a more general strengthening of the Secretariats political role. Unlike the League Secretaries-General, the new Secretaries-General of the UN were authorized to bring issues before the Security Council that they considered to be a threat to international peace and security (Article 99). They could now also be assigned any function that the Security Council or General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council or the Trusteeship Council decided on (Article 98), thus transcending the purely administrative function as the head of the Secretariat.
While much has changed, a lot remains the same, as GRAM-SKJOLDAGER reminds us. The UN Secretariat today continues to confront a major challenge the League grappled with: How the international civil service achieves broad geographical representation and close interactions with its surroundings, while also maintaining the undivided loyalty of its officials and securing its institutional independence.
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