A Model for today's international civil servant - Perspective

UN Chronicle, Sept-Nov, 2003 by David K.J. Jeffrey

"I am a professional optimist", Ralph Bunche told journalists at Nicosia International Airport at the conclusion of a visit in July 1966 to view the peacekeeping operations in Cyprus. "If I were not a professional optimist through 21 years in the United Nations service, mainly in conflict areas--Palestine, Congo, here and in Kashmir--I would be crazy. You have to be optimistic in this work or get out of it.... That is, optimistic in the sense of assuming that there is no problem--Cyprus or any other--which cannot be solved, and that, therefore, you have to keep at it persistently and you have to have confidence that it can be solved." (1)

Widely hailed, among his many accomplishments, as a great international civil servant, American and citizen of the world, Ralph Johnson Bunche's life story is one full of inspiration to all engaged in the pursuit of peace. As a year-long programme marking the 100th anniversary of his birth in Detroit, Michigan, commences to celebrate and build upon the legacy of this diplomat, scholar and internationalist, it is timely for the current staff of the United Nations, to which Ralph Bunche devoted 25 years of his spectacular career, to reflect on one of its most famous and optimistic alumni. A visible reminder of the esteem with which he is regarded within the United Nations and the City of New York is the Ralph Bunche Park located directly opposite the UN Secretariat building.

Many staff members who pass this memorial, however, may not be fully aware of his great legacy. Such reflection is timely because in 2003, when the Iraq crisis was added to the long list of conflicts with which the Organization has been confronted, the relevance and even future of the United Nations has again been scrutinized and questioned However, within the Organization, while the mood may have at times been troubled, the outlook was much more positive. An unofficial survey of stall members revealed that 80 per cent did not see the crisis as making the United Nations irrelevant. Further, 60 per cent felt optimistic about its future, while only 20 per cent were decidedly pessimistic. So, during these challenging times, what can be gleaned from Ralph Bunche's views on the meaning of being an international civil servant and how can they be pursued by his current successors?

Staff members today are required to make the same commitment to the United Nations, as did all their predecessors. As international civil servants, they are charged with translating into reality the ideals of the United Nations and its specialized agencies, as enshrined in the UN Charter. UN staff are part of the international civil service which "relies on the great traditions of public administration that have grown up in Member States: competence, integrity, impartiality, independence and discretion. But over and above this, international civil servants have a special calling: to serve the ideals of peace, of respect for fundamental rights, of economic and social progress, and of international cooperation." (2)

It was this same calling to which Ralph Bunche responded in 1946 when he was asked by then UN Secretary-General Trygve Lie to leave his senior role at the United States State Department and join the fledgling United Nations, in charge of the Department of Trusteeship, where he would oversee post-war decolonization efforts.

Having grown up in material poverty but in a family rich in spirit, imbued with a sense of pride in his identity as a black American, but very conscious of racial inequalities, Ralph Bunche had all the makings of a fine international civil servant. His great achievements in political science, as a student at the University of California in Los Angeles and Harvard University, then as a professor at Howard University, and his study tour of colonial policy in Africa, would equip him very well for his future career. He lived through the international turmoil of the Second World War and the domestic struggles of the nascent civil rights movement. His own ideals as a young man would come to be reflected by those adopted by the United Nations and subsequently by sweeping social reforms in the United States. He arrived on the international scene at a time that would prove most fortuitous for the emerging Organization, playing significant roles in its founding and the drafting of its Charter.

Ralph Bunche clearly had the highest regard for the United Nations, choosing to spend the majority of his working life as part of the UN Secretariat from 1946 until ill health forced his retirement in 1971. His views on the meaning of being an international civil servant can be identified not only from his speeches and writings but, perhaps even more cogently, from his actions.

As one of his biographers observed: "The civil rights movement was terribly important to black Americans and to Ralph, but he had placed his faith in and was determined to devote himself to the United Nations and the emerging dependent territories, seeking a higher goal than the equality of one people." (3) Having made this choice, he reaffirmed it when he declined to move back to Washington, DC to join the Truman Administration, preferring instead to remain at the United Nations. He saw in the Organization an opportunity to serve not just his fellow black Americans but the peoples of the world, and not merely the Government of his country but an international organization, of which the United States was a founding member, where his working allegiance would lie with the United Nations itself.