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The Executive Head: An Essay on Leadership in International Organization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Robert W. Cox
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Extract

The quality of executive leadership may prove to be the most critical single determinant of the growth in scope and authority of international organization. Now sufficiently long and varied to allow a comparative approach, the history of international organization may provide elements for a theory of leadership. This essay is but a preliminary effort in that direction. It is concerned not only with how the executive head protects and develops his position as top man but also with how, by doing so, he may be the creator of a new (if yet slender) world power base.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Spring 1969 , pp. 205 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1969

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References

1 The fact that ILO, particularly under the leadership of its first Director-General, Albert Thomas, has been held up as a model of dynamic leadership in international organization may excuse the prominence of the ILO case in this article. Of Thomas' leadership the best account is still Phelan, E. J., Yes and Albert Thomas (London: Cresset Press Limited, 1949)Google Scholar. More recent is Schaper, B. W., Albert Thomas: Trente ans de réformisme social (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum & Comp. [1959])Google Scholar.

2 Phelan, pp. 124–127.

3 Virally, Michel, “Le role politique du secrétaire-général des Nations-Unies,” Annuaire français de droit international (Vol. 4) (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: Paris, 1958), pp. 360–399Google Scholar.

4 This is a natural bias in most biographical studies, for example those on Albert Thomas, and would seem to be the central idea in Schwebel, Stephen M., The Secretary-General of the United Nations: His Political Powers and Practice (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Siotis, Jean, Essai sur le secrétariat international (Publications de l'lnstitut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales, No. 41) (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1963), pp. 60–64, 135ffGoogle Scholar; and Gordenker, Leon, The UN Secretary-General and the Maintenance of Peace (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 5–6, 18ffGoogle Scholar.

6 Beloff, Max, New Dimensions in Foreign Policy: A Study in British Administrative Experience 1947–59 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), pp. 39, 58–59Google Scholar.

7 Hammarskjöld, Dag, Introduction to the Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work of the Organization, 16 June 1960–15 June 1961 (General Assembly Official Records [16th session], Supplement No. 1A), p. 6Google Scholar; also Hammarskjöld, Dag, The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), passimGoogle Scholar; a study written in the same context is Bailey, Sydney D., The Secretariat of the United Nations (United Nations Study No. 11) (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1962)Google Scholar .

8 Neustadt, Richard E., Presidential Power: the politics of leadership (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1960)Google Scholar. The author describes his book as a contribution to analysis of “the classic problem of the man on top in any political system: how to be on top in fact as well as in name.” (P. vii.) Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959)Google Scholar, especially Part 8, “Evolution of the Presidency,” adopts a similar approach. Gordenker follows Neustadt's approach in his stress on process and influence.

9 Barnard, Chester, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1946)Google Scholar.

10 Haas, Ernst B., Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1964), especially pp. 119ffGoogle Scholar.

11 Bailey, pp. 57–58; Gordenker, p. 103.

12 Loveday, Alexander, Reflections on International Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

13 Loveday, pp. 118–119. Author's italics.

14 Cf. Ismay, Lord Hastings, NATO: The First Five Years, 1949–1954 (Paris, 1954), p. 64Google Scholar.

15 Siotis, Jean, “Some Problems of European Secretariats,” Journal of Common Market Studies, 03 1964 (Vol. 2, No. 3), especially pp. 245ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Concerning the arrangements for top appointments in the UN see Gordenker, pp. 91ff.

17 There is a “written procedure” in force in the European Commission whereby files with decisions by each member are circulated to all the others. Anyone with experience of official bodies would assume that the principle of nonintervention would become the rule. Rarely would any member of the executive college interfere in the work of another member for fear of others crossing his own jurisdictional boundaries.

18 Phelan, pp. 28–33.

19 The parallel with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's use of the cabinet is evident from Schlesinger:

The meetings evidently retained some obscure usefulness for the President. The reaction he got from this miscellany of administrators perhaps gave him some idea of the range of public opinion. It also helped him to measure the capacity of his subordinates…. But, like all strong Presidents, Roosevelt regarded his cabinet as a body of department heads, to be dealt with individually–or, sometimes, as a group of representative intelligent men, useful for a quick canvass of opinion–not as a council of constitutional advisers.

(P. 504.) The similarity of UN practice under Lie, Hammarskjöld and Thant is pointed out by Gordenker.

20 It is, of course, difficult to disentangle at this distance in time the personal motives of Butler as regards his resignation. But these motives do not materially enter into the political analysis of the use of resignation as a weapon.

21 Letter from Hammarskjöld, , quoted in Ascoli, Max, “The Future of the U.N.—An Editorial,” Reporter (New York), 10 26, 1961, p. 12Google Scholar.

22 Goodrich, Leland M., “The Political Role of the Secretary-General,” International Organization, Autumn 1962 (Vol. 16, No. 4)CrossRefGoogle Scholar stresses the Secretary-General's role as consensus-builder and concludes that dangers to the UN might be avoided

if governments assume their responsibilities in the General Assembly and Security Council and do not place upon the Secretary-General or make it necessary for him to assume responsibilities beyond his powers and of such a nature as to expose him to serious political attack.

(Pp. 734–735.)

23 Hammarskjöld, Introduction to the Annual Report of the Secretary-General on the Work, of the Organization, 16 June 1960–15 June 1961.

24 Perceptive executive heads have realized this, as, for example in former ILO Director-General Edward Phelan's comment to Schwebel:

The Secretary-General's activity behind the scenes is useful. But multiple consultations decide nothing. They keep the Secretary-General informed and they exercise a gentle influence. This is not the same as influencing an international, collective decision.

(Schwebel, p. 211.) Nor is it the same as influencing a government to change its policy.

25 Apter, David E., The Politics of Modernization (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965). PP. 432–463Google Scholar.