Andrew Boyd (1) (1920–)

Andrew Boyd's 1962 polemic in support of the relatively new United Nations is interesting at several levels although my copy, once read, will be off to the charity shop to save shelf space. It appeared while the Katanga Crisis was still unresolved and Hammmerskold only recently dead.

Penguin Specials were fast produced politically-driven contributions to public debate. Penguin was already producing an African Library in response to excitement about a rather self-satisfied British show more decolonisation process where there was still hope in the liberal credentials of the new African states.

Boyd is the type of the British establishment liberal, an early junior participant in the United Nations during the post-war liberal internationalist period when Labour was in power, then an international affairs correspondent of The Economist. The latter's ideology has not changed in the decades since.

The context is complex - not only is the Cold War still at its height (with the Cuban Missile Crisis yet to be the apex that year) but tensions over decolonisation existed not only between nations but within British politics. A resentful British Conservative Imperialist Right would be termed Far Right today.

The Katanga crisis (well explained in this book) was a flash point in these latter tensions. Boyd is looking to justify and protect the very idea of the United Nations after intense local British media and political criticism, partially ill-informed, from reactionary imperial tendencies at home.

Boyd is not quite to be trusted in his framing because this is an apologia as well as a polemic. The comments on the Russians are predictably snide although (if you read between the lines) there was some merit in the Soviet anxiety that the UN was building itself up as an independent power base.

Similarly, while the attitude to Africans was unconscionable on the reactionary Right, it too was 'rational' in seeing Katanga (a province of the newly independent Congo) as a buffer state for Rhodesia and as security for important mineral concessions for the West (plus ca change).

But the real issue here is not Katanga which, as so often, was a pawn of others - foreign industrial interests linked to the British and Belgian conservative establishments and still poorly educated and greedy local big men on the make and the take - but the aspirations of the UN.

Or rather the aspirations of UN idealists like Boyd, as propagandist, and Hammerskjold, who had been engaged in much the same deliberate and cunning institutional mission creep that we have seen latterly with NATO - with equally disastrous consequences.

The original UN was essentially a Great Power fix to try to do what the Great Powers did in 1815 at a global level - be a talking shop to allow crises to be defused through rhetoric and build time and consensus for conflict resolution under a value system both liberals and communists could share.

Naturally, the Cold War complicated matters but the UN did useful work (on balance) in interposing itself by consent and with Security Council mandate between potentially warring parties, often very courageously in terms of personal risk. It was on the side of the angels.

The problems started with large-scale decolonisation which brought in a huge number of new nations with limited capacity. The Americans lived with this because they were not going to do anything against their own national interest in any case but the Russians got nervous.

The point was that a settlement between imperial victors with competing ideologies threatened to become something else - a proto-proto-world government pushing (under Hammarskjold) for small nations to combine and build sufficient military capacity to solve disputes directly.

One of the rules of the game was that the UN would deal with conflicts between nation states and not enter into conflicts within nation states. Whatever we may think of Katanga, as a secessionist operation it should really have been considered a conflict within a new nation state.

We can see here the slide that took place from one system (the 'realist' model of negotiation between sovereign nation states) into what we might call today liberal internationalism at its earliest stage. This latter became hegemonic eventually but is now crumbling under its own internal contradictions.

Boyd is defending this emergent system which privileges the small powers over the great powers in a form of medieval estates system writ large. It is pretty clear that Hammerskjold thought like this in part because he was a Swede, a 'neutral' in the recent war with a foot in both camps.

Hammerskjold's death in an air crash, probably but not certainly (though Boyd would have no inkling of this) an assassination by someone connected to the economic interests of white mineral exploitation, drew a halt to the ambitions of the radical wing of the UN but the ideology persisted.

The history of the next half century is the triumph of liberal internationalism as cover for Western hegemony leading to its twenty-first century over-reach. The UN was side-lined. It lost even its original potential power for conflict resolution stopping Great Powers from entering into small games.

If we are to understand the politics of all this, we have to understand that, in over-reaching himself, Hammerskjold, in an echo of his own technique of rule manipulation, created the conditions for the articulation and appropriation of the rights theory in the Charter by the hegemonic system.

In other words, despite Boyd's snide approach to Krushchev and Russian officials, the Russian analysis may have been correct if impotent. Liberal internationalism appropriated the values of 1945, extended them remorselessly and weaponised them against communism.

To achieve this required liberal internationalist victory internally within the West, above all the destruction of British imperial-reactionary thought as surplus to requirements. Naturally, American progressives and British liberals could find themselves in perfect attunement here.

The rest, as they say is history. Hammerskjold, a visionary in his way, showed the path. Rights-based idealism became established as possibility, actual UN-centred world government (thankfully) was sidelined and a rather sinister notion of the 'West' constructed to replace it.

Unfortunately for idealists, history has a way of biting back and so it is in this case. The collapse of communism created a vacuum. The victors behaved arrogantly, creating a sump of resentment. They over-extended - and now they are being rolled back not only globally but within the West.

This book, then, represents an interesting moment in history when rhetorical cover for cynical imperial manoevres was becoming a belief system for a whole generation of intellectuals before the realities of power allowed that belief system to become appropriated for a new world system.

There is just one thing to add - the value of the early chapters in producing (ironically) a very realist account of how the UN actually operates on a day to day basis as part of Boyd's polemic. He is concerned to dampen expectations and bring the UN down to earth as a real power player.

His account rings true - of a still ramshackle organisation that gets things done because of a clever, idealistic, dedicated and thoroughly manipulative executive authority at the centre of it. There are lessons here in assessing all trans-national liberal organisations purporting to be in our interest. show less

Intersting in being a desciption of the UN almost at the moment of its creation, including the text of its charter and other relevant materials.