ABSTRACT
Dag Hammarskjöld was received by his predecessor Trygve Lie at Idlewild Airport in New York with a warning: ‘The task of the Secretary-General is the most impossible job on earth’ (1954: 417). Lie’s words carry an unmistakeable tone of bitterness at having to retire. Above all, this half-joking, half-serious sentence sums up one man’s experience of a seven-year term in a unique post. The complaint about the most impossible job on earth has often been repeated. This complaint usually goes hand in hand with the remark that it is also one of the most diffi cult political offi ces to understand and analyse.1 Max Jacobson, a Finnish diplomat, described the ideal Secretary-General as ‘a communicator like Reagan, a reformer like Gorbachev, a diplomat like Kissinger, and a manager like Iacocca’ (quoted in Rivlin 1994: 53). It seems impossible to sketch the demands and scope, the laws and determinants of this offi ce in just a few strokes. These diffi culties arise partly from the circumstance that – as already indicated – the analysis of the offi ce inevitably implies a discussion about the mission, functioning and nature of the United Nations (Dicke 1998). The Secretary-General is the personifi cation of the UN per se. As Boutros-Ghali put it:
[L]e Secrétaire-Général est, qu’il le veuille ou non, l’incarnation de l’organisation mondiale. C’est à lui, à titre principal, que l’opinion publique internationale demande des comptes. C’est sur sa personne que se concentrent les critiques ou les frustrations de la communauté internationale.
