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Secondment in the United Nations Secretariat: An Alternative View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

David A. Kay
David A. Kay
Affiliation:
A graduate student in the Department of Public Law and Government at Columbia University, New York.
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Extract

With the increased concern in the post-1960 period over the problem of achieving an equitable geographical distribution in the United Nations Secretariat, renewed attention has been focused on the role of short-term appointments in the recruitment of Secretariat personnel. What in the previous fifteen years of the Organization's history had been viewed largely as a technical facet of personnel policy suddenly became an issue of political contention in both the Fifth (Administrative and Budgetary) Committee and in the General Assembly itself. This article will first briefly detail the various positions in the debate over the role of short-term appointments. Its main focus, however, will be on the institutional dynamics to which secondment relates and on an attempt to gain insight into its operation through the experience of the European Communities with this type of appointment.

Type
Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Winter 1966 , pp. 63 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1966

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References

1 In the United Nations Secretariat, staff appointed for periods of less than five years are referred to as “fixed-term” staff. The United Nations practice has been to recruit these short-term personnel to a considerable extent from universities, research organizations, and private industrial firms and to a lesser extent from national civil services. This article is particularly concerned with that small group of short-term appointees who have been seconded from their national civil services to the United Nations but who expect to return within three to five years to their national services.

2 Report of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations(UN Document PC/20), p. 92. The Preparatory Commission was following in the footsteps of the League of Nations where permanency of tenure existed in principle, though not always in practice, at the Member of Section level (this level corresponds roughly to the P–1 and above rank of the United Nations Secretariat). In actual League practice there was a decided shift away from permanent contracts to short-term contracts after 1930. This shift, which resulted primarily as a consequence of the economic and political crisis of the 1930's, was so marked that by 1938 only about 50 percent of the persons of Member of Section and equivalent rank in the League Secretariat held permanent contracts. (Ranshofen-Wertheimer, Egon F., The International Secretariat: A Great Experiment in International Administration [Washington, D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1945], p. 302.)Google Scholar

3 General Assembly Official Records … Annexes (16th session), Agenda item 61, p. 13.Google Scholar

4 General Assembly Official Records … Fifth Committee (18th session), p. 178.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., p. 162.

6 Ibid., p. 186.

7 Ibid., p. 189.

8 General Assembly Official Records … Fifth Committee (17th session), p. 216.Google Scholar

9 General Assembly Official Records … Fifth Committee (18th session), p. 168.Google Scholar

10 General Assembly Official Records … Fifth Committee (17th session), p. 235.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., p. 220.

12 Ibid., pp. 215–216.

13 Bailey, Sydney D., The Secretariat of the United Nations (Rev. ed.; New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964), p. 16.Google Scholar

14 Primary emphasis will be placed on the experience of the European Economic Community (EEC) as it is by far the largest, both in size and scope of activities, of the Communities.

15 The following chart gives the number of staff positions authorized for the various Community institutions in the EEC budgets for 1961 and 1962:

(Lindberg, Leon N., The Political Dynamics of European Economic Integration [Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1963], p. 54.)Google Scholar

16 Article 157(2), Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community (Brussels: Secretariat of the Interim Committee for the Common Market and Euratom, n.d.).Google Scholar

17 Lindberg, p. 55.

18 The composition of the Commission's staff is as follows:

(Ibid., p. 325. See also, European Economic Community, Commission, Seventh General Report on the Activities of the Community [1 April 1963–31 March 1964] [Brussels: Publishing Service of the European Communities, 06 1964], p. 364.)Google Scholar

19 Lindberg, p. 55.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid., p. 85. According to the new personnel statute which took effect in 1962, agents temporaires can occupy Commission posts only for a maximum of two years plus one renewal of one year. After this period, such agents temporaires must either resign or go through the process of becoming permanent EEC civil servants. There has been insufficient time since the entry into force of this statute to assess any possible effect on the Commission staff. See Règlement No. 31 (CEE) et No. 11 (CEEA), fixant le statut des fonctionnaires et le régime applicable aux autres agents de la CEE et de la CEEA, reprinted in European Communities, Journal Officiel, 06 14, 1962Google Scholar, and cited in Lindberg, p. 327.

22 Stein, Eric and Nicholson, Thomas L. (ed.), American Enterprise in the European Common Market: A Legal Profile (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), Vol. 2, pp. 94–95.Google Scholar

23 Lindberg, pp. 286–287.

24 Lindberg, Leon N., “Decision Making and Integration in the European Community,” International Organization, Winter 1965 (Vol. 19, No. 1), p. 71. Italics in original.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Dag Hammarskjöld recognized the origin of the international civil service to be the domestic traditions of the British civil service. See Hammarskjöld, Dag, “The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact,” in Dag Hammarskjöld: Servant of Peace, ed. Foote, Wilder (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 331.Google Scholar

26 Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, 111: The Free Press, 1957), p. 196Google Scholar; and Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (ed. and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 214.Google Scholar

27 Parsons, Talcott, The Structure of Social Action (Glencoe, 111: The Free Press, 1949), p. 507Google Scholar; and Gerth and Mills, p. 196.

28 Haas, Ernst B., Beyond the Nation-State: Functionalism and International Organization (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 101.Google Scholar

29 The great attention that the delegates of Western countries in the Fifth Committee have paid to the effects of temporary appointments on the internal efficiency of the Secretariat is a reflection of the paramount importance that internal efficiency has in the Weberian model.

30 This is also true of national bureaucracies in times of rapid and important change. See Thorstein Veblen in Merton, p. 198.

31 Haas, p. 92. Italics in original.

37 Functionalists pin their hopes for rational organizational action on the technical and non-controversial character of international welfare activity. I have argued that the process by which a given activity becomes non-controversial is itself a political matter, derived not from initial consensus but from initial conflict, which may shake down to a consensus as a result of national redefinition of “need.” If this is true, it follows that a purely rational decision-making model is as inappropriate for a public international organization as it is for any public administrative agency that performs more than routine tasks, such as selling postage stamps or regulating the diameter of telegraph wires.

38 The difficulty in drawing a more distinct line between positions suitable and unsuitable for secondment will become readily apparent if one considers the role played by the staff in the Bureau of the Budget in the United States government. What must be optimized is the contact within a problem-solving context of officials who will eventually be called upon to occupy policy-making positions in national governments.

39 In this connection it should be noted that the measures suggested here in no way resemble the Soviet troika proposal which provided for a collective executive body to replace the Secretary-General. Each member of the troika would have been able to halt the implementation of decisions of the policy-making bodies of the United Nations through the exercise of a veto.