The legacy of former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld is a subject which has attracted a large and growing field of literature, which could even be described as a hagiography given that most works ladle praise on his time in office. In recent years, Hammarskjöld’s death in a plane crash in the Congo in 1961 has been reinvestigated, with an official UN Commission due to issue its report in the coming months. The re-examination of the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death has led historians to cast a critical eye over the political context of the time, and especially his efforts to carve out a more activist role for the UN in international affairs. Hammarskjöld believed that the organisation should become more interventionist in helping to resolve international conflict, and throughout his nine years as secretary-general he utilised his powers under the UN Charter to strengthen his office and to develop new competencies for the UN, such as peacekeeping. While these lasting changes to the UN have now become synonymous with the role of the organisation, at the time, many of his reforms proved controversial, not least when they impinged upon the interests of the superpowers. In particular, the UN intervention into the newly independent Congo in 1960, with the largest peacekeeping mission ever mandated up to that point, led to confrontation and frustration between Hammarskjöld and a host of states with key interests in the region, including Britain, Belgium, the United States (US), and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). At the root of this were not just Cold War tensions, which have been the focus of most scholarship, but also Hammarskjöld’s approach to the process of decolonisation.
As Britain, Belgium and France gradually freed their colonies, a new debate emerged about how to transform former imperial subjects into nation-states, and what the role of the UN should be in this state-building exercise. It is precisely this topic that Henning Melber’s book opens up, which is one of the few aspects of Dag Hammarskjöld’s tenure as secretary-general that has not been thoroughly researched. The book highlights Hammarskjöld’s role in shaping the post-colonial world by analysing his contributions to ideas of the international civil servant, and economic development in post-colonial states, before turning to analyse his role in the Congo crisis. These topics use a solid selection of both primary source documents and secondary literature to argue that Hammarskjöld’s role requires further analysis; in particular, Melber rightly argues that further research should go beyond the arguments which have focused on Hammarskjöld’s ethical approach to his role (see Lipsey 2013; Heller 2001; Stahn and Melber 2014; Urquhard 1994; Williams 2011). While the book clearly builds on these existing works there are also marked differences. What Melber impressively manages to achieve is to open Hammarskjöld’s legacy to offer more balanced assessments of his contributions towards the international system. In addition, he focuses on the lesser-known aspects of his role as secretary-general, in a similar way to the work of scholars such as Eva Muschik and Aaron Rietkerk who have examined Hammarskjöld’s work beyond the Security Council (see O’Malley 2018; Muschik 2018; Rietkerk 2016). This book puts decolonisation front and centre, and persuasively argues that we should reconsider Hammarskjöld from this perspective. This would seem to offer a departure from the work of Lipsey (2013) and Fröhlich (2007), among others, who focus heavily on the spiritual and ethical dimensions of Hammarskjöld as a man – which is a problematic and rather nebulous basis for analysis. Rather, the emphasis on Hammarskjöld’s legacy for decolonisation opens an under-explored and more controversial aspect of his legacy.
Melber’s contributions in these areas are significant, as he charts Hammarskjöld’s work on decolonisation issues while also opening discussions about lesser-known aspects of his Secretariat, in particular, how he shaped relations with the post-colonial world, especially in the area of economic development. While the book makes good use of UN archives, it lacks new sources of primary documentation on Hammarskjöld’s role, particularly from archives in African states and the global South more generally. The focus on the Secretariat is also quite narrow and does not analyse in any detail Hammarskjöld’s contribution to other important debates in the Third (‘Economic and Social’) and Fourth (‘Special Political and Decolonization’) General Assembly committees. Other prominent issues such as the question of the treatment of Indians in South Africa, the apartheid question, the conflict over Kashmir and the issue of the status of South-West Africa (now Namibia) receive no attention.
Similarly, given the author’s evidently deep knowledge of the subject, one wonders whether more could be said about Hammarskjöld’s general views on nationhood, sovereignty and state-building and precisely what the UN’s role could be in this area. This is particularly important given the transformation of these questions in the late 1950s and early 1960s during a moment when the UN itself was changing. Another notable absence in the book is Hammarskjöld’s activities in the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), particularly considering that he drew his authority for the Congo mission from these meetings. There may be an argument to be made that in his quest to make the Secretariat more active, Hammarskjöld was able to utilise the UN structure as a whole, not simply the interpretations of the Charter where much of the literature on his tenure has focused.
Overall, the book does not claim to offer a systematic analysis of all of Hammarskjöld’s activities at the UN, and its greatest achievement is in clearly opening up an under-studied aspect of his legacy, but one which had significant implications for the UN and for post-colonial states. The book offers two important contributions to the field. First, Melber presents a balanced view of Hammarskjöld’s record in the area of decolonisation, which, in a field dominated by hagiographic accounts, offers a different perspective and suggests that other frames of analysis may be used to consider Hammarskjöld’s legacy. Second, the book addresses an important subject which deserves further research, that of how Hammarskjöld’s policies shaped, over a longer term, the UN role in managing the decolonisation process. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the inner-workings of the UN in the late 1950s and early 1960s and, crucially, for those seeking a new perspective on Hammarskjöld and his efforts to position the UN as an active state-building organisation in the post-colonial world.