Becoming the secretary-general of the United Nations is notoriously difficult. To be appointed, a candidate must receive at least nine votes from the 15-member U.N. Security Council while also avoiding a veto from any of its five permanent members. It has long been suspected that candidates strike murky deals with the veto-wielding members to get their candidacy over the line, but almost nothing has been made public about how these backroom deals work.
To shed some light on this opaque process, the 1 for 8 Billion campaign, a civil society coalition pushing for greater transparency in selecting the next secretary-general, interviewed more than 40 former diplomats, candidates from previous races, and former senior officials. The resulting report found that all five permanent members—the United States, United Kingdom, China, France, and Russia—have attempted to compromise the independence of candidates in past selection processes, including the current secretary-general, António Guterres.
Becoming the secretary-general of the United Nations is notoriously difficult. To be appointed, a candidate must receive at least nine votes from the 15-member U.N. Security Council while also avoiding a veto from any of its five permanent members. It has long been suspected that candidates strike murky deals with the veto-wielding members to get their candidacy over the line, but almost nothing has been made public about how these backroom deals work.
To shed some light on this opaque process, the 1 for 8 Billion campaign, a civil society coalition pushing for greater transparency in selecting the next secretary-general, interviewed more than 40 former diplomats, candidates from previous races, and former senior officials. The resulting report found that all five permanent members—the United States, United Kingdom, China, France, and Russia—have attempted to compromise the independence of candidates in past selection processes, including the current secretary-general, António Guterres.
Now the race to find Guterres’s successor is reaching its critical phase. With secretive straw polling scheduled to take place in the Security Council Thursday, we hope that calling out these deals will empower those fighting for a fairer, more effective U.N. Transparency will help candidates push back against the expectation that they must trade favors with powerful countries to secure their appointment.
In his autobiography, Ban Ki-moon wrote that, in 2016, France was blocking his bid to become the next U.N. leader. Ban called French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to understand the objection. Douste-Blazy told him that France’s support was conditional on a French national being appointed undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, one of the most powerful roles in the U.N.
In Ban’s telling, he did not agree to that demand outright, merely responding that Douste-Blazy “should elect me Secretary-General. Then I would consider his request.” Yet the facts suggest it was not so much a bold gesture of defiance as it was a tacit acceptance. Ban went on to not only retain the incumbent French national in the peacekeeping post but also subsequently appoint two French nationals to it. What his autobiography does not mention is that he also appointed Douste-Blazy to the post of senior advisor innovative financing for development, which has the same rank as undersecretary-general for peacekeeping.
This episode is a rare example of a secretary-general talking about the quid pro quos they faced. But it is hardly the only time that it has happened. Our research has documented a dozen such examples, implicating every single permanent member of the Security Council and most secretaries-general over the U.N.’s history.
Sometimes these trades are well-documented: Kofi Annan agreeing to appoint a French national as head of peacekeeping in exchange for France’s support is all but confirmed by his semi-official autobiography. Sometimes they can be inferred. For example, while we do not know for certain that Kurt Waldheim’s decision to create a new undersecretary-general post for a Chinese national was linked to China’s surprising decision not to block his appointment as secretary-general in 1971, the timing is suggestive.
In other instances, trades are common knowledge within diplomatic circles but are hard to categorically confirm. For example, one senior diplomat told us it was “widely assumed” that the appointment of a Spanish national to be Guterres’s senior advisor on policy was linked to Spain’s support for his candidacy during the country’s elected term on the Security Council.
Secretaries-general have adopted different coping mechanisms, but none have been able to ignore the pressure entirely. U Thant and Annan invested significant political capital in resisting state influence and attempting, not always successfully, to carve out a team of their own choosing. In contrast, Dag Hammarskjold and Trygve Lie accepted the Security Council’s permanent members appointing their top team for them. They then created “kitchen cabinets” of more junior but more trusted staff to do the actual work—“freezing out” or “snowing under” officials they preferred not to work with.
The current secretary-general has a novel approach. On the one hand, Guterres has yielded to the unwritten rules of national monopolies on top jobs. We were told that such requests now concern even fairly junior roles (at some subdirector levels) and positions within the secretary-general’s own inner office, which were previously seen as off-limits. At the same time, however, Guterres has been willing to spend capital on ensuring that, after the nationality box has been ticked, the person appointed is of his choosing, not the state’s. When it came to the appointment of the last two undersecretaries-general for humanitarian affairs, for example, Guterres only seriously considered British candidates. However, he declined to appoint the British government’s preferred candidate in favor of a more independent-minded Brit.
At a time when the U.N. is facing urgent calls for reform, backroom bargaining does not help. Most states and civil society organizations are crying out for changes that will revive multilateralism and restore trust in the U.N. If the incoming secretary-general has already promised a slate of senior appointments to the Security Council’s permanent members, then current structures will be frozen in place, leaving little room for progress.
Guterres found this out the hard way early in his first term. To make U.N. crisis response more effective, he sought to merge two departments that oversaw political and peacekeeping interventions. But one department was run by a senior U.S. national and the other by a senior French national—and neither country was willing to give up their position. In the end, Guterres was forced to keep the two departments separate, merely changing their names and reshuffling a few functions. Both national monopolies had been secured during previous selection processes.
All this does not just prevent U.N. reform—at times, it drives it in surprising directions. In our report, Jeffrey Feltman, a former undersecretary-general for political affairs, explained how Guterres created a major new department at the U.N. to essentially fix a Russian personnel headache. In 2016, Russia was publicly opposed to Guterres’s appointment as secretary-general, stating, deep into the selection process, that it wanted to see a woman from Eastern Europe prevail. Yet Russia ended up backing Guterres, who is not only a man from Western Europe but also a former NATO leader to boot.
Why the U-turn? The evidence points to a Russian request for a senior role at U.N. headquarters for one of its nationals. Feltman told us about the predicament that Guterres found himself in. During a private lunch between the two men, in the period between Guterres’s appointment and the beginning of his tenure, Guterres confided that he was unsure how he could meet Russia’s expectation while also keeping France and the United States happy. Feltman suggested the creation of a new office to coordinate the U.N.’s counterterrorism work with a Russian at the helm. This was subsequently done, and the U.N. Office of Counter-Terrorism was born. Ten years later, the office has an annual budget of tens of millions U.S. dollars, almost 200 staff members, and continues to be led by a Russian.
But the biggest impact on U.N. reform is more insidious and more fundamental. Beyond all else, the P5 members value assurances on their national priorities and their status. One former candidate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that conditions are rarely presented explicitly, however, “when you listen carefully, you can detect the red lines of the party you are talking to.” To pass the test, candidates must convince the permanent members that their privileged status within the U.N. system will be protected, which puts any candidate campaigning to shake things up or spread power more evenly in jeopardy. Helen Clark, who was a secretary-general candidate in 2016, said that being perceived as too independent could be fatal, recalling that a senior former diplomat told her, “Your strength is your weakness.”
The U.N. Charter establishes the secretary-general and their team as “international officials responsible only to the Organization.” Clearly, this independence is not absolute. Secretaries-general work in partnership with states, according to rules and systems established by states, and are—and, moreover, should be—accountable to states. Nevertheless, to be effective and to be impartial, they will, at times, need to take discrete positions from states and speak truth to power.
Too often, the process of selecting a secretary-general leaves the winning candidate having promised too much to powerful states to be able to truly exercise their independence. They limp into office compromised, and owing favors, in a way that extends the already considerable powers of the Security Council’s permanent members and top donors. Small and medium-sized states, which perhaps have the most to benefit from and contribute to the U.N., are sidelined along the way.
The U.N. has had some talented civil servants over the years who happened to be of the “correct” nationality for the role. But the fact that the secretary-general cannot simply select the best person for any particular role on merit and build a diverse team around them drastically impoverishes the U.N.’s work. It also feeds the perception and the reality of the U.N. falling far short of its values when it comes to representing the totality of the world’s peoples and perspectives. Finally, it contributes to the low morale of many U.N. staff, who know their chances of advancement are minimal without the patronage of a powerful state.
Shining a light on bad conduct can give candidates and member states the leverage to push back against the bind. Some secretaries-general have demonstrated that it is possible to say no to powerful states. Given the dire financial and political constraints that the U.N. is up against, it needs to be able to marshal every bit of credibility that it can. By enabling candidates to resist the tawdry pressure to trade jobs for support, the U.N. can appoint someone who will lead with integrity and build the best possible team to take the organization forward.