Strengthening the Work of the United Nations: A Sustained Strategy for Peace

“The real issue between nations usually matters little. …The spirit in which nations approach each other to effect peaceful settlement is everything.” —Andrew Carnegie

The quest for peace was never far from Andrew Carnegie’s mind and heart. “I am drawn more to this cause than to any,” he wrote in 1907 when he accepted the presidency of the newly formed Peace Society of New York. Carnegie had always believed in the power of international laws and organizations to stave off conflict and he trusted that future wars would be averted by mediation. “Peaceful arbitration has so far been the chief agent of progress toward the reign of Peace,” he maintained.

In 1903, Carnegie supported the founding of the Peace Palace at The Hague, which today houses the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the UN’s International Court of Justice, the Hague Academy of International Law and one of the most prestigious international law libraries in the world. In 1910, in an effort to “hasten the abolition of international war,” he gave $10 million to establish the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organization dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations.

Carnegie Corporation of New York was founded in 1911 to “promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding,” a mission that was, in Carnegie’s mind, the surest path to permanent peace. “Whoso wants to share the heroism of battle let him join the fight against ignorance…and the mad idea that war is necessary,” he declared in The New York Times. Carnegie felt that war is wasteful, that diplomacy can resolve disputes without bloodshed and that nations can and should act collectively to prosecute cases of injustice when necessary. One of the first to call for the establishment of a “league of nations,” he argued that war might be eliminated if such a global organization were established with authority to settle international disputes through arbitration and the use of economic sanctions. (Years later, President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for the League of Nations had much in common with Carnegie’s ideas, as did subsequent proposals for the United Nations.)

Prior to World War I, Carnegie had used his influence with world leaders to try to halt the march to global conflict—to no avail. When the Great War did break out in 1914, Carnegie was devastated. He had been writing his autobiography, but the thought of “men slaying each other like wild beasts” so overwhelmed him that he put down his pen.

For Andrew Carnegie, the power of education to end conflict and engender peace was an article of faith, according to Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation. He saw foundations as catalysts for progress even when the odds against positive change seem overwhelming. “Throughout the course of the Corporation’s long history, we have held fast to that role. Carnegie’s lifelong dedication to international peace has been a hallmark theme of the Corporation’s work, which it pursued through World War II and the Cold War, and to which it still devotes untiring efforts,” Gregorian wrote in his 2003 annual report essay. “We have carried out this mission through grants, scholarships, national and international commissions, convenings and research, and under the leadership of my predecessor David Hamburg, through the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (CCPDC).”

The members of the commission were among the world’s most distinguished leaders: Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway; Virendra Dayal, member of the Human Rights Commission of India and former chef de cabinet for Secretaries General Pérez de Cuellar and Boutros-Ghali; Gareth Evans, former foreign minister of Australia and president of the International Crisis Group; Alexander L. George, professor emeritus of international relations at Stanford University; Flora MacDonald, former foreign minister of Canada; Donald F. McHenry, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Herbert S. Okun, former ambassador to the United Nations and the German Democratic Republic; Olara A. Otunnu, former UN under-secretary-general and former foreign minister of Uganda; David Owen, former foreign minister of the United Kingdom; John D. Steinbruner, then director of the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution; Brian Urquhart, former UN under secretary-general for special political affairs; Cyrus R. Vance, former U.S. secretary of state; John C. Whitehead, chairman emeritus of the Brookings Institution and Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan, former foreign minister of Pakistan.

CCPDC produced reports and analyses, held conferences and linked the world to its work through its web site and, in the process, helped to make the concept of preventing deadly conflict a priority concern for the United Nations as well as the wider global community. The commission’s work played a significant role in influencing Secretary-General Kofi Annan to adopt the concept of a “culture of prevention” for the UN. In his 1999 report to the fifty-fourth session of the General Assembly, Annan said, “For the United Nations, there is no higher goal, no deeper commitment and no greater ambition than preventing armed conflict. The main short- and medium-term strategies for preventing nonviolent conflicts from escalating into war, and preventing earlier wars from erupting again, are preventive diplomacy, preventive deployment and preventive disarmament.”

Since 1997 when he was appointed president, Gregorian and the Corporation staff have maintained the focus on peace as central to the foundation’s agenda. In that connection, the Corporation has supported various activities of the United Nations, including efforts to help the UN become a stronger, better institution by a range of means such as funding reform efforts, contributing to scholarship, doing policy research, training diplomats, sponsoring conferences or supporting publications that will keep the UN’s legacy alive.

Building a Bridge to Understanding

Founded in 1945, the United Nations, originally comprising 51 member states, aimed to achieve “the willing cooperation of free peoples in a world in which, relieved of the menace of aggression, all may enjoy economic and social security.”¹ From the beginning, Carnegie Corporation provided funding to build public support and understanding for the fledgling institution. In the second year of the UN’s existence, in keeping with the Corporation’s commitment to the diffusion of knowledge, a grant of $30,000 (over $250,000 in today’s dollars) funded the United Nations News, a monthly publication designed to “give a brief, factual, unbiased summary of the current activities of the United Nations, with a minimum of editorial comment.”

News editors summarized the work of all the UN’s main organs, commissions andcommittees so that writers, editors and educational directors of membership organizations could use the information in their publications. Copies of the News were made available to public, school and college libraries and became source material for teachers, discussion group leaders, radio commentators and others. Within a year the United Nations News could boast of thousands of subscribers from coast to coast, among them members of Congress, foreign ambassadors and college presidents.

Between 1948 and 1952 the Corporation provided annual grants of $25,000 (about $195,000 today) to the Corporation’s sister organization, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This funding was earmarked for UN support because, at that time, the Endowment was actively conducting research and public education programs related to the United Nations and the future of the postwar international legal system, as well as providing diplomatic training for foreign service officers from emerging nations. (Earlier, while World War II was still being fought, the Endowment had conducted research in order to analyse the lessons learned from the League of Nations, which could be applied to the organization that would become the United Nations.)

It was with the appointment of David Hamburg as president of Carnegie Corporation in 1983 that the foundation embarked on an active pursuit of peace in potential conflict situations, focusing on mediation techniques, reconciliation approaches and, above all, robust prevention measures—a guiding theme of Hamburg’s presidency. During the early 1980s the Cold War was a major factor in international relations and the potential for nuclear confrontation existed between the world’s two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, these two nations along with France, Great Britain and China were conducting regular tests of nuclear weapons, and international tensions were running high.

Hamburg sized up the world situation in his first annual report essay, bluntly stating, “The overriding problem facing humanity today is the possibility of nuclear holocaust.” In response, the Corporation initiated the Avoiding Nuclear War program to promote the study of international security and the assembling of a body of scholarly analysis on nuclear issues and on U.S.-Soviet relations. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace joined in this effort to find good ideas for managing and preventing crises, and for over 20 years this organization has produced numerous studies, conferences and publications on nonproliferation, for which the Corporation has provided well over $5 million in grants.

Like Andrew Carnegie, David Hamburg set his sights on the elimination of war. His lofty views were best summed up in his 1996 annual report essay, where he wrote, “As our children and their children learn about the horrifying mass violence that human beings have committed against each other throughout the ages, it is my fervent hope that, at the beginning of the second millennium, the communities of the world will have planted seeds of cooperation and reconciliation that will grow into a system in which mass violence becomes increasingly rare, or even—dare I say it—someday nonexistent.” During his tenure, the Corporation sought ways that, in Hamburg’s words, “governments, intergovernmental organizations and the institutions of civil society could foster the conditions under which different human groups can learn to live together amicably.” His objective was nothing less than “mobilization of the best possible intellectual, technical and moral resources to work on these great problems,” and he intended to apply research, analysis and education at the nation’s strongest universities to the task. “The painfully difficult effort to achieve decent, fair, peaceful relations among diverse human groups is an enterprise that must be renewed,” Hamburg maintained.

In aspiring to address the world’s most intransigent issues, the Corporation naturally turned its attention to the United Nations. As Hamburg saw it, to play its role effectively, the UN would require much more substantial financial and political support than it had ever received, which would depend on a much higher level of public understanding about the UN’s functions and its potential than existed at the time. To meet this imperative, the Corporation has, through the years, provided significant, sustained support for many of the best minds in the foreign policy realm to study, advise, train and problem solve on behalf of UN entities from the secretary-general to the Security Council to the peacekeepers in the field. Corporation funding has flowed steadily to the UN and to organizations that facilitate its work, often at the UN’s request, mitigating many critical areas of conflict—any one of which might have exploded into a global catastrophe. Since 1997, President Hamburg’s successor, Vartan Gregorian, has continued his policies in pursuit of peace as well as in support of the UN.

How are these policies manifested? The Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict illuminated several fundamental issues in which the UN and other actors played a key role: self-determination; post-conflict peacebuilding and statebuilding in war-torn states and access to water resources. The Corporation has invested in these and other issues, supporting scores of individual scholars who have built up a corpus of knowledge that will be helpful to decision makers of international bodies and sovereign states.

“Knowledge—steeped in history and constantly enriched by current and changingevents—can provide a foundation for understanding between societies, cultures, religious beliefs and political systems,” Gregorian stresses, “and understanding can be a bridge to peace.”

1 “History of the Charter of the United Nations,” http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/history/index.html

Written by: Karen Theroux. Theroux is an editor/writer in the Corporation’s Public Affairs department with many years’ experience in educational publishing and communications.