This succinct political and intellectual biography of Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish diplomat who served as the second secretary-general of the United Nations (1953–1961), offers important insights into the role of the UN in Africa during the early years of decolonisation. Like earlier scholars, Henning Melber explores the ins and outs of the controversial plane crash that took Hammarskjöld's life. However, his primary concern is Hammarskjöld's diplomacy – specifically, his role in shaping UN involvement in African decolonisation in the context of the Cold War. Until now, Hammarskjöld's own part in this process, while highly contested, has received little in-depth scholarly attention.
Director emeritus of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden, Melber is clearly an admirer of the diplomat. However, he successfully walks the line ‘between glorification and castigation’ (xi), paying tribute to Hammarskjöld's role in shaping the UN as a lead player in African decolonisation, but also exploring the man's blind spots and weaknesses and the controversies that surrounded him. To support his claims, he mines four volumes of Hammarskjöld's statements and speeches (totalling 2696 pages), which elaborate on the secretary-general's worldview and his understanding of the role the UN should play; Markings, Hammarskjöld's posthumously published journal of poems and spiritual meditations; the diplomat's personal notes; and numerous books and articles written by Hammarskjöld's associates and later scholars.
The book begins with a portrait of Hammarskjöld and the environment that made him – the middle-class Swedish, intellectual and Evangelical Lutheran background that shaped the principles that guided him as both a diplomat and international civil servant. While some critics charge that Hammarskjöld used his position to promote Western interests, Melber argues that he was instead an ‘anti-hegemonic’ (4) actor who manoeuvred within the limitations imposed by the great powers that dominated the UN and other international institutions. Although Hammarskjöld was the product of Nordic – and thus Western – socialisation, his goals varied from those of the most powerful Western nations. His underlying respect for ‘those at the margins of global power structures’ (51) – and his belief that the UN should help them claim their rights – led him to use the powers of his office to collaborate with new African governments and other states that refused to align with East or West. He sought out African opinions and valued African agency. He attempted, within the constraints imposed by the UN Charter, to realise its underlying principles that recognised the sovereignty of all states and the universality of the right to self-determination, economic development and political independence. In fact, Melber argues, Hammarskjöld's resistance to powerful nations and their agendas may well have contributed to his untimely death.
The portrayal of the man and his make-up is followed by a series of case studies that demonstrate how Hammarskjöld attempted to guide the UN in its mission to promote international peace and security and to effect African decolonisation. The first two cases exemplify defeats: Hammarskjöld's failure to make headway in eradicating Apartheid in South Africa and ending South Africa's occupation of Namibia; his inability to garner UN support to investigate French actions in Tunisia, where in 1961 French paratroopers killed unarmed protestors demanding the closure of a French naval base. In contrast, the UN, under Hammarskjöld's leadership, prevailed in the1956 Suez Crisis, when it forced Britain, France and Israel to withdraw their troops from Egypt, where they had intervened to thwart the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. The final case, UN involvement in the Congo Crisis (1960–1961), was another failure, with an impact that has extended decades beyond Hammarskjöld's death. The Congo debacle involved Belgian military intervention in a sovereign African state, support by Western mining interests for Congolese secessionist movements, and Belgian and US intelligence involvement in the ousting and assassination of the Congo's elected prime minister. Hammarskjöld was on a mission attempting to resolve the Congo Crisis when his plane went down in Northern Rhodesia, quite possibly the result of foul play.
To conclude, Melber's volume represents an important contribution to the literature, offering a broad understanding of the ethical, moral and political framework that guided Dag Hammarskjöld in his mission to make the UN a leader in the struggle for African decolonisation, as well as his successes and failures in that endeavour. Its notable weakness is one that Melber acknowledges at the outset – the lack of African voices and perspectives, which he attributes to their absence from the official record of the times. Although Melber successfully reads between the lines of official accounts, demonstrating the ways in which less powerful actors manoeuvred within the limitations imposed on them by hegemonic nations, his assessment would have benefitted from reference to contemporary accounts by African participants, such as Kwame Nkrumah's Challenge of the Congo, and from interviews with the dwindling number of African participants in these momentous events.
