The Big Influence of Small Countries in the United Nations Secretariat

Who really runs the world? We're not talking in a power-brokers-conspiring-in-the-back-room sort of way. Rather, by looking at the institutions that countries themselves have set up to organize the world's affairs, can we determine who is doing most of the managing?

That's the question Eric Werker, associate professor in the Business, Government and the International Economy unit at Harvard Business School, asks in a new working paper, Who Runs the International System? Power and Staffing at the United Nations Secretariat. He conducted the research with Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Economics Paul Novosad.

“Just the conversations that are happening in the UN are important in determining international priorities”

Among their findings: Powerful countries including the United States, China, and India have less administrative influence than you might think, while small but rich democracies such as Finland and New Zealand are overrepresented.

Does It Matter?

"There are two views of the United Nations," says Werker. "Either you think it matters or you don't."

In the first camp are those who believe that the United Nations has real influence on the world by setting rules and norms between nations. "Just the conversations that are happening in the UN are important in determining international priorities—do we go after land mines, or gender disparity, or corruption? Any of these decisions will help some countries and hurt others."

The United Nations has 40,000 employees spread out around the world.Photo: iStockPhoto

In the other camp are those who believe that despite all of these powers, the United Nations merely reflects the agendas of the 193 member states.

Either way, the national makeup of senior positions that run the United Nations can tell us a lot about which countries are actually calling the shots in world affairs. "Even if you think the UN is merely reflecting the world order instead of creating it, you should still know who is running it," says Werker.

Although the United Nations Secretariat, the executive arm of the organization, has some 43,000 employees worldwide, most of the strategic decisions are made by 80 or so senior officials. Headed by the secretary-general, the Secretariat plays key roles in agenda-setting for various deliberative UN organizations and manages global peace-keeping operations—including the UN's response to the Ebola outbreak. There is keen competition and string pulling among nations to win those upper level staff appointments.

While those members, in theory, are supposed to check their national allegiances at the door, in practice that's not the case, says Werker. "Both the UN's own analysis and remarks by diplomats over the decades have indicated nations really do act in their own national interest."

By looking at the national composition of Secretariat staffing over the years, Werker hypothesized that it is possible to show the changing nature of world power, providing another and perhaps better way to measure international influence than traditional measures such as counting the number of tanks and bombs countries possess. "War, thankfully, is a very rare event," he says. "When two countries do go to war, it means that one of them has miscalculated. By contrast, in this setting you have a constant struggle in real time between every nation in the world vying for influence within the Secretariat."

To figure out who has been winning that competition, Werker and Novosad consulted the Yearbook of the United Nations. They compiled a database of every senior official in the Secretariat from 1945 to 2008—some 4,000 names in all. Then, consulting news reports and international directories, they determined the nationality of each official.

“It's not clear that it's in the best interest of the world for these rising powers to take a back seat when it comes to solving international conflicts”

Finally, Werker and Novosad compared the percentage of officials from each country to the percentage of that country's world population in order to determine the amount to which a nation was overrepresented in the Secretariat, "who was punching above their weight," says Werker. When they did so, a small number of demographically similar countries came out on top.

The Small, The Rich, The Nordic

"We found a handful of smaller, richer democracies most represented by this metric, including Sweden, Norway, and Finland," he says. Rounding out the top five were two other small, rich democracies — New Zealand and Ireland. In the top 10 also appeared Denmark and Switzerland, along with seeming long shots Panama, Jamaica, and Uruguay.

Werker wasn't surprised by the overrepresentation of Scandinavian countries, given their high rankings for education and low rankings for corruption. "The mandate of the UN on staffing is supposed to rest on three things: competence, integrity, and the third being national representation," Werker says.

Even when controlling for the first two measures, the top countries shared other characteristics. Chief among them were willingness to make investments in international diplomacy—in terms of both their number of consulates and embassies and the amount of money they allocated in diplomatic efforts. While military spending also correlated with influence in the early years of the institution, it has been less of an indicator in more recent years, says Werker.

Instead, the countries that seem to be overrepresented reflect a kind of "soft power," more adept at working behind the scenes in international institutions.

"At HBS we talk about different kinds of leadership, and sometimes the best leaders are those who rarely have to do or say anything, but [who] can be very effective through quiet example-setting," says Werker. "Maybe we just trust Scandinavians to be nice neutral parties to undertake these jobs, which is the ultimate soft power compliment, where you don't even think they are working in their national interest. That doesn't mean if push came to shove, they would win a military battle, but the best kind of war is one you don't have to fight."

Less Influence For Us, China

As for the United States, even though it still represents the largest country in terms of actual representation, its UN-related influence has steadily waned relative to population. At least until the 1980s, that didn't seem to matter, says Werker, since its voting record matched that of allies that maintained high degrees of representation. In the past 35 years, however, the US has diverged from positions of its allies, leading to a decline in its relative power within the organization.

Perhaps the most surprising finding in the survey is the degree to which burgeoning economic powers such as Brazil, India, and China, have remained underrepresented in the Secretariat—ranking 83, 89, and 95 respectively.

"You can look at this in two ways," says Werker. "Either in spite of being a military and economic power, these countries haven't yet been able to project soft power. Or, you can take another view, that these countries are rejecting the global system. Either way, it's not clear that it's in the best interest of the world for these rising powers to take a back seat when it comes to solving international conflicts."

Then again, says Werker, it took Germany and Japan many years after World War II in order to reach higher levels of representation, and both countries still lag compared to other G8 countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Canada.

Perhaps it's only a matter of time before the world order in the United Nations begins to reflect the new world order on the ground.