‘Peacemaker’ by Thant Myint-U review

Over the past two decades, historians have worked to recapture the spirit of ‘Third World’ internationalism that burnt brightly in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. This was an era of decolonisation, as colonies across Asia and Africa won independence and transitioned into new nation-states. It was also the era of nation-building and development initiatives, the Non-Aligned Movement, the New International Economic Order, and – real and imagined – solidarity across the ‘Third World’ (a term first used by the French historian Alfred Sauvy in 1952).

Scholars revisiting these years have often focused on the promise and optimism inherent in the Asian-African Bandung Conference of 1955, the peak of ‘Pan-Arabism’ with Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the short-lived union with Syria under the United Arab Republic in 1958-60, and the apogee of ‘Pan-Africanism’ with Ghana’s independence in 1957 and the formation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963. New studies have appeared on Nasser and Nkrumah, Che Guevara and Cuban support for liberation movements in Africa, Algeria as a haven for the Black Panthers, and the attractive power of Third World struggles for left-wing intellectuals in Europe and North America. Thant Myint-U’s Peacemaker offers another, more sobering, vantage point for reconsidering this period and its historical significance. The book provides an up-close and (quite literally) personal account of the decade-long tenure of Burmese diplomat U Thant as secretary of the United Nations over 1961-71. Thant Myint-U is U Thant’s grandson, and a former UN diplomat himself; Peacemaker offers an intimate, empathetic, and mournfully nostalgic perspective on Thant’s years in office. Those years were tumultuous: the book traces Thant’s efforts to broker peace deals amid conflicts as varied as the civil wars in Congo and Nigeria, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, the Bangladesh Liberation War and subsequent Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, and deepening US military intervention in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

As Thant Myint-U argues, those efforts, while not always successful were nonetheless significant. The book is a timely reminder of the challenges facing the UN and other international organisations trying to resolve conflicts and mitigate human suffering around the world. As the UN’s first non-white leader, U Thant deserves to be ‘rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity’, to borrow a phrase from E.P. Thompson. Peacemaker shows how prominently U Thant figured in the evolution of the UN during this critical decade and delivers on the promise of an ‘untold story of the 1960s’ made in its subtitle.

What is the thrust of that story? Much of the book comprises a close focus on U Thant himself, but towards its conclusion Thant Myint-U steps back to provide a wide-angle perspective. Reflecting on U Thant’s accumulated record and position as of 1969, he notes the ‘fundamental contradiction’ that undermined his tenure: that, despite being secretary-general of the UN, he had ‘no real power’. Furthermore: ‘The status attached to his office was what allowed him to intervene and defuse crises when possible. But this meant that expectations were always very high. When he could not or would not intervene, there was little to protect him from charges of inaction.’ The era of his tenure was particularly unforgiving, with significant, often contradictory demands placed on the UN: ‘The Afro-Asians wanted a global institution that could safeguard their new states against the return of empire. The Americans wanted the UN to be a core component of a Washington-centered liberal world.’ Thant’s aim was to ‘reconcile the West and the Third World’, a task that proved beyond him (or any of his successors).

Much of this failure was due to the powerful forces undermining what Thant Myint-U describes as ‘an internationalism in the transition from empire’. In 1961, when U Thant assumed UN leadership, the Kennedy administration was engaged in efforts to reach accommodations with Egypt’s Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno, and was at least nominally committed to promoting decolonisation and development across the Third World. But over U Thant’s years as secretary-general, the American stance shifted to support for military coups and dictatorships from Brazil to Indonesia, uncritical backing for Israel, and direct forms of military intervention, first in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and then in more disastrous fashion in Indochina. The 1960s thus marked a turning point in American foreign policy, from initial signs of possible convergence with the aspirations of the Third World, to the assertion – and overextension – of American imperial power.

At the same time, U Thant’s tenure also saw the fading of the egalitarian and emancipatory promises that had accompanied independence struggles across Asia and Africa in the aftermath of the Second World War. The nation-building and development initiatives of the 1960s saw dramatic expansion of state power at the expense of societies previously mobilised in those independence struggles and popular politics. By the 1970s the most prominent Third Worldist regimes – Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia – had given way to accommodation with the West, alliances with the US, and IMF structural adjustment programs. In U Thant’s idiosyncratic home country of Burma, a military coup in 1962 ended a 15-year experiment with democracy, ethnic pluralism, and federalism, initiating the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Indians, the escalation of conflicts with ethnic minority groups, and the inauguration of a brutal military dictatorship which remains in power to this day. Peacemaker recovers something of the lost promise of a bygone era, but clearly much more than UN-led diplomacy is needed to address the conflicts and challenges that plague the world today.

• Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s
  Thant Myint-U
  Atlantic, 384pp, £22
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

John Sidel is Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics at LSE.