Shirley Hazzard, the UN charter and the alienation of the individual in international organizations

There can be no understanding of what international organizations do in international law without an insight into the lives of those who work within them. However, there is little first-person testimony about everyday life in international organizations. This article draws attention to one writer who made a notable but hitherto largely unacknowledged contribution to plugging this gap, in the form of the National Book Award-winning novelist Shirley Hazzard. She worked in the UN Secretariat for nearly a decade from 1951, a formative period where the Secretariat’s internal and external relationships were being established. Perhaps unusually for a novelist, she does so with reference to the UN Charter’s provisions on Secretariat independence in Chapter XV. Hazzard’s lived reality of the UN fostered a disillusionment that is captured in two books. The non-fiction memoir-cum-polemic Defeat of an Ideal captures how a timorous, complaisant UN leadership bowed to external intervention in the workings of the Secretariat, and the resulting reduction of a demoralized staff to ‘anonymous, unreasoning servility’. The short story collection People in Glass Houses explores the everyday psychological reality of working in an international organization where international civil servants labour without faith that their roles contribute to the organization’s legal mandate.