The Principle of Pragmatic Idealism, with Björn Holmberg

KEVIN MALONEY: Here today on the Values & Interests podcast I am honored to be joined by the executive director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, Björn Holmberg. Thank you so much for coming to Carnegie Council.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: It is a pleasure to be here, Kevin. Thanks for inviting me.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a lot to discuss in the world of multilateralism, peace, security, and moral and political leadership. You are at the nexus of that in terms of your role leading the foundation and also your career across these spaces, so we are going to dig into that today. For everybody listening I want to give you a blueprint in terms of the values and professional system of somebody who has done this work for decades, so thank you so much for being here.

We will start as we always do on the Values & Interests podcast by digging into your own personal value system. We can start there and then build the blocks from the formation of your value system and then work through your career.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: Thanks for having me here. Of course this is not an easy question but one I have been thinking a lot about: What made me come here, and what are the values that drive me? Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary-general of the United Nations, said, “The longest journey is the journey inward,” and I think that is how life makes us be one way, and there are a lot of decisions along that way.

On a more personal note, as you asked me for that, I think my parents were really important, both being civil servants. One started as a theologian, the other as a nurse. They became university teachers and dedicated their whole lives I would say to being humanists, sharing values of everyone being equal. I think what was important was that in life, in practice, they were walking the talk and always trying to empower people.

I remember being a small kid and my father brought students home to support them when they had trouble at home and challenges and also involved me in that. I think that was the basis.

There was a shock that made me understand that we might be different and have different values. I was 10 or 11 years old and we had an immigrant in our class. I was living in a wonderful suburb. I won’t say isolated but a lot of Swedes, so to say, and I don’t think anyone was racist, but the difference of someone coming from a completely different culture suddenly spurred a lot of actions and things that I couldn’t stand for with the upbringing of my parents. That was the first time I would say I actually had to use words but also my fists to support and protect my comrade at a certain cost, but it was also where you had to make that choice.

KEVIN MALONEY: When I reflect on my own values formation, my mother was a public-school teacher for many years, and I draw a direct line to that. She could have done other things, but she chose to do that. She had a massive impact on many people including my brothers, sisters, and myself.

It is so interesting when you think about ethics, values, and morality. It feels very complicated or that you can only understand it if you are studying philosophy at Cambridge, but you as a 10-year-old in that class were doing applied ethics. You saw what was happening, reflecting on what was happening based on your own value system that your parents gave to you, and you knew you had to do something about it. I think a lot of times in the world of politics or technology people try to put ethics over here almost as a point of distraction, so we can’t actually deal with the issue that is at hand. It is interesting to hear about that formative moment for you.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: I think that was a wake-up call, that we have different values and a different understanding of the world. I don’t think it is only lack of values; it was something foreign coming, something not known by many, and that became a negative reaction.

That was the start, but then I went to Central America as a 17-year-old and lived in Honduras. I still love the country and see it as my second country, but then I saw the civil wars in Central America, I saw the lack of gender equality compared to Sweden, which was a liberal, gender-equal space with of course a lot of challenges but still different. I saw that the world could be very different from the world where I was brought up, and that interested me in trying to understand especially why there are wars.

The abuse I saw of civilians by some of the armed forces and insurgents or armed groups that were fighting made me move from pacifist—I thought of refusing military service in Sweden during the Cold War in the 1980s—to becoming an officer in the reserves because I wanted to do peacekeeping. I think that was also a consequence of seeing what war did to social cohesion and people, and that led me in the end to become a peace and conflict researcher, then working with the United Nations, aid agencies, and civil society to see what small contribution I could make being raised in such a privileged context and having friends taking great risks and paying high costs compared to what I had done.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting to hear about you pivoting from being pacifist to maybe more moral realist and having that epiphany. I think that is at the heart of how we think about international relations here at the Council. It is Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr, this idea that morality and power have to interact with one another. You cannot put one in a silo because there are traps on either end of the spectrum.

I think what we are seeing a lot right now in terms of political discourse and policy is a belief that you can just go into this amoral realism corner and that values are nice to have but only get you so far. Maybe we can reflect a little about that framing and the current geopolitical situation and how you are thinking about that. I would love to hear a bit more about your work over the decades as a researcher in peace and security.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: A light reflection from being a former peace and conflict researcher and actually the first one with a light military background when I started at the department, so that was an interesting tension between a department that was rightly created much in light of the Vietnam War and other perspectives, and suddenly I came as a new, young officer who had quite strong moral convictions of what is right and wrong and how we should contribute to conflict prevention and conflict resolution, in the worst of cases using arms as a last resort.

What I saw in my first semester of peace and conflict studies was that the Berlin Wall fell. Very few foresaw that change of behavior, and now we see the opposite. That was kind of the victory of idealism and now the United Nations and multilateralists would be strengthened. We didn’t expect it, and then we thought when Fukuyama said it was the “end of history,” it would continue forever.

I sense now we have a discourse which is very gloomy that what is happening now will also continue forever. I still think about Steven Pinker’s book about the tendency to have less and less war in the world and that this might be a temporary dip.

Going back to Morgenthau and so on, if you talk about prudence, responsibility, and the interests of the nation I think what we would learn from the time after the Second World War to now is that multilateralism has to a large extent worked. It prevented a Third World War and a nuclear war, and I think it goes back to what we know from Axelrod, who did game theory. He said that if you have a very transactional, realistic approach, which you have debated in some of the pods I know, that you always want to win the next round. Axelrod showed us that the tit for tat in personal dilemma game theory is the one that wins, basically that if you collaborate and if the opponent does not collaborate you punish that opponent once but then try again.

I think that is the core of multilateralism. I do believe where we stand now we will start paying the price both with more wars, which we see, and less respect for international rule of law. Unfortunately the lessons learned will be that the costs will be too high. The thing is, how can we change the thinking of leaders to understand that collaboration actually even for greater power is much better in the long run.

KEVIN MALONEY: One of the things I have been thinking a lot about is the transactionalism right now in diplomacy and that being prioritized as an ends and a means. It is almost this dopamine hit that the politician gets and the public gets, like, “We got a good deal.” What you talked about previously is a zero-sum deal.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: It’s a zero-sum game.

KEVIN MALONEY: In a lot of ways somebody won and somebody lost.

I completely agree with you. I think we are going to see a domino effect from this transactional approach. For many people, through no fault of their own, context is not as easy to access now due to what algorithms prioritize in our information ecosystem, so it is a big challenge from a narrative perspective for those who are supporting liberal values and related principles of I would say responsible internationalism.

I want to turn to the foundation’s work and how you think about the mission and purpose today some 80 years on from the founding of the United Nations and 70 years on from Dag Hammarskjöld’s time as secretary-general.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: The foundation was created in 1962 following the death of the second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, and the idea was to continue his work and legacy. Over time it has been shifting, but for the past 15 years we have been very much focused on strengthening a constructive multilateralism, which is interesting to say today when we see that it is actually being weakened.

We have also focused on having an effective United Nations at its center, so it is multilateralist but with an effective United Nations at its center. I am not saying that regional organizations, banks, and others are not important, but it has the United Nations as its focus.

I think what we see now is less and less trust between nations and as you say more and more nationalism, embracing interests much in line with Morgenthau and traditional realists of trying to promote national interests more than collective interests, so I think more and more our work is trying to provide evidence of the benefits of multilateralism, more collaboration, what the United Nations can do, and I think also awaken the idea of not just speaking about the effectiveness of the United Nations but talking about why did we create the United Nations from the start and what can we do, not just the United Nations but the Member States, because as Dag Hammarskjöld said, “The responsibility rests primarily with the Member States.” It is a consensus-based organization, even though the Security Council is a bit different, where we know that even though you can have a vote in the General Assembly and Security Council in the end the more states and people that stand behind it the more impact the decisions will have.

For us it is very much to talk about first how you make sure you have quality financing for the United Nations, that Member States pay the bill, but also that the United Nations is much more strategic in its use. We see fragmentation today between agencies, so how can the United Nations work more as one, which was what Kofi Annan said way back.

The second area is peacebuilding and sustaining peace, where there is a huge need today with more conflicts—we have not had so many armed since 1945—and trying to strengthen the peacebuilding architecture of the United Nations through dialogues and platforms, bringing Members States together with UN experts to increase the effectiveness of that structure.

Third, it is very much for us to try to promote a more effective leadership within the United Nations. That relates to effectiveness, but I would say that effectiveness is also very much based on what Dag Hammarskjöld said, that morals should be an integral part of international relations and multilateralism without “moralizing,” so to say.

Much like Carnegie Council, we are looking at the tension between the normative erosion happening today when it comes to human rights, democracy, and gender equality, and how will UN civil servants, international civil servants, be able to uphold the values of the Charter, the values of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and so on.

In that we see as a core component—very much looking at Dag Hammarskjöld, the international civil servant—civil service is being eroded across the globe, and we believe we need to show to Member States why it is important that international civil servants work in the interests of all peoples and all nations and not in the interests of specific nations. We see there a critique of the international civil service, and we are afraid that retreat will decrease UN effectiveness in working for everyone under the Charter.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a lot there I want to dig into, and I think it is important especially for the listeners who are not in the UN world but are interested and care not only that it survives but thrives moving forward.

The first thing I want to talk about is this conflation of what the United Nations does and the narrative around it. We constantly hear about the five permanent members of the United States Security Council (the P5), their ineffectiveness, politicization, and the inability to get things done. This is mirrored in domestic situations around the world politically. Could you bifurcate the P5 side of things, which might feel a bit more performative and stuck to the work that the United Nations is doing—saving lives and delivering food and medicine around the world. I want to hone in on that narrative.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: I think that is an excellent question because I think way back other secretary-generals made the same point, that there is so much focus on the United Nations in New York and the Security Council. We know that the Security Council is dependent on the veto power by the five major powers, the victors of the Second World War, and that means that the less consensus we have globally among them the fewer actions the Security Council can take, and that overshadows the importance of the UN system because in most countries we have a UN Country Team with a resident coordinator who works closely with the government, civil society, and others to facilitate and support development, conflict prevention, and whatever reform that could make that country more prosperous and equal and relieve poverty or whatever the challenge would be.

We don’t really see that work, and I think one argument we make at the Foundation is that we need to provide in this age of fake news and non-verified sources we need to show much more robust evidence of impact. What difference is the United Nations making? Now, for example, the decrease of the World Health Organization staff by 25-30 percent actually means civilians and children dying of starvation.

There is also a decrease of humanitarian aid when it comes to vaccines. There is talk about 14,000 kids who will die each year. If you turn that to say, “What has the United Nations been doing,” we can show positive numbers of the United Nations making a difference.

If we go back to Morgenthau and national interests, the argument here should also be to a lot of Western countries that if you are concerned with migration, remember that investing in the Sustainable Development Goals and investing in humanitarian assistance decreases the likelihood that people have to flee their homes and move out of their countries. We need to show that collective interest of investing in the world.

I don’t think the United Nations is doing enough. We always call ourselves “critical friends” of the United Nations. We should be much more monitoring, evaluating, and showing evidence.

KEVIN MALONEY: You don’t want everybody to tell you the truth, I’ll be honest, but you want your close friends to tell you the truth.

I think this goes back to the message and the narrative. There is a lot of evidence now with some great research coming out of places like the Metropolitan Group—this is in the context of democratic backsliding, whether it is the Philippines, El Salvador, or Kenya—that the most effective narrative is one that is values-based. Across cultures there are certain values that resonate with people, no matter their language, culture, or tribe.

The tension there, as we talked about before, is how do you deliver a values-based message that does not feel like moralizing or talking down to somebody? How do you get the value proposition across? I think that is a big challenge right now because there are anti-liberal forces in a very strategic way attempting to push back. This is not the same ecosystem politically information-wise that it was in 1998 or even 2005.

At a geopolitical level can you give us your thoughts on the value of pluralism today and the efficacy of liberalism? What are the challenges around that? How can we be pushing back in a strategic way where we don’t sacrifice our values in doing that?

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: It depends a bit on perspectives because I think there is a sense in many countries that after the Second World War the Western liberal idea was pushed on many minor societies maybe with outside engineering, without national ownership, and that has been one of the core results of research, showing that if we want to see development in independent and also democratic countries it must be nationally owned.

I think even though we would like to push ideas like democracy and gender equality we need to think of how we do that because without ownership you have no change. It could be your own kids or a nation.

I will give you one example from way back when I was working as the national deputy director of Plan International Sweden, working on children’s rights but especially with a focus on gender equality for girls and women. Many times when we worked there, on sexual reproductive rights, for example, it was working with the mullahs, it was working with the schools and structures based on their value system and ideas and providing evidence of why early pregnancy is detrimental for society and the specific girls.

One argument here is that we need to bring in values but do it in a much more humble way and also make the operational argument aside from the value-based argument that it actually benefits having this. Then I come back to the principle of pragmatism of Dag Hammarskjöld. You speak a lot about “pragmatic idealism.” We can impose things, and as Jan Eliasson, the deputy secretary-general of the United Nations and one of my inspirations as a young Ph.D. student supporting him when he was negotiating the peace treaty [concerning] Nagorno-Karabakh, he always said that we need to look at the world how it is and how it should be, and if we are looking too much at how it should be we might leave ownership behind. It needs to be a joint process.

I am coming back to that. We see in development cooperation or aid, which I don’t prefer as a term because it says “top down,” but if we see ownership, we see change. I have seen numerous evaluations of that, that change must come from inside, from you as a person but also as a society.

KEVIN MALONEY: I fully agree. Another ethical framework we think about here is taking the world as it is but simultaneously having your moral or values North Star. President Franklin Roosevelt talked about “tacking back and forth” on a ship and the ability to do that, but knowing where you’re going, though there might be some left and right turns and some treacherous waters you have to get through.

I think a lot of times in this zero-sum environment people don’t want to hold two truths at once, so we talk about the criticism of the liberal international order and how things have deteriorated. That is completely true and can be true at the same time you can accept that there is a level of universality around values. There is not an Eastern or Western thing. Human rights are inherently good and everybody deserves them. I think these are the difficult conversations.

Ethics provides a nonpolitical framework to interrogate values differences, so I think the more we can center morality in a non-moralizing way will hopefully help to unlock some additional areas for cooperation in good faith and not just transactional bad faith or without reciprocity. It is an interesting moment.

I want to get back to the pragmatic idealism of the Secretary-General Hammarskjöld. Maybe you can tell the story of how he didn’t know he was getting the job and kind of came into it. He had this bold idea to build up the Secretariat, which, for those who are listening and are not in the United Nations, is the civil service around the secretary-general. He put forth this radical idea that national interest and alignment with that was not the be-all and end-all of a diplomat. That was a radically different idea for the time and something that was needed for the United Nations, which was a bit on shaky ground at the time. Maybe we could talk about that a little bit and how he pushed that pragmatic idealism but thought big in that moment.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: His father was prime minister during the First World War and a county governor before and after in Uppsala, and he was a very principled man. He stood up for Swedish neutrality during the First World War to such an extent that we had starvation in Sweden because we were locked out from food transports, and he was criticized for being too principled. But he, like Dag Hammarskjöld, came from the Swedish tradition dating back to the early 17th century of Axel Oxenstierna, who with the king then saw that we needed to separate the ministries from the agencies, the bureaucrats from the politics.

Since long back we have had a framework legislation in Sweden, or direction to agencies, so the ministries are not allowed to take decisions on individual matters but give a direction. I think he brought that tradition and what he had from his father and very much also of course a moral conviction from his mother into the United Nations, and when he saw the United Nations, which was then in a crisis—the McCarthy period in the United Nations and a lot of Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were inside the UN building actually vetting for communists in the United Nations. We know from biographies that he saw this didn’t work and that we needed to have an independent international civil service based on impartiality and professionalism that stands up for the Charter, “We the people,” not one nation or one interest. I think this is one of the key contributions which he brought from his upbringing and that we today need to defend when we see national interests in multilateral collaboration being strengthened and the role of the international civil service being questioned.

Like I said before, we need to ask ourselves: “Why do we need an international civil service? Why is it good for everyone and not just being short-sighted on national interests in a transactional way as we spoke about before?”

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting when you look back historically and the threat of nuclear war at the time and when you look at the crises in the Suez or Congo as the framework being any spark could lead to World War III. It is very interesting now. I feel like we are still in that great-power competition way a bit or are shifting back, but the risks are not just hard-power risks. There are existential risks around technology and climate. What is the moral imperative to take something forward and not just the political imperative?

We have this hard-power political imperative and the moral imperative of the UN founding of “never again” plus let’s stop World War III and nuclear war from happening. How do you think about that equation now for the United Nations and for its purpose as a moral and political imperative?

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: I do believe, as we do at the foundation, that the United Nations is a kind of moral compass. It is a political project, but it is also a moral project, hopefully without being moralist. Of course that project will be questioned when nationalist interests are on the rise.

That is why I come back to my argument that I think what we need now is less division and more inclusion. We need to promote dialogue. That is part of the pluralism issue that you raised before, that the United Nations should be a space for everyone even though you disagree on certain principles because we see now what we took for granted before, which is actually that the UN Charter and a lot of conventions are not being respected, so you need to reset that compass and you can’t do that being moralistic, but you need to gather actors and show the benefits of collaboration.

I want to give you a concrete example. I think sometimes we can go to the central issues that are at the height of international conflicts. It could be Israel and Gaza or other issues. We need to think of areas where we can actually come to an understanding. In 2023, Rena Lee, ambassador from Singapore, negotiated with her team within the UN framework the High Seas Treaty just a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When relations between the P5 were frozen she still managed through dialogue to get them to put other things aside and focus on the high seas, where there were common interests. I think what multilateralists need to show now is that we can do things that benefit everyone and hopefully with time you create some kind of resilience of the system, to show that the United Nations can be relevant and multilaterlist at large in so many other areas.

What I am afraid of when it comes to climate change, war, even nuclear war, lack of arms control now, and the investment in nuclear arms is that we know from organizational theory, research, and psychology that men and women learn best from their mistakes and that it is usually generational. The generation that fought the Second World War is not active anymore, and we are short-sighted.

KEVIN MALONEY: And the cycle kicks off.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: The risk here is that we are going to have to go through detrimental changes, and a nuclear war or passing too many of the tipping points of climate change means that we might not have a second chance. This comes back to being a pragmatic idealist or whatever we will call it like Dag Hammarskjöld was, to know how the world is but work on how we would like it to be without being moralist and showing the benefits of collaboration and hopefully avoiding very hard-learned lessons. That is key. That is why we are promoting dialogue as an impartial actor, never impartial on the morals but impartial between actors. That is key for us.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is ethical realism in practice.

It is a very difficult time in terms of what you talked about, this generational proximity, and I have talked about this on the podcast previously. I was born in 1989. My grandparents fought in World War II, so I had that generational memory ingrained in me. Even for people ten years older than me the norms of U.S. politics have shifted massively and that generational proximity isn’t necessarily there. I am not saying my experience was better or worse than anyone else’s, but there were serious consequences from lessons not learned in the 1930s and 1940s.

I know there has been a lot of thinking about that in terms of what the cycles of lesson learning look like and I think that is important to talk about narratives a bit more, to lean into and unlock the wisdom or the lessons learned so they are not forgotten.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: You are right. I am thinking about when we come back to Morgenthau and other political realists and now we see possibly more transactional realism, which is more short-sighted, is that one of the things we know from peace and conflict research, aside from democracies don’t fight wars with each other, is that now we see democracies on decline, which is a negative trend. We also know that the security dilemma is one of the strongest drivers of conflict within but also between nations.

Realism by definition means that you will increase the sense of insecurity of your opponent, and we know that from the arms race in the first Cold War in the 1950s, we know that from the missile race. Now we see a large shift away from Western countries in investing in Sustainable Development Goals toward armaments, war, and prevention, which is not increasing but decreasing the sense of security on all sides, so we need to shift that narrative.

You can fully understand the need for national defense. I would not say otherwise. The problem is that you get a vicious circle that the security dilemma is making us invest in an unproductive sector, which is military means. I am a former infantry captain in the reserves, so I know what I am talking about. I am not saying you don’t have the right to defend yourself, but what is happening now is that we spurring and strengthening this security dilemma, and I think then you come back to the importance of the United Nations and importance of regional organizations like the African Union or the Organization of American States to provide both formal and informal platforms to decrease the risk of escalation but also hopefully over time creating much more of a sense of community and collaboration.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think one of the moral risks in the increasing securitization of the international relations space is that you create different tiers of human beings, and we are seeing this playing out whether it is Gaza or Ukraine in terms of civilian deaths and children being taken or killed. For the sake of security you can excuse or make a moral argument for doing a lot of things as we have seen in history, and we are lost to that proximity to history of the 1930s and 1940s at this point, and we are seeing some of these terrible things play out again.

I think from a universality of the human condition, from the equal moral worth of everybody, we are starting again to see a bifurcation of that. That trend line concerns me massively especially as we see the increasing budgets on the hard security side and decreasing budgets on the global aid and global development side of things.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: I think you see in this regard international humanitarian law and international law, which is concerning, but I also ask sometimes what happened after 9/11, which was a horrible event for the United States and especially those living in New York, New Jersey, and so on. Something happened there in 2001, and human rights were put aside in the hunt for terrorists, and I think that is partly when the West started losing its moral imperative.

KEVIN MALONEY: I completely agree.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: We need to think about what is happening now. What leadership do we have, and what values do we stand for? What we assumed were given values in the UN Charter and human rights conventions are now more based on, “Well, if we have interests aligned with these values, we will promote them; otherwise, national interests come first.”

KEVIN MALONEY: A red line was crossed. We talked about assuming a “moral mask for an immoral means or end,” and, not to be too U.S. bashing, I think going back to what we talked about earlier in terms of what is going to be the knock-on effect of an increasingly transactional approach to foreign policy? We don’t know that now, but I am willing to draw a pretty straight line in terms of where we are in the United States politically right now and internationally to the values red lines that were crossed in response to 9/11.

Again, in my generation there is a very clear bifurcation between the pre-9/11 world and post-9/11 world. In a lot of ways, working here at the Council I am able to see that not through my own personal experience but also in terms of values at the U.S. and international levels. I feel that from a U.S. leadership perspective we are seeing another one of those moments playing out, and we are not going to understand the effects for 15 to 20 years, but there will certainly be an impact, and that is why we need organizations like the United Nations that are values-based and do take a pragmatic approach while still understanding that two things can be true at once and there needs to be serious retooling to the system now to make sure we can move forward.

Maybe we can close with that and turn more into a positive light, channeling the secretary-general and the mission of the foundation. What would be your pitch to go all in right now to multilateralism, and what would be your message to those listening?

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: We know from history that collaboration—Axelrod’s research example, tit for tat—is much better for everyone, including a great power. I think what we need to see now is first of all a UN Member State investment in the ongoing reform of the United Nations, the UN80 Initiative launched by Guterres, the secretary-general, and I think also to try to understand the benefits of collaboration and create those spaces because we have now a tendency of excluding because of global tensions and geopolitics to keep those channels of dialogue open.

As I said before, also for the United Nations—and that has been raised now in one of the parts of the UN initiative process—to invest much more in providing evidence of the impacts of multilateralism, if it is all for humanitarian assistance, arms control, or peacebuilding, to show its worth. If we look at the costs of the United Nations, three years ago it was $76 billion. It is the same as the turnover of Pepsi-Cola in one year. We are not really investing much in multilateralism, so when we talk about a non-effective United Nations, first of all of course the United Nations can become more effective, but it is not a large investment we are making.

I think we also need to see, as you made the argument, the United Nations being a moral compass and being that political project for pluralism globally. We cannot just talk about effectiveness without talking about norms. We know that norms also make things work better, for example, national ownership we know makes development cooperation much more effective. We know that gender equality is almost a precondition for national growth because otherwise we are excluding half of the population from the productive sector.

I think you need to be that pragmatic realist to show that there are actually benefits to collaboration. The High Seas Treaty that Rena Lee and her team presided over is such an example, and transactional realism or being short-sighted will cost us all. Migration is another example. We need to show that collective action can make a huge difference.

Of course we all should demand that the United Nations is a much more effective entity, but also the Member States need to provide conditions for the international civil service because the more they push for national interest and having their own candidates independent of merits the less effective the organization will be.

In the dialogues—of course, Chatham House Rule with high-level UN staff, Member States, and so on—we hear that there is a huge need for reforming the United Nations within when it comes to civil service to make it much more innovative. I know you work at Carnegie Council to engage young people to see if they can make a career as an international civil servant in the interest of all peoples and not just one nation. I think there should be a bit more vision, a bit more trying to understand other perspectives, which is pluralism, and maybe being a bit pragmatic. We have to accept sometimes that some nations might not be able to be very vocal on gender equality because of national domestic conditions, so be a pragmatic diplomatic, be a friend who sees that we are at different stages, whatever you would say, if it is the beginning or end or so on.

KEVIN MALONEY: The trap to always fall into is loving the sound of your own voice. If it is only virtuous and valuable to you, then what have you accomplished?

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: You’re right.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to end on more of an open question. You are the expert and have been working in this space for decades. Is there anything I didn’t ask that you feel you want to touch on, especially for my listeners, who are interested in this pragmatic idealist/ethical realist approach to international relations?

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: I can go back to Dag Hammarskjöld.

KEVIN MALONEY: We need examples of moral leadership.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: He was very clear that he was acting as the highest global civil servant and was acting with impartiality between the actors but was not neutral on the morals. You can be a pragmatic idealist. It is possible, and I think we can learn from that and that there is not a dichotomy between the effectiveness of a multilateralism of the United Nations and norms. They need to go hand in hand. That is one thing.

I always want to say that I think we get stuck a bit in the narrative of our generation, and as we look at the world today it looks like things are going the wrong way if you have a more liberal perspective on gender equality, democracy, and so on, and of course when it comes to war and climate change. But we also know there are trends over time. We have seen that poverty in the world has decreased over the years and violence has decreased. We have kind of a dip now, but we are so short-sighted sometimes that we think this is the end of days and we are living in the most pivotal moment of history. Each generation says that.

I remember the kaiser of Austria-Hungary before the First World War when he saw a car driving through and was on his horse. He said that is a thing that will never evolve. With horses we can never change. We are so stuck in our history.

Dag Hammarskjöld went to the United Nations in 1953. If we recollect how the world looked in 1953, it was last year of one of the most violent post-1945 wars, the Korean War, with tremendous losses of life. We had a lockdown in the Security Council. We had a week in the United Nations when there was basically a communist hunt with a very weak civil service, and still he had the courage, moral compass, and the pragmatism to turn things. He engaged in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and was instrumental in preventing things from getting even worse. He was able to negotiate with the Chinese to liberate American pilots. He did a lot of things you would never think were possible in that age.

You can still see a United Nations and still see multilateralism if we have more courage and more accountability from the Member States investing. Even though he had some resistance from some Member States including the P5 he got through the first peacekeeping operation, the first United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF I) in 1957 by using the General Assembly. There are some spaces in the Charter.

KEVIN MALONEY: The story about “dip the helmets in blue paint.”

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: Of course. I actually carry around the UN Charter, and I opted not to go for the blue one, but the yellow one like a star shining. We need to reread it, follow its advice, and we need to think about “We the people,” like Dag Hammarskjöld did.

KEVIN MALONEY: I love the branding. We can’t let it ossify. It needs to shine in front of us.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: I think Dag Hammarskjöld can show us that even in the gloomiest times you can be an actor. If you are a citizen, you can engage in social cohesion, on international development cooperation, on democracy, whatever. If you are an international civil servant, you know that even if your days are tough—and that is one of the topics for us—you stand up for values and that you are supported by the organization. The United Nations is central because otherwise the values will vanish. We need to keep them alive and take risks, not be risk-averse.

KEVIN MALONEY: We need a pragmatic, values-based community. It is almost too much to ask of any person to be on the values island by themselves, so a community in a pragmatic way that allows you to do your job and get back to the world but stay true to your value system is incredibly important.

Let me close with a plug because I would say the secretary-general is less known to the American audience now—we have talked about proximity to history—asking people to look into the foundation and look into Dag Hammarskjöld’s legacy a bit more. After Dag Hammarskjöld’s tragic death, John F. Kennedy made a very statement, when he said: “I realize now that in comparison to him I am a small man. He was the greatest statesman of our century.” This is who JFK named the greatest statesman of the century, so I encourage my listeners and watchers to dig into the mission of your organization and the value system of the man to take lessons and move that forward now.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

BJÖRN HOLMBERG: Thanks for having me here. It was a pleasure.