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How UNICEF became the compromise
In UNICEF we are rightly proud of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the organisation in 1965. Less well known is how nearly it went elsewhere.
Four of the five members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee wanted to give that year’s prize to the UN Secretary-General, U Thant. Their chairman, Gunnar Jahn, took a firm position opposing the award for U Thant.
The decision spared the Committee a public rupture, but left internal scars both in the Nobel Committee and in the UN. Looking back from today's vantage point, the decision also foreshadowed a growing tension between the UN's political and humanitarian arms—one that would soon become starkly visible in Nigeria/Biafra and Pakistan/Bangladesh.
A long road to Oslo
“No one keeps UNICEF going but the idea itself.”
— Maurice Pate, declining the Norwegian proposal of 1960 to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize
Over the years, friends and admirers of Maurice Pate suggested that he should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. His answer never varied: if there was to be a prize, it should go to UNICEF as a whole, not to him. When the Norwegian Committee for UNICEF proposed putting his name forward in 1960, he declined and asked that UNICEF be nominated instead.
In fact, UNICEF had been nominated once already, in 1950, by Tyyne Leivo-Larsson, Finland’s Minister of Social Affairs. When she took office in 1948, Finland was struggling with displacement, severe shortages of food and medicine, and large numbers of war orphans. UNICEF milk, raw materials for clothing and medical supplies were vital for the country’s children.
That aid had particular significance. Finland had been excluded from UNRRA and from other Allied post-war assistance, partly because it had fought alongside Germany against the Soviet Union. Its precarious position under Soviet pressure after the war also ruled out the Marshall Plan and other Western initiatives. UNICEF’s approach was different. From its inception, its policy was that aid should reach children in every country, friend or former foe.
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| Tyyne Leivo-Larsson |
UNICEF did not win the Nobel in 1950. The prize went instead to Ralph Bunche, the UN official who had mediated the 1949 armistice agreements ending the first Arab–Israeli war.
A second and third push
The Norwegian Committee for UNICEF had no standing under the Nobel rules to submit a candidate in any case. There were strict rules about who could nominate candidates. As a result, the next formal nomination of UNICEF came in 1963, from a much wider and fully qualified circle:
- the Norwegian politician Gudmund Harlem;
- members of the Swedish and Swiss parliaments;
- the Yugoslav parliamentarian Vladimir Simić;
- Thailand’s Prince Wan Waithayakon, a former President of the UN General Assembly.
That breadth of nominations, from Europe to Asia, marked UNICEF as a formidable candidate for the years ahead. Harlem nominated UNICEF again in 1964 and 1965, joined both years by his fellow Norwegian MP Berte Rognerud and by members of the Yugoslav parliament.
1965: a stronger rival
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| U Thant |
In 1965, however, UNICEF faced a new and very strong competitor. Five members of the Norwegian parliament and five members of the Swedish parliament nominated U Thant. Their case rested on a remarkable record of crisis diplomacy following Dag Hammarskjöld’s death in September 1961.
- The Congo. As Acting-SG, U Thant pushed through the Security Council a resolution allowing peacekeepers to use force. He also pressed for economic sanctions against Katanga and finally launched the military operation that ended the secession in January 1963.
- Cuba. During the missile crisis of October 1962, U Thant served as a neutral bridge between Kennedy and Khrushchev. On 24 and 25 October he publicly appealed to both leaders to step back. This gave Moscow a face-saving way to keep its ships clear of the American quarantine and gave Washington reason to pause. Kennedy acknowledged the debt, writing to Khrushchev that “the distinguished efforts of Acting Secretary General U Thant have greatly facilitated both our tasks.”
- Vietnam. Through 1964 and into 1965, U Thant tried to head off a widening American war by arranging secret talks in Rangoon between American and North Vietnamese representatives. He also became a vocal critic of US actions.
Even as the Nobel Committee considered the nominees that summer and autumn, war was breaking out between India and Pakistan. In August 1965, U Thant flew to both capitals and helped bring about the ceasefire that took effect on 23 September. This action too was probably in the minds of the four committee members supporting his candidacy.
Why did Gunnar Jahn block U Thant?
By October 1965, four of the five members were determined to give the prize to U Thant. Had the Committee followed its normal practice of majority decision, he would have won. But Jahn was set firmly in opposition. His reasons appear to have been twofold:
- Simply doing his job. Crisis management by the Secretary-General was, in Jahn’s view, the ordinary duty of a salaried international official, not extraordinary personal peacemaking.
- No campaigns. Jahn resented lobbying on behalf of candidates by governments, parliaments or committees. He regarded such lobbying as an improper attempt to compromise the Committee’s independence.
Jahn had taken the same position previously. He had blocked Norway’s own Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General, just as firmly as U Thant. Yet he had not always been consistent: he had supported the Nobel for Ralph Bunche in 1950 and for Hammarskjöld in 1961.
But was there more behind Jahn's position than principle?
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| Thant Myint-U, historian, grandson of U Thant |
Threat to resign
Faced with four colleagues ready to outvote him, Jahn threatened to resign. Jahn's diaries show that he had used that threat more than once to get his way. The threat carried weight - Jahn had been a member of the Committee for nearly three decades and had chaired it since 1941. A public resignation on the eve of the announcement would have gravely damaged the Committee’s reputation.
The majority reluctantly gave way. Seeking a clean compromise that Jahn could accept, the Committee chose UNICEF, a candidate nominated in 1950, 1963, 1964 and 1965. The choice was helped by a wave of public sympathy for UNICEF after Maurice Pate’s death on 19 January 1965, just as that year’s nominations had closed.
Ramifications in the Committee
The scars remained, within the Committee and very likely within the UN. The Norwegian government was irritated. In early October its ambassador to the UN had informally told U Thant that he had been selected, only to learn a few days later that he had not.
U Thant was nominated again in 1966, this time by four members of the Norwegian parliament, but Jahn remained opposed and in the end no prize was awarded. Jahn retired at the end of 1966, aged 83. No prize was awarded in 1967 either, under a new chairman. Whether true or not, the official position in both years was simply the Committee found no candidate who met the criteria of Nobel’s will.
At the UN
The announcement on 26 October 1965 that UNICEF had been selected instead of U Thant came as a shock at the UN, where word of U Thant’s selection had circulated only days earlier. Political staff read it as an affront to their work in UN mediation. There was a feeling that Jahn's reasoning of "simply doing his job" would mean no Secretary-General could ever be honoured for crisis management.
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| Ralph Bunche, 1950 Nobel Laureate, USG |
The strongest reaction came from Ralph Bunche, Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs and himself the 1950 laureate. Bunche, who had worked closely with U Thant through the Congo and Cuba crises, called the decision “a gross injustice to U Thant.”
U Thant's Reactions
U Thant’s own response was both diplomatic and characteristic of his personal humility. He issued a simple public statement congratulating UNICEF.
“The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to UNICEF is a well-deserved recognition of its devoted work for the children of the world.”
— U Thant
At a deeper level the decision must have hurt. There was obvious embarrassment that the reversal came after news of his selection had spread through the UN and diplomatic circles.
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| U Thant's Memoir |
But U Thant's own feelings seem to have been more complicated. In his memoir, View from the UN, he recalled responding to news of his likely selection with almost exactly Jahn's argument: “Is not the Secretary-General merely doing his job when he works for peace?” He also insisted that he was pleased when the prize went to UNICEF.
But he also described the Secretary-General's role as requiring something more than the job description. The office required a willingness to take risks—to risk prestige, reputation, and one's position in the interest of peace.
Peacemaking was indeed the Secretary-General's job—but doing that job could require political and personal risks far beyond the routine exercise of official duties.
Political versus humanitarian action
The Committee's choice went beyond the personal embarrassment of the SG. It also touched a sensitive question about the UN's political role in mediating crises between governments. It gave fresh prominence to the UN's humanitarian work, last recognised by the Nobel Committee when UNHCR received the prize in 1954.
The UN's political work between states demanded respect for their sovereignty. Its humanitarian agencies increasingly confronted a different imperative: how to reach people in need regardless of which government or armed force controlled the territory in which they lived.
In the decade after 1965 those divergent approaches of the UN's political and humanitarian wings would play out in stark form: Biafra (1967–1970) and East Pakistan/Bangladesh (1971). Both helped give rise to the “sans frontières” thinking that would increasingly challenge the idea that borders and sovereignty should always take precedence over urgent human need.
- Biafra will be the subject of the next articles in this series. For now it is enough to note that the war exposed two opposing doctrines within the UN. The Secretariat treated the conflict as Nigeria’s internal affair, in keeping with the organisation’s defence of its member states’ sovereignty. UNICEF insisted on reaching starving children on both sides of the lines. Neither was acting simply out of personal conviction; each was following the logic of its own mandate.
- East Pakistan/Bangladesh deserves an article of its own, as a turning point in UN thinking on humanitarian intervention. UNICEF and other humanitarian organisations worked on both sides of the border, while the political arm of the UN continued to see the crisis through the lens of national sovereignty and pursued a fruitless mediation between Islamabad and New Delhi.
The tension between sovereignty and the international responsibility to protect people in extreme circumstances would continue for decades, eventually contributing to the UN's adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine in 2005.
The Presentation - "Good deeds save the world" - 10 December 1965
The presentation speech was given by Aase Lionæs, a member of the Nobel Committee and a Norwegian delegate to the UN since 1946. Although she had been among the members of the Committee supporting the award for U Thant that year, Lionæs's speech explained why UNICEF was nevertheless a worthy laureate. She recalled the debates that year over whether the UN should create a children’s fund at all.
She went on to ask how a relief organisation for children fitted the definition of a peace prize. She found her answer not in philosophy or law but in the first line of a poem Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote on his deathbed: “Good deeds save the world.” By relieving human misery, she argued, UNICEF fulfilled Nobel’s condition of promoting brotherhood among nations.
Consensus at the UN was rare, she said, but everyone had understood the language of UNICEF, which had proved that compassion knows no national boundaries. She described disease, starvation and ignorance as “arcs of the same vicious circle.” UNICEF attacked all three at once, and its aid was meant not as a hand-out, but as a spur to self-help.
"Everyone has understood the language of UNICEF ... even the most reluctant person is bound to admit that in action UNICEF has proved that compassion knows no national boundaries. Aid is given to all children without any distinction of race, creed, nationality or political conviction ... UNICEF has become an international device capable of liberating hundreds of millions of children from ignorance, disease, malnutrition and starvation ... The aim of UNICEF is to spread a table decked with all the good things that Nature provides for all the children of the world ... UNICEF offers young people an alternative worth living and working for, a world of freedom for all people, equality between all races, brotherhood among all men."
Aase Lionaes
The Acceptance
In his acceptance speech, Henry Labouisse, who had become UNICEF's Executive Director only six months earlier, began with a tribute to his predecessor:
"We of UNICEF accept the Nobel Prize for Peace with humility, knowing how little we are able to do and how immense are the needs. We accept it with gratitude toward the governments who are the fountainheads of our financing, toward the Specialized Agencies of the United Nations that provide us with their advice, toward the national committees, nongovernmental organizations, and the very many individuals who give us invaluable support."
— Henry (Harry) R. Labouisse
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| Henry Labouisse receives the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF from Gunnar Jahn |
In the end
U Thant never won the Nobel Peace Prize. UNICEF did.
The circumstances of 1965 make clear that UNICEF emerged as a compromise within a deeply divided Committee. Yet that should not obscure the strength of UNICEF's own claim: it had already been nominated repeatedly and enjoyed broad international support.
Looking back over the 61 years since, it is worth asking whether the events of 1965 revealed something larger about the changing place of the United Nations in international affairs. In a world locked in Cold War politics, was there decreasing room for the UN to act as an intermediary between the great powers? Was it increasingly coming to be valued instead for what it could do at the edges of conflicts and in their aftermath?
Next: A Little History #16 — Biafra.
See also: Events around the Nobel - an interview with Jack Ling
UNICEF's 80th Anniversary is coming soon. Did you miss an article in the series A Little History? Here is the full list of articles so far posted. Add your own contributions to UNICEF's history.
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