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WHEN THE UNITED NATIONS
and Kofi Annan won the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize, the citation
noted that the secretary-general had been “preeminent
in bringing new life” to the organization. Although it
was the eighth time the United Nations had been awarded the
prize, it has also come under fire over the years for being
a bloated, ineffectual bureaucracy. That critique is a familiar
one for John Ruggie, who served as assistant secretary-general
and chief advisor for strategic planning to Annan from 1997
to 2001. In fact, he would be the first to acknowledge that
there was some truth in the accusation.
“The United Nations had become a highly fragmented organization
that didn’t have clear priorities — it was trying
to be all things to all people,” says Ruggie, the recently
appointed director at the Center for Business and Government.
“My job was to help Kofi Annan reposition the United
Nations to become more relevant, agile, and coherent so it
could respond effectively to the challenges it faced.”
Before assuming that role, Ruggie was dean of Columbia University’s
School of International and Public Affairs. He’d worked
on consulting projects for the United Nations and sometimes
ran into Annan, who was then in charge of peacekeeping, at
conferences in New York, so it wasn’t surprising that
mutual friends suggested they get together and talk when the
Ghana native was elected secretary-general.
“He told me that he wanted to have someone around who
wasn’t going to get swallowed up by the ‘In’
box,” Ruggie says. “Ninety-five percent of people’s
time is soaked up by putting out fires and handling the tons
of cable traffic coming in from around the world. That leaves
5 percent for undertaking new initiatives and trying something
a little different. I was supposed to reverse that balance.”
In some sense, Ruggie’s
border-crossing background is a logical lead-in to the decades
he’s devoted to the study of global politics and economics.
Born in Graz, Austria, Ruggie’s family moved to Toronto
in 1956, when he was 11 years old; he married Mary Zacharuk
at the end of his sophomore year at Ontario’s McMaster
University and became a U.S. citizen in the 1970s, not long
after receiving a PhD in political science at UC Berkeley.
He came to the field, he says, because “it seemed to
close the least number of doors,” but adds that the real
issue in his family was getting an advanced degree of any
kind at all.
“My father, who was a house painter, finished fourth
grade, and my mother attended school through the eighth grade
— no one in my family had gone to high school, let alone
college or graduate school.” While Ruggie’s family
supported his chosen path, they couldn’t help but feel
some anxiety as their son advanced further and further into
what, for them, was uncharted territory.
“My parents came around to the idea that there was a
way to make a living beyond physical labor — as a doctor
or a lawyer, for instance — but a PhD devoted to researching
cosmic issues was not something they could grasp easily and
didn’t for a long time,” Ruggie says. “My mother-in-law,”
he added, “whose background was similar to my parents,
encouraged me to sell insurance. There were times I was tempted.”
But at Berkeley, Ruggie met his mentor, Ernst Haas, a German-Jewish
refugee who came to the United States in the 1930s, served
in the Army, and studied history and international relations
theory on the G.I. Bill. “He was a phenomenal teacher
— very demanding, very rigorous,” says Ruggie, noting
that Haas’s Beyond the Nation State got him “hooked”
on the subject of international transformation.
“Ernie was an extraordinary role model in terms of his
discipline and imagination. I really wanted to impress him
but had never taken an international relations course before
coming to Berkeley. When he gave me an A-, I was heartbroken.
I figured that was the end of my academic career.” Instead,
the two collaborated on writing projects, became teaching
colleagues, and remain in touch to this day.
Looking around Ruggie’s
comfortable, book-lined office, it’s difficult to imagine
he ever considered the possibility of failure. Framed photos
decorate the walls, many of them taken on the go with Annan
— in an airplane packed with the press, striding up the
Pentagon steps. Clearly, Ruggie’s four years at the United
Nations were a drastic, and not entirely expected, departure
from the groves of academe.
“I don’t think I ever would have gone to the UN
if it weren’t for Kofi Annan,” Ruggie remarks. “Aside
from being one of the world’s most admirable and attractive
human beings, he’s as much of an out-of-the-box thinker
as I’ve encountered at the upper levels of any organization
— public, private, or nonprofit.”
There was no job description for his newly created position
at the UN, but it evolved to encompass several concerns: UN
reforms, relations with the global business community, and
relations with the United States. “When the Iraqi crisis
hit in 1998, for example,” says Ruggie, referring to
the political bombshell that hit when Saddam Hussein refused
to cooperate with international arms inspectors and shut down
long-term UN monitoring operations, “I accompanied Annan
to all the Security Council meetings so he’d have an
advisor close by who could figure out where the potholes were
likely to be in Washington.”
Ruggie’s job at the UN also included creating the Global
Compact, an initiative to engage the world business community
to promote good corporate practices in the areas of human
rights, labor standards, and environmental principles. Anti-globalization
activists criticized the UN’s efforts to reach out to
big business, but Ruggie counters with this matter-of-fact
perspective: “Kofi Annan took office at a time when private
investment flows exceeded official development assistance
by a factor of six. You’re not going to get your job
done if you can’t tap into those resources and channel
them for socially desirable purposes.”
The Global Compact grew out of a speech Annan gave in Davos
at the 1999 meeting of the World Economic Forum, says Ruggie.
“The essential message was: It’s in your own self-interest
to make globalization more socially inclusive. If it isn’t,
the backlash against it will be so great that the whole thing
will unravel and no one will benefit. That was 10 months before
Seattle,” he says, referring to demonstrations held during
the meeting of the World Trade Organization.
With 400 member companies, including names such as Nike and
DuPont, detractors have suggested that the Global Compact
allows corporations to selectively police themselves while
dressing in the UN flag. “I believe the kind of social
learning approach that’s embodied in the Global Compact
has a better chance of producing steady progress than attempts
by the United Nations to establish external performance criteria
and monitoring systems,” Ruggie counters. In addition
to the inherent difficulty of defining corporate complicity
in rights abuses in legally enforceable language, the rapid
rate of change in the corporate world would quickly outpace
any predetermined code of conduct.
“Our goal was to get companies to commit to working
with the UN, NGOs, and international labor to translate the
Global Compact’s principles into ongoing corporate management
practices,” he says. “The idea is that the principles
would become part of the genetic makeup of the company and
structure corporate behavior, even as the economic climate
changes.”
As the Center for Business
and Government’s new director, Ruggie plans to continue
his work in fostering responsible corporate behavior. “It’s
an opportunity to create an institutional platform beyond
what I could accomplish as a researcher,” says Ruggie
of his new post, which he took over in August when his predecessor,
Ira Jackson, left to head up the Arthur M. Blank Foundation
in Atlanta.
Increasingly, he says, society and even governments are looking
to corporations as agents in helping to deal with pressing
social problems, especially at the global level. Finding the
right balance between public and the private sector responsibilities,
Ruggie says, is one of the most pressing issues of our era.
Ruggie’s plan for advancing this agenda will be twofold:
research and outreach. “First, we need to get a better
grip on what works, what doesn’t, and why,” he says,
referring to private-public partnerships. A recent $5 million
gift from Frank and Deni Weil, who helped establish the center
many years ago, will fund a new program on “collaborative
governance” — looking at how the public, private,
and nonprofit sectors can work together effectively to advance
social goals. In addition, Ruggie is leading a schoolwide
effort to develop a major initiative focused specifically
on global corporate social responsibility.
But he also has plans to put that research to practical use.
“The world is suffering from governance gaps and governance
failures, while problems continue to multiply,” he states,
“especially the kind that Kofi Annan likes to call ‘problems
without passports.’ We need all hands on deck, pulling
together to make a difference.” Executive programs and
Forum events will feature among his outreach efforts.
He will also continue to serve as a member of the Global
Compact Advisory Council. He says that working at the UN provides
a distinct perspective on how other countries view the United
States. “We are by far the most powerful country in the
world, but where are we headed from here?” he asks. “In
one of the 2000 presidential debates, George W. Bush said
that if the United States is arrogant, we will trigger hostility
abroad; but if we remain humble, others will flock to our
side and expect us to exercise leadership. I think he was
dead-on about that, but what troubles me is whether or not
we are willing to live up to that insight.”
Ruggie becomes more and more animated as he talks, whether
he’s discussing the conflicting forces behind U.S. foreign
policy or the New York rock scene (his son, a classically
trained musician, plays bass guitar and writes the music for
a band called “Blend Engine”). An enthusiast of
“outdoorsy” activities such as skiing, hiking, scuba,
and tennis, he admits to often not having much time for any
of these things. Now that he and his wife, Mary Ruggie, a
professor at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy,
are settled in Newton, Ruggie hopes to fulfill one of his
objectives when he left the UN — to “lead a more
balanced life.” In passing, he mentions participating
in a rite of passage for any aspiring Bostonian. “Last
weekend, we walked the Freedom Trail from end to end,”
he says proudly. “It was great.”
Julia Hanna is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.
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