The Golden Egg

One of the major industries of Geneva--along with banking and watchmaking--is the care and feeding of the European headquarters of the United Nations, which now includes five senior agencies, 20 international programs, 41 annual conferences and 4,000 official meetings each year, all charged with carrying out the decisions of the General Assembly in New York City. The Swiss call it "the golden egg," and with good reason. Since 1966, the combined budgets of the various organizations and agencies have doubled, swelling to $250 million annually, more than is spent by the U.N. in New York. The U.N.'s Geneva headquarters has in short become one of the greatest bureaucracies ever built. TIME Correspondent William McWhirter recently explored it and sent this report:

Every new idea that surfaces in the General Assembly seems to arrive in Geneva with its own subagency. It has been like the mighty unleashing of the deepest, darkest bureaucratic instincts of six continents, 132 countries and all the races of man, as if the only true law among nations has turned out to be Parkinson's.

"There has been a terrible extension," admits Georges Palthey, a U.N. official since 1945 and the assistant director-general of the Geneva branch. "The general plan was to bring, as much as possible, services of a social and economic character to Geneva. That was the plan, but the implementation has been mishmash. We can say now that the U.N. in Geneva is dealing with all the possible problems on the planet, from the sea bed to space."

Such expanded responsibilities require ever larger offices, and a massive $78.5 million building program is under way. A new wing of the Geneva Secretariat will open next month, doubling the present space of the Palais des Nations; one of the Secretariat's prime responsibilities is to keep the printing presses, which turn out more than 250 million pages a year, running. Two steel-and-glass headquarters, for the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and a 1,200-car garage are also being built.

In addition to ILO and ITU, Geneva is the home of such prestigious U.N. agencies as the World Health Organization (WHO), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Last week the branch of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), Paris-based since 1946, disclosed plans to move its headquarters to Geneva by next summer. Soon to come is a helter-skelter maze of smaller programs, ranging from the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to the International Bureau for Declaration of Death, which identifies victims of civil wars and natural disasters, to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which now has more member countries (142) than the U.N. itself.

UNCTAD is a case study in proliferation. It began as a trade conference in 1964, mainly for the benefit of the less-developed nations, and has since held only three conferences, the last one a five-week affair last spring in Santiago, Chile. So far, UNCTAD has written a convention recommending that developing countries be given increased trade preferences, and in 1968 concluded an international sugar agreement. Though its record is modest, UNCTAD has its own secretary-general, external relations division, office of administration, information unit, technical-assistance coordination unit, research division, trade expansion and economic integration division, commodities division, manufactures division, invisibles and technology transfer division, trade with socialist countries division and a New York liaison office--in all, a staff of 324.

The U.N. agencies can of course point to a considerable record of accomplishment. GATT ran the Kennedy round of trade talks. WHO operates on an unparalleled scale in virtually all areas of health care. UNICEF provides broad assistance to developing nations, offering health and education services and job training for mothers and for children up to the age of 15. As a whole, the working bodies remain an invaluable, irreplaceable collection point for information flowing between East and West and from the developed to the developing nations.

Still, the agencies have become increasingly concerned about their own relevance and are furiously leaping from one new issue to the next. This year they are battling fiercely among themselves for pieces of such issues as environment, population, pollution, drugs and disease. "We have already studied occupational cancer very seriously," says an ILO spokesman. "In the fall we will discuss multinational companies. It will be a very big study. We are also very concerned about migrant workers. Do you know about migrant workers?" There is talk that next year the General Assembly may create a general protein fund, naming a special coordinator for protein.

Usually, everyone ends up with a piece of everything. As a result, the agencies complain that they are spending more and more of their time just consulting with one another. In the field of drug control there is the Division of Narcotic Drugs, the U.N. Fund for the Secretariat of International Narcotics Control Board and the newly created U.N. Fund for Drug Abuse Control. Recently, another new group of agencies has been started to coordinate special areas among the rival bodies.

In the meantime, each agency seems determined to establish its own independence not only from every other agency but from the working apparatus of the U.N. as well. They have managed to free themselves from the Secretariat by making their annual budget and program reports accountable only to the General Assembly, which is not equipped to be an administrative body. They have built pint-sized superstructures, asserting reasonably enough that it is better to be the director-general of a small fiefdom than a third assistant deputy in a larger one. Almost every agency, without any central coordination, has also begun to run its own fund drives for voluntary contributions. This has become an effective device for securing further independence from the parent body while, in some cases, more than doubling an agency's budget.

Worry. Only one Geneva agency has ever gone so far as to commit itself to management analysis; the study was done by McKenzie & Co., a New York management consultant firm. The ILO, which was founded in 1919, is still a bit unnerved by the experience. "It left us a house divided between two cultures," says an ILO administrator, "one following the new ways and the other continuing to do what it had always done. It also left us feeling that we aren't a family business any longer. They asked us questions about what we thought our purpose was, what we thought our apparatus was supposed to accomplish and what we thought of our results. You don't ask those kinds of questions in a family business, do you?"

U.N. administrators spend considerable time worrying about the Geneva problem, not the least because Kurt Waldheim, the Secretary-General, has made a point of giving it special attention. But the U.N. has become almost powerless to impose itself upon the budgets, staffs or even programs of the various agencies. One answer, in some minds, is to begin to centralize a good many U.N. functions, perhaps even working toward a common budget, but that would mean taking back what has already been handed out--a political feat anywhere. Should Geneva become too cumbersome, however, U.N. officials are now working on another possible solution: the creation of another complex of scientific and technological agencies in Vienna.

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