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the ethics of dag hammarskjöld
Dag Hammarskjöld’s
zeitgemäße Betrachtungen
– Reflections on Inge Lønning’s Dag
Hammarskjöld Lecture
By Henning Melber *
It is a tremendous privilege to be with you tonight for the first
Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture at Voksenåsen just delivered so
eloquently by Inge Lønning. It is an even bigger honour to
have been invited to share a few additional thoughts on this
lecture with the distinguished presenter (who I understand
is among Norway’s leading intellectuals) and those attending
this august event.
In my view Inge Lønning could not have chosen a more suitable
thematic focus to demonstrate the simple complexity of
Hammarskjöld and its relevance for us today. If you wonder
whether ‘simple complexity’ is a contradiction in terms, then
let me clarify that I think that complexities do not have to
be complicated. Just as Hammarskjöld did not separate politics
from nature and the arts, his political convictions and the
politics guided by them could not be separated from morality
and religion. He was a deeply spiritual man. Those who associate
this with obscurantism or mysticism not of this world,
however, are not only doing an injustice to Hammarskjöld as a
* Presented as a comment to the first Dag Hammarskjöld Lecture in the
Dag Hammarskjöld Programme at Voksenåsen, 2nd October 2009.
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Henning Melber (born 1950) obtained a PhD in Political Science in
1980 and a venia legendi (“the right to teach”) in Development Studies
in 1993. He was Director of the Namibian Economic Policy Research
Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek (1992-2000) and Research Director at the
Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala/Sweden (2000-2006), where he is the
Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation since then.