UN Chronicle: Issue 1, 2000: The Chronicle Interview

The United Nations has joined more than 200 countries and organizations at the largest international exposition ever to be held. Expo 2000, which opened in Hannover, Germany on 1 June and runs through 31 October, has as its motif "Humankind-Nature-Technology". In that context, the United Nations Pavilion is highlighting Secretary-General Kofi Annan's millennium theme, "The UN Works for You". Mr. Annan has appointed Nadine B. Hack as Commissioner-General for the United Nations at Expo 2000. She is President of NBH Executive Consulting, an international strategic planning and major events production company. Ms. Hack is also a former New York City Commissioner for the United Nations, Consular Corps and International Business, and has worked with many non-governmental organizations [NGOs]. Just prior to the Expo's opening, she spoke with Russell Taylor of the UN Chronicle about the preparations and her expectations for th UN Pavilion.

Expo 2000: What is it about?

The first world Expo that I was consciously aware of was the 1968 Montreal Expo. They are essentially world's fairs; an opportunity for different countries and world organizations, but primarily countries-which distinguishes the Expos from world fairs where you have a lot of corporations and businesses-to present themselves in their fullest in terms of trade opportunities, in terms of tourism opportunities, in terms of promotion, to the world at large. The UN has been participating, since the 1950 Haiti Expo, so it has a long-standing history. Expo authorities have seen the UN presence as incredibly prestigious and have always placed the pavilions in wonderfully central locations.

When you arrive at Expo 2000, you come in through the main entrance, right where the train leaves you off from the airport and the city of Hannover. You walk over a bridge and come down into the central plaza. The German National Pavilion is on your left and the UN Pavilion on your right, so we're right in the heart of it. Based on prior Expos, anywhere from 40 million to 50 million people are expected to come. In earlier Expos, the UN had as many as 20,000 visitors a day, and we expect at least that many, given our location. It's very, very exciting.

When Secretary-General Kofi Annan first called and asked me to assume this responsibility, I had a very candid conversation with him. I suggested, rather than looking at this as a one shot deal-the Expo, five months-"let's look at it in a larger context of all the various activities of the millennium year campaign of the UN. Let's try to tie as much of it together as possible with the theme for this year's Expo: 'Humankind-Nature-Technology'". We have adopted it for the UN Pavilion.

Given this theme, what is the UN's overall message?

The overall message is, "The UN Works for You". And we're tying that theme into every component of the presentation. This is a real challenge. On the one hand, you want the exhibit to be content-rich and substantive, since there's a huge amount of information to convey about the fullness of what the entire UN system is doing worldwide on major issues. On the other hand, you also want it to be entertaining and exciting, so that the average visitor is not going to say "ho, hum" and leave.

The presentation is being structured in such a way so that, as you walk through the exhibition spaces, it stays very simple, with lots of visuals. But, at the same time, it's also made up of very complex digital imagery projected from the ceilings, from the floors, from the walls. The team that we have assembled is really terrific. They've won awards in the past at several Expos.

Jan Ralph, the technical director, he's the best. And Luis Sardá is a leading designer in Europe. He's just been commissioned by the King of Spain to launch an exhibit at the National Museum in Madrid on the history of design in Spain. He's an acknowledged "design guru" and has assembled a whole team of architects and audio-visual people. These are the same people who produce the 30-second TV shots shown during the half-time at soccer World Cups, and they're all working for a fraction of their usual costs just to be affiliated with the UN Pavilion.

And they're bringing together different areas of the creative arts: digital technology, music. ...

...music, soundtrack, everything. We're negotiating with several well-known musical groups, with hopes that they will release the rights to use their soundtracks. We're talking with a lot of popular world music people, bringing together environmental sounds, different Afro and Caribbean beats, music from the Middle East, and from around the world. It will be an all-inclusive environment when you walk in. And what's exciting about the whole show is that it "translates" better. You get a chance to walk through the exhibits, which are set up as a chambered nautilus: you can enter a section on "nature", a section on "technology" or a section on "humankind". It's done in very simple, very direct terms: connecting and personalizing "The UN Works for You". So, instead of mind-numbing statistics,there are hundreds of millions of this or that; it's brought down to a very graphic, very individual level. "Here's a pregnant woman who has to walk for miles to get her water", or "There is Steffi Graf, the UN Goodwill Ambassador in Germany, who says 'I work as a volunteer for the UN. Would you like to volunteer in this capacity? You can sign up here.'" There are non-stop places for interactivity along the way.

Are you working with other parts of the UN system?

We're featuring all of the specialized agencies. In the entrance will be one of the six pillars or major organs of the UN, with video transmission and information in simple text. Once you enter, everything has been designed to keep people moving. There's no start or beginning. The flow is wonderful. In the centre, a 30-by-30 foot skylight throws a beautiful ambient light down onto a circle of interactive computer sites. There, once people have walked through the basic exhibit, and there will be many visitors for whom it will be just that, the more interested ones-the scholar, the student, whoever's interested-can log on and explore by region, by topic, by area of each one of the agencies and see all the work they're doing. They can learn about the Convention on climate change or on desertification. They can go in through UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) and other women's programmes. There will be web connections to each and every one of the UN's main Web sites and to each and every agency web sites.

What happens after the Expo?

One of the other things I discussed with the Secretary-General early on is the overlapping theme that ties together humankind, nature and technology-and that is sustainable development, because that's where all of these issues factor into each other. In keeping with the spirit of sustainability, I asked: Why put all these resources into creating this wonderful pavilion that will be dismantled at the end of the five months?

So, the interactive centre that's in the middle of the Pavilion is going to be moved en masse at the end of the Expo to the visitors lobby of UN Headquarters in New York and will become a permanent fixture there. Other segments will be lifted and set up as a permanent exhibit in Bonn. We're also exploring different places where other pieces can be housed. The whole thing will have a longer shelf life than the five months.

Where is the money coming from?

All 4.5 million German marks is coming from private sponsors-Volkswagen AG, RWE AG, Deutsche Telekom AG and the Association of German Public Sector Banks. The UN is not paying a penny. We're also in the process of negotiating with several other companies. Ideally, we could do incredible things with this if we had enough time to reach out to enough people, but we have to start assembling in Hannover in April and the doors open on 1 June. It's very tight.

The Hannover Expo authority has been terrific about finding links with German corporations and the Ministry of Economic Development in Germany. We went out, with the Expo authorities as our partners, had wonderful meetings and were able to get confirmation from the sponsors. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GTZ) is also funding a good number of the pavilions from third world countries. (GTZ, owned by the Federal Republic of Germany, operates as a private-sector enterprise with a development-policy mandate: to make sustainable improvements to the living conditions of people in partner countries and to conserve the natural resource base on which life depends.)

Each pavilion has a presentation panel that lists who the sponsors are. Our sponsors will also be listed on all the literature we give out for the UN Pavilion. They were particularly excited when they heard that part of this was going to become a permanent exhibit, with a little flag saying, "This was from Expo 2000. Sponsors who made this possible were …". So, this is all being underwritten. It is a gift to the UN. The UN-cost-free to itself-will be able to present itself to a large public audience. From my perspective, this is a win, win, win situation for the UN. There's really no downside.

Comments

Images are courtesy of Expo 2000/Artist Luis Sardá.

On how Ms. Hack's service as New York City Commissioner for the UN has helped in preparing Expo 2000:
When former Mayor of New York City David Dinkins first asked me to serve in the post, we both thought it would be a really reasonable position for someone like me. I had a long-standing involvement as an activist in many NGOs, such as the World Policy Institute, the International League for Human Rights and others that have consultative status at the UN, and I had also worked with the UN system. But I learned, literally from my first day on the job, that it was so much more of a multi-layered, complex Organization, with overlapping jurisdictions. I felt my learning curve hadn't been that steep since I had been a toddler, in terms of absorbing huge amounts of information about who on paper made a decision, who behind that person made a decision, or which division of the Secretariat and/or Committee of the General Assembly and/or multiple ones had final authority. If I began negotiating in good faith with one entity, believing that was who I should be pursuing, I'd then find out six or seven other entities who, if I hadn't involved them in the discussion, would have been upset at the least.
So, I really learned how to become as familiar as possible with the broadest spectrum of everyone involved in everything and to try to be as inclusive in every initiative that I launched. I would say that, by the time I left, I literally knew everybody from the Secretary-General's Office on the 38th floor to the basement electricians. And every component of it was so fascinating.

But probably the longest lasting legacy of my tenure was the deals with UNDP and UNICEF to keep them here in New York. That was a very complex, two-and-a-half-year negotiation that involved many departments of the UN, the agencies in question, and many federal, state and city agencies. The negotiations in the end run resulted in a net benefit of a billion dollars annually to the City.