During the early Cold War, the leaders of all three sought to transcend what they defined as national and political disputes in order to focus on what they termed international and professional issues (which they saw as inherently apolitical) such as economic development, health, and nutrition. Granted, these were artificial dichotomies, but they were nonetheless important. Such dichotomies gave these international civil servants rhetorical leverage in their effort to draft and execute their international agendas. But the dichotomy is also ironic, given that all of these organizations were inter-governmental organizations that relied on nations for their funding and their mandate and that often benefitted from the international rivalry between the superpowers in pursuing their more ambitious development projects, such as the malaria eradication program.
These international civil servants played a pivotal role in notions of global governance. They combined a professional identity with an international lineage from the technical work of the League of Nations, especially its economic conferences and work in nutrition, health, and epidemiology. Then they built on these legacies to develop a defined sense of a global common good for which every nation was responsible. As such, they served as lynchpins in the development of contemporary global governance structures.