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At Stanford, UN leader calls for global action

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The United Nations has thus far fulfilled its charter to prevent a third world war, but with 60 million refugees, continued bloodshed with unresolved civil conflicts and terrorism spreading like cancer, the world's leading peacekeeping organization must spearhead global action, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday at Stanford on the 70th anniversary of the international organization.

Ban, the U.N.'s eighth secretary-general, did not rest on any laurels during his speech at a public event sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). "I humbly accept criticism that the U.N. is not doing enough," he said. 

However, the situation could have been worse if not for the United Nations, he continued. "Without peacekeepers, or without the U.N.'s continued humanitarian assistance and advocacy of human rights, I'm afraid to tell you that this world would have been poorer, more dangerous and even bloodier without the United Nations."

Ban's visit to Stanford – his second to the university in less than three years – was part of a trip to the Bay Area to commemorate the signing of the U.N. charter. In 1945, representatives from 50 nations gathered in San Francisco to create the United Nations – an international organization aimed at saving future generations from the "scourge of war."

Today, the United Nations has grown to 193 member nations. Its challenges – from climate change and poverty to civil wars and terrorism – have never been greater, Ban said.

"This is a critical year; 2015 is a year of global action," he said. "The U.N. cannot do it alone. We need strong solidarity among government, business communities and civil societies, from each and every citizen."

The fact that so many young people around the globe are drawn to violent narratives is worrisome, Ban said. "Violent terrorism is spreading like cancer around the world."

The rise in terrorist activities stems from "a failure of leadership," he said. That's why the United Nations needs to develop a comprehensive plan of action to address extremism, he maintained.

The U.N.'s 70th anniversary coincidentally fell on a momentous day of tragedy and celebration around the world. Dozens were killed when terrorists launched horrific attacks across three continents – in France, Tunisia and Kuwait – fueling anger, sadness and fear of more violence.

But in the United States, celebrations rang out in response to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalizes same-sex marriages nationwide.

Ban, who has long advocated for equality and last year pushed the United Nations to recognize same-sex marriages of its staff, drew a round of applause when he heralded the court ruling as "a great step forward for human rights."

The June 26 event was co-sponsored by Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, with promotional co-sponsors Asia Society, Asia Foundation and the World Affairs Council of Northern California. 

May Wong is a freelance writer for the Stanford News Service.

Coverage and related multimedia links:

Remarks at Stanford University by Ban Ki-moon (U.N. News Centre, 6/26/15)

Photos of Ban Ki-moon at Stanford University (U.N. Photo, 6/26/15)

At Stanford University, Ban says U.N. ready to build a better future for all (U.N. News Centre, 6/27/2015)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomes growing engagement of India, China (NDTV, 6/27/2015)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks at Stanford, celebrates U.N.'s 70th anniversary (Stanford Daily, 6/29/15)

Hoover archival photographs featured at lecture delivered by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Hoover Institution, 6/29/2015)

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Ban Ki-moon, the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations, urged the audience to see 2015 as a year of global action.
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Will the U.S. and Europe Avoid a Lost Decade? Lessons from Japan's Postcrisis Experience

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This paper reexamines Japanese policy choices during its banking crisis in the 1990s and draws some lessons relevant for the United States and Europe in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–09. The paper focuses on two aspects of postcrisis economic policy of Japan: the delay in bank recapitalization and the lack of structural reforms. These two policy shortcomings retarded Japan’s recovery from the crisis and were responsible for its stagnant postcrisis growth. The paper also suggests some political economy factors that contributed to the Japanese policies. In France, Italy, and Spain bank recapitalization has been delayed and the structural reforms have been slow. Without drastic changes, they are likely to follow Japan’s path to long economic stagnation. The situation in Germany looks somewhat better mainly because the structural reform was undertaken before the crisis. Although the recovery has been slow in the United States as well, the problems are at least different from those faced by Japan then and many European countries now.

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IMF Economic Review
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Takeo Hoshi
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Stanford to host UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

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Ban Ki-moon, the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations, will deliver a public speech at Stanford University on Friday, June 26.

Ban’s visit will highlight the 70th anniversary of the founding of the U.N., part of a larger trip to the Bay Area to commemorate the San Francisco Conference, where the charter establishing the U.N. was signed in 1945. After his speech, he will participate in a question and answer session with Ambassador Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea (2008-11).

The Stanford event will take place at 3 p.m. RSVP is required by June 24; seating is first come, first served. Media must pre-register by 9 a.m. on June 25.

It is Ban’s second visit to Stanford in under three years. In Jan. 2013, he delivered a speech to mark the occasion of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC)’s thirtieth anniversary.

“I believe we face a unique opportunity,” Ban said in Dinkelspiel Auditorium. “Because the changes we face are so profound – the decisions we make will have a deeper and more lasting impact than perhaps any other set of decisions in recent decades.”

Calling on students to be ‘global citizens,’ he spoke about the ongoing crisis in Syria, the mandate to act on climate change, and the need for a sustainable peace worldwide.

“Growing up, the U.N. was a beacon of hope for me and my country,” he said. “I urge you to harness that same spirit and make a difference.”

Ban was born in the Republic of Korea in 1944. As a youth, more than fifty years ago, Ban visited California during his first trip to the United States with a Red Cross, saying “my trip here opened my eyes to the world.” He has since held a 37-year career in public service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, including the role of minister of foreign affairs and trade, foreign policy advisor and chief national security advisor to the president.

“It’s truly our pleasure to host Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the seventieth anniversary of the U.N.,” said Gi-Wook Shin, a Stanford professor and director of Shorenstein APARC. “The U.N. has had a profound impact on the shaping of global order in the postwar era. And Ban’s leadership has steered the organization toward the world’s most pressing aims.”

Ban is reaching the end of his term as secretary-general. He assumed office in Jan. 2007 and was reelected for a second term in June 2011. Over his tenure, Ban has led a major push toward peace and non-proliferation activities, youth, women’s rights and the environment. He has urged leaders of China, Japan and South Korea to work harder on reconciliation over the wartime past to ensure long-term stability in the region.

The June 26 event, which can be followed at #UNatStanford, is co-sponsored by Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University; with promotional co-sponsors Asia Society, Asia Foundation and the World Affairs Council of Northern California.

CONTACT: Event inquires may be directed to Debbie Warren, dawarren@stanford.edu or (650) 723-8387; Media inquires may be directed to Lisa Griswold, lisagris@stanford.edu or (650) 736-0656

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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon talks with professor Gi-Wook Shin following a public lecture at Stanford in Jan. 2013.
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The United Nations at 70: A Conversation with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

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RSVPS ARE NO LONGER BEING ACCEPTED AS WE HAVE REACHED VENUE CAPACITY. Seating is first come, first served.

The livestream experienced technical difficulties and was not able to be broadcast. Video of the event is now posted below.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit will highlight the 70th anniversary of the founding of the UN, part of a larger trip to the Bay Area to commemorate the San Francisco Conference, where the charter establishing the UN was signed in 1945. After his speech, he will participate in a question and answer session with Ambassador Kathleen Stephens, the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea (2008-11).

This is Ban’s second visit to Stanford in under three years. In January 2013, he delivered a speech to mark the occasion of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center’s thirtieth anniversary.

Media must pre-register by 9 a.m. on June 25. Please direct media inquires to Ms. Lisa Griswold, lisagris@stanford.edu.

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After State Socialism: The Political Origins of Transitional Recessions

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Transitions from state socialism created a startling range of initial economic outcomes, from renewed growth to deep economic crises. Debates about the causes have largely ignored the political disruptions due to regime change that coincided with sudden initial recessions, and they have defined the problem as relative growth rates over time rather than abrupt short-run collapse. Political disruptions were severe when states broke apart into newly independent units, leading to hyperinflation, armed warfare, or both. Even absent these disruptions, the disintegration of communist parties inherently undermined economic activity by creating uncertainty about the ownership of state assets. The protracted deterioration of the party- state prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union generated widespread conflict over control of assets, which crippled economic activity across the Soviet successor states. A more rapid path to regime change was less disruptive in other post-communist states, and the problem was absent in surviving communist regimes. Comparative accounts of regime change frame an analysis of panel data from 31 countries after 1989 that distinguishes the early 1990s from subsequent years. A wide range of variables associated with alternative explanations have little evident impact in accounting for the onset and severity of the early 1990s recessions.

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American Sociological Review
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Andrew G. Walder

Explaining Institutional Change: Policy Areas, Outside Options, and the Bretton Woods Institutions

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I propose and test a theoretical framework that explains institutional change in international relations. Like firms in markets, international institutions are affected by the underlying characteristics of their policy areas. Some policy areas are prone to produce institutions facing relatively little competition, limiting the outside options of member states and impeding redistributive change. In comparison, institutions facing severe competition will quickly reflect changes in underlying state interests and power. To test the theory empirically, I exploit common features of the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—to isolate the effect of variation in policy area characteristics. The empirical tests show that, despite having identical membership and internal rules, bargaining outcomes in the Bretton Woods institutions have diverged sharply and in accordance with the theory.

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American Journal of Political Science
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Phillip Lipscy

Political disruptions generated economic collapses in post-communist states

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Political fragmentation early on exacerbated the post-communist economic transitions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, new Stanford research shows.

In a new paper, Stanford sociology professor Andrew Walder says that the neoliberal economic policies introduced in those former communist countries did not cause their economic collapses. Neoliberal is a modified form of liberal policies tending to favor free-market capitalism.

In an interview, Walder said, "Policy choices mattered, but they did not create the initial problems that they were intended to solve."

Rather, the longer the decline of the communist system before regime change and the greater the uncertainty over state ownership of assets, the more likely the country fell into prolonged decline.

The lesson for surviving communist or socialist regimes is that future transitions will be less economically damaging if they are rapid and political certainty exists about the ownership of state-owned assets, wrote Walder and co-authors Andrew Isaacson and Qinglian Lu, both Stanford graduate students in sociology.

The worldwide transformation of state socialism during the 1990s saw many of those countries plunge into recession, usually far beyond initial expectations, he said. Most analysts originally expected short-run hardships as those societies and their economies were restructured. It did not happen that way.

"Sharp recessions in the first states to emerge from the revolutions of 1989 were followed by much deeper economic crises in new states that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union," said Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Humanities and Sciences and a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The few surviving communist autocracies that retooled their economies avoided recessions and grew more rapidly, despite once being considered the least promising places for market reform. China and Vietnam are two examples.

Recessions and politics

The researchers examined economic and growth-rate data from 31 countries for the period from 1989 to 2007. They analyzed three competing explanations for post-socialist economic performance – policy choice, initial economic circumstances and reform-era political institutions.

They found that by far the largest differences in growth rates across some 31 transitioning economies were due to wide differences in the initial years of the 1990s. After these initial crises passed in the mid-1990s, growth rates were similar.

They studied those countries that experienced no regime change, like China; those that experienced rapid regime change, like Poland; and those that experienced a prolonged and deep deterioration of political institutions before their eventual collapse.

The initial recessions were a result of the political disruption that accompanies regime change, and state socialist economies were particularly vulnerable to the collapse of communist parties. The political nature of state socialism makes it unusually vulnerable to this problem, Walder said.

"Communist parties played a central role in defining and enforcing the state's property rights over assets – especially important because almost all assets were the property of the state," the authors wrote.

So, when a communist party's ability to perform this function declined for a prolonged period, the economy was undermined by uncertainty over ownership claims.

"This was a problem in all communist regimes that collapsed shortly after 1988, but the political decline of the Soviet Union in its final years was far more protracted and severe than in other communist regimes, where regime change was much more abrupt," they wrote.

The big picture

In the big picture, Walder noted that at the time of the collapse of many post-Soviet economies in the 1990s, everyone's attention was focused on "what is to be done," and this pitted proponents of Chinese style "gradualism" versus "big bang" reforms prescribed by many Western economists.

"It later led to charges that neoliberal policy advice led to the collapse of economies, and to counter-arguments that it was a failure to properly carry out these policies – or something about a country's fundamentals – that was actually the cause of economic collapse," according to Walder.

In retrospect, he said, the worst economic crises were well advanced before any of these policy approaches were carried out, and the real causes were political in nature and rooted in different patterns of decline of communist parties in the prior period, something that eluded the attention of those on both sides of these debates.

It also shows that the heated debates about privatization – its speed and extent – were of secondary importance during the initial years of post-communism.

Walder said, "What mattered most was the capacity of a state to define and enforce property rights of any kind. This is the root cause of the economic collapse in so many of the former Soviet republics."

And so, the alleged merits of Chinese-style "gradualism" were confused with the advantage of not having political institutions collapse, he added.

Soviet Union collapse

The Soviet decline was far more prolonged and pronounced than in all of the other states where communist parties eventually surrendered power, said Walder. Two factors contributed to this:

One was a set of ill-conceived economic reforms that undermined the communist party's control over state assets several years before the Soviet collapse. The other factor was the fall of the Soviet communist party-state. By 1989, the party was already disintegrating, so ownership claims over state assets became unclear, Walder said.

"When communist parties deteriorated deeply over the medium run – as in the USSR – it set off a struggle to control assets, leading to deep economic crises that were intensified in states that broke apart into new entities, which in turn often led to hyperinflation and armed warfare," said Walder.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

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People walk under balloons placed along the former Berlin Wall, part of a light installation 'Lichtgrenze' (Border of Light) to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2014.
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The Patchwork Ecosystem of Local Shopping Streets: Globalization and Gentrification from New York to Shanghai

Professor Sharon Zukin's talk will describe how, in cities across the world, the everyday spaces of local shopping streets are undergoing dramatic transformations.  Globalization brings new products and people, while different types of gentrification reshape the street's aesthetics and atmosphere.  How do we "read" these changes?  Do they destroy the sense of the "local" to make every street, in every city, more alike?

Professor Zukin is the author of a number of books on cities, culture and consumer culture, and urban, cultural and economic change.  She received the Lynd Award for Career Achievement in urban sociology from the American Sociological Association, and the C. Wright Mills Book Award for Landscapes of Power.  You can learn more about her work here: http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/faculty_profile.jsp?faculty=420

Presented by the Program on Urban Studies and co-sponsored by the Anthropology Department, Center for East Asian Studies, Center on Poverty and Inequality, The Europe Center, Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, Sociology Department, Stanford in Government and Urban Beyond Measure.

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Sharon Zukin Professor of Sociology Speaker Brooklyn College, CUNY
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