Part II: Asia in the World Series

The causes and moral implications of genocidal mass killings have, in the past couple of decades, become a major area of scholarly as well as popular debate and political contention. But in the process questions of definition, guilt, compensation, and of reconciliation have become muddled and been subject to political and ideological bias. While many of these issues remain controversial and even unresolvable, a clearer exposition of causes, consequences, and debates about major examples can help us reach more objective judgments and improve our understanding of these terrible events. Many, though not all of the examples used to discuss this will come from an edited book due to appear in March 2014 entitled Confronting Memories of World War II.  This volume is a joint Stanford University Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and University of Washington Jackson School endeavor.  Discussing this topic with a broad set of historical examples is far from merely being an academic exercise as it directly touches important contemporary political controversies.

Dan Chirot has authored books about social change, ethnic and nationalist conflicts, Eastern Europe, and tyranny. He co-authored Why Not Kill Them All? (Princeton Univeristy Press), about political mass murder and most recently he wrote a completely new, very revised edition of his book How Societies Change (Sage Publications).  He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism’s decline, entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, ethnopolitical warfare, the economic history of Eastern Europe, and memories of World War II.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations and from the US State Department. He has consulted for the US Government, the Ford Foundation, CARE, and other NGOs. In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on African conflicts. He earned his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia.

Part I: Asia in the World Series

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution the world economy has gone through a set of stages, or cycles, each defined by its leading centers, its major technologies, and its most critical political conflicts. While technologies have progressed immensely some of the same patterns have been repeated. Though most economists do not seem to believe that there have been long term more or less regular cycles, thinking in terms of repetitive and therefore somewhat predictable and explainable changes can help us better model the past and get some sense of possible futures. Until now the dominant economies have all been Western. Will this continue? Why has Asia lagged, and are contemporary developments going to fundamentally change the nature and causes of success in the world economy?

Dan Chirot has authored books about social change, ethnic and nationalist conflicts, Eastern Europe, and tyranny. He co-authored Why Not Kill Them All? (Princeton Univeristy Press), about political mass murder and most recently he wrote a completely new, very revised edition of his book How Societies Change (Sage Publications).  He has edited or co-edited books on Leninism’s decline, entrepreneurial ethnic minorities, ethnopolitical warfare, the economic history of Eastern Europe, and memories of World War II.  He founded the journal East European Politics and Societies and has received help from, among others, the John Simon Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations and from the US State Department. He has consulted for the US Government, the Ford Foundation, CARE, and other NGOs. In 2004/05 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace working on African conflicts. He earned his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Columbia.

One of the most important developments in the modern global economy is financial globalization. This has raised threats to the stability of political regimes in two ways: (1) by enhancing the possibility of a financial crisis that could cause political turmoil; and (2) by easing access to foreign sources of financing for opposition political groups. I argue that state capitalism – defined as state-owned publicly listed corporations -- has risen disproportionately among single party regimes as a way to address these dual threats. Single party regimes have both the motivation and a greater institutional capacity for addressing these threats in comparison to other regimes. Tests are conducted on 607 firms in 1996 and 856 firms in 2008 across seven East Asian economies, and are supplemented with case studies of Malaysia and South Korea.  The evidence suggests that financial globalization is contributing to the rise of the state as a counter reaction.

Richard W. Carney is a Fellow in the Department of International Relations located in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. His research and teaching are in the areas of international and comparative political economy with a focus on corporate governance and finance in East Asia. He has published articles in many academic journals including the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of East Asian Studies, and Business and Politics. He is also the author of the book Contested Capitalism: The Political Origins of Financial Institutions, and editor of the book Lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis. He was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Fiesole, Italy (2003-04), and has held visiting positions at INSEAD. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (UCSD 2003). Before joining the ANU in 2011, he was an Assistant Professor in Singapore.

We have ample examples of efforts to "engage" adversaries, from Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik to Kissinger’s conception of détente and Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy. Yet much more attention has been given to understanding the logic of sanctions than the logic of inducements. Drawing an array of new sources of information on the North Korean economy, from the direction of its foreign trade to two firm‐level surveys of Chinese and South Korean firms doing business in the country, we consider the political and economic logic of engagement. Like sanctions, the conditions under which engagement strategies are likely to work are subject to a number of constraints. Target governments appear well aware of the risks of engagement and there is only mixed evidence for claims that such engagement has transformative effects.

Dr. Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Distinguished Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies and Director of Korea-Pacific Program (KPP) at the University of California, San Diego Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

Stephan Haggard works on the political economy of developing countries, with a particular interest in Asia and the Korean peninsula. He is the author of Pathways from the Periphery: The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (1990), The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (1995, with Robert Kaufman), The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis (2000) and Development, Democracy and Welfare States: Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe (2000, with Robert Kaufman). His current research focuses on the relationship between inequality, democratization and authoritarianism in developing countries. 

Professor Haggard has written extensively on the political economy of North Korea with Marcus Noland, including Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform (2007) and Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (2011). Haggard and Noland co-author the "North Korea: Witness to Transformation" blog at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Neo-liberalism, which became a dominant ideology in policy-making in many countries from the early 1980's, is now blamed for worsening inequality and the 2008 world financial crisis. As the recovery process is moving very slowly due to lingering uncertainties from the Euro crisis, going back to the European model of a welfare state is not a feasible policy direction for most countries. Thus, now is the time to seek a new paradigm for a sustainable capitalism and welfare state, Dr. Sang-Mok Suh argues. He proposes 'welfarenomics,' implying a better balance between economics and welfare.

Welfarenomics means promoting a sustainable calitalism through modifying the neo-classical market economy model in three ways: (1) strengthening the role of government in the areas of formulating & implementing national strategy; (2) increasing social values of business activities through developing new CSV (Creating Shared Value) activities; and (3) creating a habitat for co-development through activating civil society. Welfarenomics also implies promoting a sustainable welfare state through modifying the European welfare state model in three ways: (1) building a foundation for 'workfare' through developing customized job programs for welfare beneficiaries; (2) utilizing various welfare programs as means for social innovation; and (3) improving the effectiveness of welfare programs through applying various management concepts to the field of social welfare.

The presentation will cite some of the recent experiences in Korea, but the concept of welfarenomics can be applied to any country in need of achieving both economic growth and social equity.

For the past four decades, Dr. Sang-Mok Suh has been a policy-making expert in both economics and social welfare. After receiving his PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1973, Professor Suh worked at the World Bank for five years and at the Korea Development Institute (KDI), a top South Korean think tank, for ten years as a researcher. His doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between economic growth and income distribution. In 1986, he led the research team at KDI for formulating the National Pension Scheme for Korea. He was vice president of KDI, 1984–1988. As a Korea National Assembly member, 1988–2000, Dr. Suh played the key role of coordinating economic and welfare policies between the ruling party, on the one hand, and the government and opposition parties, on the other. While he was Minister of Social Welfare, 1993–1995, Dr. Suh formulated a comprehensive welfare strategy for Korea for the first time and initiated the Osong Bio Industrial Complex.