Glyn Ford has been a Labour Member of the European Parliament since 1984. Re-elected in June 2004 for South West England, he is a member of the International Trade Committee and a substitute member of the Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy Committee.

In addition, Mr. Ford is involved in the following all party parliamentary groups: the Globalisation Intergroup as president, the Anti-racism Intergroup as vice-president and the Sports Intergroup.

Glyn Ford is a specialist on East Asia, particularly Japan and North Korea. Since his first election, he has been an active member of the Parliaments Delegation with Relations to Japan, serving as vice chairman for a period of five years. He has extensive experience on North Korea having visited the country nine times and twice as a member of the European Parliament ad-hoc delegations. He was also responsible for two reports on the Korean Energy Development Organisation in the Industry, Research & Energy Committee.

Mr. Ford has also extensive experience in election observation, having participated in missions to South Africa, Kenya, Cambodia. He spent eight months in 2004 as the chief observer EU Election Observation Mission to Indonesia.

From 1989 to 1993, Mr. Ford was the leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party (EPLP) and a member of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party.

Between 1984 and 1986, Glyn Ford was the chair of the Parliaments Committee of Inquiry into the Rise of Racism and Fascism. In 1990, he was the rapporteur for the second Committee of Inquiry into Racism and Xenophobia. From this came his book Fascist Europe . He was the Parliament's representative on the Consultative Committee into Racism and Xenophobia, which was set up in July 1994 by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand. Mr. Ford served as the European Parliament's rapporteur for the report on the setting-up of a European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.

Glyn Ford has been responsible for a number of other reports submitted to the Parliament. In October 1986, he was the rapporteur on the Committee on External Economic Relations, which submitted a report to the Parliament on counter-trade. In 1987, he submitted a report on Star Wars and Eureka, calling for non-participation in the Star Wars programme. This was lost in the Parliament by just two votes. Glyn Ford has also been the rapporteur on two further reports submitted to the Parliament on the Control and Regulation of Lobbyists which was passed with an almost record breaking majority. He was also rapporteur for a report on a Code of Conduct for Lobbyists which was passed in May 1997 and for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO) on the Research Committee.

Before becoming a member of the European Parliament Glyn was a local councillor in Tameside and was chair of the Environmental Health and Control Committee and the Education Services Committee.

With a degree in geology from Reading University (1972) and a masters degree in Marine Earth Science from University College London (1974), Glyn Ford worked as a student and then as a staff member in Manchester Universitys Department of Science and Technology Policy, finishing in 1984 as a senior research fellow. In 1983, he spent six months as a visiting professor teaching science and technology policy in the Department of Systems Science at the University of Tokyo.

This seminar is part of the North Korea Seminar Series hosted by the Shorenstein Forum.

William Brown (Bill) is an economist and senior research analyst with CENTRA Technology, Inc. of Northern Virginia, specializing in North Asia-area economics. He is also a member of the adjunct faculty of George Mason University's graduate school of public policy where he teaches courses on Asian economic development and international trade.

Bill has extensive experience as an economic analyst in the US government, having worked in the Chief Economist's Office of the Commerce Department, as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Economics in the National Intelligence Council, and as an eco-nomic analyst in the CIA's Office of Economic Research where he focused on his research on the North Korean and Chinese economies. He served for two years in the US Embassy in Seoul and has traveled extensively in the region, including a trip last summer across the DMZ into North Korea.

Mr. Brown writes occasionally for the Chosun Ilbo in Seoul and speaks on Korean and Chinese issues to a number of Asian and US audiences. He holds an M.A. in economics from Washington University, Missouri with most of his Ph.D. work completed, and a B.A. in International Studies from Rhodes College, Tennessee. He grew up in Kwangju, South Korea as the son and grandson of Presbyterian missionaries and speaks and reads some Korean and Chinese.

Hosted by the Walter H. Shorenstein Forum as part of its ongoing seminar series on North Korea.

Using rich information found in the archives of the South Korean shipbuilding union, Professor Nam challenges the conventional view of the labor movement in 1960s South Korea. The labor movement from that time was viewed as being pro-state, pro-company, anti-labor and not worthy of serious study. During this time, Korean shipbuilding workers developed a militant union movement. They had a vision of nation-building that was egalitarian and democratic and at odds with the views of nation-building that were propagated by the Park Chung Hee regime. The attitudes, aspirations, and influence of these unionizing shipbuilders provides clues to understanding the explosive power of popular activism since the mid-1980s.

Professor Nam's book Labors Place in South Korean Development: Shipbuilding Workers, Capital, and the State in the Twentieth Century will soon be published. Nam received her B.A. and M.A. at Seoul National University and in 2003 received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington.

About Mr. Chu

Yun-han Chu is Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica and Professor of Political Science at National Taiwan University. He serves concurrently as the president of Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Professor Chu received his Ph. D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and joined the faculty of National Taiwan University in 1987. He was a visiting associate professor at Columbia University in 1990-1991. Professor Chu specializes in politics of Greater China, East Asian political economy and democratization.

He currently serves on the editorial board of Journal of Democracy, International Studies Quarterly, Pacific Affairs, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China, and Journal of East Asian Studies. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of eleven books. Among his recent English publications are Crafting Democracy in Taiwan (Institute for National Policy Research, 1992), Consolidating Third-Wave Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), China Under Jiang Zemin (Lynne Reinner, 2000), and The New Chinese Leadership: Challenges and Opportunities after the 16th Party Congress (Cambridge University Press 2004). His works also appeared in some leading journals including World Politics, International Organization, China Quarterly, Journal of Democracy, Pacific Affairs, Asian Survey, and many others.

East Asia is on the move. Diverse national strands are being woven into a distinctive regional fabric. No longer are regionalism and regionalization projections of specific national models. Such models are being drawn upon to create something new and different that is much more than any one national paradigm writ large. Prof. Katzenstein will describe and explain this development with particular reference to East Asia as a distinctively porous region in the American imperium.

Peter J. Katzenstein is a 2004-2005 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has written many books, including Norms and National Security (1996), Small States in World Markets (1985), and Corporatism and Change (1984), and edited many others, including Network Power: Japan and Asia (1997) and The Culture of National Security (1996). In 1993 he received a Cornell University award for distinguished teaching and shared (with Nobuo Okawara) the Ohira Memorial Prize. His degrees are from Harvard University (PhD), the London School of Economics (MSc), and Swarthmore College (1967).

Regional financial cooperation in East Asia is proceeding with unprecedented intensity. Latest developments include creation by the regional central bankers group of two Asian bond funds and the launching of an Asian Bond Market Initiative by the finance ministers of ASEAN + 3 (China, Japan, South Korea). Some observers continue to attribute such cooperation to sharpened antagonism between East Asia and the West since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. But this view overlooks a key internal driver: China's remarkable shift toward a more proactive stance toward regional cooperation. Current 2005 East Asian financial cooperation is motivated by factors that differ considerably from those observed in the immediate aftermath of the Asian financial crisis and with implications that extend beyond East Asia.

Jennifer Amyx is a 2004-2005 Shorenstein Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Research Center. She is the author of Japan's Financial Crisis: Institutional Rigidity and Reluctant Change (2004), articles on East Asian financial cooperation, and a book-in-progress on the latter topic. Since earning a Stanford PhD in political science in 1998 she has held fellowships at Australian National University and been a visiting scholar at several Japanese financial policy and research institutions including the Bank of Japan.

Speakers and details to be decided.

Change in the structure of a political elite can offer a window into political change and transformation of a state socialist regime. Soyoung Kwon will present a study of the North Korean political elite, focusing on its composition between 1980 and 2004. Her research is based on a profile analysis of the social and career attributes of the Party Central Committee members. Dr. Kwon examines the changes to the North Korean political elite to see whether it displayed a similar pattern of change in the Soviet and Chinese elites. Her analysis compares the major characteristics of the political elites of the past 24 years in order to identify the level of elite diversification, changing group representation, and any structural adjustment in the elite group under the Kim Jong Il leadership.

Buffet lunch will be provided to those who RSVP to Jasmin Ha at jaha@stanford.edu by Tuesday, February 1.