Secretary Norman Y. Mineta is a person of many firsts. He was the first Asian-American mayor of a major city, San Jose, California; the first Japanese American from the mainland to be elected to Congress; and the first Asian American to serve in a presidential cabinet. Mineta served as President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce and President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Transportation. SPICE is honored to be collaborating with Mineta and Bridge Media, Inc., on making Mineta’s legacy more broadly known at the secondary and collegiate levels through the Mineta Legacy Project (MLP). The MLP will include a documentary and educational curriculum that are being developed with Mineta’s full involvement.

The documentary, titled An American Story: Norman Mineta and His Legacy, “delves into Mineta’s life, public service career, and unabashed love for his country… this, in spite of the fact that in 1942 his country betrayed him,” note producers Dianne Fukami and Debra Nakatomi.

Presidents Clinton and Bush were recently interviewed for the documentary and educational curriculum. “[Mineta’s] family was in a Japanese internment camp in World War II, and it could have made him bitter, angry,” commented President Clinton, “but instead he used that…to deepen his own commitment; to make sure that people weren’t discriminated against or held back or held down. In that sense, he represents the very best of America.”

This quote will be one of many presented to students in the educational curriculum, which pivots around the essential question, “What does it mean to be an American?” When asked this question, President Bush referred not only to key values such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but also to a sense of decency in the public square and to the nation’s communities of compassion. “It means that we care about each other. One of the real strengths of America [are] what I would call the ‘armies of compassion’…people in their communities who set up programs to feed the hungry or find shelter for the homeless, without the government telling them what to do.” He also referred to the United States’ long history of immigration, and said that being an American means recognizing that “although, on the one hand, we ought to enforce our laws, [on the other hand] we ought to welcome immigrants in a legal fashion, because immigrants reinvigorate our soul.”

Beyond Mineta’s groundbreaking achievements, Mineta epitomizes the dreams and aspirations of youth. He is the son of immigrants and his family was forcibly removed from his home to spend years in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. And yet, he remains a patriot, has led with integrity to achieve a long and distinguished career as a public servant, and continues to champion the underserved and mentor students.

The educational curriculum is being developed by Rylan Sekiguchi of SPICE in consultation with Fukami and Nakatomi and is targeted to high school and college educators and students. The curriculum will be offered free on the MLP and SPICE websites and is being developed in coordination with the documentary. The standards-aligned lesson plans will highlight six key themes connected to the life of Secretary Mineta—immigration, civil liberties & equity, civic engagement, justice & reconciliation, leadership & decision-making, and U.S.–Japan relations—and ask students to examine them in both historical and current-day contexts. Mineta himself has underscored the enduring relevance of these themes in U.S. society, for example drawing parallels between the Japanese-American experience following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and the Arab-American and Muslim-American experience following 9/11. As our country debates contentious topics such as deportations, immigration bans and restrictions, surveillance, and registries, the lessons learned from Mineta’s life can help us.

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Jonas Tallberg is Professor of Political Science at Stockholm University. His research interests are global governance and European Union politics. He currently directs the research program “Legitimacy in Global Governance” (LegGov), funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Tallberg’s book publications include Legitimacy in Global Governance: Sources, Processes, and Consequences (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, co-edited), The Opening Up of International Organizations: Transnational Access in Global Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2013, co-authored) and Leadership and Negotiation in the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, British Journal of Political Science, and European Journal of International Relations. While at The Europe Center, Jonas will work on three different projects related to European and global governance:

The Choice for Europe since Maastricht: Member States’ Preferences for Economic and Fiscal Integration Funded by the European Commission, Horizon 2020, 2015-2019

emuchoices.eu

Following the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis in 2009, European policy-makers agreed to a string of reforms that together amount to a profound deepening of fiscal and monetary cooperation in Europe. These reforms resulted from a rear-guard battle against the raging crisis and arduous negotiations among EU governments. While it is far from certain that they will suffice to alleviate the Eurozone’s problems, they raise a number of intriguing questions. What considerations led EU states to advocate these particular solutions to the Eurozone crisis? What states were successful in shaping the reforms agreed upon and why? What are the implications of these reforms for the viability of the Eurozone? This project brings together researchers in eight European countries to provide the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of domestic preference formation and interstate bargaining in the reform of the Eurozone.

Legitimacy in Global Governance (LegGov) Funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2016-2021

statsvet.su.se/leggov

The purpose of this research program is to offer the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of legitimacy in global governance. To what extent are global governance institutions (GGIs) regarded as legitimate? What explains that legitimacy? By what processes are GGIs legitimated and delegitimated? What are the consequences of legitimacy (or its absence) for the functioning of GGIs? How are these legitimacy dynamics in global governance similar to or different from the dynamics of legitimacy in the nation-state and other forms of governance? While legitimacy in global governance has generated growing interest in recent years, it has not yet been researched methodically by a coordinated team of specialists. We address the overarching question of why, how, and with what consequences GGIs gain, sustain and lose legitimacy by exploring three principal themes: (1) sources of legitimacy, (2) legitimation and delegitimation strategies, and (3) consequences of legitimacy. In the broadest sense, the program considers what systematic attention to legitimacy can tell us about world politics, and what experiences from world politics suggest for understanding legitimacy in contemporary politics generally.

The Performance of International Organizations: Institutional Design and Policy Output in Global Governance Funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2014-2018

statsvet.su.se/forskning/forskningsprojekt/pio

Many problems confronting today’s societies are transnational in character, leading states to increasingly rely on international organizations (IOs) for policy solutions. Yet the performance of IOs varies extensively. While some IOs are highly successful in developing, adopting, and enforcing policy, others are less successful. How can we account for this mixed record in IO performance? Are there identifiable factors that make IOs work better or worse? While existing research points to a multitude of factors that are beyond the control of IOs themselves, this project explores when, how, and why the institutional design of IOs shapes their performance. The project adopts a mixed-method design, combining a statistical analysis of performance in a large number of IOs with in-depth case studies of select IOs. It spans IOs in multiple policy areas and world regions over the time period 1950 to 2010. The project promises three central contributions to research and policy. First, it will offer the most systematic and comprehensive analysis so far of how institutional design shapes the performance of IOs. Second, it will generate a unique dataset on the policy output of IOs of extensive value to the research community. Third, it will be policy relevant, by providing policy-makers with evidence on the effects of design choices that can help them to systematically improve global governance.

"As 2018 unfolds, the domestic and international dimensions of Trump’s crisis-ridden presidency are beginning to intersect in wildly unpredictable and potentially disastrous ways. There are signs of preparations for a U.S. military attack on North Korea by mid-year, and a new report by a leading Russian expert on North Korea indicates that the Pyongyang regime “is convinced that the U.S. is preparing to strike.” This would likely be not a full-scale military assault to terminate the North Korea’s tyrannical regime but rather a punishing “bloody nose” strike, either to send a message about American resolve to halt further testing and development of Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons program or to actually destroy as much of its existing infrastructure as possible," writes Larry Diamond in The American Interest. Read here.