UN historian speaks

About 50 faculty members and students attended the Murphy Institute of Political Economy’s eighth annual Mary C. Parker Yates lecture by Craig N. Murphy, historian for the United Nations Development Program yesterday in Norman Mayer Hall. “I was hired one year ago to write an independent evaluative history of UNDP and its predecessors … going back to 1940,” Murphy said. His lecture titled “The Marshall Plan and the U.N. Development Model after 9/11” provided attendees insight into the basics of the organization. “UNDP is a weighty organization, it is large with an office in 174 countries over its existence and it is trying to do something really difficult. They are trying to coordinate activities by organizations who they do not have direct authority over,” Murphy said. Murphy is the Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College, and his research focuses on international institutions and the political economy of inequality across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, race and geography. “For those of us who are extremely privileged, we have a lot of influence of those who are not as privileged,” Murphy said. “We cannot be expected to be thinking all the time of those of East Timor or Bulgaria.”He discussed the foundations of the organization which lie in World War II and Norman Churchill. “They were the first U.N. agency concerned with development. It is the coordinator of all the other organizations in all developing countries. There is an U.N coordinator whose job is to coordinate all of the U.N. activities within a country,” Murphy. said. The United Nations grew out of an anti-fascist alliance of 1942, it agreed to pay for reconstruction by countries not directly attacked in the war by giving one percent of national income to help the people reconstruct. This eventually led to a combination of the Marshall Plan and the U.N. Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which existed before U.N. itself. Many of the parts of the Marshall Plan found its way into the eventual UNDP. These include Paul Hoffman, who went from the administrator of the Marshall Plan to the administrator of the UNDP. He brought many of the people, ideas and decisions from the Marshall Plan to UNDP. Hoffman saw himself as a fundraiser and had a lieutenant who was in charge of the distribution of funds to developing countries. “UNDP is perceived as a gigantic helper of developing countries,” Murphy said. In recent years the UNDP has taken a stance in which it directly favors democracy and the creation of free market opportunities. “UNDP is one of the great groups of all time to the Communist Party [in China] of all time because it brought information in about market economies and how to hold elections,” Murphy said. “UNDP helps the socialization and democratization of developing states.”Students and professors in attendance were there for many different reasons ranging from extra credit opportunities for their classes, personal growth and even research. “I wanted to understand more about the U.N. Agencies and histories role in them,” Tulane College freshman Jesse Glass said. “Our students are interacting in their programs and this is a topic that has a lot of implications for political science discussion,” Political Science Chair Nancy Maveety said.