To promote a deeper understanding of Japanese culture, history, contemporary issues, and U.S.–Japan relations, we recommend the following diverse set of teaching resources and curriculum tools to bring Japan to life in K–12 classrooms. Many others can be found on the SPICE website. In addition, SPICE offers a national distance-learning course for high school students called the Reischauer Scholars Program.
*Please note the date has changed from September 23 to September 22*
A talk by Arnold Suppan, author of Hitler - Beneš - Tito: Conflict, War and Genocide in East Central and South East Europe. The monograph explores the development of the political, legal, economic, social, cultural and military “communities of conflict” within Austria-Hungary (especially in the Bohemian and South Slav lands); the convulsion of World War I and the Czech, Slovak and South Slav break with the Habsburg Monarchy; the difficult formation of successor states and the strong discussions at Paris 1919/20; the domestic and foreign policies of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the question of national minorities (Sudeten Germans, Magyars in Slovakia and the Vojvodina, Danube Swabians, Germans in Slovenia); Hitler’s destruction of the Versailles order; the Nazi policies of conquest and occupation in Bohemia, Moravia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia; the genocide committed against the Jews in the Protectorate, Slovakia, the Ustaša-state and Serbia; the collaboration of the Tiso- and Pavelić-regime with Nazi Germany; the retaliation against and expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; and finally the issue of history and memory east and west of the Iron Curtain as well as in the post-communist states at the end of the 20th century.
Sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Department of History.
Free and open to the public.
Pigott Hall (Building 260)
Room113
Appeared in Stanford Report, June 26, 2014
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Marine Le Pen and the French political party she leads, the National Front, are the topics of a book being written by Stanford Associate Professor Cécile Alduy. |
In an unexpected turn of events in May, France's far-right National Front political party won the largest share of votes (25 percent) in the European Parliament election and 24 of France's 74seats.
While the National Front victory was one of numerous wins for right-wing groups across Europe, the National Front has ascended in popularity quite rapidly – thanks in part to a strategic rebranding initiative led by party president Marine Le Pen, the daughter of longtime National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. She has guided the party away from the anti-Semitic, radical rhetoric that characterizedher father's tenure from 1972 to 2011.
Stanford Associate Professor Cécile Alduy, a scholar in French literature, is currently working on a book about the evolution of the National Front's discourse under Marine Le Pen's leadership. Her research interests span Renaissance poetics, the cultural history of gender, and the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance.
In an interview, Alduy shared her study of modern French politics and how Renaissance ideologies are playing out there today.
How does your academic background inform your ideas about contemporary French politics?
I think that it makes me particularly attentive to two things: first, the long history in which recent evolutions in the definition of French national identity take place and, second, the rhetoric of political discourse. That is, the fact that politics is a lot – and maybe first and foremost – speech, communication and symbols. Political leaders act – and are judged – as much by what they say as by what they actually do.
How do you apply French history to current affairs?
My first book examined the rise of a proto-national sentiment in French Renaissance literature – how poets and rhetoricians elaborated certain myths, figures and narratives to give shape to a nascent national consciousness. This led me to be on the lookout for reminiscences or reincarnations of such representations of collective identity in contemporary literature and public discourse.
During the Renaissance, it took a lot of rhetorical guts to describe France as a unified kingdom when most of its people did not speak the same language and its borders were still in flux. Poets and lawmakers worked hand in hand to establish French as the official language throughout and to rein in regional and religious differences. One of the images that helped was that of the king of France as the incarnation of the people. I see reminiscences of this powerful image in the attempt made by several political leaders in the past 10 years to appear as providential men (or women), particularly in the far-right self-portrayal as the voice of the people.
Your forthcoming publication, Marine Le Pen: Words, Myths, Media (to be published by Seuil in 2015), investigates Le Pen's use of language. What about her political discourse do you find most striking?
What is most striking is how she has managed to smooth out her father's rhetorical asperities – such as his anti-Semitic gaffes, for instance, including the latest one on rounding up a bunch of artists for the next fournée, or batch for the furnace – to offer instead a sleek, almost mainstream rhetoric to the public. In contrast to the often clearly racist slurs of her father, she has launched a two-pronged attack on immigration on cultural and economic grounds. Immigration from non-European countries is in her words unsustainable because of cultural rather than racial differences, and even more importantly because it is unaffordable in the current economic crisis.
Could you provide an example of Le Pen's "semantic takeover" and explain her media strategy?
Marine Le Pen has decided to portray her party as the true champion of laïcité (France's strict notion of the separation of church and state, which forbids any display of religious affiliations in public offices and schools). But she has stretched the concept so much, and in a unique unilateral direction, that in her mouth, laïcité is a politically correct, and readily acceptable, word for an attack on any display of the Muslim faith in public – not just in public schools but in the streets.
She is collapsing two different meanings of "public" into one: public-funded entities (schools, companies or government) and everything that we say is "in the public eye" or that happens "in public." This is a devious play on words but it works: people, including politicians and journalists, have started to confuse the two notions. The meaning of laicité is dangerously slipping from that of a legal framework that guarantees the neutrality of public education and services to a restrictive normative system of values that excludes from the national community certain behaviors and religions.
How has the French mindset about immigration evolved from the Renaissance era to today?
Immigration was not seen as a problem in the Renaissance – rather the opposite. For one thing, foreigners could be taxed more and on more things. They also brought new art forms, technologies and money.
France's notion of national identity was constructed during the Renaissance as something cultural rather than what we would now call "ethnic." French poets and authors of the Renaissance put forward an image of France as the "Mother of the Arts and Letters" (a phrase, incidentally, reused by Marine Le Pen in her speeches). France was to be unique in the world because of its contribution to the arts, to philosophy, literature and sciences. The French kings were adamant to invite foreigners who could help them achieve these goals (Leonardo da Vinci is only the most famous example).
This is a very different take from now, when anti-immigration movements point out what they think is the unbearable economic and "civilizational" cost of immigration for the country. (Economists have concluded that the balance sheet of immigration in France is actually positive but the representation of immigration as costly continues to prevail.)
This summer you will be working on "Extreme Rhetoric: 40 Years of National Front Speeches (1972-2013)," a digital humanities project and database of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen's public speeches since 1972. What will you and your fellow researchers be looking for?
We are looking for what has changed and what has not changed in the party over the last 40 years. We want to uncover the structural components that form the backbone of its ideological makeup and point out the evolution in diction, word choice and topics.
For instance, the representation of history in their discourse has not changed over the last 40 years. Father and daughter have been telling the same narrative of France's decadence: both wax lyrical in their nostalgia for a Golden Age, lament the fall of France from its former grandeur, resort to conspiracy theories to account for its fall, and call for a renewal thanks to the union of the people to a charismatic leader (themselves). But the enemies have changed. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism was the threat. Now it's Europe, globalization and even unregulated capitalism.
Both leaders differ also in the kinds of rhetorical authorities they are trying to embody. In a smaller-scale study of Marine Le Pen's lexical universe last year, I showed how she beefed up the economic side of her discourse, quoting liberal French economist Thomas Piketty and American economist Paul Krugman, for instance, to present herself as a pragmatist and an expert. Her father, by contrast, situated his discourse almost exclusively in the realms of moral principles ("the good," "justice," "moral obligations," etc.) and rarely condescended to explain how his economic agenda would work in the real world. But their platform has not changed. In other words, the content remains the same, but the rhetorical surface has been reworked.
With contributions by Stephan Braese, Barbara Hahn, Christine Ivanovic, Martin Klebes, Vivian Liska, Fred Moten, Sigrid Weigel, Liliane Weissberg, and Thomas Wild, this book explores the thoughts of Hannah Arendt which move in a border area between the disciplines and yet goes beyond the concept of interdisciplinarity.
PROGRAM
Friday May 9, 2014
9:00am Introduction
9:10am Does Naturalization Foster the Political Integration of Immigrants? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design in Switzerland
Jens Hainmueller & Dominik Hangartner
Discussant: Rafaela Dancygier
9:50am Lingua Franca: How Language Shapes the Direction of Public Opinion
Efrén Pérez
Discussant: Rahsaan Maxwell
10:30am BREAK
10:50am Transnational Ties and Support for International Redistribution
Lauren Prather
Discussant: Ali Valenzuela
11:30am Gender-Based Stereotyping and Negotiation Performance: an Experimental Study
Jorge Bravo
Discussant: Rob Ford
12:10pm BREAK
1:00pm The Rhetoric of Closed Borders: Quotas, Lax Enforcement and Illegal Migration
Giovanni Facchini & Cecilia Testa
Discussant: Karen Jusko
1:40pm Varieties of Diaspora Management
Harris Mylonas
Discussant: Yotam Margalit
2:20pm BREAK
2:40pm The Situational Context of Attitudes Towards Immigrant-Origin Minorities
Rahsaan Maxwell
Discussant: Jorge Bravo
3:20pm The Politics of Churchgoing and its Consequences among Whites, Blacks and Latinos in the U.S.
Ali Valenzuela
Discussant: Cara Wong
Saturday May 10, 2014
9:50am How State Support of Religion Shapes Religious Attitudes Toward Muslims
Mark Helbling
Discussant: Sara Goodman
10:30am BREAK
10:50am Opposition to Race Targeted Policies – Ideology or Racism? Particular or Universal? Experimental Evidence from Britain
Rob Ford
Discussant: Jens Hainmueller
11:30am Conflict and Consensus on American Public Opinion on Illegal Immigration
Matthew Wright
Discussant: Efrén Pérez
12:10pm BREAK
1:00pm The Electoral Geography of American Immigration, 1880-1900
Karen Jusko
Discussant: Dan Hopkins
1:40pm Do We Really Know That Employers Want Illegal Immigration?
Maggie Peters
Discussant: Giovanni Facchini
2:20pm BREAK
2:40pm Nurture over Nature: Explaining Muslim Integration Discrepancies in Britain, France and the United States
Justin Gest
Discussant: Claire Adida
3:20pm Immigration and Electoral Appeals over the Past Half Century: A Sketch of the Evidence
Rafaela M. Dancygier & Yotam Margalit
Discussant: Cecilia Testa
4:00pm Looking Ahead
CISAC Conference Room
Encina Hall Central, 2nd floor
616 Serra St.
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Appeared in Stanford Report, May 29, 2014
By Clifton B. Parker
The electoral eruption of anti-European Union populism is a reflection of structural flaws in that body but does not represent a fatal political blow, according to Stanford scholars.
In the May 25 elections for the European Parliament, anti-immigration parties won 140 of the 751 seats, well short of control, but enough to rattle supporters of the EU, which has 28 member nations. In Britain, Denmark, France and Greece, the political fringe vote totals stunned the political establishments.
Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama said the rise of extremism and anti-elitism is not surprising in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn and subsequent high levels of unemployment throughout Europe. In one sense, the EU elites have themselves to blame, he said.
"The elites who designed the EU and the eurozone failed in a major way," he said. "There was a structural flaw in the design of the euro (monetary union absent fiscal union, and the method of disciplining countries once in the zone)," said Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Research Afflilate at The Europe Center.
Some have argued that the European Union should adopt a form of fiscal union because without one, decisions about taxes and spending remain at the national level.
As Fukuyama points out, this becomes a problem, as in the case of a debt-ridden Greece, which he believes should not have qualified for EU membership in the first place. In fact, he said, it would have been better for Greece itself to leave the euro at the outset of the 2008 crisis.
Still, Fukuyama said the big picture behind the recent election is clear – it was a confluence of issues and timing.
"It is a bit like an off-year election in the U.S., where activists are more likely to vote than ordinary citizens," he said.
Fukuyama believes the EU will survive this electoral crisis. "I think the EU will be resilient. It has weathered other rejections in the past. The costs of really exiting the EU are too high in the end, and the elites will adjust, having been given this message," he said.
Meanwhile, the populist parties in the different countries are not unified or intent on building coalitions with each other.
"Other than being anti-EU, most of them have little in common," Fukuyama said. "They differ with regard to specific positions on immigration, economic policy, and they respond to different social bases."
Ongoing anger
Dan Edelstein, a professor of French, said the largest factor for success by extremist candidates was "ongoing anger toward the austerity policy imposed by the EU," primarily by Germany.
Edelstein estimates that a large majority of French voters are still generally supportive of the EU. For the time being, the anti-EU faction does not have a majority, though they now have much more representation in the European Parliament.
Edelstein noted existing strains among the anti-EU parties – for example, the UK Independence Party in Britain has stated that it would not form an alliance with the National Front party in France.
Immigration remains a thorny issue for some Europeans, Edelstein said.
"'Immigration' in most European political debates, tends to be a synonym for 'Islam.' While there are some countries, such as Britain, that are primarily worried about the economic costs of immigration, in most continental European countries, the fears are cultural," he said.
As Edelstein put it, Muslims are perceived as a "demographic threat" to white or Christian Europe. However, he is optimistic in the long run.
"It seems a little early to be writing the obituary of the EU. Should economic conditions improve over the next few years, as they are predicted to, we will likely see this high-water mark of populist anger recede," said Edelstein.
Cécile Alduy, an associate professor of French, writes in the May 28 issue of The Nation about how the ultra-right-wing National Front came in first place in France's election.
"This outcome was also the logical conclusion of a string of political betrayals, scandals and mismanagement that were only compounded by the persistent economic and social morass that has plunged France into perpetual gloom," she wrote.
Historian J.P. Daughton said that like elsewhere in the world, immigration often becomes a contentious issue in Europe in times of economic difficulties.
"High unemployment and painful austerity measures in many parts of Europe have led extremist parties to blame immigrants for taking jobs and sapping already limited social programs," he said.
Anti-immigration rhetoric plays particularly well in EU elections, Daughton said. "Extremist parties portray European integration as a threat not only to national sovereignty, but also to national identity.
Edelstein, Alduy and Daughton are all Faculty Affiliates of The Europe Center.
Wake-up call
Russell A. Berman, a professor of German studies and comparative literature, said many Europeans perceive the EU as "somehow impenetrable, far from the civic politics of the nation states."
As a result, people resent regulations issued by an "intangible bureaucracy," and have come to believe that the European Parliament has not grappled with major issues such as mustering a coherent foreign policy voice, he said.
"The EU can be great on details but pretty weak on the big picture," said Berman, who is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Faculty Affiliate of The Europe Center. "It is this discrepancy that feeds the dissatisfaction."
Yet he points out that the extremist vote surged in only 14 nations of the EU – in the other 14, there was "negligible extremism," as he describes it.
"We're a long way from talking about a fatal blow, but the vote is indeed a wake-up call to the centrists that they have to make a better case for Europe," Berman said.
Mark von Hagen teaches the history of Eastern Europe and Russia, with a focus on Ukrainian-Russian relations, at Arizona State University, after teaching 24 years at Columbia University, where he also chaired the history department and directed the Harriman Institute. At the Harriman Institute, he developed Ukrainian studies in the humanities and social sciences. He was elected President of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2002 and presided over the Congress in Donetsk in 2005. He also served as President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (2009). During his New York years, he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and remains a member of the Advisory Board for Europe and Asia at Human Rights Watch. He has worked with historians, archivists, and educators in independent Ukraine and with diaspora institutions. He has served on the advisory board of the European University in Minsk (in exile in Vilnius, Lithuania), to the Open Society Institute; on the Board of Directors of the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and the International Fellowship Committee of the Social Science Research Council.
Ambassador Vlad Lupan has been the Ambassador, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Moldova to the United Nations, in New York, since January 2012, where he is focusing on development issues, rule of law and human rights, and conflict resolution. He has held a variety of diplomatic posts since 1996 till 2008, last one being Head of Political-Military Cooperation Department and was a negotiator on Transnistrian conflict settlement. He also worked with OSCE field Missions in in Georgia, Albania and Croatia. In 2008 Mr. Lupan joined the civil society, and became a member of the advisory board to the Ministry of Defense. During this time he was also the host of the “Euro-Atlantic Dictionary” radio talk show. In 2010 he became the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Acting President of the Republic of Moldova, and was later elected as a Member of the Parliament.
Educated at the State University of Moldova and at the National School of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania, Ambassador Lupan earned his international relations degree, and later a master’s degree in journalism and public communications from the Free Independent Moldovan University in Chisinau. Ambassador Lupan has published mainly in Romanian, though he also published in Russian or English, on foreign and domestic politics issues, including international security matters, Security Sector Reform, Transnistrian conflict settlement and European Union Eastern Partnership.
Dr. Yaroslav Prytula is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Economic Analysis and Finance at Lviv Ivan Franko National University (LIFNU) and a Professor at the Lviv Business School of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. Previously he served as an Academic Secretary of LIFNU and a Vice-Dean of the Faculty of International Relations at LIFNU. He is a member of the Supervisory Board of Lviv Ivan Franko National University. His scholarly interests are in macroeconomic modelling, quantitative methods in social science and higher education in transitional societies. His current research is related to socio-economic regional development in Ukraine. During 2001 he spent a semester in The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs under William and Helen Petrach scholarship and continued his research during 2003-04 in The George Washington University Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning under the U.S. Department of State funded Junior Faculty Development Program. During 2004-07 he was a fellow of the Open Society Institute Academic Fellowship Program. During 2007-09 Yaroslav was a fellow of the Global Policy Fellowship Program of the Institute for Higher Education Policy (Washington, DC). In 2011 Dr. Prytula was a visiting scholar at the George Mason University under the University Administration Support Program funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and administered by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Currently Dr. Prytula is a Fulbright Research Scholar at the George Washington University School of Business. Dr. Prytula was awarded his PhD in Mathematical Analysis from LIFNU in 2000. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of LIFNU. Yaroslav Prytula has received numerous awards and scholarships.
Presented by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Stanford Humanities Center.
Levinthal Hall
Born in Paris in 1956, Christine Lagarde completed high school in Le Havre and attended Holton Arms School in Bethesda (Maryland, USA). She then graduated from law school at University Paris X, and obtained a Master’s degree from the Political Science Institute in Aix en Provence.
After being admitted as a lawyer to the Paris Bar, Christine Lagarde joined the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie as an associate, specializing in Labor, Anti-trust, and Mergers & Acquisitions. A member of the Executive Committee of the Firm in 1995, Christine Lagarde became the Chairman of the Global Executive Committee of Baker & McKenzie in 1999, and subsequently Chairman of the Global Strategic Committee in 2004.
Christine Lagarde joined the French government in June 2005 as Minister for Foreign Trade. After a brief stint as Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, in June 2007 she became the first woman to hold the post of Finance and Economy Minister of a G-7 country. From July to December 2008, she also chaired the ECOFIN Council, which brings together Economics and Finance Ministers of the European Union.
As a member of the G-20, Christine Lagarde was involved in the Group's management of the financial crisis, helping to foster international policies related to financial supervision and regulation and to strengthen global economic governance. As Chairman of the G-20 when France took over its presidency for the year 2011, she launched a wide-ranging work agenda on the reform of the international monetary system.
In July 2011, Christine Lagarde became the eleventh Managing Director of the IMF, and the first woman to hold that position.
Christine Lagarde was named Officier in the Légion d'honneur in April 2012. A former member of the French national team for synchronized swimming, Christine Lagarde is the mother of two sons.
Bechtel Conference Center
Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
Marcel Fafchamps is a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a member of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Previously, he was the Satre Family Senior Fellow at FSI. Fafchamps is a professor (by courtesy) for the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His research interests include economic development, market institutions, social networks, and behavioral economics — with a special focus on Africa and South Asia.
Prior to joining FSI, from 1999-2013, Fafchamps served as professor of development economics in the Department of Economics at Oxford University. He also served as deputy director and then co-director of the Center for the Study of African Economies. From 1989 to 1996, Fafchamps was an assistant professor with the Food Research Institute at Stanford University. Following the closure of the Institute, he taught for two years at the Department of Economics. For the 1998-1999 academic year, Fafchamps was on sabbatical leave at the research department of the World Bank. Before pursuing his PhD in 1986, Fafchamps was based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for 5 years during his employment with the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency that oversees employment, income distribution, and vocational training in Africa.
He has authored two books: Market Institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa: Theory and Evidence (MIT Press, 2004) and Rural Poverty, Risk, and Development (Elgar Press, 2003), and has published numerous articles in academic journals.
Fafchamps served as the editor-in-chief of Economic Development and Cultural Change until 2020. Previously, he had served as chief editor of the Journal of African Economies from 2000 to 2013, and as associate editor of the Economic Journal, the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and the Revue d'Economie du Développement.
He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an affiliated professor with J-PAL, a senior fellow with the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a research fellow with IZA, Germany, and with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, UK, and an affiliate with the University of California’s Center for Effective Global Action.
Fafchamps has degrees in Law and in Economics from the Université Catholique de Louvain. He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Poor sanitation breeds trouble. |
