Kenneth Scheve, a professor of political science and expert on the politics of economic policymaking, has been named director of The Europe Center.
The announcement was made Wednesday by Gerhard Casper, director of the institute.
“As we add to our work on governance in developing countries by also focusing on the governance issues of the developed world, including Europe and the United States, Ken will bring just the right expertise and scholarship to the Europe Center,” Casper said.
Scheve succeeds Amir Eshel, the Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. Eshel, a professor of German studies and comparative literature, has led The Europe Center and its predecessor – the European Forum – since 2005. Casper thanked Eshel for his eight years of outstanding leadership and added that the emphasis Eshel placed on the humanities will remain a defining element of the center’s work.
The European Forum was founded in 1997 and renamed The Europe Center three years ago. The center has matured into Stanford’s focal point for European policy-oriented research and is part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Division of International, Comparative and Area Studies.
Scheve (pronounced SHEE-vee) plans to build on the center’s strength as a magnet for faculty and researchers across Stanford who are interested in European issues.
“The mission of The Europe Center is to promote interdisciplinary research on the history, culture, institutions and people of Europe with the idea that that in itself is an important objective,” he said. “Studying Europe with a mix of perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities is a productive way to learn about an array of social and political phenomena that face all societies.”
He said two of the most important issues in international relations – failed states and the role that international institutions play in managing conflict and cooperation – can be better understood through a thorough study and examination of European history, society and current affairs.
“The European Union is the most mature and complex international institution that’s ever been developed,” Scheve said. “Seeing how it both succeeds and struggles to govern is instructive in thinking about how international institutions function in the world more generally. Governance issues within European states, in relation to the EU, and in Europe’s relationships with the rest of world are important public policy problems about which research at Stanford can play a role in informing contemporary policy debates.”
Along with continuing to provide a vibrant forum for faculty, Scheve wants to expand The Europe Center’s relationship with Stanford students.
Looking to the university’s Bing Overseas Studies Program, he sees an opportunity for the center to provide more research and internship opportunities for undergraduates planning to study in Europe.
“We can help prepare them for their overseas studies and help promote undergraduate courses and research opportunities in and about Europe,” he said. “I want us to bridge their educational experience on campus with what happens in the Bing program in Europe.”
For graduate students, Scheve wants to encourage interdisciplinary research by offering grants and fellowships with a particular focus on pre-dissertation and dissertation completion support.
Scheve – who is currently writing a book on the comparative history of the rise of progressive taxation in 19th and 20th century Europe and other advanced economies – has taught at Stanford since 2012.
He previously taught at Yale and the University of Michigan. His first experience with Stanford came in 2005, when he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
Scheve holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Notre Dame. He earned his doctorate in political science from Harvard in 2000.
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Stanford, CA 94305
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sychung@konkuk.ac.kr
Dean at Miller School of MOT, Konkuk University
Sunyang_Chung_4by6.png
PhD
Dr. Chung received the Ph.D from the University of Stuttgart in Germany. He worked at the Fraunhofer-Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (FhG-ISI) in Karlsruhe, Germany. He has been a senior researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STEPI), under Korea's Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST).
In 2004, on the basis of his research work, Dr. Chung was selected as the youngest lifetime fellow of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) (Korea's equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences). Since March 1, 2008, he has worked as Director of KAST's Policy Research Center.
In 2008 he established the William F. Miller School of MOT (Management of Technology) at Seoul's Konkuk University. Dr. Chung currently serves as Dean of the Miller MOT School. He had also been President of the International Association of Innovation Cluster in Korea from 2010 to 2012.
Dr. Moretti's book, The New Geography of Jobs, was described by Forbes magazine as “easily the most important read of 2012.”
Americans frequently debate why wages are growing for the college-educated but declining for those with less education. What is less well-known is that communities and local labor markets are also diverging economically at an accelerating rate.
A closer look at the 300-plus metropolitan areas of the United States shows that Americans with high school degrees who work in communities dominated by innovative industries actually make more, on average, than the college graduates working in communities dominated by manufacturing industries, according to research by University of California, Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, the author of The New Geography of Jobs, a book that Forbes magazine called “easily the most important read of 2012.” In the San Jose metropolitan area, for example, a high school graduate averages $68,009, compared with the $65,411 that is average for a college graduate in Bakersfield, Calif.
Some places have always been more prosperous than others, but these differences have increased more rapidly over the last 30 years as the gross domestic product and patents for new technologies have concentrated in two to three dozen communities that Moretti identifies as “brain hubs” or “innovation clusters.”
In these clusters, highly specialized innovation workers, such as engineers and designers, generate about three times as many local jobs for service workers ― such as doctors, carpenters, and waitresses ― as do manufacturing workers, Moretti said recently when speaking at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Here are edited excerpts from Moretti’s answers to questions from the Stanford audience.
What causes clusters to emerge?
This is a very active area of research, but I think fundamentally, there are three major reasons why clustering takes place. One is the thick labor market effect. If you are in a very highly specialized position, you want to be in a labor market where there are a lot of employers looking for workers, and a lot of workers looking for employers. The match between employer and employee tends to be more productive, more creative and innovative in thicker labor markets.
It is the same thing for the vendors, the providers of intermediate services. Companies in the Silicon Valley will find very specialized IP lawyers, lab services, and shipping services that focus on that niche of the industry. And because they are so specialized, they're particularly good at what they're doing.
The third factor is what economists call human capital spillovers ― the fact that people learn from their colleagues, random encounters in a coffee shop, at a party, from their children, and so on. There's a lot of sociological evidence that this is one of the attractions of Silicon Valley. You're always near other people who are at the frontier, so you tend to exchange information. Sometimes it's information about job openings. Sometimes it’s information about what you're doing, what type of technology you're adopting, what type of research you are doing. And this, as you can imagine, is important for R&D, for innovation.
So these three forces are crucial, and that means that localities that already have a lot of innovation tend to attract even more workers and even more employers. That further strengthens their virtuous circle.
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Dr. Enrico Moretti leading a seminar organized by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) of the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of its Silicon Valley Project.
Are these clusters sustainable forever?
Probably not. Previous clusters have collapsed in spectacular ways. The Silicon Valley of the 1950s was Detroit. People have researched the rise of Detroit, and it mimics very well the rise of Silicon Valley in terms of the amount of innovation, the type of engineering, the type of salaries they were paying. In the 1950s, if you were a car engineer, there wasn't any better place in the world to be, and if you were a car company, you had to be there. But then, of course, it collapsed.
In my book, I have a chapter on the difference between Detroit and Silicon Valley. This region has kept reinventing itself in ways that are remarkable. It was all orchards, and then it became all hardware, and then it became all software. And now it's becoming something else: social media and biotech and clean tech. Some types of clusters don't survive big negative shocks, and other clusters are able to leverage themselves into the next thing.
Is there a clean energy cluster that is structurally different from an internet or an IT or a biotech cluster? Or are they all intermingled?
Typically, clusters are very specialized. Silicon Valley is the exception in the sense that there are so many different technologies. More typical examples are Boise, Idaho, for radio technology or Portland, Oregon, for semiconductors. Seattle has a combination of software and now a growing body of life sciences. Boston is mostly life science. D.C. is a remarkable story. It's very diversified now in terms of private-sector innovation, but most clusters are going to be small pockets of one industry.
Does your argument hold for high-paid but non-high-tech sectors? I was thinking of New York being a financial sector or L.A. being entertainment, and Houston being oil and gas. Then you mentioned Washington, D.C. That's government.
I would argue that three you mentioned would belong to what I define as innovation sectors in the following sense: Finance in New York is not bank tellers; it’s people who invent new products, new technology, and new ways of making things. They are unique, and you can't easily reproduce the cluster somewhere else. That certainly applies to entertainment, especially the digital part of entertainment that is the fastest-growing part of entertainment jobs.
It also applies to the D.C. cluster. The growth of D.C. over the last 20 years is mostly driven by private-sector headquarters moving there, and an educated labor force. Some of the companies are military contractors. Some companies are life science. They're anchored by the National Institutes of Health being there, and other government agencies. But most of the growth actually comes from the private sector.
Now oil, Houston, I'm not sure. I don't know how strong these clustering forces are for these type of jobs. I would imagine ― and we're not talking about the guy who drills, but it's more like the guy who plans where to drill ― to the extent that there is a high component of innovation that makes something that is unique, I would say it applies.
If I'm a high-tech worker, how am I responsible for creating five other jobs? It’s hard for me to accept there are five.
The way to interpret the multiplier is to imagine dropping 1,000 innovation jobs in one city but not in another, and then going back 10 years later to measure how many additional local service jobs there are in the city that experienced that innovation-sector drop of jobs. So it's a long-run effect, but it’s not impossible for three reasons.
One is that the average high-tech worker tends to do very, very well, and people who are wealthy tend to spend a large fraction of their salary on personal and local services. They tend to go to restaurants and movies, and to use taxis and therapists and doctors on average more than people who are paid less.
The second reason is high-tech companies themselves employ a lot of local services; everything from security guards to IP lawyers, from the janitor to the very specialized consultant. High-tech companies tend to use more services than manufacturing companies.
The third reason is the clustering effect. Once you attract one of those high-tech workers, then in the medium to long run, you're going to be attracting even more of those high-tech workers and companies, which will further increase your multiplier. So it's a long-run number, measured over a 10-year period.
You pointed out that the salaries of the less-educated part of the local population are higher in those places that do have a lot of the innovation. How is that reconciled with the drastic drop over 30 years in their national average compensation?
We don't have enough brain hubs where innovation is concentrated. We have 320 metro areas in the U.S., and probably, by my definition, we have 15 to 20 brain hubs. In those places, you have brisk job creation outside the innovation sector, and you have decent wages for people outside. But we also have a big chunk of the country producing not very much, in part because manufacturing jobs have been shrinking, and innovation hasn't really taken place.
So what hope is there for these areas?
That's a million-dollar question. It's tough because, in some sense, if this clustering effect is particularly strong, it's good news for places like here, but it's terrible news for places like Flint or Detroit. A successful local labor market has a very nice equilibrium, where you have a lot of skilled workers who want to go there and a lot of innovative employers who want to go there. It's really hard to re-create somewhere else.
And it's not like we're not trying. We're spending $15 to $18 billion annually in what economists call place-based policies, which are essentially subsidies to try to attract employers to these areas. The idea being: “They're not coming, so if we just break this vicious circle, if we just bring some, then the clustering effect starts taking off. We can effectively create innovation hubs where they don't exist.”
I haven't found one example of an innovation hub in the U.S. that has been created by deliberate policy that says, "We're going to create an innovation hub here." Taiwan might be a good success story. It’s hard to get data, but Taiwan was an agricultural economy in the 1960s that had very little innovation. Then in the 1970s, it created enormous government subsidies for semiconductors and a lot of other technologies. All the others didn't pan out, but semiconductors worked. Taiwan is still putting money in, so it's not exactly clear whether it's a perfect example. Picking the next big thing is very hard for the venture capitalist. It's virtually impossible for the government worker.
What's the situation in other regions around the world ?
Obviously, India and China are major success stories, but that doesn't mean that this clustering effect is not at play within those countries. A different example is Italy, where I am from. Italy has been the Detroit in this story. It had a very strong pharmaceutical sector in the 1980s, and a smaller computer cluster. Once the pharmaceutical industry started becoming global, you saw mergers and a concentration of the industry’s R&D in a few places. I know because my dad was employed there, and his lab was first moved to Sweden and then to New Jersey.
I think the same is happening throughout many countries in continental Europe, and even in places like China and India, which have success stories but enormous regional differences. The innovative part of the Chinese economy is concentrated in a handful of megalopolises.
This is an interesting paradox of the current economy. Probably the best news of the last 20 years globally is the vast increase in the standard of living in places like China and India and Brazil, so there's certainly been a convergence in the standard of living when you compare nations. But when you look within those developing nations, you see the same great divergence that you see here.
Professor Enrico Moretti
Enrico Moretti is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Michael Peevey and Donald Vial Career Development Chair in Labor Economics. He is also director of the Infrastructure and Urbanization Program at the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics and Oxford University. His talk at Stanford was hosted by the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, located in the Graduate School of Business.
Kathleen O'Toole is a journalist who frequently writes about social science. She is currently assistant editorial director of marketing and communications at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Parties in pluralist democracies face numerous political issues that citizens may be split on, but most models of party competition assume a simple, often one-dimensional structure. A new, inherently multidimensional model of party strategy is presented, where parties compete by selectively emphasizing policy issues. Issue emphasis is determined by two distinct goals: mobilizing the party’s core voters and broadening the support base. Optimal issues for this purpose lie in between idealtypical positional and valence issues, as they need to be relatively uncontroversial within the party, while at the same time widely supported in the electorate at large. The capacity of an issue to promote both goals is captured by an integrated index labeled “issue yield.” A model based on this index is tested on a 27-country comparative dataset combining mass surveys and manifesto scores from the 2009 European Election Study. Results of multilevel tobit regressions suggest that issue yield is a powerful indicator of party strategy.
Lorenzo De Sio is Assistant Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. His main interests are in elections, public opinion and voting behaviour, both in Italy and in comparative perspective, with a specific focus on models of voting behaviour and party competition. A member of the Scientific Committee of the Italian National Election Studies (ITANES), he is the coordinator of the Italian Center for Electoral Studies (LUISS Rome), and a member of the Methods Working Group for the “True European Voter” international research project. Besides his two books in Italian, his scientific publications include articles appearing in Comparative Political Studies, West European Politics, South European Society and Politics, Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica. He has been Visiting Research Fellow at the University of California – Irvine, and Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute.
The Program on Human Rights at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), together with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, are pleased to introduce the 2013 Summer Human Rights Fellows. These four remarkable Stanford undergraduates were selected from a competitive pool of applicants to spend the summer serving in organizations advancing human rights work around the world.
The Summer Human Rights Fellowship enables undergraduate students to gain practical experience at international organizations that promote, monitor, evaluate, or advance human rights work. In order to apply, potential fellows must identify their ideal placement and work with the partner to ensure there is a viable project that allows the student to contribute meaningfully to the organization’s work. This year, the fellows will be working on the ground in India, Jordan, and Guatemala with informal workers, at-risk children, trafficking victims, and using technology to advance social justice worldwide. Upon their return to Stanford next year, each of the Human Rights Fellows will participate in campus events to describe their work.
Below are the profiles of our four fellows highlighting their summer projects, interest in human rights and some fun facts. Click here to learn more about the fellowship program.
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Name: Firas Abuzaid (’14)
Major: Computer Science
Hometown: Plano, Texas
Tell us about your project. I'll be working with Visualizing Justice in Amman, Jordan. The mission of Visualizing Justice is to empower people worldwide to create visual stories for social justice and human rights. My mission for the summer is to exploit new software innovations in web development to augment Visualizing Justice’s data visualization capabilities, thus making their stories more expressive and accessible worldwide.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? I think there is a disconnect between the technologies we develop and the societies we live in, and that gap is most noticeable in the area of human rights. In particular, our innovations in technology have created an information overload problem. We are now inundated with information about various human rights issues, but struggle for a more nuanced or contextualized understanding of those issues. Also, the quality of the information has not kept up with the growth in quantity. If we can invest the time to build better tools and re-couple the quality of information with its quantity, then we, as a society, can make a lot more progress in the field of human rights.
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? I want to develop new tools that make it easier for individuals to create compelling data visualizations, especially those that lie outside the traditional domains of technology.
Fun fact about yourself: I can solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute.
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Name: Lara Mitra (’15)
Major: Human Biology
Hometown: Washington, D.C.
Tell us about your project. I’m traveling to Ahmedabad, India to work with Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), a union of 1.4 million informal economy workers, which provide community-driven socioeconomic services, including healthcare, local banking, social security, and housing to marginalized groups. Given my interest in public health, I will focus on SEWA’s initiatives responding to people's inherent right to a healthy life, working with the health team to analyze and document the changing role of front-line health workers who deliver care to expecting mothers. I aim to assess the effectiveness of services provided by three unique classes of health workers, and identify how their knowledge and skills can be harnessed to deliver primary health care to a broad swath of the rural and urban population.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? The day of my 16th birthday found me waiting in line at the DMV in Washington, DC. When I reached the front of the line, I was given one final form to fill out. I mindlessly scribbled my name and date of birth before I stumbled upon a question that I did not know the answer to: “Would you like to be an organ donor?” This was my first exposure to a human rights issue that I hope to pursue well into the future. Upon doing some research, I became hooked on the topic of organ donation. The future human biology major in me enjoyed reading about the dire need for kidneys in the US, but the humanitarian in me found another area of the debate more gripping – the black market for organs.
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? Find a job that allows me to combine my interests in medicine and human rights!
Fun fact about yourself: My parents made me take classes in juggling and unicycling growing up in case the whole college thing didn't work out.
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Name: Nicolle Richards (’16)
Major: Human Biology (planned)
Hometown: Vienna, Austria
Tell us about your project. I will be traveling to Guatemala to work with Kids Alive, a nonprofit that works to rescue orphans and at-risk children. In Guatemala, they run a care home for girls who have been abandoned or abused – often in the form of forced labor and/or physical and sexual abuse. I will be working with the girls in the care home, and also evaluating a program that works to continue supporting the girls who have returned home.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? Throughout high school, I volunteered at a care home in Romania for women and girls who had experienced abuse. This first exposure to drastic poverty sparked my interest in social work and development, and led me to explore different aspects of human rights. Later in high school, I taught summer school in the Dominican Republic to at-risk children, where exposure to obvious injustice solidified my passion to fight for human rights. As a Christian, I believe that I have a responsibility to help those less fortunate – and fighting for human rights is an obvious way to do this!
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? I hope to study international human rights law and eventually work combatting human trafficking around the world.
Fun fact about yourself: I get to spend my vacations in Seoul, South Korea where my family currently lives.
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Name: Garima Sharma (’15)
Major: Economics
Hometown: New Delhi, India
Tell us about your project. I am going to be working with Apne Aap: Women Worldwide, an anti-trafficking NGO based in Forbesganj, India. Forbesganj is in close proximity to the Indo-Nepalese border, which has led to its emergence as a source, transit center, and destination for women trafficked for prostitution. I have spent the past two quarters designing an interactive human rights education curriculum focused on sex trafficking, which I will use in Forbesganj to engage with at-risk girls who are the daughters of sex workers in the red light district, as well as 12-14 year-old girls belonging to the Nutt (lower-caste) community. Simultaneously, I will be working with older men, women and community leaders, with the goal of making preliminary headway into a community-wide anti-trafficking strategy.
What first sparked your interest in human rights? I cannot count the number of times that I have been verbally harassed, whistled at or sung to by strange men in the course of my fairly “normal” existence as a middle-class girl in India. My passion for wanting to ensure that women are able to demand and access a life of dignity is a consequence of having grown up in a society that normalizes aggression against us. This prompted me to intern at the National Human Rights Commission of India, where I spent my time reading reports on trafficking, examining anti-trafficking legislation, and talking to activists and victims of human rights violations. I realized we critically need to place greater focus on the prevention of violations and develop a true, nuanced appreciation for the concept of human rights – a change I am hoping to effect through this fellowship.
What are your post-Stanford aspirations? A few years down the line, I hope to work as a policymaker advancing women’s rights in India.
Fun fact about yourself: I am one of two—I have a twin sister named Anima, who attends medical school in India.
The Europe Center, through its Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region, has forged partnerships with those who bring visionary solutions to the challenge of diversity and reconciliation in our increasingly globalized world. “Harbor of Hope: a special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures” held on May 6th is the latest effort by the Europe Center to disseminate this new way of thinking. The participation of Sweden’s leading documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten, and Sweden’s cultural entrepreneur Ozan Sunar, resulted in an unprecedented pairing and an evening of motivating insight for a large public audience. The program included the screening of Gertten’s documentary “Harbour of Hope”, a multi-media presentation by Sunar and an opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion with both of these special guests.
The evening opened with a welcome by the Europe Center’s director, Professor Amir Eshel, who highlighted the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation for making possible the Europe Center’s Sweden Program and this research. The center’s Associate Director, Dr. Roland Hsu then framed the thinking behind inviting these particular two guest speakers, Gertten and Sunar.
“This evening”, said Hsu, “we gather for a special look at the challenge to meet and embrace difference. In today’s globalized world, market economies, and educational opportunities, but also war and persecution send unprecedented numbers of peoples across borders, away from home cultures, and into new host neighborhoods.
In the US and in Europe we share the concern and opportunity to learn what drives people far from home. Tonight, we focus our gaze on the city of Malmo, a city whose neighborhoods contain extraordinary diversity. Such diversity has a history, which we shall see on film, and it has a future, thanks in large part to the cultural programing we will learn about after the film.
Our challenge is to learn from the experience of families, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and children, displaced from the familiar, and replaced in new settings. e will look at this challenge through the eyes of two visionary artists who have touched us with their works, and who are bridging divides across competing memories, and across growing diversity of today’s mobile and global West.”
Hsu’s introduction of Magnus Gertten and Gertten’s documentary film “Harbour of Hope” included a line from a NY Times review of Gertten’s art which he felt echoed throughout the evening’s program: “it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.” “Harbour of Hope” includes footage from the original archival film shot on April 28, 1945, the day that 30,000 survivors of German concentration camps arrived in Malmo, Sweden to begin their lives over again. This powerful and unforgettable film is about the life stories of 3 of the survivors seen on this footage: Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg.
Following the viewing of “Harbour of Hope”, Hsu introduced the next guest Ozan Sunar by saying “In Mr. Sunar’s cultural programming, we may see not the past overwhelming the present, but instead the present clearing the way for its future.” Sunar, with a long career in the fields of arts, media and integration politics, blazed a path for those seeking new ways to include artistic values from diverse origins into Sweden’s contemporary culture. He is currently the founding and artistic director of the international cultural house Moriska Paviljongen in Malmo. Sunar’s presentation and the subsequent discussion on his work uniting heretofore communities in conflict through culture were both inspiring and provocative.
Harbor of Hope: a special evening celebrating Sweden's diverses cultures; May 6, 2013, Stanford University:
The Europe Center was pleased to host Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission (HRVP), at Stanford University on May 7th. HRVP Ashton’s address to a capacity audience of Stanford senior scholars is part of the Europe Center’s program focused on European and EU regional and global relations. The event co-sponsors - the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Hoover Institution, and the - speaks to the esteem and the interest that multiple partners share in engaging the European Union’s highest foreign policy official.
The Europe Center’s director Amir Eshel opened the session, followed by President Gerhard Casper, director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who delivered a formal introduction of Ashton. HRVP Ashton spoke at length and in considerable detail on the mission of the office of EU High Representative, and addressed a number of the critical foreign policy challenges that we face today.
Three pillars of EU foreign policy In her talk, Lady Ashton highlighted three pillars of EU foreign policy:
Europe assumes primary responsibility for bringing and safeguarding peace in its “neighborhood”. Ashton proposed that the European Union – in terms of its status as a foreign policy actor – should be judged by the record of its mission to foster post-conflict resolution, and promote long-term stability and growth throughout its own member states, and in neighboring regions of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, and Eastern and Baltic regions of former Soviet societies.
European Union foreign policy should promote what Ashton termed “Deep Democracy”. This includes reformed and transparent judiciary, police, and representative governing institutions that safeguard the well-being and individual emancipation of citizens, and women’s and human rights.
European Union international relations prioritize effective and long-term cooperative missions with “strategic partners” beginning with the United States, as well as Russia and China. Ashton emphasized that the EU also prioritizes long-term relations and strategic missions with regional and supra-national institutions beginning with the United Nations, and including the African Union, ASEAN, and the Arab League.
“Deep Democracy”: the long-term challenge Of special note was Ashton’s significant elaboration on the priority for “deep democracy”. When asked about the case of Mali, and what the vision was for what comes after the current French and European military intervention, she emphasized the following points of policy and tactics.
The EU views the military engagement against Jihadist forces in Mali, within a larger regional view of the “Sahel Arc”. The EU is deeply engaged in the “Arab Awakening” movements – and the attendant security, political, and civil crises in each country of the region, and in terms of displaced populations across borders.
In the case of Mali, the office of the EU High Representative invited the country’s leadership to Brussels for close coordination of policy.
The EU foreign policy has been set to closely support the Malian government’s own road map for peace, territorial sovereignty, internal cohesion, and development.
In remote districts of northern Mali, residents have seen little evidence of the value of government. The EU foreign policy of engagement in Mali includes programs to deliver primary health care (i.e. immunization and women’s reproductive health) and infrastructure (i.e. transportation and employment in local economic initiatives) to demonstrate the efficacy and value of state institutions.
The decision to commit troops from Europe to foreign soil remains, Ashton emphatically stated, the responsibility of the individual sovereign states, and of their democratically elected representatives who, in making such commitments, are ultimately responsible to their citizens.
Individual European nations are invited to meet with the governments and civil society leaders of countries undergoing transformations, to tell their distinct histories of democratic development.
Ashton delivered her insights in response to questions from the audience on a number of topics, including the growing magnitude of displaced regional refugees, EU-US military cooperation, and the support and criticism of the EU within European nations.
As part of its ongoing effort to better conceptualize and measure governance, the Governance Project housed at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law held two workshops in Beijing and Sonoma in the fall of 2012. The workshops featured Chinese and Western scholars who proposed new approaches to assess the quality of governance in China. A collection of papers capturing the various dimensions of governance presented at the workshops was released in May to contribute to the body of scholarship on this subject.
The Governance Project is led by Francis Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at FSI, who launched the initiative in 2012 to engage scholars in the exercise of evaluating the quality of state institutions and government effectiveness. The paper series helps to define the concept of governance more broadly and to outline parameters for its assessment.
Authors who contributed to the series include: Bo Rothstein, the August Röhss chair in political science and head of the Quality of Government Institute at the Göteborg University in Sweden, who examines the quality of government in China through the lens of public administration; Zhao Shukai, a researcher from China’s Development Research Center and deputy secretary-general of the China Development Research Foundation, who discusses rising social tensions in rural China as evidenced by conflicts in grassroots governance; and Anthony Saich, the Director of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, who surveys Chinese households to gauge levels of dissatisfaction with the government, the performance of local officials in dealing with the public and implementing policy, and with the provision of goods and services.
Germany has always been too strong or too weak for Europe. Now it is Number One again, but what a difference 70 years of democratic development and European integration have made. Merkel's Germany is no "Fourth Reich", and the political class knows it. If she isn't "triangulating" like Bill Clinton, Merkel "leads from behind" like Obama. After two murderous grabs for hegemony, Germany is an accidental great power - so strong because France, Britain, Italy and the rest are so weak.
Abstract: Taiwan (the Republic of China) has been changing with the times. So has its diplomacy. Having served his country for more than 40 years in various important diplomatic posts under different administrations, Ambassador Chen is one of Taiwan’s most seasoned diplomats. He joins us to share his personal experience and perspectives of Taiwan’s diplomacy. It is a historical review, but also an attempt to explore the future. Ambassador Chen believes that the diplomacy of Taiwan is unique because of its unique background. Although it should be defined by its own people, the country has been heavily influenced by the Chinese Mainland and the United States of America. How to promote Taiwan’s interests while preserving its identity and dignity, and conducting the balancing exercises in an asymmetric international environment has always been the crux of diplomacy in Taiwan. Ambassador Chen’s insights will allow us a better understanding of diplomacy in Taiwan, its successes and frustrations and presenting a possible roadmap for the future.
C.J. Chen is the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (1999-2000). He has also served as Taiwan’s de facto Ambassador to the United States (2000-2004) and European Union (2004-2006). Having spent most of his career in the Foreign Ministry, Mr. Chen is regarded as one of Taiwan’s most accomplished diplomats and an expert on U.S./Taiwan relations. He was educated in Taiwan, Britain, Spain and the US, and has extensive experience representing his nation in the United States. He began his first tour of duty in Washington, D.C. in 1971 and was later a key member of the team that negotiated with the United States government for the future relations between Taiwan and the U.S. after the U.S. switched diplomatic ties from the Republic of China (ROC) to the People’s Republic of China) in 1979. Mr. Chen was heavily involved in communicating with the U.S. Congress during the implementation of the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) which still serves as the back bone and framework for U.S./ Taiwan relations. In addition to Mr. Chen’s diplomatic experience, he was also selected by the Kuomintang (KMT), to be a member of the Legislative Yuan, where served under both the blue (KMT) and green (DPP) administrations.
CISAC Conference Room
Ambassador C.J. Chen
Founder, Taipei Forum and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (1999-2000)
Speaker
Professor Enrico Moretti
