Demetrios G. Papademetriou is Distinguished Senior Fellow, Co-Founder and President Emeritus of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), and President of MPI Europe. Dr. Papademetriou has published more than 270 books, monographs, articles and research reports on migration and related issues, and advises senior government officials, foundations, and civil society organizations in dozens of countries. He also convenes the Transatlantic Council on Migration and the Regional (North American) Migration Study Group, chairs the Advisory Board of The Open Society Foundations’ International Migration Initiative (IMI), and is Co-Founder and Chair Emeritus of Metropolis.
France is grappling with rising terrorism and the climate change problem, French Ambassador Gérard Araud said during a talk sponsored by The Europe Center.
"We had been expecting a terrorist attack for some time," said Araud, referencing the January massacre in Paris in which two shooters who identified themselves as Islamic terrorists killed 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices and wounded several others. "The attack in Paris was like our 9/11."
He said that France is undertaking both educational and law enforcement efforts aimed at taming the spread of radicalized Islamic youth in the country – but there is no easy solution.
For example, it is almost impossible to monitor all the potential suspects, shut down offensive websites only to see them pop up shortly thereafter, and even track youth coming and going from Islamic campaigns in places like Syria and Iraq.
"Everything," Araud said, "depends on the balance between civil liberties and law enforcement. We're trying to adjust to this new threat."
More than a hundred people turned out for Araud's talk, which was held in the Koret-Taube Conference Center. The event, held May 1, was billed as the "State of the France-U.S. Relationship and Priorities for 2015."
Araud was appointed Ambassador of France to the United States in 2014. He has held positions within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Development. During his career, Araud became an expert on the Middle East and security issues, and was the French negotiator on the Iranian nuclear issue from 2003 to 2006.
He spoke about the problem of increasing anti-Semitism in France.
"It's totally unacceptable," he said. On the educational front, French schools routinely teach students about the horrors of the Holocaust and some even make field trips to places like Auschwitz, one of the Nazi concentration camps where Jewish people were exterminated during World War II.
One upcoming topic of global interest, Araud said, is the United Nations climate change conference scheduled to start Nov. 30 in Paris.
He described it as perhaps a "last chance" attempt at an effective global agreement on the issue, and sounded upbeat about the possibility of success. "Things are much more positive than in 2009" when similar talks in Copenhagen failed to spark worldwide unity.
The reasons, he said, are that more countries are acknowledging the impact of carbon emissions and that China has expressed a desire to cooperate. But much depends on the talks in Paris, both their tone and substance.
"Top down approval certainly won't work," Araud said, noting that the conference needs to produce a consistent and credible message of action on climate change that appeals to many countries.
He noted Stanford's new energy system aims to cut campus greenhouse gas emissions by 68 percent and fossil fuel by 65 percent. "It's quite positive," he said.
Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, introduced Araud and described the bilateral relationship between the United States and France as "central to everything that we do."
McFaul pointed out that Araud played a key role in the writing of the economic sanctions that eventually brought Iran to the nuclear negotiations table.
When he started his speech, Araud said it was his first visit to Stanford. "Thank you for the weather," he smiled.
Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.
I propose and test a theoretical framework that explains institutional change in international relations. Like firms in markets, international institutions are affected by the underlying characteristics of their policy areas. Some policy areas are prone to produce institutions facing relatively little competition, limiting the outside options of member states and impeding redistributive change. In comparison, institutions facing severe competition will quickly reflect changes in underlying state interests and power. To test the theory empirically, I exploit common features of the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—to isolate the effect of variation in policy area characteristics. The empirical tests show that, despite having identical membership and internal rules, bargaining outcomes in the Bretton Woods institutions have diverged sharply and in accordance with the theory.
Due to the high interest in this event, we have moved it to a larger room. It is now in the Oksenberg Conference Room, Encina Hall, 3rd floor.
The February Minsk II agreement introduced a fragile ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, following a year of crisis and conflict between Kyiv and Moscow. Ukrainian President Poroshenko needs to grapple with a daunting list of critical economic and political reforms. Russian President Putin, however, appears intent on destabilizing the Ukrainian government and has the means, including military force, to do so. What can we expect next in the Ukraine-Russia stand-off, and how should the West respond?
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Steven Pifer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where his work focuses on arms control, Ukraine and Russia. A retired Foreign Service officer, his more than 25 years with the State Department included assignments as deputy assistant secretary of state with responsibilities for Russia and Ukraine (2001-2004), ambassador to Ukraine (1998-2000), and special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia on the National Security Council (1996-1997).
Co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and The Europe Center.
The Europe Center is pleased to announce the Spring 2015 Graduate Student Grant Competition for graduate and professional students at Stanford whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates from across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Moreover, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. Grants range from $500 to $5000. Additional information about the grants, as well as the online application form, can be found here. The deadline for this Spring’s competition is Friday, April 17th. Recipients will be notified by May 4th.
In Fall 2014, the Center awarded grants to 10 graduate students in departments ranging from History to Economics to Musicology. We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured student this month is Adriane Fresh (Political Science).
To this end, the Center recently solicited applications for the second annual The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe. The Center is sponsoring six undergraduate student internships with leading think tanks and international organizations in Europe in Summer 2015. Jacob (Jake) Leih (International Relations, 2016) and Eddy Rosales Chavez (International Relations, 2017) will work at The ALDE Group in the European Parliament. Ameena Tawakol (Public Policy, 2017), Eunhye (Grace) Choi (Economics, 2018), and Audrey (Hope) Sheils (International Relations, 2016) will work at Bruegel, a leading European think tank. Additionally, Kate Wilson (Public Policy, 2016) will work at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). The Europe Center is also actively seeking to develop ties with business, governmental, and non-governmental organizations in Europe that can participate in The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in future years.
Please mark your calendars for the second annual lectures in this series by Joel Mokyr, Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University.
Details: May 20 and May 21, 2015; 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.; Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall
The Europe Center invites you to attend the talks of speakers in the following workshop series:
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We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.
Political fragmentation early on exacerbated the post-communist economic transitions in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, new Stanford research shows.
In a new paper, Stanford sociology professor Andrew Walder says that the neoliberal economic policies introduced in those former communist countries did not cause their economic collapses. Neoliberal is a modified form of liberal policies tending to favor free-market capitalism.
In an interview, Walder said, "Policy choices mattered, but they did not create the initial problems that they were intended to solve."
Rather, the longer the decline of the communist system before regime change and the greater the uncertainty over state ownership of assets, the more likely the country fell into prolonged decline.
The lesson for surviving communist or socialist regimes is that future transitions will be less economically damaging if they are rapid and political certainty exists about the ownership of state-owned assets, wrote Walder and co-authors Andrew Isaacson and Qinglian Lu, both Stanford graduate students in sociology.
The worldwide transformation of state socialism during the 1990s saw many of those countries plunge into recession, usually far beyond initial expectations, he said. Most analysts originally expected short-run hardships as those societies and their economies were restructured. It did not happen that way.
"Sharp recessions in the first states to emerge from the revolutions of 1989 were followed by much deeper economic crises in new states that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union," said Walder, the Denise O'Leary and Kent Thiry Professor in the Humanities and Sciences and a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies.
The few surviving communist autocracies that retooled their economies avoided recessions and grew more rapidly, despite once being considered the least promising places for market reform. China and Vietnam are two examples.
Recessions and politics
The researchers examined economic and growth-rate data from 31 countries for the period from 1989 to 2007. They analyzed three competing explanations for post-socialist economic performance – policy choice, initial economic circumstances and reform-era political institutions.
They found that by far the largest differences in growth rates across some 31 transitioning economies were due to wide differences in the initial years of the 1990s. After these initial crises passed in the mid-1990s, growth rates were similar.
They studied those countries that experienced no regime change, like China; those that experienced rapid regime change, like Poland; and those that experienced a prolonged and deep deterioration of political institutions before their eventual collapse.
The initial recessions were a result of the political disruption that accompanies regime change, and state socialist economies were particularly vulnerable to the collapse of communist parties. The political nature of state socialism makes it unusually vulnerable to this problem, Walder said.
"Communist parties played a central role in defining and enforcing the state's property rights over assets – especially important because almost all assets were the property of the state," the authors wrote.
So, when a communist party's ability to perform this function declined for a prolonged period, the economy was undermined by uncertainty over ownership claims.
"This was a problem in all communist regimes that collapsed shortly after 1988, but the political decline of the Soviet Union in its final years was far more protracted and severe than in other communist regimes, where regime change was much more abrupt," they wrote.
The big picture
In the big picture, Walder noted that at the time of the collapse of many post-Soviet economies in the 1990s, everyone's attention was focused on "what is to be done," and this pitted proponents of Chinese style "gradualism" versus "big bang" reforms prescribed by many Western economists.
"It later led to charges that neoliberal policy advice led to the collapse of economies, and to counter-arguments that it was a failure to properly carry out these policies – or something about a country's fundamentals – that was actually the cause of economic collapse," according to Walder.
In retrospect, he said, the worst economic crises were well advanced before any of these policy approaches were carried out, and the real causes were political in nature and rooted in different patterns of decline of communist parties in the prior period, something that eluded the attention of those on both sides of these debates.
It also shows that the heated debates about privatization – its speed and extent – were of secondary importance during the initial years of post-communism.
Walder said, "What mattered most was the capacity of a state to define and enforce property rights of any kind. This is the root cause of the economic collapse in so many of the former Soviet republics."
And so, the alleged merits of Chinese-style "gradualism" were confused with the advantage of not having political institutions collapse, he added.
Soviet Union collapse
The Soviet decline was far more prolonged and pronounced than in all of the other states where communist parties eventually surrendered power, said Walder. Two factors contributed to this:
One was a set of ill-conceived economic reforms that undermined the communist party's control over state assets several years before the Soviet collapse. The other factor was the fall of the Soviet communist party-state. By 1989, the party was already disintegrating, so ownership claims over state assets became unclear, Walder said.
"When communist parties deteriorated deeply over the medium run – as in the USSR – it set off a struggle to control assets, leading to deep economic crises that were intensified in states that broke apart into new entities, which in turn often led to hyperinflation and armed warfare," said Walder.
Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.
