Synopsis:

Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House, delivered the following talk in The Europe Center series “The European and Global Economic Crisis”.

With measured optimism about the prospect for a way out of the current Eurozone crisis, Dr. Niblett argues that the introduction of the common Euro, seen by many in past years as a vanguard tool for European integration, is now potentially a functional wedge between ‘debtor’ and strongly capitalized nations.  

Dr. Niblett, arriving directly from participating in the World Economic Forum in Dubai, and based on Chatham House research, described the “perfect storm” of the past two decades of credit-driven growth, divergence within the EU, rising debt-to GDP ratios of member nations especially in the cases of Italy and Greece.  His analysis combines these economic details with the following:

• Demographics – high levels of unassimilated immigrants
• European welfare economies still distributing resources at twentieth-century levels now in the twenty-first century
• The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade populist parties
• The weakening of Europe’s center parties
• The “Russification” of Europe’s East – especially in recent events in Ukraine
• The stalled integration of Turkey into the EU

The totality of the above paints a grim portrait of Europe under the weight of nearly impossible conditions.   And yet, Dr. Niblett underlines evidence for measured optimism:

• Ireland is making strides to reform its economy
• Ireland’s educated and yet unemployed workforce does have the possibility to immigrate to Europe
• The UK is finally rebalancing its state budget and market liberalization
• France is facing, albeit with massive labor protest, its state budget levels
• Spain will likely turn over its government in the face of its massive youth protest
• Italy is evaluating in its political process a series of budget reforms

These are the structural side of what Dr. Niblett sees as Europe’s tools for recovery.

On the side of European practice, the Franco-German proposals for European Central Bank “bailout funds” include new rules for transparency of internal government operations. This promises innovation to make the EU into an area of political and financial transparency, and to enable the EU to engage in direct investment, as evidence is beginning to show, in the world’s emerging economies.  In this sense, Dr. Niblett sees for Europe a competitive edge over the US in engaging in world markets.

Perhaps most sanguine of Dr. Niblett’s analysis is his reading of the Eurozone crisis as a force to push the member nations of Europe further towards supra-national economic strategies.  In order to participate in the investment in emerging markets, the Benelux countries, not to mention France, Germany, and neighboring European states, are responding to the crisis by considering policy that promotes investment and outsourcing for service-sector employment, instead of export commodities which have been undercut in recent years.

There is a risk, in Dr. Niblett’s view, that Europe will respond to the Eurozone crisis by fracturing into rival “clubs” of small and large or debt-restructuring and creditor nation-states.  But the European nations, especially those currently participating in the Eurozone, have untapped capacities for growth:

• Educated youth
• Underemployed female laborers
• Outstanding higher educational institutions
• Pent-up small- and medium-enterprise markets
• Potential for growth in the service sector labor market
• Room for more tightly integrating and rationalizing the region’s energy market.

Those interested in further detail and analysis are invited to visit the work and productivity at:

The Europe Center, at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies: http://tec.fsi.stanford.edu

Chatham House, at the Royal Institute for International Studies: http://www.chathamhouse.org/

Speaker bio:

Robin Niblett became the Director of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International
Affairs) in January 2007. Before joining Chatham House, from 2001 to 2006, Dr. Niblett
was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Washington based
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). During his last two years at CSIS, he
also served as Director of the CSIS Europe Program and its Initiative for a Renewed
Transatlantic Partnership.

Most recently Dr. Niblett is the author of the Chatham House Report Playing to its
Strengths: Rethinking the UK’s Role in a Changing World (Chatham House, 2010) and
Ready to Lead? Rethinking America’s Role in a Changed World (Chatham House,
2009), and editor and contributing author to America and a Changed World: A Question
of Leadership (Chatham House/Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is also the author or
contributor to a number of CSIS reports on transatlantic relations and is contributing
author and co-editor with William Wallace of the book Rethinking European Order
(Palgrave, 2001). Dr Niblett is a frequent panellist at conferences on transatlantic
relations. He has testified on a number of occasions to the House of Commons Defence
Select Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee as well as US Senate and House
Committees on European Affairs.

Dr Niblett is a Non-Executive Director of Fidelity European Values Investment Trust. He
is a Council member of the Overseas Development Institute, a member of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Global Institutional Governance and the
Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Europe.

He received his BA in Modern Languages and MPhil and DPhil from New College,
Oxford.

Abstract
The Internet is now approaching near-ubiquity as a method for gathering, distributing and obtaining the news. Over the last decade, social tools and websites built in Silicon Valley have come to dominate that conversation. The use of those tools, the Net and the nature of online journalism varies wildly from country to country. Danny O'Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists discusses how those tools are used by journalists and their sources in dangerous conditions, and what technologists can learn about the future from these edge cases.

Danny O'Brien is CPJ's Internet Advocacy Coordinator. He has spent over twenty years documenting and explaining the growth of the Internet and new media and its effect on free expression and society. He has written articles for Wired, New Scientist, the Guardian, and TV shows for the BBC. Prior to joining CPJ last year, O'Brien was International activist for the original Internet freedom organization, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and was a founder of the British pressure group, the Open Rights Group. He is based in San Francisco. http://www.twitter.com/#!/danny_at_cpj

The decades-long political winter in the Arab world seemed to be thawing early this year as mass protests toppled Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and it appeared that one Arab dictatorship after another might fall during the so-called Arab Spring. Analogies were quickly conjured to the collapse of dictatorships in Europe and Latin America in the 1970s; Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines in the 1980s; and Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s—the transformative “third wave” of global democratization. Many scholars and activists reasonably imagined that a “fourth wave” had begun.  At this momentous inflection point, which may well define the future shape of the Arab world, the United States has never faced a more urgent set of opportunities and challenges there. Diamond will discuss the prospects for democratic development that exist alongside the very real risks of Islamist ascension, political chaos, and humanitarian disaster, and suggest principles and long-term strategic thinking the U.S. might employ to increase its legitimacy in the region.

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where he also directs the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Diamond is co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and a senior consultant to the National Endowment for Democracy. Diamond served as a senior adviser on governance to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad and as an advisor to the Iraq Study Group.  Diamond, author of the Spirit of Democracy and several other works on democratic development, has also edited or co-edited some 36 books on democracy. A renowned teacher and mentor, Diamond, who teaches courses on comparative democratic development and post-conflict democracy building, was named “Teacher of the Year” by the Associated Students of Stanford University and received the prestigious Dinkelspiel Award for Distinctive Contributions to Undergraduate Education in 2007.

A. Lawrence Chickering is a political and social entrepreneur and writer whose work has focused on empowering citizens to increase their roles in public institutions from government schools to foreign policy—while also contributing to economic and social progress.

To this end, Chickering has founded or co-founded several public policy organizations that promote “transpartisan” reforms in both the U.S.and globally. His most recent organization, Educate Girls Globally (EGG), works with the government in the tribal state of Rajasthan inIndia, promoting cultural change not only in traditional communities, but also in government bureaucratic cultures.

Chickering has focused his recent writing on the challenges of policy toward the “weak states” that have become the new priority concerns of foreign policy.  At a time when the new threats to security come from non-state actors, he believes that both development and counterinsurgency warfare (COIN) need civil society organizations (CSOs) to play a greatly expanded role in promoting change by empowering citizens.

In a series of articles he has written for the Small Wars Journal (SWJ), Chickering has raised questions about the government’s capacity to reform its institutions and policies, and embrace CSOs as active partners.  A major problem, he argues, is that the foreign policy community, both inside and outside the government, knows almost nothing about civil society and how it can promote change from “inside” societies.  That explains why foreign policy continues to be directed entirely toward governments, assuming that weak states are strong, and asking them to do things they have no capacity to do.

Chickering stresses the importance of empowering people rather than only helping them.  EGG provides no financial incentives.  Both its school reform and community projects result from empowerment alone.  Together with working in government schools, this allows EGG to operate at very large, strategic scales and low costs.  This commitment, however, conflicts with the overwhelming objectives of donor and philanthropic organizations. 

Chickering believes that the troubled transition from dictatorship to democracy, now underway in Egypt and other countries, could have been largely prevented by an indigenous civil society strategy promoting trust, expanding participation in government, and building human infrastructure for transition.  He also believes that a strong civil society strategy is the essential, missing element in efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. 

To show what is possible in this arena, EGG is currently negotiating with the U.S. Central Command to implement a demonstration project in Afghanistan.  The experience in Rajasthan shows how the model empowers people to take responsibility for their own security, in addition to other forms of progress. 

Chickering’s coauthored book, Strategic Foreign Assistance: Civil Society in International Security, and his more recent SWJ writings, present the most complete statements of his thinking about how civil society initiatives can be used to promote economic, social, and political change in these tribal societies. He believes that new ways of thinking about foreign and national security policy need to be built on a combination of civil society initiatives and new thinking about the strategic uses of communication to influence people’s perceptions. 

Chickering has authored two “transpartisan” books on American politics. His book Beyond Left and Right (1993) drew wide praise across the U.S. political spectrum, and his 2008 book Voice of the People, coauthored with James S. Turner, includes two chapters on foreign policy.

Mr. Chickering is a graduate of StanfordUniversity and theYale Law School. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

Abstract
Paul Kim will share his long journey that has been focused on devising, offering, and evaluating educational access to the underserved children in developing regions of the world. In shedding light on how these fortuitous events, this narrative account of educational progress and change shares the research outcomes of a variety of mobile technology-integration projects at the K-12 level including: (1) literacy development in Mexico, (2) mobile math learning in California and India, (3) executive functioning assessment in Palestine, and (4) mobile science learning in El Salvador and India. Each country and school visited has its own unique story or set of stories and outcomes that can guide future developments of mobile learning technology including educational games, e-books, and other applications.

Paul Kim is the Assistant Dean for Technology & CTO for Stanford University School of Education. He is one of researchers for Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) http://pomi.stanford.edu. He has been conducting research with multidisciplinary approaches and teaching graduate courses on technology-enabled empowerment and entrepreneurship. He is also working with numerous international organizations in developing mobile empowerment solutions for extremely underserved communities in developing countries. In the higher education space, he advises investment bankers and technology ventures focused on e-learning, knowledge management, and mobile communication solutions. His due-diligence engagements include early-stage angel funding and also later-stage private equity-based investments for large education enterprises.

Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv