Five visiting scholars with expertise on Southeast Asia will spend varying portions of the academic year 2008-09 in residence at Stanford. Shorenstein APARC and the Southeast Asia Forum will host four of them: three were selected under the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia. and one is a recipient of a 2008-09 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. A fifth scholar will be on campus as a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution.

The five are John Ciorciari, Joel S. Kahn, Mark Thompson, Angie Ngoc Tran, and Christian von Luebke.

John Ciorciari spent the 2007-08 academic year at Stanford as a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow at Shorenstein APARC. He finished a book that examines how Southeast Asian states have "hedged" their relations with the United States and China.

Dr. Ciorciari will spend upcoming academic year at Stanford as a Hoover Institution National Fellow. In that capacity he plans to expand his research to include the international relations of India.

Joel S. Kahn is a professor of anthropology (emeritus) in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia. He will be at Stanford for the first half of October 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Lecturer.

While at Stanford Professor Kahn will give three public lectures. Their tentative titles are: "A Southeast Asian Modernity?"; "Empires, States, and Political Identities in (Pen)insular Southeast Asia"; and "Religion, Reform, Science, and Secularity." Details including dates, times, and venues will be posted as they become known.

Mark Thompson is a professor of political science at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. He will be in residence at Stanford in Winter and Spring 2009 as the 2009 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

While at Stanford, Prof. Thompson will pursue a book project on "Late Democratization in Pacific Asia." The book will question the claim that democratization in Pacific Asia (including Southeast Asia) has been driven by economic growth and offer an alternative perspective. He will present the results of his project in a public lecture in the spring of 2009. Date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

Angie Ngoc Trần is a professor in the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB). She will be in residence at Stanford for the second half of November 2008 as the 2008 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford University Distinguished Fellow.

In a public lecture on November 17, 2008 (Mobilized Workers vs. Morphing Capital: Challenging Global Supply Chains in Vietnam), Professor Tran will present the results of her study of labor-capital relations in Vietnam and how the different national origins of investors and owners affect workers' conditions, consciousness, and activism. Details including time and venue will be posted as they become known.

Christian von Luebke was a research fellow in Tokyo at Waseda University's Institute for Global Political Economy in 2007-08 following receipt of his 2007 PhD in public policy and governance at the Australian National University. He will be at Stanford for the 2008-09 academic year as a Walter H. Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow.

During his residence Dr. von Luebke will pursue a research and writing project on "Good Governance in Transition: Explaining Local Policy Variations in Indonesia, China, and the Philippines." He will give a public lecture on the results of his project in winter or spring 2009. The date, time, venue, and other details will be posted when known.

Heads of international organizations and foreign policy leaders from around the world met in Berlin, Germany on July 15 and 16 to discuss the future of international security and cooperation. Convened by the Managing Global Insecurity Project (MGI) and the Bertelsmann Stiftung, the event -"Responsible Sovereignty: International Cooperation for a Changed World" -was the MGI project's fifth and capstone advisory group conference. The Berlin meeting was convened by three members of MGI's Advisory Group - Strobe Talbott, Brookings President; EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Javier Solana; and Wolfgang Ischinger, Chairman of the Munich Security Conference - in partnership with Gunther Thielen, Chairman and Chief Executive of the Bertlesmann Foundation.

Also in attendance were the co-directors of the Managing Global Insecurity Project, Stephen J. Stedman, CISAC Senior Fellow and Director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University, Carlos Pascual, Brookings Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy, and Bruce Jones, Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the New York University Center on International Cooperation (CIC). The MGI advisory group is made up of U.S. Bipartisan and international leaders.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier; and Rajendra Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opened the event. Notable international officials and other participants included Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency; former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin; former Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov; former Indian Foreign Minister Lalit Mansingh; and former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata. Also present were Francis Deng, Ban Ki-moon's Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide and the originator of the idea of Responsible Sovereignty in the 1990s.

The meeting brought together high-level representatives from influential nations with members of the MGI Advisory Group and world leaders on climate change, nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, and conflict prevention and response. In particular, the session focused on the idea that all states, whatever their politics and interests, share duties to their citizens and to each other in tackling common threats like terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and global climate change. The goal of the Berlin session was to generate momentum toward a 2009-2010 campaign to expand global partnerships and rejuvenate international cooperation to address today's most pressing global challenges.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of European integration. This year FCE has conducted a series of seminars and international conferences to bring European authors and policy leaders together with forum researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the challenges of social integration. The series has combined the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations, crime and social conflict, and European models of universal citizenship. The directors of the forum plan multiple publications. Here is a preview of the forthcoming anthology on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe (Stanford University Press) edited and with an introduction by FCE Assistant Director Roland Hsu.

In periods of EU expansion and economic contraction, European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for membership and for accommodating the free movement of citizens. With the lowering of internal borders, member nations have asked whether a European passport is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local communities. Addressing the European Parliament on the eve of the 1994 vote on the European Constitution, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, defined national membership in terms of a particular tradition of civic values:

The European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity, which over 2,000 years evolved into what we recognize today as the foundations of modern democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This set of values has its own clear moral foundation and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether modern man admits it or not.

Havel’s claim for the continuing efficacy of Greco- Roman and Christian values can be read as a prescription for founding policy and even sociability. In today’s multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated, but also challenged, in debates over the most effective response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict. For those who endorse or reject Havel’s binding moral roots, this new anthology reveals surprising positions.

The scale of change since Havel’s 1994 speech challenges confidence in European traditions for new Europe. During 1995–2005, EU immigration grew at more than double the annual rate of the previous decade. European immigrant employment statistics are difficult to aggregate but show a steep downward trend. EU Eurostat figures show the Muslim community is the fastest growing resident minority.

The violence in recent years also presses us to revise theory and practice. In the east: How will Balkan communities resume relations after massacres and ethnic cleansing? Does EU recognition of Kosovo validate claims for Flanders independence and Basque ethnic heritage? Can Roma immigrants look to Italian governments to enforce ethnic safeguards? In the west, the widespread riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of mainly North and West African descent against military police have ruptured public security and social cohesion. France’s official response was aimed more to excise rather than reintegrate the protesters. In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced “zero tolerance” for those he termed racaille (scum). The descriptor was effectively deployed to shape public opinion and the ministry declared a national state of emergency, invoking a law dating from the 1954–1962 War of Algerian independence, applied previously only against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New Caledonia, for searches, detainments, house arrests, and press censorship without court warrant.

Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence did not catch the government by complete surprise. Researchers, including Alec Hargreaves in Ethnicity in Today’s Europe, have revealed a study conducted in 2004 by the French interior ministry that documented more than 2 million citizens living in districts of social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor community policing. The ministry’s document admits that youth unemployment in what journalists referred to as quartiers chauds (neighborhoods boiling over) surpassed 50 percent. Constitutionally barred from conducting ethnic surveys, the report nevertheless acknowledges what most already understood: that the majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth were French-born whose parents or grandparents were of African descent.

Post-war era immigration, from the 1950s European reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization, is best defined as post-colonial migration. European governments created neighborhoods for immigrants who moved from periphery to metropole. The new residents’ education, language, and collective memory were shaped by colonial administrations, and that background was roughly familiar to the host communities. Since 1990, however, based on projections in this anthology, we have entered a period, for lack of a better name, of post-post-colonial diaspora.

The peoples immigrating to Europe are increasingly coming from lands without characteristic European colonial heritage. While few countries of origin have no instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago and sub- Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic trend takes Europe, and the larger trans-Atlantic west, into an era not well served by existing models.

In this anthology, nine prominent authors substantiate this shift. The essays create an unusual and productive dialogue between social scientist modeling and humanist cultural studies to confront assumptions about immigrant origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance. Bassam Tibi (International Relations, University of Gottingen/Cornell) criticizes European multiculturalism, which, he argues, inadvertently enables European Islamist fundamentalism. Tibi’s essay challenges his fellow Muslim immigrants to embrace traditional European civic values (which he dates neither from antiquity nor the Christian era, but rather from the French Revolution) as the foundation not for multiculturalism, but for a cultural pluralism that fosters social integration. The result, in his terms, would replace Islamist fundamentalism with a Euro-Islam capable of Euro-integration. Kadar Konuk (German Studies, University of Michigan) sets Tibi’s insight on European- Muslim ethnicity into the history of European-Turkish relations. Readers questioning Turkey’s EU candidacy will find that the two essays shift the common critique of Turkish policy toward a more pressing question of Europe’s social capacity to integrate prospective Turkish-EU citizens.

Contributions by Alec Hargreaves (French Studies, Florida State), Rogers Brubaker (Sociology, UCLA), and Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia) — all leading authors on European political culture and social theory — rethink Western European responses to minority integration. Articles by Carole Fink (History, Ohio State), Leslie Adelson (German Studies, Cornell), and Salvador Cardús Ros (Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona) reveal cultural expressions that are often overlooked in studies of European minority identity. The final article by Pavle Levi (Art and Art History, Stanford University) focuses on the case of post-ethnic war Balkans, to test the ability of mass media and film to influence the creation of cross-border inclusive cultures.

Ethnicity in Today’s Europe was developed from the fall 2007 conference on the topic sponsored by FCE and the Stanford Humanities Center.

To sign up for upcoming FCE programming, and for an alert from the Stanford University Press when this anthology and works on this topic are released, plese visit the Stanford University Press website.

FSI senior fellow Stephen Stedman reviews John Bolton's book, Surrender Is not an Option, in the July/August issue of the Boston Review. "The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale," he writes. "Imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand."

One of the more remarkable underreported stories of 2008 was a speech in which the State department’s legal adviser John Bellinger admitted that there “are also realities about the International Criminal Court that the United States must accept.” He also stated that the Bush administration would work with the Court to maximize its chances of success in Darfur. Bellinger did not say that the United States might actually join the Court, but acknowledged that it enjoyed widespread international support and legitimacy, and that the United States could fruitfully cooperate with it on areas of mutual benefit.

Neither mea culpa nor volte-face, the speech nonetheless indicates the distance the administration has traveled in seven years. While Bellinger’s oratory went largely unnoticed by foreign policy wonks and the attentive public alike, it did not escape the scrutiny of John Bolton, who dismissed it as Clinton-era “pabulum” and reflective of “the yearning the Rice State Department has for acceptance” by academics and foreign intellectuals. He added ominously, “the fight resumes after Jan. 20.”

Bolton has been a powerful influence on Republican foreign policy for the last twenty years. Before his appointment as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005—which was achieved without Senate confirmation—Bolton dominated arms-control policy in the first Bush term. He killed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, negotiations with North Korea, and the Biological Weapons Convention verification protocol. During the Clinton years, he campaigned tirelessly from his Heritage Foundation perch for missile defense and against global governance, which he seems to equate with global government. In 1998, when then-Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan released a report critical of both the United Nations secretariat and member states for the failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, Bolton chastized Annan for having the temerity to criticize governments for what they did or did not do in the former Yugoslavia. He added menacingly: “I think if he continues down this road, ultimately it means war, at least with the Republican Party.”

Bolton came of age politically during Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. The future policy heavyweight was a high schooler in Baltimore at the time. He honed his conservatism at Yale College and Yale Law School, ducked Vietnam through a National Guard posting (“looking back, I am not terribly proud of this calculation”), and got his first taste of Washington as an intern to Spiro Agnew. During the Bush Sr. presidency, Bolton was Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs in James Baker’s State Department, and was one of the first people who Baker called when he needed a posse of chad-disputing lawyers in Florida in November 2000. Bolton’s name keeps showing up in various articles about the fight inside the Republican Party for the soul of John McCain’s foreign policy.

All of this makes it imperative to read his memoirs, which clarify the stakes in the forthcoming election. Although it is hard to imagine Bolton in a McCain administration—his memoirs offend so many within his party, across the aisle, and overseas, that Bolton could not win Senate confirmation for capitol dog-catcher—Bolton will be plotting, pressing, and pushing to force McCain’s foreign policy back to the unilateralism of George Bush’s first term, when the war on terror meant never having to say you’re sorry. And there are important national security posts that do not require Senate approval.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand.

To Bolton, the United Nations is a “target rich environment,” and I had a front row seat to watch his gunslinging. In 2005 I served as Special Adviser to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. I was responsible for developing member-state support for his efforts to overhaul the United Nations. In that capacity, I was in Brussels in March 2005 when President Bush nominated Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. One high-ranking EU official recoiled in horror, and, to share his agita, repeated two of Bolton’s more famous lines: that “UN headquarters could lose ten floors and no one would know the difference,” and that “there was no United Nations.” How in the world, the official asked, could such a man be Ambassador to the United Nations?

Amidst nodding heads and shared pained looks, I offered that if I could pick the ten floors, I would agree with Bolton. Moreover, I said, any sentient being who spends time in Turtle Bay—the Manhattan site of the United Nations—will at some point in frustration say to themselves that there is no United Nations. Bolton’s sin was to say it publicly. Finally, I suggested that John Bolton was irrelevant: “If the President of the United States and the Secretary of State want a strong, effective United Nations, then Bolton will have to deliver. If they don’t, you could have John Kerry as the U.S. ambassador, and nothing will happen.”

Oh well; win some, lose some. Which is what Condoleeza Rice is rumored to have told a friend who asked how John Bolton could have possibly been nominated for the position under her watch.

Or more accurately, I was half right, half wrong. Reading this book, one can almost feel sorry for how unsuited Bolton was for his new job. For four years he had been the point man for breaking American commitments abroad, insulting allies and enemies alike, ditching the ABM Treaty, and unsigning the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (“my happiest moment at State”). In the heady days of the first Bush administration, when it believed the United States was so powerful it could get anything that it wanted without friends, partners, or institutions, Bolton was the “say no” guy, a job he performed with great brio. How could he know that in 2005 his big boss, the President, and his nominal boss, the Secretary of State, would actually decide that international cooperation was necessary, and that maybe we should start worrying about America’s free fall in world opinion? A pit bull in the first term, Bolton would be a yap dog in the second, grating on the Secretary of State, the President, and most American allies.

Almost sorry, for whatever else you say about John Bolton, he is not of the “we can disagree without being disagreeable” school of American politics. This is one of the nastiest, pettiest memoirs in the annals of American diplomatic history. Among the many targets of insults and catty remarks are former and present U.K. ambassadors to the United Nations Emyr Jones Parry, Adam Thomson (“I could never look at or listen to Thomson without immediately thinking of Harry [Potter] and all his little friends”), and John Sawers; recent U.K. foreign ministers; just about every UN civil servant mentioned; indeed, just about every U.S. civil servant mentioned, along with countless journalists and politicians.

The memoir reads like an international relations primer done in the style of a modern morality tale—imagine Kenneth Waltz’s classic Man, the State, and War as written by Ayn Rand. Bolton, usually singlehandedly, takes on what he calls the High Minded, the Normers (those who create international norms of behavior or try to “[whip] the United States into line with leftist views of the way the world should look”), the EAPeasers (career State Department officials who advocate negotiations with North Korea), the Risen Bureaucracy, the Crusaders of Compromise, the Arms Control True Believers, and the EUroids.

The book has the formulaic allegories typical of the genre—the young, innocent female (Kristen Silverberg, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs) driven to tears after being berated by the cold-hearted career bureaucrat (Nicholas Burns); the noble knight (Bolton himself) fighting against the political higher ups who care only about “positioning themselves” (Rice) or their legacy (Colin Powell). And of course Bolton’s plaintive cries that the 2005-06 changes in administration policy occurred against the will of the President. One sees the peasants now: ‘If only the King knew what was happening, this would never go on.’

Now add a heaping dose of xenophobia. Foreigners, appeasing foreigners, foreigners claiming to know us better than we know ourselves: all loom large in Bolton’s memoirs. He insults the former Swedish foreign minister and President of the General Assembly Jan Eliasson as not only having “an ethereal Hammarskjöldian vision problem, but also a Gunnar Myrdal problem, yet another foreigner who ‘understood’ us better than we did ourselves.” (This is the Myrdal who shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics with Friedrich Hayek, and whose classic book on race, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.) At one point in his belittlement of a Bush political appointee, a special assistant to Condoleeza Rice, no less, Bolton adds that she was “a naturalized citizen originally from Pakistan,” in case we wondered why she could not possibly understand America’s real foreign policy interests. In Bolton’s worldview Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland; Henry Kissinger, a naturalized American citizen originally from Germany.

In the Bolton universe, you want Iran and North Korea to be referred to the Security Council, so that when it fails to unite behind a resolute strategy, the United States is then free to take the tough action it needs to take. And in the case of North Korea, Bolton is clear about what that would be: “unilateralist, interventionist, and preemptive.” Is it any wonder that when it came to Iran and North Korea, our allies and adversaries were loathe to refer them anywhere near Bolton?

Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 article “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was prompted by the supporters of the Goldwater campaign. Bolton strides right off the pages of Hofstadter’s essay:

He is always manning the barricades of civilization . . . he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

According to Bolton, we do not need diplomats who negotiate, seek common ground, and strive for cooperative solutions. We need litigators who will go to the wall defending American interests, who will understand that when others say no, they mean no, and that therefore compromise is illusion. But in a world where the United States needs international cooperation for its own peace and prosperity, what comes next? Bolton’s answers are laughable—we stick with our “closest friends in the United Nations”—Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. Or we forge a new alliance with Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to overcome the parasitic and paralytic EU. The road to global primacy runs through . . . Wellington?

There are, of course, some glaring contradictions in the memoirs. Bolton is known as a sovereignty hawk and he spells out the content of that doctrine as “greater independence and fewer unnecessary restraints.” The job of civil servants, politically appointed or career, is “to implement the president’s policies.” So it comes as a double shock when we find Bolton handing a draft Security Council resolution to the Israeli ambassador, in case the ambassador wants to ask his Prime Minister to appeal directly to Bush or Rice to change President Bush’s policy on Lebanon.

Another example concerns Bolton’s recurring beratement of UN officials for forgetting that they work for the member states. He then describes how one Under-Secretary-General, American appointee Christopher Burnham, surreptitiously showed him budget documents that put the United States at an advantage in budget negotiations. It is hard to see how you can have it both ways. Either UN officials serve all member states equally or the organization is up for grabs to the most powerful state.

But it is the big betrayal that is at the heart of the book. Facing a quagmire in Iraq, a faltering coalition in Afghanistan, a nuclear armed North Korea, the possibility of a nuclear Iran, and a war against terror that was creating more, not fewer, terrorists, Condoleeza Rice convinced President Bush that maybe they should stop digging a bigger hole for American foreign policy. And that meant actually trying diplomacy in North Korea, Iran, and the Middle East.

The losers were John Bolton and his acolytes; the winners were the professionals like Nicholas Burns and Christopher Hill. Faced with defeat and repudiation of the failed policies he advocated, Bolton’s response is familiar and tiresome: the professionals had secretly hijacked the president’s policy; the Secretary of State cares more about appeasing foreigners than protecting American interests.

The moment of reckoning for Bolton and for the President that nominated him is not described in the book, but it took place two months after Bolton left the administration. When the United States and North Korea reached a deal in February 2007 that holds the promise of denuclearizing the country, Bolton tried to scuttle it. Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, “I’m loyal to the original policy.”

What did Bolton achieve at the United Nations? Very little, which was fine by him and fine by the cast of nonaligned Ambassadors who oppose a more effective international organization. I asked one of them in December 2006 if he was happy that Bolton was leaving. He said, “No, we’ve learned how to deal with Mr. Bolton.” When I sought clarification, he said, “Look, Bolton comes in and asks for the sun, the moon, and the stars, and we say ‘no.’ He then says, ‘I told you so’ and leaves. Everybody is happy.”

Which returns us to the question of why anyone would want to wade through these 500 self-serving pages. The best answer: to remind yourself of the stakes of this upcoming election and why the United States needs more old-fashioned diplomacy and less paranoia and arrogance. A McCain presidency might not eschew diplomacy, but in the political free-for-all that is the Republican party, Bolton and his minions are always there, ready to denigrate any agreement or compromise, to sabotage and subvert real diplomacy.

Asked by reporters whether he was loyal to the President, Bolton answered, "I'm loyal to the original policy."

To understand the stakes, consider the little known and even less appreciated record of American negotiations with North Korea since 1994. Between what was called the “Agreed Framework” that brought North Korea back into the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1994 and the end of 2000, the United States and North Korea reached twenty agreements on a wide array of issues. Certain of these agreements foundered in implementation, but an objective assessment shows that some of the noncompliance stemmed from constraints placed by American domestic politics.

The Bolton strategy killed the Agreed Framework, hoping through threats, sanctions, and use of force to end the North Korean regime. Unfortunately for Bolton—fortunately for the rest of us—our ally South Korea and our necessary partner China did not want to deal with the consequences: either a war or a collapsed, deadly state on their borders. In the end, they did not have to because North Korea left the NPT, developed a nuclear bomb, and tested it, bankrupting the Bolton policy and producing the sharp change of strategy that has born fruit in recent North Korean steps to end its nuclear program.

Writing about the successes of American negotiators in bringing North Korea and the United States back together in February 2007, former State Department negotiator Robert Carlin and Stanford Professor Emeritus John Lewis have described why Bolton and his crowd loathe diplomacy is loathed by Bolton and his crowd, and why it is so necessary:

Diplomats strive to put down words all of them can swallow and hopefully their superiors in [the] capital can stomach. Written agreements are difficult to reach. The pain often comes not so much in dealing with the other side but in dealing with your own. Unless you are dictating terms to a defeated enemy, you are going to have to compromise on something, probably several somethings, that will make many people unhappy. That was done for the February 13th agreement, and there is no shame to it.

John Bolton did much damage to American interests in the first Bush administration, but he was implementing the president’s policy. President Bush deserves the blame for putting Bolton in a position to continue hardming American interests even when the overall direction of policy changed.

Given that many countries treated the United States as radioactive in 2005; given that trust and confidence in the United States were at all time lows; given that our record was one of a violator of international law and human rights; President Bush, had he truly wanted to start to move the United States out of the hole he had been so assiduously digging, would have had to send to the United Nations an ambassador with extraordinary listening skills, who could work across various international chasms, rebuild respect for American diplomacy, and, yes, advocate agreements that would make a lot of people unhappy. Someone, in fact, a lot like our present Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, a naturalized citizen originally from Afghanistan. Instead he sent . . . Yosemite Sam.

So back to January 20. A new American president will take office with grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a nuclear-armed North Korea, an Iran headed that way, and crises in Sudan, Israel and Palestine, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Our foreign policy is anathema; our reputation in tatters. Throw in big issues like global warming, non-proliferation, catastrophic terrorism, and a potential pandemic of a deadly new influenza. It is hard to see how any of these crises or issues can be solved without sustained international cooperation and strong international institutions. Take global warming: protecting Americans from its ravages will depend on exercising sovereignty to strike deals with other countries whose domestic behavior threatens us and whose security our domestic behavior threatens. A narrow view of sovereignty as the ability to do as we damned well please will be—quite literally—the death of us all.

Surrender Is not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad
by John Bolton. Threshold Editions, $27.00 (hardcover)

 

With more than a million dollars in committed new funding, CDDRL’s Stanford Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development marches into its fifth year with a sustainable future and also a new name: the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development. The program’s new name recognizes the generous commitments of William Draper III and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills to fund the program and enable it to continue its bold vision.

William Draper made his gift to honor his father, Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr.; Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills made her gift in honor of her late husband, Reuben W. Hills.

Maj. Gen. William H. Draper, Jr. was a chief advisor to Gen. George Marshall and chief diplomatic administrator of the Marshall Plan in Germany, where he worked to rebuild the German economy and sort out issues related to industry and agriculture, including decartelization, trade and commerce, price control, reparations and the restitution of assets removed from invaded countries. After the war he became the first under secretary of the Army and later, a special representative of President Harry Truman, for whom he coordinated American military, political, and economic policies in Europe and effectively served as the first ambassador to NATO.

Reuben W. Hills was a San Francisco philanthropist and president and chairman of the board of Hills Bros. Coffee. He was also vice president and director of the San Francisco Opera and trustee of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. In 1992 he and his wife Ingrid started a nonprofit organization, The Hills Project, to connect inner-city youth with visual and performing arts. The project reaches out to 3,300 children in San Francisco and Berkeley schools, offering field trips to the San Francisco Ballet, museums, artists’ studios, and other cultural institutions as well as visits by artists.

The funding commitments from William Draper III and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills generously secure the future of the Draper Hills Summer Fellows on Democracy and Development program, which brings a group of approximately 30 civic, political, and economic leaders from transitioning countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, and Russia to Stanford every summer. Draper Hills Summer Fellows are former prime ministers and presidential advisors, senators and attorneys general, journalists and civic activists, academics and members of the international development community. Since the program was introduced in 2005, it has typically received more than 800 applications each year.

The generous support of Bill Draper and Ingrid von Mangoldt Hills enables CDDRL to continue to create a community of democratic activists dedicated to building new linkages among democracy, sustainable development, good governance, and the rule of law in transitioning nations.

This conference on Austria and Central Europe Since 1989: Legacies and Future Prospects is the third in the series of biannual international conferences to study the political and cultural landscape of Austria and Central Europe since 1945. Our previous conferences focused on Central Europe during the period of the post-war up to 1989. This year’s conference gathers leading scholars and public figures to discuss the exciting developments of our contemporary era and to offer comments on future prospects for the region.

The conference panels will offer multi-disciplinary views of Central Europe today. Addressing topics from the area stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans, speakers will focus on Austria as well as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the counties of former Yugoslavia. Presentations will explore political, economic, social, and cultural facets of the region’s larger dynamic. Among the milestone changes during this period which will be highlighted will be Austria’s (and other Central European countries’) ascendance to the European Union, the disintegration and reconfiguration of Balkan nations, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and the great mobility of goods and labor through the region and new forms of social and cultural interaction.

The two-day conference will be held at Stanford University on March 5 and 6, 2009. The conference panels will be conducted in workshop format. Papers will be pre-circulated to facilitate round table discussion among participants. Faculty, students, and the interested public are encouraged to attend.

“Should the United States promote democracy around the world?” Stanford alumna Kathleen Brown, a former FSI advisory board member, former Treasurer of the State of California, and current head of public finance (Western region) Goldman Sachs

How are democracy, development, and the rule of law in transitioning societies related? How can they be promoted in the world’s most troubled regions? These were among the provocative issues addressed by faculty from the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, as part of Stanford Day in Los Angeles on January 21, 2006. Panelists included Michael A. McFaul, CDDRL director, associate professor of political science, and senior fellow, the Hoover Institution; Kathryn Stoner, associate director for research and senior research associate at CDDRL; and Larry Diamond, coordinator of CDDRL’s Democracy Program, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, and founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy.

The capstone of a day devoted to “Addressing Global Issues and Sharing Ideas,” the CDDRL panel was attended by more than 850 alumni, Stanford trustees, and supporters as part of the nationwide “Stanford Matters” series. Moderated by Stanford alumna Kathleen Brown, a former FSI Advisory Board member, former treasurer of the State of California, and current head of public finance (western region) Goldman Sachs, the panel looked at some of the toughest trouble spots in the world, including Iraq, Russia, and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

“Should the United States promote democracy around the world?” Brown began by asking Center Director Michael McFaul. “The President of the United States has said that the United States should put the promotion of liberty and freedom around the world as a fundamental policy proposition,” McFaul responded, noting “it is the central policy question in Washington, D.C., today.” It is not a debate between Democrats and Republicans, he continued, but rather between traditional realists, who look at the balance of power, and Wilsonian liberals, who argue that a country’s conduct of global affairs is profoundly affected by whether or not it is a democracy. The American people, McFaul noted, are divided on the issue. In opinion polls, 55 percent of Republicans say we should promote democracy, while 33 percent say no. Among Democrats, only 13 percent answer unequivocally that the United States should promote democracy.

“The President of the United States has said that the United States should put the promotion of liberty and freedom around the world as a fundamental policy proposition, and it is the central policy question in Washington, D.C., today.” CDDRL Director Michael McFaulAsserting that the United States should promote democracy, McFaul offered three major arguments. First is the moral issue—democracies are demonstrably better at constraining the power of the state and providing better lives for their people. Democracies do not commit genocide, nor do they starve their people. Moreover, most people want democracy, opinion polls show. Second are the economic considerations—we benefit from open societies and an open, liberal world trade system, which allows the free flow of goods and capital. Third is the security dimension. Every country that has attacked the United States has been an autocracy; conversely, no democracy has ever attacked us. The transformation of autocracies, including Japan, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, has made us safer.

It is plausible to believe that the benefits of transformation in the Middle East will make us more secure, McFaul argued. “It would decrease the threats these states pose for each other, their need for weapons, and the need for U.S. intervention in the region,” he stated. Democratic transformation would also address a root cause of terrorism, as the vast majority of terrorists come from autocratic societies. There are, however, short-term problems, McFaul pointed out. Free elections could lead to radical regimes less friendly to the United States, as they have in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and now in Palestine. U.S. efforts to promote democracy, he noted, can actually produce resistance.

Having advanced a positive case, McFaul asked FSI colleague Stoner-Weiss, “So, how do we promote democracy?” Stoner-Weiss, also an expert on Russia, said it is instructive to see how Russia has fallen off the path to democracy. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed to be an exciting time, rife with opportunity. “Here was an enemy, a major nuclear superpower, turning to democracy,” she stated. Despite initial U.S. enthusiasm, the outcome has not been a consolidated democracy. Russia, under Vladimir Putin, is becoming a more authoritarian state, a cause for concern because it is a nuclear state and a broken state—with rising rates of HIV and unable to secure its borders or control the flow of illegal drugs.

“So can we promote democracy?” Stoner-Weiss asked. The answer is a qualified yes, from Serbia to Georgia, and the Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan. But Russia has 89 divisions, 130 ethnicities, 11 time zones, and is the largest landmass in the world, she noted. Moving from a totalitarian state to a democracy and an open economy is enormously complicated. As Boris Yeltsin said in retiring as president on December 31, 1999, “What we thought would be easy turned out to be very difficult.”

Where is Russia today? It ranks below Cuba on the human development index; it is moving backward on corruption; and its economic development is poor, with 30 percent of the public living on subsistence income. Under Putin’s regime, private media have come under pressure, television is totally stated controlled, elections for regional leaders have been canceled, troops have remained in Chechnya, and Putin has supported controversial new legislation to curb civil liberties and NGO’s operating in Russia.

“How did Russia come to this?” she asked. In retrospect, the power of the president has been too strong. Initial “irrational exuberance” in the United States and Europe about what we could do has given way to apathy. Under Yeltsin, rule was oligarchical and democracy disorganized. Putin came to office promising a “dictatorship of law” to rid the country of corruption. Yet Russia under Putin, who rose through the KGB and never held elective office, has become far less democratic. He has severely curtailed civil liberties. The economy, dependent on oil and natural gas, is not on a path of sustainable growth.

“What can the United States do?” Stoner-Weiss asked. We have emphasized security over democracy, she pointed out, and invested in personal relations with Russia’s leaders, as opposed to investing in political process and institutions. We do have important opportunities, she noted. Russia chairs the G-8 group of major industrial nations this year, providing major opportunities for consultation, and wants to join the World Trade Organization. The United States should advance an institutional framework to help put Russia back on a path to democracy, a rule of law, and more sustainable growth, she argued.

Diamond, an expert on democratic development and regime change, examined U.S. involvement in the Middle East, noting that it is difficult to be optimistic at present. “Democracy is absolutely vital in the battle against terrorism,” he stated. The United States has to drain the swamp of rotten governments, lack of opportunity for participation and the pervasive indignity of human life. “The dilemma we face,” he pointed out, “is getting from here to there in the intractable Middle East.” There is not a single democracy in the Arab Middle East. This is not because of Islam, but rather the authoritarian nature of regimes in the region and the problem of oil.

“Can we promote democracy under these conditions?” Diamond asked. We need to get smart about it, he urged, noting that success depends on the particular context of each country. “If we want to promote democracy, the first rule is to know the country, its language, culture, history, and divisions,” he stated. We need to know, he continued, “who stands to benefit from a democratic transformation and, conversely, who stands to lose?” Rulers of these countries need to allow the space for freedom, for civic and intellectual pluralism, for open societies and meaningful participation. The danger is that there could be one person, one vote, one time. A second rule is that “academic knowledge and political practice must not be compartmentalized.” “To succeed,” Diamond stated, “we need to marry academic theories with concrete knowledge of these countries’ traditions, cultures, practices, and proclivities.”

In the lively question-and-answer session, panelists were asked, “Under what conditions is it appropriate to use force to promote democracy?” McFaul answered that we cannot invade in the name of democracy—we rebuilt Japan in that name but we did not invade that nation. We invaded Iraq in the name of national security. We know how to invade militarily, but still must learn how to build democracy. Effectiveness in the promotion of democracy, Diamond pointed out, requires the exercise of “soft” power—engagement with other societies, linkages with their schools and associations, and offering aid to democratic organizations around the world. Stoner-Weiss concurred, noting that we have used soft power effectively in some parts of the former Soviet Union, notably the Ukraine. People-to-people exchanges definitely help, she added.

To combat Osama bin Laden and the threat of future attacks in the United States, Diamond stated, we must halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons. North Korea and Iran are two of the most important issues on the global agenda. And we have got to improve governance in the Middle East in order to reduce the chances that the states of the region will breed and harbor stateless terrorists. A democratic Iran is in our interest, McFaul emphasized. Saudi Arabia must change as well—the only issue is whether change occurs with evolution or revolution. Democracy, economic development, and the rule of law, McFaul concluded, are inextricably intertwined.

Asked by alumnus and former Stanford trustee Brad Freeman what needs to happen to re-democratize Russia, McFaul pointed out that inequality has been a major issue in Russia—a small portion of the population controls its wealth and resources and, therefore, the political agenda and the use of law. Russia has been ruled by men and needs the rule of institutions, said Stoner-Weiss. We should insist that Putin allow free and fair elections, freedom of the press, and freedom of political expression, and re-focus efforts on developing the institutions of civil society, she stated.

Reform is a generational issue, McFaul emphasized. We need to educate and motivate the young so they can change their country from within. The Stanford Summer Fellows Program, which brought emerging leaders from 28 transitioning countries to Stanford in the program’s inaugural year of 2005, provides an important venue for upcoming generations to meet experienced U.S. leaders and others fighting to build democracies in their own countries. Such exchanges help secure recognition that building support for democracy, sustainable development, and the rule of law is a transnational issue.

As the world’s most dynamic and rapidly advancing region, the Asia-Pacific has commanded global attention. Business and policy leaders alike have been focused on the rise of China, tensions on the Korean peninsula, Japan’s economic recovery and political assertiveness, globalization and the outsourcing of jobs to South Asia, Indonesia’s multiple transitions, competing forces of nationalism vs. regionalism, and the future of U.S.-Asia relations.

What is the near-term outlook for change in the region? How might developments in the economic, political, or security sphere affect Asia’s expected trajectory? And how will a changing Asia impact the United States? These were among the complex and challenging issues addressed by a faculty panel from the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) and the Eurasia Group at the Asia Society in New York on January 23, 2006.

Moderated by director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies Coit D. Blacker, the Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, the panel included Michael H. Armacost, the Shorenstein Distinguished Fellow, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and former Ambassador to Japan and the Philippines; Donald K. Emmerson, the director of the Southeast Asia Forum at Shorenstein APARC and noted expert on Indonesia; Harry Harding, the director of research and analysis at the Eurasia Group in New York and University Professor of International Affairs at George Washington University; and Gi-Wook Shin, the director of Shorenstein APARC, founding director of the Korean Studies Program, and associate professor of sociology at Stanford.

Q. COIT BLACKER: WHAT IS THE MOST DIFFICULT, CHALLENGING ISSUE YOU SEE?

A. HARRY HARDING:

In China, we are seeing a darker side of the Chinese success story. Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, China's role in international affairs is on the rise, and China is an increasingly responsible stakeholder in an open, liberal global economy. Yet, the world is now seeing the problems China's reform program has failed to resolve. China's new five-year plan seeks to address a number of these issues, providing a plan for sustainable economic development that is environmentally
responsible and addresses chronic pollution problems, for a harmonious society that
addresses inequalities and inadequacies in the provision of medical care, insurance
and pension systems, and for continuing technological innovation, as part of China's
quest to become an exporter of capital and technology.

A. GI-WOOK SHIN:

The world should be deeply concerned about developments on the Korean peninsula. Two pressing issues are U.S. relations with South Korea and the nuclear crisis with the North. It is not clear when or whether we will see a solution. Time may be against the United States on the issue. China and South Korea are not necessarily willing to follow the U.S. approach; without their cooperation, it is difficult to secure a successful solution. The younger generation emerging in South Korea does not see North Korea as a threat. Our own relations with South Korea are strained and we are viewed as preoccupied with Iraq and Iran, as North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons.

A. DONALD EMMERSON:

In Southeast Asia, a key problem is uneven development, both in and between the political and economic spheres. Potentially volatile contrasts are seen throughout the region. Vietnam is growing at 8 percent per year, but will it become a democracy? It has not yet. Indonesia has shifted to democracy, but absent faster economic growth, that political gain could erode. Indonesia's media are among the freest in the region;
multiple peaceful elections have been held--a remarkable achievement--and nearly all Islamists shun terrorism. Older Indonesians remember, however, that the economy
performed well without democracy under President Suharto. Nowadays, corruption
scandals break out almost daily, nationalist and Islamist feelings are strong, and the
climate is not especially favorable to foreign investment. While Burma's economy
lags, its repressive polity embarrasses the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN). How long can the generals in Rangoon hold on? Disparities are also
international: dire poverty marks Laos and Cambodia, for example, while the
Malaysian and Thai economies have done well.

A. MICHAEL ARMACOST:

Japan is a "good news/bad news" story. The good news is that Japan has found a new security niche since the end of the Cold War. Previously, when a security problem loomed "over the horizon," they expected us to take care of it while, if prodded, they increased their financial support for U.S. troops stationed in Japan. During the first post-Cold War conflict in the Persian Gulf, Japan had neither the political consensus nor the legal framework to permit a sharing of the risks, as well as the costs, and this cost them politically. Since then, they have passed legislation that permits them to participate in U.N. peacekeeping activities, contribute noncombat, logistic, and other services to "coalition of the willing" operations, and even dispatch troops to join reconstruction activities in Iraq. Clearly, their more ambitious role is helping to make the U.S.-Japan alliance more balanced and more global.The bad news is a reemergence of stronger nationalist sentiment in Japan and more generally in Northeast Asia. In part this is attributable to the collapse of the Left in Japanese politics since the mid-1990s. This has left the Conservatives more dominant, and they are less apologetic about Japanese conduct in the 1930s and 1940s, more inclined to regard North Korea and China as potential threats, more assertive with respect to territorial issues, less sensitive to their neighbors’ reactions to Prime Ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and more eager to be regarded as a “normal” nation. Many Asians see the United States as pushing Japan to take on a more active security role and, in the context of rising Japanese nationalism, are less inclined to view the U.S.-Japan alliance as a source of reassurance.

Q. COIT BLACKER: WHAT ARE THE COMPETING AND CONFLICTING TENSIONS BETWEEN REGIONALISM AND NATIONALISM?

A. HARRY HARDING:

In China, there has been a resurgence of nationalism over the past 10 to 15 years. Since the end of the Maoist era and the beginning of the reform movement, the leadership has embraced nationalism as a source of legitimacy, but this is a double-edged sword. It places demands on the government to stand up for China’s face, rights, and prestige in international affairs, especially vis-à-vis Japan, the United States, and Taiwan, at times pushing Beijing in directions it does not wish to go.

A. DONALD EMMERSON:

In Indonesia, it is important to distinguish between inward and outward nationalism. Outward nationalism was manifest in Sukarno’s policy of confrontation with Malaysia. ASEAN is predicated on inward nationalism and outward cooperation. Nationalist feelings can be used inwardly to motivate reform and spur development. But there are potential drawbacks. Take the aftermath of the conflict in Aceh. The former rebels want their own political party. Hard-line nationalists in the Indonesian parliament, however, are loath to go along, and that could jeopardize stability in a province already exhausted by civil war and damaged by the 2004 tsunami.

A. GI-WOOK SHIN:

Korea is a nation of some 70 million people, large by European standards, but small in comparison to the giants of Asia, especially China, India, and Russia, making Korea very concerned about what other countries are doing and saying. Korea is currently undergoing an identity crisis. Until the 1980s, the United States was seen as a “savior” from Communism and avid supporter of modernization. Since then, many Koreans have come to challenge this view, arguing that the United States supported Korean dictatorship. Koreans are also rethinking their attitudes toward North Korea, seeing Koreans as belonging to one nation. This shift has contributed to negative attitudes toward both the United States and Japan

Q. COIT BLACKER: GENERATIONAL CHANGE IS ALSO A MAJOR ISSUE IN CHINA, THE DPRK, AND JAPAN. WHAT DOES IT BODE FOR POLITICAL CHANGE?

A. MICHAEL ARMACOST:

Japan has had a “one and a half party system” for more than half a century. Yet the Liberal Democratic Party has proven to be remarkably adaptive, cleverly co-opting many issues that might have been exploited by the opposition parties. It is clearly a democratic country, but its politics have not been as competitive as many other democracies. As for the United States, we have promoted lively democracies throughout the region. But we should not suppose that more democratic regimes will necessarily define their national interests in ways that are invariably compatible with ours. In both Taiwan and South Korea, to the contrary, democratic leaderships have emerged which pursue security policies that display less sensitivity to Washington’s concerns, and certainly exhibit little deference to U.S. leadership.

A. GI-WOOK SHIN:

In both North and South Korea, a marked evolution is under way. In the South, many new members of the parliament have little knowledge of the United States. Promoting mutual understanding is urgently needed on both sides. In the North, the big question is who will succeed Kim Jong Il—an issue with enormous implications for the United States.

A. DONALD EMMERSON:

Indonesians have a noisy, brawling democracy. What they don’t have is the rule of law. Judges can be bought, and laws are inconsistently applied. The Philippines enjoyed democracy for most of the 20th century, but poverty and underdevelopment remain rife, leading many Filipinos to ask just where democracy has taken their nation.

A. HARRY HARDING:

China has seen a significant increase in rural protests. There has been an increase in both the number of incidents and the level of violence. People are being killed, not just in rural areas, but also in major cities like Chengdu. We are seeing a new wave of political participation by professional groups, such as lawyers and journalists, galvanizing public support on such issues as environmental protection, failure to pay pensions, confiscation of land, and corruption. A new generation has been exposed to the Internet, the outside world, and greater choice, but it is not yet clear at what point they will demand greater choice in their own political life.

 

WHAT WOULD YOU ADVISE THE PRESIDENT ON U.S. POLICY TOWARDS ASIA?

In the lively question-and-answer session, panelists were asked, "Given the chance to talk to the U.S. President about change and improvement in U.S.-Asia policy, what would you say?"

MICHAEL ARMACOST: I am struck by a mismatch between our interests and our strategy in Asia. In some respects our Asia policy has become something of an adjunct of our policy toward the Middle East-where we confront perhaps more urgent, if not more consequential, concerns. Asia is still the most dynamic economic zone in the world; it is the region in which the most significant new powers are emerging; and it is where the interests of the Great Powers intersect most directly. Also, it is an area where profound change is taking place swiftly. We are adapting our policies in Asia to accommodate current preoccupations in the Muslim world, rather than with an eye to preserving our power and relevance in Asia.

HARRY HARDING: It is striking how much Asian nations still want us around- as an offshore balancer and a source of economic growth. Yet they want us to understand the priorities on their agenda as well as our own. We are seen as obsessed with terrorism and China. We should exhibit more support for Asian institution building, as we have with the European Union. We also need to get our own economic act together-promoting education, stimulating scientific research and technological innovation, and reducing our budget deficits-and quit resting on past laurels. Requiring Japan to accept U.S. beef exports and then sending them meat that did not meet the agreed-upon standards has been a setback for our relations, since the Japanese public regards the safety of its food supply as critically important.

DONALD EMMERSON: Most opinion-makers in Southeast Asia are tired of Washington's preoccupation with terrorism. To be effective in the region, we must deal-and appear to be dealing-with a wider array of economic, social, and political issues, and not just bilaterally. The United States is absent at the creation of East Asian regionalism. For various reasons, we were not invited to participate in the recent East Asia Summit. Meanwhile, China's "smile diplomacy" has yielded 27 different frameworks of cooperation between that country and ASEAN. We need to be more, and more broadly, engaged.

MICHAEL ARMACOST: The establishment of today's European community began with the historic reconciliation between France and Germany. I doubt that a viable Asian community can be created without a comparable accommodation between China and Japan. Some observers believe that current tensions between Tokyo and Beijing are advantageous insofar as they facilitate closer defense cooperation between the United States and Japan. I do not share that view. A drift toward Sino-Japanese strategic rivalry would complicate our choices as well as theirs, and I hope we can find ways of attenuating current tensions.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) continues a multiyear study of the challenges facing European Union integration and global crisis intervention. The increasingly complex demands straining Europe and its trans-Atlantic relations—labor migration, spending on welfare economies, globalized cultures, and threats of terrorism, coupled with Europe’s struggle to ratify a single constitution—underline the need to measure prospects for unification and the EU’s ability to function as a coordinated international actor. This year, FCE is broadening its work to assess the role an integrated EU can play in addressing the world’s most troubling crises.

EU INTEGRATION: THE CASE OF TURKEY

The forum has explored the question of Turkey’s EU membership with Stanford scholars, European leaders, and the public. In spring 2006, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer and author Christopher Hitchens offered candid analyses of EU expansion. Hitchens challenged commonplace descriptions of “Christian Old Europe” antagonized by “Islamicized” secular Turkey. Europe and Islam are not newly in contention, he said, but are playing out a centuries-old relationship grounded in the European and Ottoman empires in the Eastern Mediterranean. For Hitchens, the portrait of clashing civilizations obscures the crises facing minority Kurdish and neighboring societies whose survival is at stake in EU expansion.

Delivering the Payne lecture, Fischer noted the dilemma of seeking to achieve popular ratification of a European constitution at a time when public attention is galvanized by the Turkish candidacy. Fischer rejected common comparisons between European state rulings on Islamic traditions and models of U.S. multiculturalism. Fischer found admirable aspects of the U.S. inspiration but questioned its relevance for mediating myriad EU interests. For Fischer, the EU as a supra-state actor holds the promise to democratize conflict resolution in the deliberative model of the European Parliament and legitimate its role as a peacekeeping actor.

EU INTERVENTION: CRISIS MANAGMENT AND COMBATING INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM

The forum’s new focus on EU crisis intervention began with addresses by Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s Security Services (MI-6), and Alain Bauer, former vice president of the University of Paris–Sorbonne and director of France’s National Institute for Higher Studies in Security, who discussed EU counterintelligence and international early-warning protocols. Greek Ambassador Alexandros Mallias spoke on the Eastern Mediterranean context that frames the Turkish candidacy, the economics of EU integration, and prospects for responding to the tensions in Cyprus. Austrian Ambassador Eva Novotny spoke on Austria’s immediate past EU presidency, evaluating the impact of the EU Council’s intervention in the Israel-Lebanon crisis. Professor Josef Joffe spoke on his new book, Uberpower: The Imperial Temptation of America, and the prospects for U.S.–EU interaction in global affairs.

The forum’s fall series brought public acclaim when Daniel Cohn-Bendit, co-president of the European Parliament Greens/New Alliance Parties, delivered FCE’s 2006–2007 “Europe Now” address, cosponsored by Stanford’s Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment. Speaking to an overflow crowd, and meeting separately with faculty and researchers, Cohn-Bendit focused his public remarks on European Integration: Society, Politics, and Islam. A European Parliament leader, Cohn-Bendit spoke on his party’s proposal to deploy Joschka Fischer as the EU representative to Middle East peace negotiations. Expanding and integrating the EU, Cohn-Bendit argued, is the most reasonable strategy for strengthening Europe’s role in international relations and crisis intervention.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe continues to deepen scholarly and public understanding of the EU promise to achieve democratic governance, economic growth, security, and social integration among its member states and in its foreign engagements.