The recent run-up in global food prices is wreaking well-documented havoc throughout the developing world. As prices for major food staples have doubled or tripled over the past 12–18 months, food riots have broken out in more than a dozen countries, and the president of the World Bank has suggested that the rise in food prices will push 100 million people below the poverty line, undoing decades of economic growth almost overnight. FSE’s Peter Timmer calculates that high rice prices alone could cause the premature death of 10 million people in Asia. It is difficult to imagine an issue of more pressing global importance today.

Ongoing FSE research is focusing on which agricultural adaptations should be prioritized, for what crops, and in what locations.Getting prices down out of the stratosphere of course involves understanding what got them there in the first place. And while there is much disagreement over the primacy of different factors, most analysis seems to agree on three important contributors. The first is the recent expansion of biofuels production in the United States and the European Union, which has diverted corn and other grains from traditional feed and food markets into the production of fuel. Turning grain into fuel has been made increasingly profitable by the high and rising price of oil — the second factor in rising food prices — which, in addition to increasing demand for petroleum alternatives, has raised the production costs of farmers, raising transport costs and increasing the price of farm inputs like diesel and fertilizer. Finally, the agricultural and trade policies of various governments around the world have added to the problem, particularly as the nervous governments of a few key Asian rice exporters have attempted to stabilize domestic food supplies by restricting exports, helping send rice prices through the roof.

As these factors have come together in recent months, underwritten by longer-run trends of rising incomes and food demand in the developing world, many analysts have reached for the appealing metaphor of the “perfect storm,” invoking a situation in which everything that could have gone wrong did. But are things really as bad as they might have been?

Perhaps not. The recent spike in food prices saw only a half-hearted contribution from one of the main culprits in past short-run price swings: weather. A bad weather year that harms production in important producing regions often sends prices soaring. One of the best examples is an extreme el Nino event of the sort that occurs roughly once a decade, during which drought cripples rice production throughout much of Southeast Asia. Earlier work by FSE researchers showed that global rice prices can rise 50 percent or more as a result of extreme el Nino events.

The recent food price spikes were certainly not without influence from the weather. For instance, the much-cited long-run drought in Australia — traditionally a large wheat exporter — certainly has put upward pressure on global wheat prices, and there were modest weather-related declines in yield in other parts of the world (such as Russia and Ukraine). On the whole, however, supply disruptions over the past few years have been minor, and favorable weather is expected to result in record harvests for many large food- and feedproducing nations in coming months. But agricultural markets have hardly responded to this good news and prices remain at or near all time highs.

What then might a perfect storm actually look like? Add the effects of climate change to the current mix of biofuels, high oil prices, and trade restrictions, and the recent rise in food prices could be a small measure of things to come. Research is expanding rapidly in the field of climate change impacts, and researchers at FSE are at the forefront of understanding the implications of climate change for humanity’s ability to feed itself. The conventional wisdom has long been that a modest amount of climate change could actually be beneficial for global agriculture, with warming temperatures perhaps lengthening the growing season and expanding the areas in which we can grow crops. But recent work by researchers at FSE and others suggests that climate change could hurt agriculture immediately and, in some places, severely.

The rise in food prices will push 100 million people below the poverty line, undoing decades of economic growth almost overnight. High rice prices alone could cause the premature death of 10 million people in Asia.In a paper published in the January issue of the journal Science, an FSE research team led by David Lobell examined the likely effects of climate change on agriculture throughout the developing world. Combining data from a suite of climate models that simulate future changes in rainfall and precipitation with a host of historical data on climate and agricultural production, Lobell and colleagues found that by 2030 the production of staple crops in some of the poorest parts of sub- Saharan Africa could decline by 30 percent or more in the absence of adaptation, with somewhat smaller declines predicted for much of South and Southeast Asia. Production declines of this magnitude represent monumental declines in welfare for some of the poorest people on earth, the same populations currently being buffeted by high food prices.

Unfortunately, new evidence also questions the ability of higher latitude countries such as the United States to cover the production shortfalls in the developing world. Again contrary to perceived wisdom, this new work shows that climate change could immediately harm agriculture in this country and other large exporting regions, further constraining global supply. Such a climate-induced supply shock, in the context of the recent developments on the demand side for food, could give us a true perfect storm for high food prices. Recent price spikes might only pale in comparison.

Given the imminence and magnitude of the production decline possible and the attendant possibilities for rising food prices and hunger throughout the developing world, FSE researchers are turning from predicting impacts to assessing adaptation options. In particular, ongoing research is focusing on which agricultural adaptations should be prioritized, for what crops, and in what locations. To that end, FSE researchers recently received a $350,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation — one of the most important funders of agricultural research — to help the foundation prioritize agricultural investments in sub-Saharan Africa in the face of climate change. With the potentially severe impacts of climate change already on our doorstep, there is little time to lose.

Clear evidence suggests the importance of health service provider payment incentives for achieving efficiency, equal access, and quality, including attention to primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. “Pay for performance” may be on the cusp of significant expansion in Asia, and reform away from fee-for-service has been underway for several years in several economies. Yet despite the policy relevance, the evidence base for evaluating payment reforms in Asia is still very limited.

China in particular has been undertaking significant reforms to its health care system in both rural and urban areas. With the expansion of insurance coverage and need to resolve incentive problems like “supporting medical care through drug sales,” there is an urgent need for evaluating alternative ways of paying health service providers. Evidence from policy reforms in specific regions of China, as well as other economies of the Asia-Pacific, can provide valuable evidence to help inform policy decisions about how to align provider incentives with policy goals of quality care at reasonable cost.

To illuminate these questions, the Asia Health Policy Program and several collaborating institutions are planning to convene a conference on health care provider payment incentives on November 7-8, 2008 in Beijing. The conference will highlight and seek to distill “best-practice” lessons from rigorous and policy-relevant evaluations of recent reforms in China and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific.

The organizing committee – including health economists from Shorenstein APARC, Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Seoul National University – reviewed submissions in June 2008 and accepted sixteen. The conference papers cover payment issues in Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Tajikistan, the Philippines, and the US, and the disciplines of economics, health services research/health policy, public health, medicine, and ethics. Topics include institutionalized informal payments; the impact of global budget policies on high-cost patients; public-private partnerships; public-sector physicians owning private pharmacies; evidence-informed case payment rates; payment and hospital quality; bonuses and physician satisfaction; physician prescription choice between brand-name and generic drugs; and differences in pharmaceutical utilization across insurance plans that pay providers differently (fee-for-service versus capitation).

Policymakers from China’s National Development and Reform Commission and Ministry of Health will also speak at the conference. Selected research papers will be published through the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center either in a special volume or in a special issue of an English-language health policy journal.

In their column on National Review on June 24, 2008 called “10 Concerns about Barack Obama,” William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn, begin their list of attacks on Senator Obama by writing that “Barack Obama’s foreign policy is dangerous, naïve, and betrays a profound misreading of history.” In arguing against any engagement with Iran, William Bennett and Seth Leibsohn point out that “Ronald Reagan met with no Soviet leader during the entirely of his first term in office.”

This statement is factually correct. And there was most certainly a big debate within Reagan Administration about whether to talk with the leaders of the Evil Empire. However, Bennett and Leibsohn imply in their piece that this debate was only resolved after the Soviet Union met some preconditions to talks and changed internally, that is after, as they write, that Reagan “was assured Gorbachev was a different kind of leader – after Perestroika, not before.”

In fact, the debate about engaging the evil empire was resolved three years before Reagan met with Gorbachev. The debate and the resolution in favor of talking to the leaders of the evil empires is meticulously chronicled in George’s Shultz’s memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: Diplomacy , Power, and the Victory of the American Ideal (1993). Just the title of Chapter 25, "Realistic Reengagement with the Soviets," underscores how misleading the Bennett and Leibsohn rendition of history is.

When they first came to Washington, many foreign policy advisors within Reagan administration advocated the Bennett and Leibsohn position and did not want to have any contact with the Soviets, even though every American president since the recognition to the USSR in 1933 had met with their Soviet counterparts. When George Shultz became Secretary of State in 1982, he began to challenge this policy of disengagement, arguing that the United States needed to engage both the Soviet leaders but also Soviet society. As he writes in his memoirs about the start of the New Year in 1983, “I wanted to develop a strategy for a new start with the Soviet Union. I felt we had to try to turn the relationship around: away from confrontation and towards real problem solving.” (p. 159) Shultz is writing about his thinking two years before Gorbachev comes to power.

Shultz’s idea for a turn towards engagement met resistance in the Reagan administration. Again, from his memoirs: “I knew the president’s White House staff would oppose such engagement. There was lots of powerful opposition around town to any efforts to bridge the chasm separating Moscow and Washington.” After listing the opponents to direct negotiations, which included Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and CIA head Bill Casey, Shultz affirmed that “I was determined not to hang back from engaging the Soviets because of fears that the ‘Soviet wins negotiations’.” (p. 159). Sound familiar? Instead the word, Iranians, for Soviets and you capture the essence of the debate today.

Shultz, as we all know, won this debate, convincing Reagan about the need to start talking directly to the Soviets (again well before Gorbachev came on to the scene). A subtitle of Chapter 12 of Shultz’s memoir is A President Ready to Engage. (p. 163). In early February 1983, Shultz even floats the idea of meeting directly with Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin for a private chat, to which Reagan responds, “Great”, and then adds “I don’t intend to engage in a detailed exchange with Dobrynin , but I do tell him that if Andropov is wiling to do business, so am I” (p. 164). (Remember Andropov died in 1983 and his successor, Chernenko, also did not serve long as the Soviet leader before dying in 1985. from 1983-1985, there was a real crisis of leadership inside the Soviet Union, a factor that contributed to the lack of direct talks at the highest levels). Speed forwarding again to today’s Iran debate, which presidential candidate sounds more like Reagan?

Shultz’s approach toward engaging the Soviets offers another profound lesson for today’s Iran debate. Shultz never let the negotiations focus just on arms control. That played o the Soviet’s strengths. Rather, he insisted on an expanded agenda that always included human rights and democracy. Again, from his memoirs, "We were determined not to allow the Soviets to focus our negotiations simply on matters of arms control. So we continuously adhered to a broad agenda: human rights, regional issues, arms control, and bilateral issues." (p.267). This same approach is needed for dealing with the Iranian regime today.

Finally, Shultz never saw negotiations or expanding contacts with Soviets and Americans as a concession to Moscow or a signal of legitimacy for the communist dictatorship. In the debate about opening consulates in both countries – a move that some hardliners at the time saw as a sign of weakness – Shultz firmly supported the idea as a change in the American national interest. As he quotes from a memorandum that he wrote in 1982, "I believe the next step on our part should be to propose the negotiation of a new U.S.-Soviet cultural agreement and the opening of U.S. and Soviet consulates in Kiev and New York...Both of these proposals will sound good to the Soviets, but are unambiguously in our interest when examined from a hard headed American viewpoint."(p. 275). Exactly the same could be said about Iran today.

Historical analogies can only go far. Many dimensions of U.S.-Iranians relations differ radically from Cold War relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But when observers do roll them out, getting the facts right should be precondition to the substantive date about their relevance.

What was Yongbyon like? How sophisticated was the plant?

It reminded me of the the Russian closed nuclear cities that you used to see.

As we approached Yongbyon there was one set of guard buildings and then lots of concrete-style guard buildings where plant workers lived.

The single greatest impression I had as I arrived was that its a really huge place. A significant facility.

Then we were shown the main building that contains the nuclear reactor. Again its a really huge place.

Inside, the buildings reminded me very much of ones built in a Soviet style.

The equipment inside seemed to be functioning well, but everything seemed very outdated, although it was adequate to get the job done.

However, the North Korean scientists themselves were very efficient at what they did - they were very impressive.

What did the plant tell you about how nuclear material was handled?

The reactor itself seemed safe and, as I said, the staff were very competetent.

In the spent fuel pool building, however, there was significant contamination - that building did not meet Western safety standards.

One has to be extremely careful when handling radioactive material - its a very tricky process - and they were not up to modern safety standards [in that particular building].

Do you think Yongbyon was built entirely by North Korea, as the government claims, or do you think there was outside help?

There was no question in my mind that the central facilities at the plant were built by North Korea.

They had significant help in installation and training from the Soviet Union.

But in the 1970's, the North Koreans decided to go solo.

They are masters at reverse engineering and the technology looked very much like nuclear facilities found in the early UK nuclear programme.

I spoke with the scientists there and there was no doubt in my mind that they understood the entire process.

Were you allowed to see everything you wanted to see on your visit?

I've been to North Korea five times and Yongbyon three times.

The first time I visited Yongbyon, in 2004, they had carefully scripted my visit.

They allowed me to physically handle the plutonium in a test tube, but they would not allow me into the laboratory itself.

But during my visits in 2007 and 2008 I was allowed to take pictures inside the building with my own camera.

By the time of the second visit they had also improved safety standards and I was required to wear a contamination suit.

Do you believe North Korea is serious about abandoning its nuclear programme?

I believe they are serious about abandoning plutonium production - they are serious and sincere.

However, they still have between 30 and 40 kilograms of plutonium that could be used to make weapons.

Getting rid of that will take some time.

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education has taken on world religions, Russian leaders and Aztec history. Now it's boiling down the glory and controversy of China's history, culture and politics in time for the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Helping to make the scholarship and research at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies accessible to younger learners, the program, known by its acronym "SPICE," has developed a multimedia curriculum for middle and high school students that introduces them to the sights and sounds of China through the prism of the upcoming Olympics.

"The Road to Beijing" includes a documentary featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma and musicians from the Silk Road Ensemble discussing how they blend traditional Chinese and classical music, and a documentary developed by NBC that showcases Olympians planning to compete in the August games. The package also offers an interactive website and professional development material for teachers.

The curriculum can be tailored for use in a single day or during several classes.

"We want to make Stanford faculty's scholarship accessible to a younger and broader audience," said Gary Mukai, director of SPICE. "We have a number of China specialists on campus, and we want to spread the knowledge of Stanford to other schools."

SPICE has been offering curriculum packages to middle and high school students for the past three decades, covering topics such as Islam, the span of Soviet and Russian leaders from Lenin to Putin and the political geography of Europe.

While "The Road to Beijing" uses the Olympics to hook student interest, it also offers lessons on the political, social and environmental criticism facing China.

"That's one of the richest parts of the curriculum," Mukai said. "It engages students and gets them to think about critical issues."

The teacher guides and documentaries are free on the SPICE website, http://spice.stanford.edu. More written materials, CD-ROM PowerPoints and DVDs of the documentaries cost $34.95.

Just look at the number of construction cranes around you and you’ll immediately know that you have landed in a petrostate. What’s special about the Caspian oil giant Kazakhstan is the fact that there are two types of cranes—the idle ones and the busy ones. This becomes nowhere more apparent than in the country’s new capital Astana. The idle cranes stand on private construction sites and the busy ones on public construction sites.

Kazakhstan is probably one of the countries worst hit by the global credit crunch. After years of aggressive borrowing on international markets Kazakh banks have had to pull the plug on many domestic projects after their own cash stream evaporated and it became clear that they would need to settle most of the $14 billion in scheduled principal repayments on external debt this year. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had been warning about the unsustainability of the ever growing debt ratio for the past two years, but to little avail. Growth rates above 9 percent for the past seven years and great future prospects thanks to ever expanding oil production earned Kazakhstan a credit rating of “stable” from Standard & Poor's rating agency. Now, the bubble burst, the S&P rating turned “negative”, and the private cranes stopped.

The busy cranes—in contrast—run 24/7. No effort is spared to make sure that the fancy new government building, the pavement, the flower-adorned square will be finished in time for the highlight of the year: the birthday of both the President Nursultan Nazarbayev and the capital on July 6 (their 68^th and 10^th, respectively). This simultaneity is no coincident. Astana is largely Nazarbayev’s creation. It was him who anointed the city in the middle-of-nowhere the new capital of the young Republic, who chose its no-nonsense name (“Astana” literally means “capital”), and who caused its population to triple. The upcoming celebrations almost turned into a Nursultan & Nursultan party. If Mr. Sat Tokpakbaye and his fellow parliamentarians had gotten their way, the capital would yet again have undergone a name change—this time to honor its creator more explicitly by endowing it with the President’s first name (there is already an oil field named after him). But out in his modesty, the President declined. With his proposal Mr. Tokpakbayev, achieved the near-impossible: to distinguish himself by loyalty in a Parliament whose members all come from the same Nur-Otan party.

The idle and the busy cranes both stand for different answers to petrostates’ most burning policy question—how to best use the ballooning governmental revenues from the thriving oil and gas sector. Save or spend?—is the 500 billion dollar question (to take the value OPEC earned from net oil export in 2007). Kazakhstan, like 23 other oil and gas producing countries, followed the IMF’s advice and established an oil fund with the goal of sterilizing, stabilizing, and saving governmental oil revenues. The so-called National Fund of the Republic of Kazakhstan (NFRK) has accumulated more than $26 billion in the eight years since inception, and the total value of all oil-related funds around the world is estimated to surpass the astronomical sum of $2.300 trillion. While the theoretical logic underlying the creation of oil funds is compelling, their actual track record in achieving macroeconomic stability and fair intergenerational income distribution is more mixed. As a number of recent studies demonstrate (e.g. Shabsigh and Ilahi 2007; Usui 2007), oil funds are no substitute for the strengthening of all institutions involved in the revenue management and budgeting process. Strong expenditure and deficit control mechanisms are indispensable because such richly endowed funds make it easier for the government to borrow money on international financial markets whereby the fund acts--explicitly or implicitly—as a collateral, which in turn undermines the fiscal prudence that the fund was meant to ensure in the first place. More indirectly, the accumulation of large sums of money creates a moral hazard problem also with respect to private sector spending. The temptation is huge for private (and state-owned) companies to take overly risky decisions in the hope that the oil fund will bail them out in case their speculations turn sour. When oil fund assets correspond to more than a quarter of the country’s GDP—as it is the case in Kazakhstan—this temptation is hard to resist. Recent demands by Kazakh banks to dip into the NFRK for alleviating their liquidity problems provide just one case in point, and the national oil company KazMunaiGas may soon follow suit.

However, spending, rather than saving, does not provide a panacea either and is fraught with its very own set of problems.

First, governments of oil rich countries faces a challenge similar to that of rich parents who want to raise their children to become productive members of society. As the US billionaire investor Warren Buffet was once quoted saying: “a very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything but not enough to do nothing.” Political scientists refer to this concern as the risk of a growing “rentier mentality” (Beblawi 1990), i.e. the tendency of citizens in petrostates to expect the government to solve all their problems rather than relying on their own initiative. The resulting societal dependency may actually suit governments very well since who will bite the hand that feeds him/her? Innovation and entrepreneurship are undermined and undemocratic structures perpetuated. Second, pro-cyclical spending of highly volatile oil revenues results in a series of negative macroeconomic consequences ranging from soaring inflation, exchange rate appreciation, and a further accentuation of the crowding-out of private investments. Finally, a massive explosion in government revenues (e.g. the newly introduced oil export tariff alone is expected to add another $1.5 billion per year) makes it close to impossible for the governmental apparatus to identify and supervise a sufficient number of new spending projects with a satisfactory social return. The floodgates are wide open to white elephant projects, mismanagement, and corruption.

The Kazakh government is acutely aware of this dilemma. Like all other oil producing nations around the world, Kazakhstan is desperately trying to navigate safely between Scylla (saving) and Charybdis (saving). As a possible solution to this dilemma a number of scholars and activists are now proposing the direct distribution of oil revenues to all citizens (and thus the ultimate owners of a country’s natural resource endowment), thereby empowering them to decide for themselves how they want to spend the monetized share of their subsoil assets.

The only real world examples of direct distribution arrangements can be found in the US state Alaska and the Canadian province Alberta. This option has also been proposed for Nigeria (Sala-i-Martin and Subramanian 2003), Iraq (Birdsall and Subramanian 2003; Palley 2003; Sandbu 2006), and Kazakhstan (Makmutova 2008).

While direct distribution arrangements may mitigate some of the problems highlighted above, they have to be greeted with some degree of caution. High levels of corruption and patronage-driven politics not only undermine the effectiveness of top-down development projects but can also jeopardize the fair distribution of oil revenues. Furthermore, even if every entitled citizen does receive his or her share of oil revenues, the long-term impact on a country’s economic development may be small or possibly even negative because of increased inflation and spending on unproductive goods and services imported from abroad. These considerations are not of particular relevance in the two existing examples of direct distribution of oil revenues. Alaska and Alberta both enjoy a relatively good record in fighting corruption and in observing the rule of law. They are both part of a larger, highly developed economy which helps to mitigate inflationary pressure and the risk that citizens will spend most of their additional income on goods imported from abroad. But the picture looks very different in most other oil dependent countries.

One possibility for addressing the risk that directly distributed oil revenues will be spent unproductively is to combine the direct distribution scheme with certain conditions that are intended to encourage citizens to invest in ways that boost their own productivity. This approach has so far not been discussed in academic or policy circles, but the conditional distribution of oil revenues (CDOR) offers the potentials of marrying the merits of two programs that are generally considered to be successful, namely the direct distribution of oil revenues and conditional cash transfer programs employed throughout the world to fight poverty in a more targeted and bottom-up fashion. A whole range of different design options are compatible with this overarching concept. CDOR schemes do not have to adopt the exclusive pro-poor focus of conditional cash transfer programs. In fact, both in Alaska and in Alberta oil revenues are deliberately distributed in an income-blind manner, staying true to the logic that citizens are entitled to a share of oil revenues in their capacity as the ultimate owners of these resources. Also in contrast to most existing conditional cash transfer programs (e.g. Oportunidades in Mexico), the conditions attached to the direct distribution of oil revenues would probably be primarily linked to the use of these revenues rather than some pre-qualifying behavior (e.g. taking infants to regular health check-ups). Eligible spending areas would be selected based on their potential to maximize productivity gains and could include education, health, energy efficiency, start-up capital for small enterprises. Additional design options worth examining include the saving and pooling of CDOR money, which would allow citizens to realize a medium to larger scale common project within the approved spending priorities. For instance, the most promising strategy for greater productivity in Kazakhstan’s agricultural sector lies in the creation of larger units (co-operatives, publicly traded agricultural complexes), and specific incentives may therefore be built into the CDOR scheme to promote such a move away from subsistence farming.

The conditional distribution of oil revenues under any of these design options presents a promising discussion platform for a new initiative the World Bank announced in April 2008—tentatively labeled EITI++. This initiative is meant to help resource rich countries to “manage and transform their natural resource wealth into long-term economic growth that spreads the benefits more fairly among their people”, by focusing not only on the transfer of oil revenues from companies to governments (as does the “original” Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) of 2002) but also on the generation, management, and distribution of oil revenues. The transparency mechanism of double disclosure pioneered by EITI could thereby be used to ensure that all citizens receive the share of oil revenues they are entitled to. Transparency could be further enhanced by tools currently developed by the Google Foundation’s Inform & Empower program.

The implementation of the CDOR scheme could build directly upon the experience gained under conditional cash transfer schemes, including the scientific testing of its effectiveness in a randomized experiment setting. The bottom-up development philosophy underlying the conditional distribution of oil revenues ties nicely in with other approaches to strengthen the consumers of public goods and services that have gained currency over the past decade (e.g. vouchers for health and education services).

With this sketch of a conditional distribution of oil revenues scheme in my pocket (and and unconditional love for the kicking baby in my belly) I navigated my way through yet another construction site to see Mr. Kuandyk Bishimbayev, one of Kazakhstan’s young and rising stars (now the head of the so-called “Division of Socio-Economic Monitoring” within the Presidential Administration). During our meeting I got the impression that my enthusiasm for this novel approach to oil revenue management proved contagious, and since my return to Stanford I have rolled out my networking machinery to spread the virus among my academic colleagues. The time is certainly ripe. With oil prices set to remain high for the foreseeable future Kazakhstan and all other petrostates cannot afford to miss this historic opportunity to promote the diversification of their economies and to create the foundation for a future where oil may lose its dominant position to alternative sources of energy.

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.

Interest in democracy, economic development, and the rule of law is clearly on the rise. Just as global attention in 2005 remained riveted on establishing and protecting the fundamentals of democracy in transitioning societies—the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan, the constitutional vote in Iraq, the threat to civil liberties in Russia—these issues took on increasing prominence on the Stanford campus, for policymakers and students alike.

STANFORD SUMMER FELLOWS PROGRAM

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), the Freeman Spogli Institute’s newest research center, hosted its first annual Summer Fellows Program on campus in August. This innovative program is designed to help emerging and established leaders of transitioning countries in their efforts to create the fundamental institutions of democracy, fight the pernicious problem of corruption, improve governance at all levels of society, and strengthen prospects for sustainable economic development. In contrast to other programs of democracy promotion, which seek to transfer ready-made models to countries in transition, the Stanford program provides a comparative perspective on the evolution of established democratic practices, as well as theoretical and practical background on issues of democracy and good governance, to assist with needed economic, political, and judicial reform.

The three-week 2005 leadership seminar attracted 32 participants from 28 countries for specialized teaching, training, and outreach, including leaders from the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and parts of the former Soviet Union, whose stability is so vital to the international system. The curriculum draws on the combined expertise of Stanford scholars and practitioners in the fields of political science, economics, law, sociology, and business and emphasizes the dynamic linkages among democratization, economic development, and the rule of law in transitioning countries.

DEMOCRACY, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE RULE OF LAW

In the fall quarter of 2005, a new undergraduate course, titled %course1% (PS/IR 114D), examining the dynamic and interactive linkages among democratic institutions, economic development, and the framework of law proved to be an all-star attraction for Stanford students. Conceived by the research faculty and staff at CDDRL as an important introduction to fundamental concepts and team-taught by a number of prominent Stanford scholars—including University President Emeritus Gerhard Casper (Stanford Law School), Larry Diamond (Hoover Institution), CDDRL Director Michael A. McFaul (Hoover Institution and Department of Political Science), and Peter B. Henry (Graduate School of Business), the course attracted a record number of students this fall. Encina Columns recently interviewed Kathryn Stoner, associate director of research and senior research scholar at CDDRL, the course convener, to glean a few highlights.

Q. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO OFFER THE COURSE AT THIS TIME?

A. CDDRL research staff and faculty decided to offer the course in the fall of 2005 as a launch for what we hope will become an honors program. We wanted to use PS/IR 114D as a gateway course into other courses taught by our faculty, as well. For example, Larry Diamond teaches a very popular course on democracy, and we thought our course would be a good way to introduce undergraduates to some of the basic themes of that course, while also introducing them to connections between democracy and economic development and the interplay of these with the rule of law.

Q. DID YOU ENVISION A QUARTER-LONG OR YEAR-LONG COURSE? WHY?

A. The course was always envisioned as just a quarter-long course. This is to provide a launch into the menu of other courses that are offered by our faculty.

Q. WERE YOU SURPRISED BY THE STUDENT RESPONSE?

A. We were very surprised to have 130 students in the course this fall. We ran the course as a “beta test” in the spring of 2005 with just 25 students, but apparently the buzz among undergraduates was good and our enrollment numbers jumped in September when we offered the course again. The political science department was caught a little off guard and we had to hustle to find enough teaching assistants to staff the course.

Q. WHO WERE YOUR MAIN LECTURERS AND WHAT WERE THEIR TOPICS?

A. We had 13 lecturers in all including Gerhard Casper, on what rule of law means and why people choose to follow law or not; Larry Diamond, on meanings of democracy and Iraq; Avner Greif, on how economic institutions are established historically; and Jeremy M. Weinstein, on international aid and development in Africa, to name but a few.

Q. WHAT TOPICAL THEMES HAVE YOU EXPLORED WITH YOUR STUDENTS?

A. The Iraq lecture by Larry Diamond was particularly topical and the students clearly learned a lot from him. They also enjoyed Jeremy Weinstein’s lecture on debates on aid policy in Africa. He set it up in an engaging way so that students had to decide whether “conditionality” was a good idea in providing aid to Africa or not.

Q. DID YOU FIND THAT PARTICULAR ISSUES HAD SPECIAL "RESONANCE" FOR STANFORD STUDENTS?

A. I think that there is growing interest among Stanford undergraduates in how democracy can be promoted and to what extent the United States should be involved in this project. Many students in our course are interested in doing some sort of work in the development field, so they wanted to explore cases of when democracies have become consolidated versus situations where they slid back into dictatorship. They are also particularly interested in when or whether force is appropriate in promoting or establishing democracy in the Middle East and Afghanistan, for example.

Q. WHAT PROVED MOST GRATIFYING TO YOU? DID YOU GAIN NEW INSIGHT?

A. I always gain new insights when I interact with smart students who are deeply interested and engaged in these issues. I also find it a real privilege to actually sit down and listen to my colleagues deliver lectures on areas of their expertise. That is truly a treat.

Q. WHAT'S NEXT? WILL YOU OFFER THIS COURSE AGAIN?

A. Yes, we intend to offer the course every fall quarter. We are also currently planning to launch an honors program, perhaps this spring. As part of that we will offer a seminar for juniors interested in writing theses on the general themes of democracy, development, and the rule of law in the developing world.

The Initiative on Distance Learning (IDL) has for six years offered courses on international security issues to Russian regional universities via distance-learning technologies. Thanks to a seed grant from the Whitehead Family Foundation, the Freeman Spogli Institute’s IDL program is currently pursuing a promising collaborative project with the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) and the University of Pretoria, which will adapt the IDL program for use in institutions of higher education in South Africa. In the interdisciplinary spirit of FSI, the project affords IDL the opportunity to work with Stanford’s Center for Innovations in Learning, the School of Education, and the Woods Institute for the Environment, forming the eLearning Initiative in South Africa, or ELISA.

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Mobile, hand-held technologies are nearly ubiquitous in South Africa, making it an ideal environment to assess their efficacy in teaching. More students have access to a cell phone (99.4 percent) than have an e-mail account (0.4 percent) in the Unit for Distance Education at the University of Pretoria1. Wireless technologies are allowing many developing countries to “leapfrog” ahead of developed countries by adapting mobile and flexible communication technologies, rather than investing in costly land-line infrastructures. Distance-learning educators need to take advantage of this new technology, in order to explore ways to enhance the learning process for receptive students.

This is particularly important in South Africa, which plays an increasingly prominent leadership role in addressing the political and economic development issues facing the African continent and the global community. Dedicated to training a cadre of leaders to approach pressing issues from multiple perspectives, South Africa has undertaken educational curriculum reform over the past 15 years. Educators are seeking to make education more widely available to all levels of society: reforming institutions of higher education, experimenting with innovative technology to reach students in remote areas, and participating in distancelearning courses within Africa and from abroad.

Mobile technologies have the potential to bridge the “digital divide,” offering the functionality of minicomputers, with less expense and greater portability. Students who might otherwise not be able to attend classes gain access to course materials, assignments, and learning interactions on demand. Students can use text, graphics, and video to express their ideas through mobile devices. Students can receive guidance and work plans from faculty or collaborate with fellow students; faculty can record their students’ work for analysis and grading. IDL welcomes this chance to study the ability of mobile devices to supplant computers as the technology of choice in higher education in South Africa.

ELISA will offer its first course to Tshwane University of Technology students in 2006, and expand the program in subsecquent years.

A foreign policy firmly grounded in democratic values makes it possible for small states to stand up for their rights in the face of the shifting interests of large states, Estonia’s President Arnold Rüütel said Jan. 20.

“It is precisely action based on values that can provide answers in complicated situations,” Rüütel said. “This also makes it possible to distinguish long-term important issues from short-term changing interests.”

During a lunchtime speech at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Rüütel thanked the United States for maintaining its policy of nonrecognition of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from World War II until 1991, when Baltic independence was restored in a bloodless revolution. “For us, this represents a powerful confirmation of a values-based foreign policy that remains crucial also today,” he said.

Rüütel, a onetime Communist who helped orchestrate Estonia’s transition to independence, spoke to about 100 students, faculty, and donors at an event hosted by management science and engineering Professor William J. Perry, who also is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, and co-director of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. Accompanied by an Estonian delegation, Rüütel also met with Institute Director Coit D. Blacker and visited the Hoover Institution, where archival specialist David Jacobs had prepared an exhibit of Baltic-related material.

The display included a series of informal photographs from the personal album of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop taken during his visit to Moscow to sign the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was concluded just a few days before the beginning of World War II. The pact, which included a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence, sealed the fate of the Baltic states for a halfcentury. Soviet officials denied the protocol’s existence until 1989. The unpublished photographs, obtained by U.S. forces after World War II, include a rare image of an enthusiastically grinning Stalin taken just after the pact was signed. “That’s a smile from the heart,” Rüütel remarked in Estonian.

Rüütel’s speech, which was translated into English, discussed Estonia’s two-year-old membership in the European Union and NATO. While the union gives opportunities for economic and social development in a globalizing world, Rüütel said, membership also offers Estonia a chance to contribute to international stability. And while NATO offers unprecedented protection, he continued, Estonia also is obliged to contribute to international security.

“NATO is not only a toolbox from which different tools can be taken,” Rüütel said. “It is an important mechanism for political and military cooperation among 26 states. We need it.” Public support for the organization remains at a steady 65 to 70 percent, he explained. “The NATO airspace control operation in the Baltic states certainly plays a role in this context,” he said. “Last year, U.S. planes contributed to it. We are grateful to the U.S. government.”

As a member of NATO, Estonia plans to increase its defense expenditure to 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2010, Rüütel said. The country also has participated in the “coalition of the willing.” Estonian soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside U.S. forces “have proved to be worthy combatants,” Rüütel said. “Responsible tasks lie ahead of us in Afghanistan. The Estonian parliament has decided to send up to 150 soldiers at a time there this year. Allow me to recall that there are 1.4 million inhabitants in Estonia.”

The president said that military operations can help to restore stability in conflict areas by providing security but that long-term success can be achieved only through the establishment of a free society based on democratic principles and the rule of law.

“The more successful the reconstruction and the strengthening of good governance are, the faster our peace forces can be [brought] home.” Arnold Rüütel, President of EstoniaWe need considerably higher capabilities for the strengthening of the civilian component in crisis management and [ensuing] reconstruction than we have today, both at the level of states and international organizations,” he said. “The more successful the reconstruction and the strengthening of good governance are, the faster our peace forces can be [brought] home.”

Rüütel also discussed his country’s role in combating international terrorism. “Estonia is determined to be a credible partner,” he said. “Among other things, this means making sure that our territory [is] not used by terrorists to prepare operations, to move money or for any other purpose.”

After the speech, Blacker asked about Estonia's relationship with neighboring Russia. A border agreement between the two countries remains unsigned. In response, Rüütel offered a history lesson about the consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Estonia. Many of the country’s leaders were arrested, murdered or sent to death camps in Siberia, he said. Following the Nazi occupation of Estonia during the war, Soviet repression continued after 1945. In a country of 1.2 million inhabitants, about 70,000 people were deported to Siberia and more than 100,000 escaped to the West. As a result of World War II and its aftermath, he said, Estonia lost one out of every five citizens. “Practically, every Estonian family was somehow touched by these events,” he said. “This is something really difficult to forget.” Russia has failed to deal with its history in an honest way, he said.

Although Estonia cannot forget the past, Rüütel said his country is ready to cooperate with Russia and he expressed hope that a border treaty would soon be completed. “I would like to hope that Russia, one day, will understand that we are good neighbors living side by side with each other,” he said.