Abstract
Information access and distribution is expanding exponentially.  Recent technological advancements have created a state of information openness where the general public has easy access both to a wealth of information previously available only for select government agencies and to a large array of communication-collaboration tools that can further develop and disseminate content. This information, or cyber, openness is having a profound impact on society at large and has equally profound, if not greater, implications for international and national security in terms of both capabilities and vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, many of the potential expanded capabilities have yet to be realized and many of the new vulnerabilities have yet to be fully understood.  This project aims to illuminate the emerging cyber capabilities from various viewpoints: users and developers, operational impacts and vulnerabilities in conflict and crisis management, enhancement and suppression of democratic development, and future trends: what issues will face society in the cyber world of 2050?

In this conversation, former Secretary General of National Security Council, Republic of China (Taiwan), Su Chi, and Director of CDDRL, Larry Diamond, will engage in a conversation about the first two years of President Ma Ying-jeou's administration.  The topics to be explored will include President Ma’s performance in domestic, international and cross-strait policy; the trajectory of the complicated triangular relationship among Taiwan, China, and the United States; domestic political trends in Taiwan; and the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) Party’s future political prospects as Taiwan looks toward special municipal elections at the end of this year and then a presidential election in March of 2012.

Serving as Secretary General of National Security Council between May 2008 and February 2010, Dr. Su Chi was widely considered one of President Ma’s closest and most trusted advisers since the KMT returned to power in 2008.  A prominent political scientist, Dr. Su began his government career in 1989 as Secretary General of the President’s Office. In 1993-94, he was appointed Commissioner of the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission,  Executive Yuan. In 1993-96, he was Vice Chairman of the ministerial-level Mainland Affairs Council, Executive Yuan. He was then appointed Director-General of the Government Information Office in 1996-97. Between 1997 and 1999, Dr. Su was Deputy Secretary-General to President Lee Teng-hui. In 1999-2000, he served as the Chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council. Between 2005 and 2008, he was a KMT Legislator.

Dr. Su Chi obtained his MA and Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, MA in International Studies from the Johns Hopkins University, and BA in National Chengchi University (Taiwan).

What explains the recent large swings in the behavior of Japanese voters? Last August, for the first time in the post-WWII era, Japan's leading political party, the Liberal Democratic Party, lost power, making way for a new DPJ government. During the preceding months leading up to the lower house elections in August 2009, popular media coverage pointed to fundamental structural changes in the Japanese political economy as the underlying causes for changing voter preferences. To what extent can structural changes in the economy and society explain changing voter behavior and electoral outcomes? Japan's two decade old stagnating economy, rapidly graying society, and post-industrial advanced economic structure provide an ideal case for studying this question. Using both national and sub-national level data spanning two decades, we test both popular theories and conventional wisdom about the political effects of a graying society, widening income disparities, and industrial structural change.

Kay Shimizu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. She received her undergraduate degree and PhD in political science from Stanford University (2008). Her research concerns the political economy of Japan and China, with a focus on fiscal politics, central local relations, and the politics of economic structural change. Her book manuscript, Private Money as Public Funds: the Politics of Japan's Recessionary Economy, examines the role of private financial institutions in Japan's political struggles to adjust to a changing economic and demographic landscape. She is on leave during the 2009-2010 academic year as an Advanced Research Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Program on US Japan Relations at Harvard University.

Viewed from the realist perspective of mainstream international political economy, economic and elite-based political integration are the keys to building a region; “soft” or “normative” questions of identity can be ignored.  Contesting that view, Dr. Pietsch will argue that research on regionalism, especially in Southeast Asia, could benefit from a focus on the nature and role of national and regional identity in that process. Compared with the growing body of scholarship on European identity as a means of understanding “Europeanization,” regional identity in Southeast Asia is still underexplored. Addressing this gap is important especially in relation to issues of democratization such as human rights, migrant labor, access to citizenship, environmental sustainability, gender equality, and corruption. These questions necessarily invoke national cultural and political values and their implications for regional identity.

Drawing on relevant theories, Dr Pietsch will use AsiaBarometer data to examine public opinion on democratization, national identity, and regional cooperation in Southeast Asia. Her preliminary findings underscore the need to broaden scholarship on regionalism in Southeast Asia to encompass both cultural and political manifestations of identity. In addition, she will show how identity helps explain why ASEAN-style regionalism is often thought by analysts to have succeeded in economic and security terms but to have failed in the consciousness of Southeast Asians themselves.

Dr. Juliet Pietsch is a senior lecturer in political science in the Australian National University’s School of Politics and International Relations. She studies broad patterns of social and political behaviour in Australia and East Asia. Recent publications include Dimensions of Australian Society (co-authored, 2010), and "Generational Change: Regional Security and Australian Engagement with Asia," The Pacific Review (co-authored, 2010).

The United States and Japan celebrated the 50th anniversary of the current US-Japan security treaty in January 2010, despite several dark clouds on the horizon. Both countries have seen transitions to Democrats in power in 2009 that led to new political debates over security practices. Is the future actually as rosy as portrayed by diplomats on both sides in this "anniversary year"? Relations will probably continue their rocky course in the coming months, but in the medium term the underlying logic for close US-Japan security cooperation, and for continuing development of defense capabilities in Asia for both countries, is quite strong.

Andrew Oros is a specialist on the international and comparative politics of East Asia and the advanced industrial democracies, with an emphasis on contending approaches to managing security and on the linkage between domestic and international politics. He is the author of Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity, and the Evolution of Security Practice (Stanford University Press, 2008) and the co-editor of and contributor to Japan's New Defense Establishment: Institutions, Capabilities, and Implications (Stimson Center, 2007), Can Japan Come Back? (Pacific Council, 2003), and Culture in World Politics (Macmillan Press, 1998). His latest work is as co-author of the forthcoming Global Security Watch: Japan (Praeger Press, 2010). He also has shared his research in over a dozen scholarly articles, numerous mass-media quotations, and lectures to policymakers in Washington, DC, Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, and elsewhere.

Soviet policy in Eastern Europe during the final year and immediate aftermath of World War II had a profound impact on global politics. By reassessing Soviet aims and concrete actions in Eastern Europe from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, Kramer’s essay touches on larger questions about the origins and intensity of the Cold War. The essay shows that domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with Iosif Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe. Stalin’s adoption of increasingly repressive and xenophobic policies at home, and his determination to quell armed insurgencies in areas annexed by the USSR at the end of the war, were matched by his embrace of a harder line vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. This internal-external dynamic was not wholly divorced from the larger East-West context, but it was, to a certain degree, independent of it. At the same time, the shift in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe was bound to have a detrimental impact on Soviet relations with the leading Western countries, which had tried to avert the imposition of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. The final breakdown of the USSR’s erstwhile alliance with the United States and Great Britain was, for Stalin, an unwelcome but acceptable price to pay.

Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: De-Stalinization, the Soviet Union, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Income Distribution and Social Transfer Policies in the Post-Communist Transition: Changing Patterns of Inequality. He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991, which, like his earlier books on the Soviet bloc, draws heavily on new archival sources from the former Communist world.

Co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.