In recent years, the United States and its European Union partners have often diverged in their policy outlooks towards the wider European periphery—the diverse region stretching from the Balkans and Turkey, to the Westernmost former-Soviet republics and Russia. Whether a temporary hiatus or a more profound strategic divergence, this state of affairs reflects a departure from the mission of extending peace, freedom and prosperity to the European continent that the two sides have pursued in the post-Cold War period.

Fabrizio Tassinari, PhD, is Head of Foreign Policy and EU Studies Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels and at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS in Washington, DC. He has written extensively on European security and integration. His book, Why Europe Fears Its Neighbors, was published on September 30, 2009.

 

Event Synopsis:

Dr. Tassinari's talk draws upon his recent book, "Why Europe Fears its Neighbors" (Praeger Security International, 2009), which attempts to survey and quantify the many challenges facing Europe with respect to its borders. Tassinari describes Europe's position toward neighbor countries as being influenced by the threat of immigration. He describes a "security-integration nexus" in progress since 1945, involving a gradual economic opening of Europe's borders to promote stability. While the EU today maintains to some degree its enlargement policy toward Turkey and the Western Balkans, other border-region states are classified under a "European neighborhood policy" with no prospects for EU membership. Recent policy discourse has decoupled security concerns from integration. The neighborhood approach, undermines EU policy by keeping neighbor states at too great a distance.

Next Tassinari offers Turkey and Russia as case studies. The debate within Turkey is leaning away from EU membership as the primary path toward modernization. Recent dialogue focuses less on meeting technical standards for EU membership and more on reckoning with issues of religion, identity and history within Turkey. With regards to Russia, in the past decade the country has become more assertive abroad and moved away from cooperation with the EU, preferring not to be grouped with countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia in the EU's approach to foreign policy.

In addressing the transatlantic relationship, Dr. Tassinari reflects that the US and EU have long disagreed about EU membership for Turkey, the direction of state building in the Balkans, and integration of some of Europe's neighbor states into NATO.

Finally, responding to the question of whether this divergence comes from a conflict over the "European power constellation" or rather is simply the result of issue-specific philosophical differences, Dr. Tassinari offers three arguments:

1. Strategic: EU policy reflects multi-level integration, wherein countries can be "more than partners and less than members." Tassinari believes even countries with no prospect for membership should be integrated as much as possible. 
2. Normative - in reality, the US and EU share goals for Europe's "neighborhood" - promoting democracy, human rights, and other values. Despite this, each side's initiatives are viewed with suspicion by the other. 
3. Institution - US policymakers buy in to the EU enlargement policy, with its firm commitments and well-rehearsed conditionality process, and don't see alternative policies such as the "neighborhood" approach as being useful. 

A Q&A session following the talk raised such issues as: Will the EU’s problems with “deepening” its relationships with neighbors hurt its prospects for “widening” through enlargement? What are the reasons for the mixed signals to Turkey from the EU? Do arguments about the EU’s denial of Turkey’s membership being based on racism hold any merit? If the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, what cross-border policy areas will remain the prerogative of nation-states and which might fall under EU Commission jurisdiction?

 

Twenty years ago, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded – not with a bang, but with a whimper. In circumstances eerily reminiscent of our own day, the establishments in Eastern Europe had borrowed large huge amounts of money (in hard currency), which they had no way to pay back (except by taking more hard currency loans). As the loan crisis deepened, they did . . . nothing.

Stephen Kotkin teaches history and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000" (new edition 2008).

Jan T. Gross also teaches history at Princeton. He is the author of the acclaimed "Neighbors" (2001) and, most recently, "Fear" (2006).

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

In this public lecture, Timothy Garton Ash asks if 1989 established a new model of non-violent revolution, supplanting the violent one of 1789. Where might it happen next? Should democracies support it? If so, how?

Professor Norman Naimark, McDonnell Professor of East European Studies; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will chair the discussion. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Deputy Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, will be the respondent.

Kulyk’s talk at Stanford will focus on popular preferences regarding language policy of the Ukrainian state as revealed by a comprehensive survey conducted in December 2006, the first such survey ever conducted in Ukraine. He will analyze the respondents’ views of actual and desirable language use in different practices, legal statuses of languages, and evolution of the language situation in the country, both on the aggregate level and broken down by ethnic, linguistic, regional, generational and other categories. He will thus demonstrate both diversity and ambivalence of popular attitudes and discuss how they influenced the state policy by constraining a compromise between the adherents of opposing political courses and, at the same time, enabling the government and major parties to alternate between emphasizing and downplaying the language issue in their political rhetoric and practice.

Volodymyr Kulyk is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kyiv, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1999. Currently, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. His research fields include politics of language and ethnicity in contemporary Ukraine and other multilingual societies, language ideologies, and media discourse. Kulyk is the author of two published books and numerous articles and book chapters on these topics in Ukrainian, English and other languages. His last published text is “Language Policies and Language Attitudes in Post-Orange Ukraine”, in Juliane Besters-Dilger (ed.), Language policy and language situation in Ukraine. Analysis and recommendations (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). His new book, Dyskurs ukraïns’kykh medii: Identychnosti, ideolohiï, vladni stosunky (Ukrainian Media Discourse: Identities, Ideologies, Power Relations) will be published in Kyiv later this year. He guest-edited a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language on “Languages and Language Ideologies in Ukraine”, to appear in early 2010. As a Wilson Center Fellow, Kulyk works on a project titled “Language, Identity and Democracy in Post-Soviet Ukraine”, which will result in an English-language book.

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

AGENDA

9:30AM	Welcome
10:00AM - 12:00PM	Morning Session “Religious Divisions After the Reformation: A Spur to Secularization?” Benjamin Kaplan (University College London) “Judaism in Europe” John Efron (UC Berkeley)
2:00PM - 4:00PM	First Afternoon Session “Secularism and Islam in Europe” John Bowen (Washington University, Saint Louis) “The Vatican, the EU, and the Enduring Dream of a ‘Catholic Europe” Tim Byrnes (Colgate University)
4:30PM - 6:30PM	Second Afternoon Session “American and European Exceptionalisms Revisited” Jose Casanova (Georgetown University) “Is there really a religious Europe? Some remarks on European diversity” Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Universität München)
6:30PM - 7:00PM	Concluding Discussion

Co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of Religious Studies, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Department of History, the Stanford Humanities Center,and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.