Stanford University

Russia, Its Neighbors, and the US Since 1991

-

Ambassador Simons will seek to honor the broad scholarship of his friend Alexander Dallin by situating a discussion of emerging states within a vision of Eurasia as a world region equally shaped and driven by its own internal dynamic(s). Simons will argue that across the region shared experience and shared features are just as weighty as differences: civil societies are weak, markets are distorted or incomplete, politics features struggle among elites over resources and tends toward semi-authoritarian rule even where democratic forms take hold. Yet there is cause for hope. Simons focuses on states, but he sees states consolidating almost everywhere, so that as resurgent Russia presses on its neighbors, they can now press back. Stable development of strong state institutions within which new civil societies can take root and grow is possible and should be the top priority, but it will come only if the nationalism that gives content to these new states is civic and inclusionary rather than ethno-religious on the East Central European model. The U.S. can help or hinder its emergence everywhere in Eurasia, but if it wishes to help it must realize that in this part of the world the path to democracy leads through state development, and that it can best act as a City on the Hill if its policy centers on today's emerging new states, since they must be the incubators of tomorrow's new civil societies.

The Annual Alexander Dallin Lecture was founded in 1998 to honor Professor of History and Political Science Alexander Dallin, a founder of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford and CREEES director, 1985-89 and 1992-94. The Dallin Lecture is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center

Thomas W. Simons, Jr. Visiting Scholar, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies; Lecturer in Government, Harvard University; Consulting Professor in 20th-Century International History, Stanford University Speaker
Lectures

Jonas Linde

616 Serra Street
Encina Hall S238
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

0
Anna Lindh Fellow, Forum on Contemporary Europe
Linde.jpg PhD

Jonas Linde is a Research Fellow in political science at the University of Gothenburg.  His main field of interest is comparative politics, with a focus on the political development in European post-communist countries. Linde's recent research has dealt with public attitudes, system support and corruption, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe. He is currently involved in a research project on the diversity of post-communist political regimes. As an Anna Lindh Fellow at the Forum on Contemporary Europe in Fall 2009, Linde will work on a book chapter on public support for democracy and non-democratic alternatives.

Principles of European Integration: Treaty revisions in multi-stage two-level processes

This project explores the revision of the treaties of the European Union using a multi-stage two-level-analysis. For the current revision of the Nice treaty, there are inferences between the domestic and European level, most obviously when referendums are carried. This time, a convention made a proposal for revision which was discussed by the member states at intergovernmental conferences (IGCs), and this project examines how member states have formed their positions on the treaty revision in inter-ministerial coordination.

Thomas Koenig

University of Mannheim
PBox 103462
D-68131 Mannheim

0
Professor of Political Science, University of Mannheim
tkoenig.jpg

Thomas König has the chair for international relations and is co-director of the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim, Germany. Before, he was professor at the German University Speyer and at the University of Konstanz. For his research, he was nominated for the Descartes Research Prize of the European Union and the Harrison Prize, received the Fulbright chair at Washington University St. Louis and the Karl W. Deutsch professorship at the Wissenschaftscentre Berlin, and was Marie Curie- and Heisenberg Fellow of the German National Science Foundation. König’s publications include the major scholarly journals and a variety of topics. He collaborated with a large number of scholars, including Chris Achen, Thomas Bräuninger, Ken Benoit, Daniel Finke, Simon Hug, Dirk Junge, Michael Laver, Brooke Luetgert, Bernd Luig, Lars Mäder, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Gerald Schneider, Jonathan Slapin, Heiner Schulz, Frans Stokman, Robert Thomson, Vera Tröger, George Tsebelis – just to name a few.

In his early publications in the 1990s, he studied the influence of interest groups on labor and social legislation in Germany, USA and Japan using network analysis and exchange theory. With Franz Urban Pappi and David Knoke he gathered data and extended the Coleman exchange model for modeling the institutionalized access of interest groups to political decision makers. Using spatial analysis, he also studied legislative gridlock in Germany in this period. From the mid-1990s, König devoted more attention to European integration by gathering data on EU constitutional, legislative and implementation politics. Today, König established a historical archive on EU politics containing all constitutional, legislative and implementation activities since the mid-1980s. For Germany, he also collected legislative data since the 1950s. These two topics – German and European politics – are dominating his further work, which is about the estimation of actors’ preferences. Regarding the European Union, König tested rivalry approaches on the power of the European Parliament, the impact of enlargements on Council decision making and the strategies of member states when they attempted to revise the institutional framework of the EU. In the beginning of the 2000s, he directed the DOSEI project and investigated the constitution-building process of the EU. Following, he studied the implementation process of EC directives and the power of the European Court of Justice.

All these data is used to evaluate the empirical implications of game-theoretical models with some focus on the analysis of Germany and European integration, including the constitutional, legislative and compliance level. In this regard, König also established the first EITM summer institute in Europe training young scholars in order to use sophisticated techniques for the study of politics. Recent publications include "Troubles with Transposition: Explaining Trends in Member State Notification Failure and Timelines", British Journal of Political Science 2009 (with Brooke Luetgert), "Why don’t veto players use their power?", European Union Politics 2009, "Why do member states empower the European Parliament?", Journal of European Public Policy 2008, "Bicameral Conflict Resolution in the European Union. An Empirical Analysis of Conciliation Committee Bargains", British Journal of Political Science 2007 (with Lindberg, Lechner and Pohlmeier).

Professor König was a Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center and at the Hoover Institution during Fall 2009.

Erick Arenas

Department of Music
Stanford University
Braun Music Center
541 Lasuen Mall
Stanford, CA 94305-3076

0
Ph.D. Candidate, Musicology, Stanford University
Erick_at_Melk.jpg

Erick Arenas is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford. His research focuses on the relationship between musical culture and ritual life in the capitals of Catholic Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Before coming to Stanford, Erick studied music history at the University of the Pacific and the University of Oregon. His master’s research dealt with the persistence of liturgical music traditions in nineteenth-century Paris and the music of Charles Gounod.

Erick’s doctoral dissertation, “Johann Michael Haydn and the Missa solemnis of Eighteenth-Century Vienna and Salzburg,” explores the style, tradition, and significance of the elaborate musical rendering of the Mass within the imperial-Viennese and archepiscopal-Salzburg contexts. He seeks to draw greater attention to the central place of sacred music in the Austrian musical legacy, a research area that has been dominated almost exclusively by concert and theatrical music scholarship. As a case study, he examines the achievements of J. M. Haydn (1737-1806), a figure once considered the preeminent composer of liturgical music within the milieu of Joseph Haydn and W. A. Mozart. By shedding light on the extent to which eighteenth-century musical life was still influenced by waning Baroque and Counter-Reformation values, Erick’s project offers one significant lens for a broader examination of the complex musical culture of the Age of Enlightenment.

In Summer 2009 Erick was awarded the FCE Advanced Graduate Student Travel Fellowship in order to study manuscript sources in Austrian music archives.

Ballet's Magic Kingdom During the Modernist Period of Russian Art

-

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Center for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies, and The Stanford Institute for Creativity & the Arts (SiCa).

Slavic Department Library
Building 240
Stanford University

Stanley Rabinowitz Henry Steele Commager Professor and professor of Russian, Amherst College; Director, Amherst Center for Russian Culture Speaker
Seminars

The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe are Alike

-

It is commonly believed that America and Europe are very different societies, and growing apart. A look at the data shows that the anecdotes are misleading and that the differences across the Atlantic have been overstated.

Peter Baldwin, Professor of History at UCLA, is author of several books on the comparative history of European and American state building, most recently, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS.

Introduction by FSI Senior Fellow Josef Joffe.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Peter Baldwin Professor of History, UCLA Speaker
Seminars

The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution

Paragraphs

In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. But the significance of the natural right did not end with its legal application. Edelstein argues that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he argues that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Authors
Dan Edelstein
Subscribe to Europe