The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Following the recent elections in Germany, Heinz Bude will explain the election results and discuss the current political climate in Germany in terms of the larger historical and global perspective.
The End of '68:
One could call it a return of the vanished. After German society determined that the Federal Republic had only become a western, liberal country as a result of the Uprising of 1968, debates continue on how to view this place of remembrance of the post-war period. This is due to a surprising actualization and sobering historization of the Uprising at an exhibition at the Berliner Kunstwerke. Here, the attractiveness of 1968 is directly linked to the RAF. Not the disparateness but the unity of protest and terror represents the lure of the matter. This re-labeling of 68 as a form of "radical chic" finds its confirmation in more recent historical research that proves that no firewall exists between 68 and the RAF. The terror of the RAF did not represent an inversion of the protest of 68, but was constitutive for the entire movement. There is no innocence, no learning, only the successful disappearance of a bout of tragic political passions.
Then what was 1968? What must dismay us in retrospect, and what has taken roots in the cultural superstructure? Perhaps the unfinished debate between Jürgen Habermas and Karl Heinz Bohrer must be resumed: What about 1968 was universalistic emancipation and what was extremist surrealism?
Encina Hall
East Wing
Ground Floor E008
Okimoto Conference Room
In its communication on Wider Europe in 2003, the Commission launched a new program to structure its relations with its neighbors, the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). With the 2004 EU enlargement in mind the EU wanted to start forging closer bonds with its new neighbors in the East. The objectives of the ENP would be to provide political stability and economic prosperity to its neighbors. The ENP would thus prevent that the new EU borders would become stark political and economic dividing lines. In exchange for reforms the EU would offer its neighbors further economic integration. The integration would fall short of EU membership, however. Prospects for membership would not be provided in the medium term, even though the approach is reminiscent of the path taken in the enlargement process. In the two years that have transpired since its launch, the EU has set out strategies and action plans for different countries as part of the ENP.
The workshop intends to study a variety of aspects of the ENP: legal, institutional, economic and political issues. It will analyze the specific characteristics of the policy and its expected political and economic impact on the neighbors, the EU's border regions and the rest of the EU. In studying these various issues a wide range of points of view will be considered: views from within the EU and from within the EU institutions, as well as perspectives from Eastern Europe, North-Africa, the Middle East and North-America.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
The Europe Center
Encina Hall
Tim Josling is a Professor, Emeritus, at the (former) Food Research Institute at Stanford University; a Senior Fellow by courtesy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and a faculty member at FSI's Europe Center. His research focuses on agricultural policy and food policy in industrialized nations; international trade in agricultural and food products; and the development of the multilateral trade regime. His recent research topics include the reform of the agricultural trading system in the World Trade Organization; the treatment of agriculture in bilateral trade agreements; the use of geographical indications in food markets; the role of health and safety regulations in trade; the impact of climate change legislation on agricultural trade policies; and the treatment of biofuel subsidies in the WTO.
At Stanford, Josling teaches a course in the Economics and Political Economy of the Multilateral Trade System, in the International Relations program. Before coming to Stanford in 1978 Josling taught at the London School of Economics and the University of Reading, England. His academic background includes a B.Sc. in Agriculture from the University of London (Wye College), a M.Sc. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Guelph, Canada, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University.
Josling is a member of the International Policy Council on Food and Agricultural Trade and former Chair of the Executive Committee of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium. He holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Kent, in the United Kingdom, and is a past President of the UK Agricultural Economics Association. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. In 2004 he was made a Fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association.
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.
Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.
Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.
Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.
Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.
Encina Hall,East Wing,
Ground Floor, E008
From the outset, the transatlantic relationship has been more than a mere marriage of convenience. It encompasses a community of states, which are committed to common values, ideals and interests. Europe and North America can look back on a common cultural and intellectual history and they are bound together by a cultural affinity.
Transatlantic relations have benefited from the conscious decision made by the US not to withdraw from Europe in 1945, as it had done after the end of the First World War but, rather, to maintain a long-term presence. This injected an element of stability into Western Europe, which made it possible to tackle the European integration project.
Naturally, there are also conflicts of interests and areas of friction within this community of values. The transatlantic community has never been a perfect community of interests. We are each other's cousins, not identical twins.
Current contentious issues are not limited to the military action by the United States against the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Europe and the U.S. also have divergent viewpoints on issues such as climate protection, the death penalty or relations with international organizations. However, leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic know that it is in everyone's interest to deal responsibly with such differences.
The visit by President Bush to Brussels and to Germany at the start to his second term as American president has helped to refocus the transatlantic relationship.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
The accession of Cyprus to the European Union (EU) in May of 2004 constitutes the most positive strategic development in the history of the island state since its independence in 1960. In the last two years, the Cypriot people have experienced watershed events, filled with frustrations, challenges but also opportunities. Cyprus' EU membership has extended the borders of the EU to the strategic corner of the Eastern Mediterranean and has brought the Middle East ever closer to Europe. It is hoped that Cyprus' EU membership can contribute to the expansion of peace, stability, security and prosperity in the area. Cyprus is situated at the crossroads of three continents and civilizations, where global political and economic interests, as well as international security concerns, converge. Together with its American ally and with the help of its European partners Cyprus aspires to play a positive role, and to act as a bridge of mutual understanding and the promotion of sustained and result oriented dialogue between its Middle Eastern neighbors and Europe. At the same time, Cyprus strives to achieve a just, permanent, functional and mutually acceptable solution to the Cyprus problem, an end of the Turkish military occupation, reunification and prosperity for all Cypriots within their common European home.
His Excellency Euripides L. Evriviades presented his credentials as the Ambassador of the Republic of Cyprus to the United States to President George W. Bush on 4 December 2003. He is also accredited as High Commissioner to Canada. Ambassador Evriviades served as Ambassador of Cyprus to the Netherlands from August 2000 to October 2003. Prior to his posting in The Hague, he served as the Ambassador to Israel from November 1997 until July 2000. Earlier in his career, Mr. Evriviades held positions at Cypriot embassies in Tripoli, Libya; Moscow, USSR/Russia; and Bonn, Germany.
CISAC Conference Room
On November 16, the European Forum at SIIS hosted a lecture by Timothy Garton Ash, Professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The lecture marked the 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of the 44th President of the United States.
Garton Ash's new book Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West was published in the United States on November 9, the day the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
The workshop with this title was organized on November 19-20 by the European Forum at SIIS and it gathered leading German historians from Stanford, other U.S. universities, and from Germany. The workshop will produce an edited volume next year, said Amir Eshel, Stanford professor and co-convenor of the European Forum.
In the context of the Iraq Wars, references to totalitarianism multiplied across the political, cultural, and intellectual spectrum. For every equation of Saddam with Hitler, another followed projecting the Nazi past onto the American present. The German experience with totalitarianism in the twentieth century is particularly intriguing. The Weimar Republic witnessed the rise of both Communist and National Socialist movements, with revolutionary aspirations, in the wake of which, ultimately, two dictatorial political systems followed. To be sure, the two cases are not symmetrical; East Germany was unthinkable without Russian occupation and the Cold War.
In light of the renewed totalitarianism discourse, a review of this past seemed more urgent than ever.
Encina Hall, East Wing, Ground Floor, Room E008