Since 2004, Dominic Martin has been Counsellor at the British Embassy Washington, responsible for Political and Public Affairs. Mr. Martin was educated at Oriel College, Oxford and joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1987. He has twice served in New Delhi, India (at the end of the 1980s and from 2001 until 2004), and also served in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the mid-1990s. Prior to this last posting in India, Mr. Martin co-coordinated the UK position in the negotiations on the enlargement of the European Union to include the countries from Central and Eastern Europe.

Frontiers of Freedom: U.S. - European cooperation on Iran, NATO in Afghanistan, and other issues the United States and Europe are tackling in the region.

Co-Sponsored with the Hoover Institution

This talk scrutinizes the relationship between individual attitudes towards democracy and such contextual characteristics as the institutional framework and the level of socioeconomic development. For this purpose the individual evaluation of a democratic rule, experts rule, army rule, and a strong leader rule is considered. The analysis discovers a strong relationship between the individual political attitudes and different contextual factors. In particular, it turns out that pre-democratic views vary at both the national and the regional level. Democratic values, on the other hand, are rather evenly distributed within countries but also vary among countries. One finding is that the socioeconomic level has a strong impact on the occurrence of pre-democratic values. For those holding strong democratic beliefs, institutional factors such as the absence of an authoritarian regime in the recent past become more important than the socioeconomic level.

Since the accession of ten new member states the European Union has launched a new effort to draw its neighbors, from Ukraine to Morocco, closer to the EU. This engagement goes beyond trade and aid to include participation in various internal EU policies and programs but stops short of offering full membership. Economic and political governance are high on the agenda. Bertin Martens will explain how this effort reinforces previous policies and could contribute to real change in the political and economic landscape around the EU.

Bertin Martens is Regional Economist for the Middle East & South Mediterranean in the European Commission's Directorate General for External Relations. He joined the European Commission in 1990 and has worked on various assignments in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe before. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Free University of Brussels and has been a Visiting Fellow at George Mason and Stanford universities. His academic research interests focus on institutional economics and governance.

Between 1870 and 1945, France and Germany fought each other in three bloody wars, each of which left bitter memories and lingering antagonisms in its wake. Bitter memories in turn fed the respective histories of the two neighboring nations, and these became integral features of French and German national identities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. How and when did this begin to change? Siegel will discuss the efforts of twentieth-century French and German historians and teachers to break the intractable cycle of warfare and memory, nationalism and history. Professor Siegel will explore the links between collective memory, scholastic history, and nationalism as well as the complexities of turning history into a tool of international reconciliation. She will explore whether the sequence of events towards reconciliation in France and Germany might be replicable in other environments, notably Asia, in the context of recent events that suggest a rising nationalism in Asia.

Dr. Mona Siegel joined the CSU - Sacramento history faculty in 2003. Her teaching and research interests include modern French history, the history of women and gender, history and memory, peace history, and the history of the world wars. Her current research projects include "The Disarmament of Hatred: History, Truth, and Franco-German Reconciliation from World War I to the Cold War."

The assumption that states can and ought to stop the flow of funds to terrorist organizations deserves greater scrutiny. Potential benefits obtained by disrupting financial networks may not decrease the intensity of attacks, even as they weaken terrorist organizations. The anti-money laundering model currently applied by the UK and US has proven counter-productive, undermining the states' counterterrorism efforts. The erosion of individual rights incorporated in the regime risks leaking into criminal law, thereby altering basic constitutional entitlements. Efforts to prevent extremists from obtaining funds may have a devastating affect on social services in poor regions and impede the development of civil society and "state building." What is intriguing about ATF is that it evokes many of the same issues that arise in other areas of counterterrorism. Whether and how to surmount them remains less than clear.

This event is a collaborative effort between CISAC and European Forum.