Stanford University

Russia on the Verge: What After the Post-Soviet Paradigm?

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Fyodor Lukyanov is editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, published in Russian and English with the participation of Foreign Affairs magazine. He has an extensive background in different Russian and international media, in which he worked from 1990 to 2002 as a commentator on international affairs.

Lukyanov now widely contributes to various media in the US, Europe and China. His monthly "Geopolitics" column appears in the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. He is a member of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, an independent organization providing foreign policy expertise and also a member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights and Civic Society Institutions.

http://creees.stanford.edu/events/DallinLectures.html

Oksenberg Conference Room

Fyodor Lukyanov Editor-in-Chief Speaker Russia in Global Affairs
Lectures

Incomplete Assimilation among Muslims in France

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Recognizing the political consequences for Europe of Muslim immigration, and relying on a novel identification strategy, this paper investigates why Muslim assimilation into French cultural norms is incomplete, and provides experimental and survey evidence that reveals the low expected payoffs that Muslim immigrants in France receive for full assimilation. While the data show that rooted French people initially distrust Muslims (compared to a matched set of Christians)  in part due to their unwillingness to fully assimilate, the real source of Muslim reluctance to fully assimilate is their perception that in anonymous transactions (i.e., through French institutions) they will always be perceived as foreign and face discrimination.

Workshop paper is available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to khaley@stanford.edu

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include comparative politics, nation-state formation, ethnic conflict, and religion. Among his publications are Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998), and Nations, States and Violence (2007). Prof. Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Event Summary

Professor Laitin opens the seminar by providing background on the research project that motivated the paper. This examined: whether Muslim immigrants in France faced unique social and economic barriers; the source of the barriers; and whether French republicanism exacerbated or lessened the barriers. He provides a brief summary of studies examining the first and third points, but the focus of his talk was on the second point: if there are higher barriers for Muslims, who is building them?

Professor Laitin then describes the study his research team carried out on a Senegalese population in France for 15 years, drawing on equal-sized groups of Muslims and Christians from similar social and economic conditions. Through a series of games and surveys, the team observed that within Senegalese Muslims in France, certain groups assimilate more than others, and those that assimilate less are treated worse by French individuals and institutions. Many of the Muslims expected to be treated less generously by French individuals, and reported more experiences of discrimination from French institutions, which Professor Laitin's team found was more difficult to overcome than individual discrimination. This group also exhibited stronger financial ties (measured by investments and remittances sent to Senegal from France) and emotional ties (measured by desire to be buried in Senegal rather than France after death). The results of the study are used to provide a series of decision rules and reward matrixes for incoming Senegalese Muslims, including the likelihood of penalties and rewards for assimilation, such as giving children French names.

During a discussion period following the presentation, such questions were raised as: Do the results of the study have more to do with the respondents being Muslim, or simply not being French - or, do other ethnic or religious groups have the same problems assimilating into French Catholic society? Is the example of preferences for burial locations more about ties to Senegal than lack of ties to France? How much of the effect is due to being black rather than Muslim? Will the results of the study change as the Muslim population in France increases? What has been the reception in France to the prohibition of collecting ethnographic data? Why is "incomplete assimilation" framed as a "response" to the discrimination - is it a choice or is it just the way things are? Where does the fault lie in the discrimination reported in the survey?

CISAC Conference Room

David Laitin

Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

(650) 725-9556 (650) 723-1808
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James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
laitin.jpg PhD

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
David Laitin Speaker
Seminars
Islam and Contemporary Europe

History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions

The second conference in the multi-year TEC-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute project on the reconciliation of divided regions and societies.

 

Conference Summary
By Roland Hsu, Associate Director, the Europe Center, and Kathryn Ciancia, (Ph.D., Stanford).

The Europe Center, with project partner the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, hosted the major international conference at Stanford University (May 17-18, 2012), dedicated to “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions”.  This conference was aimed to deepen our understanding of disputes over history, and to find ways towards resolving conflictual memory.  Participants – all leaders in their field, and representing voices from U.S., European, Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab worlds – were challenged to answer:

  • What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
  • How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
  • How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past”?
  • How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
  • What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?

Participants included:
Khalil, Gregory (Telos Group)
Göçek, Müge (Univ. of Michigan)
Milani, Abbas (Stanford)
Bashir, Bashir (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Barkan, Elazar (Columbia)
Karayanni, Michael (The Hebrew University)
Confino, Alon (University of Virginia)
Bartov, Omer (Brown)
Cohen, Mitchell (Baruch)
Eshel, Amir (Stanford)
Glendinning, Simon (LSE)
Motzkin, Gabriel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Naimark, Norman (Stanford)
Penslar, Derek (Toronto)
Rouhana, Nadim (Tufts)
Uhl, Heidemarie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Zerubavel, Yael (Rutgers)
Zipperstein, Steven (Stanford)


Notes and Highlights
In his opening remarks, Amir Eshel, Director of The Europe Center, situated the conference within its wider context—a series under the title “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies,” which began with a conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem in May 2011.  Eshel posed the question of why Stanford’s Europe Center should focus on issues relating to the wider Middle East, particularly the historic and ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.  In answering his own question, Eshel argued that the European Union had begun to look closely at its own neighborhood, with a particular emphasis on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED), which explores questions of migration, religion, and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.  As such questions are important in both Europe and the EUROMED region, scholars who work on Europe need to think within a broader geographical context that stretches beyond Old Europe or even the European Union.

Amir Eshel also introduced some of the key ideas that informed the conference. Questions of memory and history have been central to academic discourse over the past three decades.  Indeed, memory and history have taken on a crucial, even obsessive, dynamic.  Where are we today in this global interdisciplinary conversation?  Can the study of memory help us to understand the conflicted societies of the greater Middle East?  Can the huge scholarly interest in such subjects help us to think in new ways about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians?  Can the European experience of dealing with difficult memories aid us as we try to understand Israeli and Palestinian memories of the 1948 Nakba?  What is the role of historical research, on the one hand, and cultural remembrance, on the other, in promoting reconciliation and cohabitation? Since the conference aimed to focus less on the peace process in the Middle East and more on attempts at reconciliation and cohabitation, he urged participants to consider how Israelis and Palestinians might live together

In order to highlight work that had recently been undertaken, Eshel then focused on the fields of historical research and cultural discourse.  Over the past few decades, he argued, narratives have become increasingly crucial in the historiography, much of the impetus coming from so-called critical historiography.  For instance, the last decade has witnessed the publication of Motti Golani and Adel Manna’s Two Sides of the Coin, which presents two narratives of the Nakba of 1948.  In this multi-perspective narrative, the conflict is presented as one of both territory and historical memory.  Similarly, Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss’s Haifa Before and After 1948 was co-authored by Israelis and Palestinians and features fourteen different narratives.  A further collection, entitled Zoom In: Palestinian Refugees of 1948, Remembrances, deals with contemporary memories of the Nakba.  All three books were published by the Institute For Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the Republic of Letters, while the Van Leer Institute and Al-Quds University in Palestinian East Jerusalem have also published a series of schoolbooks that present similar multi-perspective narratives.

In addition to the changes in the historiography, there has been a shift in the cultural discourse, exemplified by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani (2012), which details the experiences of one Palestinian family and includes a map of Jaffa-Tel Aviv featuring Palestinian sites that vanished in 1948. The fact that Hilu’s novel received critical acclaim and was commercially successful indicates a new willingness on the part of Israelis to learn about the Palestinian experience.  Eshel has himself just completed a book comparing post-Second World War German and Austrian cultural memory with Israeli cultural memory of 1948. Since Palestinians and Israelis are bound to live together, Eshel argued that the solutions depend on narratives of the past, with history at the center of the discussion.  Throughout the conference, participants were urged to ask themselves two questions: Can we do more? Can we do better?   

 

Video casts of select sessions of the conference are available on Stanford YouTube.

Titles of the sessions are:

  • History and Memory Welcome and Introduction (Amir Eshel and Gabriel Motzkin)
  • Session 1:  "Memory and the Philosophy of History" (Gabriel Motzkin) and “From Rational Historiography to Delusional Conspiracies: Travails of History in Iran” (Abbas Milani)
  • Session 2:“The Public and Private Erasure of History and Memory: Ottoman Empire, Turkish Republic and the Case of the Collective Violence against the Armenians (1789-2009)” (Fatma Müge Göçek)  and “The Shoah and the Logics of Comparison: The place of the Jewish Holocaust in Contemporary European Memory” (Heidemarie Uhl)
  • Session 4:  America, Prolepsis and the 'Holy Land' (Gregory Khalil) and “Neutralizing History and Memory in Divided Societies” (Bashir Bashir)
  • Session 5:  "Role of Historical Memory in Conflict Resolution" (Elazar Barkan) and “I Forgive You” (Simon Glendinning)
  • Session 6: "Historicizing Atrocity as a Path to Reconciliation" (Omer Bartov) and “A Memory of One’s Own: History, Political Change and the Meaning of 1977” (Mitchell Cohen)


Plans for the Next Conference
The final session involved a Round Table discussion in which participants had the opportunity to reflect on the larger themes of the conference and to suggest ways in which the dialogue could be fruitfully continued.  Three of the conference organizers began with their own reflections on the conference before the discussion was opened up to all participants.  Norman Naimark pointed to three key ideas that he had learned from the proceedings.  The first was the concept that history and memory should not necessarily be seen as distinct entities.  Second, Naimark pointed to the importance of comparative approaches, citing Derek Penslar’s presentation as a good example.  While the conference did not deal with the fields of Eastern European, Russian, and German history, external scholarly interjections into these fields have made them places of stimulating debate. Finally, since there is much that we do not know about 1948, Naimark urged the creation of a history that would place those events within a much broader chronological context, just as Omer Bartov is doing for the town of Buczacz.  In his remarks, Gabriel Motzkin focused on the relationship between memory and the ongoing political process in Israel.  He expressed agreement with Nadim Rouhana that Jewish Israelis need to recognize Palestinian memories, but added that Palestinians have to acknowledge the Jewish religious project in which the land of Israel occupies the same place that salvation does for Christians.  Finally, Amir Eshel urged participants to consider the role of the “practical past”—how do we use the past in order to engage the present and imagine the future? He suggested that there are a variety of possible political solutions, but that there is also a long list of actions that the present Israeli government could take in order to aid reconciliation, including acts of apology and acknowledgment.

The organizers express their deep appreciation to the conference participants.  They also support the keen interest in continuing the work on this subject and the larger project, with follow-up programming.  The next conference in this series, from the Europe Center-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, will be announced at The Europe Center website.

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Landau Economics Building
Lucas Room 134(A)

Conferences
Date Label

The End of Hungarian Democracy? International Implications

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Co-sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and The Europe Center

 

Event Synopsis:

The End of Hungarian Democracy? International Implications
October 21, 2011

After an introduction by Professor Dornbach, Professor Wittenberg asserts that while a spirit of bipartisan ship is a nice feature of the U.S. legislature, it is not a fundamental requirement of democracy and  has historically not characterized the Hungarian parliament. He traces a decades-long tradition of ruling parties using Parliament to limit the presence and influence of minority parties. The current Fidesz government, which ended up with 2/3 of the seats after the 2012 election, now has a supermajority necessary to alter the constitution. Professor Wittenberg attributes Fidesz’s victory to three factors: the incompetence of older right wing parties, partly resulting from lack of governing experience during last four decades of Socialist rule; 2) the arrogance of the Socialist party; and 3) a simple lack of alternatives for voters. Wittenberg points out that Hungary’s complex electoral system resulted in more Fidesz parliamentary seats than the party’s actual popularity with voters would predict. He concludes that the 70% of parliamentary vote won, cumulatively, by extreme nationalist parties, does not bode well for the future of liberal politics in Hungary.

Professor Scheppele describes how the Fidesz party under the leadership of (Victor) Orban has taken its victory as a “mandate to change everything,” often in ways that will allow Fidesz to stay in power in the future. The constitution was amended 10 times during the party’s first year in power. Key changes included reducing the size and jurisdiction of constitutional courts, limiting media activities, allowing election commission representatives to be appointed with a 2/3 majority, and fast tracking the process of voting on new laws to approximately 3 days, leaving little room for discussion and debate. Scheppele echoes Professor Wittenberg’s argument that many voters simply did not have an attractive alternative to Fidesz, which would be less of a danger if the country’s constitution were not so easy to amend. She predicts that Hungary’s current situation should offer lessons to other countries on how to design constitutions.

Professor Halmai concludes the panel by crediting the arrogance (and corruption) of the Socialist coalition with the success of Fidesz in the 2010 elections. He highlights three central problems with the new constitution: 1) It leaves questions regarding who is to be subject to the constitution – for example, does this include the Roma population within Hungary, or Hungarian-Americans living within the United States? 2) The constitution intervenes in the private lives of Hungarians with respect to religion, marriage, abortion, etc. 3) It limits constitutional courts to narrower jurisdictions. He also laments the lack of consensus within the Hungarian government on a set of liberal democratic values.

A discussion session raised such questions as: What prospects are there for pushback from the European Union against some of the recent constraints on rule of law in Hungary? Does the fact that the Hungarian constitution considers the 1.4 million Hungarian-Americans in the United States as Hungarian citizens raise any legal challenge from the U.S.? Does the fact that Hungary has to operates within the frameworks of the European Union and NATO put constraints on its actions with regards to democracy and the constitution? Where does Fidesz’s funding come from?

CISAC Conference Room

Gabor Halmai Speaker Institute for Political and International Studies, Budapest; former chief counselor to the President of the Constitutional Court and former Vice President of the Hungarian Electoral Commission
Kim Lane Scheppele Speaker Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University
Jason Wittenberg Speaker UC Berkeley
Marton Dornbach Speaker Stanford University
Panel Discussions

The European and Global Economic Crisis: "The Eurozone Crisis and Prospects for Future European Integration or Disintegration"

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Synopsis:

Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House, delivered the following talk in The Europe Center series “The European and Global Economic Crisis”.

With measured optimism about the prospect for a way out of the current Eurozone crisis, Dr. Niblett argues that the introduction of the common Euro, seen by many in past years as a vanguard tool for European integration, is now potentially a functional wedge between ‘debtor’ and strongly capitalized nations.  

Dr. Niblett, arriving directly from participating in the World Economic Forum in Dubai, and based on Chatham House research, described the “perfect storm” of the past two decades of credit-driven growth, divergence within the EU, rising debt-to GDP ratios of member nations especially in the cases of Italy and Greece.  His analysis combines these economic details with the following:

  • Demographics – high levels of unassimilated immigrants
  • European welfare economies still distributing resources at twentieth-century levels now in the twenty-first century
  • The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade populist parties
  • The weakening of Europe’s center parties
  • The “Russification” of Europe’s East – especially in recent events in Ukraine
  • The stalled integration of Turkey into the EU

The totality of the above paints a grim portrait of Europe under the weight of nearly impossible conditions.   And yet, Dr. Niblett underlines evidence for measured optimism:

  • Ireland is making strides to reform its economy
  • Ireland’s educated and yet unemployed workforce does have the possibility to immigrate to Europe
  • The UK is finally rebalancing its state budget and market liberalization
  • France is facing, albeit with massive labor protest, its state budget levels
  • Spain will likely turn over its government in the face of its massive youth protest
  • Italy is evaluating in its political process a series of budget reforms

These are the structural side of what Dr. Niblett sees as Europe’s tools for recovery.

On the side of European practice, the Franco-German proposals for European Central Bank “bailout funds” include new rules for transparency of internal government operations. This promises innovation to make the EU into an area of political and financial transparency, and to enable the EU to engage in direct investment, as evidence is beginning to show, in the world’s emerging economies.  In this sense, Dr. Niblett sees for Europe a competitive edge over the US in engaging in world markets.

Perhaps most sanguine of Dr. Niblett’s analysis is his reading of the Eurozone crisis as a force to push the member nations of Europe further towards supra-national economic strategies.  In order to participate in the investment in emerging markets, the Benelux countries, not to mention France, Germany, and neighboring European states, are responding to the crisis by considering policy that promotes investment and outsourcing for service-sector employment, instead of export commodities which have been undercut in recent years.

There is a risk, in Dr. Niblett’s view, that Europe will respond to the Eurozone crisis by fracturing into rival “clubs” of small and large or debt-restructuring and creditor nation-states.  But the European nations, especially those currently participating in the Eurozone, have untapped capacities for growth:

  • Educated youth
  • Underemployed female laborers
  • Outstanding higher educational institutions
  • Pent-up small- and medium-enterprise markets
  • Potential for growth in the service sector labor market
  • Room for more tightly integrating and rationalizing the region’s energy market.

Those interested in further detail and analysis are invited to visit the work and productivity at:

The Europe Center, at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies: http://tec.fsi.stanford.edu

Chatham House, at the Royal Institute for International Studies: http://www.chathamhouse.org/

 

Speaker bio:

Robin Niblett became the Director of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International
Affairs) in January 2007. Before joining Chatham House, from 2001 to 2006, Dr. Niblett
was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Washington based
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). During his last two years at CSIS, he
also served as Director of the CSIS Europe Program and its Initiative for a Renewed
Transatlantic Partnership.

Most recently Dr. Niblett is the author of the Chatham House Report Playing to its
Strengths: Rethinking the UK’s Role in a Changing World (Chatham House, 2010) and
Ready to Lead? Rethinking America’s Role in a Changed World (Chatham House,
2009), and editor and contributing author to America and a Changed World: A Question
of Leadership (Chatham House/Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is also the author or
contributor to a number of CSIS reports on transatlantic relations and is contributing
author and co-editor with William Wallace of the book Rethinking European Order
(Palgrave, 2001). Dr Niblett is a frequent panellist at conferences on transatlantic
relations. He has testified on a number of occasions to the House of Commons Defence
Select Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee as well as US Senate and House
Committees on European Affairs.

Dr Niblett is a Non-Executive Director of Fidelity European Values Investment Trust. He
is a Council member of the Overseas Development Institute, a member of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Global Institutional Governance and the
Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Europe.

He received his BA in Modern Languages and MPhil and DPhil from New College,
Oxford.

CISAC Conference Room

Robin Niblett Director Speaker Chatham House, Royal Institute for International Affairs
Seminars
European and Global Economic Crisis Series

Thomas Jonter

Department of Economic History
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden

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Professor of International Relations, Department of History, Stockholm University
Thomas2.jpg PhD

Thomas Jonter is Professor in International Relations at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University. His research is focused on nuclear non-proliferation and energy security. He is also project leader for different educational and research programs in Russia with the aim to initiate academic courses and programs in nuclear non-proliferation at different universities in the regions of Tomsk and Jekaterinburg. These projects are carried out in a cooperation between Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), Monterey, United States, and  Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).  Professor Jonter is also chair of the ESARDA (European Safeguards and Research Development Association) working group for Training and Knowledge Management. Currently he is a visiting scholar at The Europe Center at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.

Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center

Why Sweden Did Not Build the Bomb: Testing the Swedish Case Against International Relations Theories

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Why did Sweden choose, in the late 1960s, to abandon its long-standing nuclear weapons plans? A number of historical investigations have analyzed some aspects of this issue, particularly as it related to the public political debate in Sweden and the formulation of the Swedish defense doctrine in the postwar years. Some studies have attempted to explicate, from a more overarching perspective, why Sweden opted not to develop anuclear weapons capability, but these efforts have generally been hampered by heavy dependence on secondary source materials consisting of published English-language works. Taken together, these studies provide a far-from-complete picture of Sweden’s historical nuclear weapons plans. The main reason for this lack of a comprehensive picture has been the paucity of primary sources. Today, however, the end of the cold war and the declassification of large parts of the relevant documentary record, especially concerning the technical preparations for nuclear weapons production, have created the prerequisites for a more penetrating analysis of this important historical issue. The purpose of this presentation is to summarize the research on Sweden’s plans to acquire nuclear weapons based on primary sources. This overarching analysis is then tested against International Relation theories which have sought to explain factors of proliferation and non-proliferation.

Thomas Jonter is Professor in International Relations at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University. His research is focused on nuclear non-proliferation and energy security. He is also project leader for different educational and research programs in Russia with the aim to initiate academic courses and programs in nuclear non-proliferation at different universities in the regions of Tomsk and Jekaterinburg. These projects are carried out in a cooperation between Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), Monterey, United States, and  Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).  Professor Jonter is also chair of the ESARDA (European Safeguards and Research Development Association) working group for Training and Knowledge Management. Currently he is a visiting scholar at The Europe Center at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.

 

Audio Synopsis:

First, Professor Jonter explains that Sweden initiated nuclear weapons research in the 1950’s because of the presence of a large uranium supply, ample technological and scientific knowledge, and concerns about self-defense. He cites wide support for nuclear research during that time, including from Prime Minister Tage Erlander, the Defense Ministry, and the military. In 1945 the Swedish National Defense Research Establishment created plans for a nuclear weapons program within a civilian nuclear power program, necessitating high levels of cooperation between military and civilian entities.  Despite pressure from the United States to abandon nuclear research, uranium production began in 1955 along with the construction of two reactors. Eventually, social groups within Sweden protested and a debate emerged within Parliament, resulting in a decision that Sweden would only pursue research related to self-defense against the Soviet Union. Behind the scenes, however, nuclear weapons research carried on covertly for some time. Jonter addresses questions of whether the program was really weapons-based or simply scientific research, how the debates in Sweden were influenced by criticisms at home and abroad, the role of private investors in the Swedish nuclear research program, and the factors that ultimately allowed Sweden to publicly back away from a weapons program.

Professor Jonter then examines implications for the international system by analyzing the Swedish nuclear case in light of several international relations theories. He also considers the argument that "outward looking" states which are active in international trade are less likely to develop nuclear weapons. Jonter asserts that research on this topic would benefit from more historical analysis of primary resources, although the secret nature of nuclear records make them difficult to access.

 A question and answer period following the presentation addressed such issues as: How does the Swedish case study compare with the Danish case? Did the Swedish government tie its hands with a public decision not to pursue weapons development? Is there evidence of Sweden having to balance nuclear weapons research with other military expenses?  Why did the government switch from high levels of secrecy about the nuclear program decisions to a policy of openness and public discussion?

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CISAC Conference Room

Thomas Jonter

Department of Economic History
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm
Sweden

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Professor of International Relations, Department of History, Stockholm University
Thomas2.jpg PhD

Thomas Jonter is Professor in International Relations at the Department of Economic History, Stockholm University. His research is focused on nuclear non-proliferation and energy security. He is also project leader for different educational and research programs in Russia with the aim to initiate academic courses and programs in nuclear non-proliferation at different universities in the regions of Tomsk and Jekaterinburg. These projects are carried out in a cooperation between Swedish Radiation Safety Authority, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), Monterey, United States, and  Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).  Professor Jonter is also chair of the ESARDA (European Safeguards and Research Development Association) working group for Training and Knowledge Management. Currently he is a visiting scholar at The Europe Center at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University.

Anna Lindh Fellow, The Europe Center
Thomas Jonter Speaker
Seminars
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