Stanford University

U.S.-European Relations After the Iraq War

U.S.-European relations hit a dramatic and highly visible low point in the weeks leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. With the exception of the British government, which was, of course, supportive of the enterprise, many long-time U.S. allies – including, most prominently, France and Germany – were openly hostile to the American action. Relations have recovered, to a degree at least on an official level, but disagreements persist and resentments fester on both sides of the Atlantic four years after the onset of the war.

Is the damage that has been inflicted on the relationship irreparable in some sense? Or, as on so many other occasions since the establishment of the trans-Atlantic partnership at the mid-point of the last century, is the current unpleasantness likely to prove transitory? While the arrows point in both directions, the evidence continues to mount that the tensions so much in evidence between the two sides over the course of the last half-decade or so transcend disputes over particular issues. If this is true – which I believe it is – then our differences over Iraq are a reflection of something much deeper that is underway within the relationship, and not, in and of themselves, the cause – or even a cause – of the problem.

The real issue, it seems to me, is not whether relations between the United States and Europe can be repaired. Within limits, they can and will be. The more interesting – and important – question is whether the very nature of the relationship has changed (and is continuing to change) and if so, how, why, and with what implications for the future?

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Renner Institut, Vienna

Coit D. Blacker

Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street, C137
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 725-5368 (650) 723-3435
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Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences
coit_blacker_2022.jpg PhD

Coit Blacker is a senior fellow emeritus at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Olivier Nomellini Professor Emeritus in International Studies at the School of Humanities and Sciences, and a Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He served as director of FSI from 2003 to 2012. From 2005 to 2011, he was co-chair of the International Initiative of the Stanford Challenge, and from 2004 to 2007, served as a member of the Development Committee of the university's Board of Trustees.

During the first Clinton administration, Blacker served as special assistant to the president for National Security Affairs and senior director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he oversaw the implementation of U.S. policy toward Russia and the New Independent States, while also serving as principal staff assistant to the president and the National Security Advisor on matters relating to the former Soviet Union.

Following his government service, Blacker returned to Stanford to resume his research and teaching. From 1998 to 2003, he also co-directed the Aspen Institute's U.S.-Russia Dialogue, which brought together prominent U.S. and Russian specialists on foreign and defense policy for discussion and review of critical issues in the bilateral relationship. He was a study group member of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) throughout the commission's tenure.

In 2001, Blacker was the recipient of the Laurence and Naomi Carpenter Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford.

Blacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Far Eastern Studies for his work on U.S.-Russian relations. He is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., and Ph.D).

Blacker's association with Stanford began in 1977, when he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship by the Arms Control and Disarmament Program, the precursor to the Center for International Security and Cooperation at FSI.

Faculty member at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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FSI Director Blacker discusses trans-Atlantic relations at Vienna's Renner Institut

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On February 7, in Vienna, FSI Director Coit D. Blacker gave a distinguished scholar lecture on "U.S.-European Relations After the Iraq War." The talk, which was held at the Renner Institut and co-sponsored by the U.S. Embassy, focused on critical relations between Europe and the U.S. that extend beyond the current administration in Washington.

Blacker discussed the noted phenomenon of "anti-Americanism," arguing that the critical relations between Europe and the U.S. transcend relatively narrow disputes with particular administrations in power in Washington. Instead, Blacker argued, European disagreements with American foreign policy stem from the distinctly different origins of political institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Historical origins and evolutions of European national, European Union, and American political cultures have led to fundamentally differing views of international relations and rationales for foreign intervention missions, and such "institutional anti-Americanism," if understood in its historical dimensions, can lead to productive debates.

Blacker's visit to Vienna was the occasion for several events, including teaching at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and renewing and deepening the Stanford-Austria scholarly exchange program hosted by FSI and the University of Vienna. The Program on Austria and Central Europe is administered at FSI by the Forum on Contemporary Europe. The U.S. Ambassador to Austria, her Excellency Susan McCaw, hosted students from Blacker's classes at the Academy, members of the diplomatic corps, and directors of the FSI Forum on Contemporary Europe, for a reception and dinner in honor of Blacker.

The U.S. Embassy Speakers Program is designed to bring U.S. experts from many different fields to Austria to speak on topics related to the United States. The Renner Institute is a leading political academy in Austria for the study of international affairs.

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French Presidential Election Roundtable

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Beyond selecting the new President, the second and final round of the 2007 French Presidential election will raise many questions about the meaning of the results for France, and for the EU and trans-Atlantic relations. This roundtable event is scheduled to follow soon after the election to give the benefit of review. Panelists from wide-ranging disciplines will each comment on what can be learned from the campaigns, the final voting patterns, and prospects for French and Francophone politics, culture, and society.

About the Panelists

Patrick Chamorel has been a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 2005. He is currently based at the Stanford Center in Washington, D.C., and will soon be the Center's Resident Scholar. He has written extensively on U.S. and European politics and U.S.-European relations. As a political scientist, Chamorel has taught and done research on comparative U.S. and European politics on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently focusing on French politics on the eve of the 2007 presidential election.

Margaret Cohen is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, and director of the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University. She is author of Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution and The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Her research interests involve rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways. She is currently working on a book concerning how the history and representation of global ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is professor of French and political science at Stanford University and social and political philosophy at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He is author of The Mechanization of the Mind: On Origins of Cognitive Science and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. His current research projects are: the paradoxes of rationality or the classical philosophical problem of the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytics philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; and the philosophical underpinnings and the future of societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is also director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French program. She is author of Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization and Remembering Africa. Her research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals, and society; and women writers.

Tyler Stovall is professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. He is coeditor, with Sue Peabody, of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. He has written numerous articles on French history and has been president of the Western Society for French History. His work on African Americans living in Paris is of special importance to contemporary understanding of both French and American culture.

Sponsored by Stanford University's Forum on Contemporary Europe, History Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

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Patrick Chamorel Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Resident Scholar Speaker Stanford Center, Washington, D.C.

Margaret Cohen

107 Pigott Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-2031

(650) 724-0106
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Andrew B. Hammond Professor in French Language, Literature, and Civilization
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of English
Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian
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Margaret Cohen is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford University, where she is appointed in English and directs the Center for the Study of Novel. Her current fields of research include the novel and narrative as well as interdisciplinary oceanic studies. In her most recent book, The Novel and the Sea (2010), she revealed the impact of the ship’s log and the history of writing about work at sea on the development of the modern novel. The Novel and the Sea received the Louis R. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of the Narrative, and an honorable mention from the American Comparative Literature Association.

In The Sentimental Education of the Novel (1999), co-winner of the MLA’s 2000 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies, she recovered forgotten sentimental fiction by women writers important to the emergence of French realism. Other books include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1993), as well as co-edited collections, most recently The Aesthetics of the Undersea (2019) with Killian Quigley, and a Norton critical edition of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2004). Professor Cohen has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the ACLS, NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies, the NEH, the John Carter Brown Library’s Alexander O. Vietor Memorial Fund, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Current projects include a book on the history of underwater film and editingThe Age of Empire for the six-volume A Cultural History of the Sea (Bloomsbury), for which she is general editor as well.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
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Margaret Cohen Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization and Director of the Center for the Study of the Novel Speaker Stanford University
Jean-Pierre Dupuy Professor of French and Political Science at Stanford University and Social and Political Philosophy Speaker Ecole Polytechnique, Paris

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi

111 Pigott Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-1947
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Professor of Comparative Literature, Emerita
Professor of French and Italian, Emerita
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Professor Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is affiliated with both the French & Italian and Comparative Literature departments. Her teaching and research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals and society; and women writers. Before coming to Stanford in 1995, Professor Boyi taught at universities in the Congo and Burundi, as well as Haverford College and Duke University. She was a Visiting Professor in the French Department of the Graduate Center, CUNY in 1994 and in 1995 a Professeur Invité at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1999-2000 Professor Boyi was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2002-2003 Professor Boyi was the president of the African Literature Association, a non-profit society of scholars dedicated to the advancement of African Literary Studies. She served as a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, where she represents the field of French (2003-2006), and as the Director of the interdisciplinary Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford (2005-2008).

Publications

Among Mudimbe-Boyi's publications are Jacques-Stephen Alexis: une écriture poétique, un engagement politique (1992); "Post-Colonial Women Writing in French (1993);"  Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization (2002); Remembering Africa (2002); Essais sur les cultures en contact: Afrique, Amériques, Europe (2006). Her latest book is Empire Lost: France and Its Other Worlds (2009).

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French Program Speaker Stanford University
Tyler Stovall Professor of History Speaker University of California, Berkeley
Panel Discussions

The Irish Peace Process and the Changing Political Landscape

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Paul Arthur is professor of politics and course director of the graduate program in peace and conflict studies at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. He has been a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and a consultant to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United Nations Research Institute on Social Development.

He has published widely on the Northern Ireland conflict. He wrote Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Problem and Memory, Forgiveness, and Conflict: Trust-building in Northern Ireland. His latest work focuses on what he calls the "consequences of peace" in post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes.

Professor Arthur has lectured widely in the United States and Europe. He is the Irish Fulbright in residence at Stanford this winter-spring.

Sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Western Institute of Irish Studies, and the Irish Studies Foundation.

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Paul Arthur Fulbright Scholar in Irish Studies, Department of History, Stanford University Speaker
Seminars

Film screening of Patricio Guzman's The Pinochet Case and Q&A with Carlos Castresana

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The Pinochet Case

Patricio Guzman's The Pinochet Case investigates the legal origins of the case against Augusto Pinochet, the general who overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973. This documentary follows the legal cases that ultimately led to Pinochet being arrested and tried for his crimes against humanity committed over the 25 years that he ruled Chile.

Carlos Castresana received his law degree in 1979 from Complutense University, Madrid, Spain. He served as a District and Examine Judge, and Court Magistrate for a number of years, before becoming a member of the Public Prosecutors of Spain, where he worked in the Anti-drug and Anti-corruption Special Offices. In 2005, he was appointed Prosecutor of the Supreme Court. He was also a professor of criminal law at the University Carlos III, Madrid.

Mr. Castresana authored the formal complaint and subsequent reports in the Pinochet Case before the Audiencia Nacional in Spain. He has served as an expert in international legal cooperation and other issues in Europe and Latin America, under appointment of the United Nations, European Union, and Council of Europe. He received the Human Rights National Award in Spain in 1997, was awarded the Doctorate Honoris causa from the Guadalajara University, Mexico in 2003, and the Certificate of Honor from the City and County of San Francisco in 2004. Mr. Castresana teaches courses on human rights in Latin America and international criminal law and is coordinator of Project H32, in the United Nation's Office of Narcotics and Crime in Monterrey, Mexico.

Sponsored by the Stanford Law School, the Program on Global Justice, the Forum on Contemporary Europe, the Stanford Film Lab, VPUE, and the Introduction to the Humanities Program.

Stanford Film Lab
Margaret Jacks Hall, Lower Level
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Carlos Castresana Coordinator of Project H32 Speaker the United Nations' Office of Narcotics and Crime
Conferences

Political Theologies: The Present of the Religious Past

A conference on "Political Theologies: The Present of the Religious Past" will bring together at Stanford some of the leading scholars in Medieval Studies from the United States and Europe to reflect on how the medieval religious past informs and shapes our present-day forms of religiosity.

The conference features Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University), Andreas Kablitz (University of Cologne), Joachim Kupper (Free University of Berlin), Stephen G. Nichols (Johns Hopkins University), and many others.

Please see the attached program for more information.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of French and Italian, the Forum on Contemporary Europe, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

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Terrace Room, 4th floor
Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460)
Stanford University

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Martyr Narratives of the Spanish Civil War

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Cosponsored with the Iberian Studies Program, the Mediterranean Studies Forum, and the Department of History.

Noël Valis is a Professor of Spanish at Yale University. She previously taught at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and the University of Georgia. Her areas of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, comparative literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to modern Spanish culture.

She has published 19 books and numerous articles in PMLA, Novel, Romanic Review, Hispanic Review, Modern Age, MLN, Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and other journals and essay collections. In May 2004 she was elected President of the Twentieth-Century Spanish Association of America. She is the recipient of both an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006-07, for the book project, Body Sacraments: Catholicism and the Imagination in Modern Spanish Narrative.

She received her B.A. from Douglass College and her Ph.D. in Spanish and French from Bryn Mawr College.

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Noël Valis Professor of Spanish at Yale University Speaker
Lectures

New Austrian & Central European Program

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Roland Hsu
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The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is proud to announce a new program to advance relations between the United States and Austria and Central Europe. In collaboration with the University of Vienna, the Austrian & Central European Program will bring together students and faculty from Stanford University and the University of Vienna to broaden understanding and research. The Austrian & Central European Program currently hosts an Austrian visiting professor at Stanford to teach a course in his/her specialty for a one-year term while also working closely with FCE to promote specific research topics pertaining to Austria and Central Europe. In addition, two fellowships will be awarded each year for one Stanford student and one University of Vienna student for a study exchange. The program will also initiate annual workshops in which faculty from one host university will travel overseas to work with their colleagues. These workshops will switch venues each year to give both universities the opportunity to host the event. The Austrian & Central European Program was formally inaugurated on October 11 with the visit of the Austrian ambassador to the United States, Dr. Eva Nowotny.

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