When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the worry in the West was what would happen to that country’s thousands of nuclear weapons. Would “loose” nukes fall into the hands of terrorists, rogue states, criminals – and plunge the world into a nuclear nightmare?

Fortunately, scientists and technical experts in both the U.S. and the former Soviet Union rolled up their sleeves to manage and contain the nuclear problem in the dissolving Communist country.

One of the leaders in this relationship was Stanford engineering professor Siegfried Hecker, who served as a director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory before coming to Stanford as a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. He is a world-renowned expert in plutonium science, global threat reduction and nuclear security.

Hecker cited one 1992 meeting with Russian scientists in Moscow who were clearly concerned about the risks. In his new book, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers, Hecker quoted one Russian expert as saying, “We now need to be concerned about terrorism.”

Earning both scientific and political trust was a key, said Hecker, also a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. The Russians were proud of their scientific accomplishments and highly competent in the nuclear business – and they sought to show this to the Americans scientists, who became very confident in their Russian counterparts’ technical capabilities as they learned more about their nuclear complex and toured the labs.

Economic collapse, political turmoil

But the nuclear experts faced an immense problem. The Soviets had about 39,000 nuclear weapons in their country and in Eastern Europe and about 1.5 million kilograms of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (the fuel for nuclear bombs), Hecker said. Consider that the bomb that the U.S. dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945 was only six kilograms of plutonium, he added. Meanwhile, the U.S. had about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the early 1990s.

Hecker and the rest of the Americans were deeply concerned about the one million-plus Russians who worked in nuclear facilities. Many faced severe financial pressure in an imploding society and thus constituted a huge potential security risk.

“The challenge that Russia faced with its economy collapsing was enormous,” he said in an interview.

The Russian scientists, Hecker said, were motivated to act responsibly because they realized the awful destruction that a single nuclear bomb could wreak. Hecker noted that one Russian scientist told him, “We arrived in the nuclear century all in one boat, and a movement by anyone will affect everyone.” Hecker noted, “Therefore, you know, we were doomed to work together to cooperate.”

All of this depended on the two governments involved easing nuclear tensions while allowing the scientists to collaborate. In short order, the scientists developed mutual respect and trust to address the loose nukes scenario.

The George H.W. Bush administration launched nuclear initiatives to put the Russian government at ease. For example, it took the nuclear weapons off U.S. Navy surface ships and some of its nuclear weapons off alert to allow the Russians to do the same. The U.S. Congress passed the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation, which helped fund some of the loose nuke containment efforts.

While those were positive measures, Hecker said, it was ultimately the cooperation among scientists, what they called lab-to-lab-cooperation, that allowed the two former superpower enemies to “get past the sensitivity barriers” and make “the world a safer place.”

Since the end of the Cold War, no significant nuclear event has occurred as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its nuclear complex, Hecker noted.

Lesson: cooperation counts

One lesson from it all, Hecker said, is that government policymakers need to understand that scientists and engineers can work together and make progress toward solving difficult, dangerous problems.

“We don’t want to lose the next generation from understanding what can actually be done by working together,” he said.  “So, we want to demonstrate to them, Look, this is what was done when the scientists were interested and enthusiastic and when the government gave us enough room to be able to do that.”

Hecker said this scientific cooperation extended to several thousand scientists and engineers at the Russian sites and at U.S. nuclear labs – primarily the three defense labs: Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national laboratories. Many technical exchanges and visits between scientists in Russia and the United States took place.

He recalled visiting some of the nuclear sites in Russian cities shrouded by mystery. “These cities were so secret, they didn’t even appear on Soviet maps.”

Change of threat

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the nature of the nuclear threat changed, Hecker said. The threat before was one of mutual annihilation, but now the threat changed to what would happen if nuclear assets were lost, stolen or somehow evaded the control of the government.

“From an American perspective we referred to these as the ‘four loose nuclear dangers,'” he said.

This included securing the loose nukes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; preventing nuclear materials or bomb fuel from getting into the wrong hands; the human element involving the people who worked in the Soviet nuclear complex; and finally, the “loose exports” problem of someone trying to sell nuclear materials or technical components to overseas groups like terrorists or rogue nations.

For Hecker, this is not just an American story. It is about a selfless reconciliation with a longtime enemy for the greater global good, a relationship not corrupted by ideological or nationalistic differences, but one reflective of mutual interests of the highest order.

“The primary reason,” he said, “why we didn’t have a nuclear catastrophe was the Russian nuclear workers and the Russian nuclear officials. Their dedication, their professionalism, their patriotism for their country was so strong that it carried them through these times in the 1990s when they often didn’t get paid for six months at a time … The nuclear complex did its job through the most trying times. And it was a time when the U.S. government took crucial conciliatory measures with the new Russian Federation and gave us scientists the support to help make the world a safer place.”

The Europe Center Graduate Student Grant Competition

Call for Proposals:

The Europe Center is pleased to announce the Fall 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition for graduate and professional students at Stanford whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates from across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Moreover, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. Grants range from $500 to $5000.

Additional information about the grants, as well as the online application form, can be found here.  The deadline for this Fall’s competition is Friday, October 17th. Recipients will be notified by November 7th. A second competition is scheduled for Spring 2015.
 

Highlights from 2013-2014:

In the 2013-2014 academic year, the Center awarded grants to 26 graduate students in departments ranging from Linguistics to Political Science to Anthropology. We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured students this month are Michela Giorcelli (Economics) and Orysia Kulick (History).

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Undergraduate Internship Program: Highlights

The Europe Center sponsored four undergraduate student internships with leading think tanks and international organizations in Europe in Summer 2014.  Laura Conigliaro (International Relations, 2015) joined the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), while Elsa Brown (Political Science, 2015), Noah Garcia (BA International Relations and MA Public Policy, 2015), and Jana Persky (Public Policy, 2016) joined Bruegel, a leading European think tank. Our featured student this month is Laura Conigliaro.

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Recap:  Panel on Europe-Russia Relations and EU expansion

On September 30, 2014, Miroslav Lajčák, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, participated in a panel discussion in which he shared his thoughts and opinions about Europe’s relationship with Russia, and about the E.U.’s management of its future membership and associations. The Minister’s viewpoints were of particular interest, given his role in the E.U. foreign policy establishment, and the Slovak Republic’s role in the E.U. and NATO.

“The fact is that E.U.-Russia relations have worsened dramatically. That cannot be denied. But it’s not E.U. enlargement that played a major role in this.”  According to the Minister, Russia did not view E.U. enlargement with hostility, in part, because enlargement remained a transparent process. “But it all changed when Europe decided to enter into Russia’s immediate neighborhood...the former Soviet Republics. And this was something that

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Minister Lajčák’s brought a variety of experiences to the panel. He served as the European Union Chief Negotiator for the E.U.-Ukraine and E.U.-Moldova Association Agreements, and was the European Union Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Sarajevo. Additionally, he was previously the Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 

After Minister Lajčák spoke, he was followed by comments by Michael McFaul, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute; Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East European Studies in the History Department and The Director of Stanford Global Studies; and Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Faculty Director of the Susan Ford Dorsey Program in International Studies.

Introducing “Immigration and Integration in Europe” Policy Lab

The Europe Center would like to introduce a new research project entitled, “Immigration and Integration in Europe:  A Public Policy Perspective,” led by Professors David Laitin and Jens Hainmueller. Duncan Lawrence has recently joined Stanford University to help direct the project. The project is part of the new Policy Implementation Lab at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The social and economic integration of its diverse and ever growing immigrant populations is one of the most fundamental and pressing policy issues European countries face today. Success or failure in integrating immigrants is likely to have a substantial effect on the ability of European countries individually and collectively as members of the European Union to achieve objectives ranging from the profound such as sustaining a robust democratic culture to the necessary such as fostering economic cooperation between countries. Various policies have been devised to address this grave political dilemma, but despite heated public debates we know very little about whether these policies achieve their stated goals and actually foster the integration of immigrants into the host societies. (Inset: David Laitin)

The goal of this research program is to fill this gap and create a network of leading immigration scholars in the US and Europe to generate rigorous evidence about what works and what does not when it comes to integration policies. The methodological core of the lab’s research program is a focus on systematic impact evaluations that leverage experimental and quasi-experimental methods with common study protocols to quantify the social and economic returns to integration policies across Europe, including polices for public housing, education, citizenship acquisition, and integration contracts for newcomers. This work will add to the quality of informed public debate on a sensitive issue, and create cumulative knowledge about policies that will be broadly relevant. (Inset: Jens Hainmueller)

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

We invite you to attend the following events sponsored or co-sponsored by The Europe Center:

Additional Details on our website
October 8-10, 2014
“War, Revolution and Freedom: the Baltic Countries in the 20th Century”
Stauffer Auditorium, Hoover Institution
9:00 AM onward

Save the Date
April 24-25, 2015
Conference on Human Rights

A collaborative effort between the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School (IHRCRC), the Research Center for Human Rights at Vienna University (RCHR), and The Europe Center. The conference will focus on the pedagogy and practice of human rights. 

Save the Date
May 20-22, 2015
TEC Lectureship on Europe and the World 
Joel Mokyr
Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

Special Event:  The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

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Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures from his forthcoming book, A World Fit for Heroes. In particular, he will speak about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.

Open Call:  The Europe Center Graduate Student Grant Competition

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Andreas Kilcher 

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Andreas Kilcher, FSI-Humanities Center International Visitor 2013-2014, is professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zurich. Kilcher is a prominent scholar of German-Jewish literature and culture, Kabbalah, and the European tradition of esotericism. He has written and edited a range of publications on the encounters between European and Jewish cultures from the sixteenth century through the present, with a focus on the twentieth century. His publications include Geteilte Freude: Schiller-Rezeption in der jüdischen Moderne (Munich, 2006), biographies of the writers Franz Kafka (Frankfurt, 2008) and Max Frisch (Berlin 2011) and numerous other articles. Kilcher’s current project includes collaboration with colleagues at Stanford on the divergent constructions of Jewish ethnography in German-speaking and Russian-speaking territories. 

Student Scholar Profile:  Christof Brandtner

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Christof Brandtner, a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Stanford, will be visiting the Vienna University of Economics and Business to present findings from his research on city rankings. Brandter’s project explores where the criteria of systematic city comparisons come from, and how they came to supplement economic power as measures of urban performance. By investigating the types and sources of variation in the evaluation of organizations, and by mapping the ways in which urban qualities are operationalized, this research sheds new light on questions related to the sustainability of global cities. Brandtner will use his visit to also conduct interviews with members of the urban development department of the City of Vienna.

Workshop Schedules  

Europe and the Global Economy

European Governance

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

Other Events

Recap:  The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy(2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history. His latest book, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931, will be released in Summer 2014 in the United Kingdom and in Fall 2014 in the United States.

Recap:  European Commission President José Barroso Visits Stanford

Barroso was named President of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) of Portugal in 1999, following which he was re-elected three times. He was appointed Prime Minister of Portugal in 2002. He remained in office until July 2004 when he was elected by the European Parliament to the post of President of the European Commission. He was re-elected to a second term as President of the European Commission by an absolute majority in the European Parliament in September 2009.

Workshop:  Comparative Approaches to the Study of Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion

Spring 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition Winners Announced

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Vibeke Kieding Banik

Vibeke Kieding Banik is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, at the University of Oslo. Her main focus of research is on the history of minorities in Scandinavia, particularly Jews, with an emphasis on migration and integration. Her research interests also include gender history, and her current project investigates whether there was a gendered integration strategy among Scandinavian Jews in the period 1900-1940. Dr. Banik has authored several articles on Jewish life in Norway, Jewish historiography, and on the Norwegian women’s suffragette movement. She has taught extensively on Jewish history and is currently writing a book on the history of the Norwegian Jews, scheduled to be published in 2015.

Workshop Schedules  

Europe and the Global Economy

European Governance

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

Other Events

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

On April 30, May 1, and May 2, 2014, Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History at Yale University, delivered in three parts "The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World", the first of an annual series.

With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War as his backdrop, Tooze spoke about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. He advanced a powerful explanation for why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States.

The three lectures focused successively on diplomatic, economic, and social aspects of the troubled interwar history of Europe and its relationship with the wider world. Over the course of the lectures, he presented an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world even today.

Tooze also participated in a lunchtime question-and-answer roundtable with graduate students from the History department.

The First Lecture

Tooze motivated his first lecture, entitled, “Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles,” by the recent political developments in Ukraine, Crimea, and in Eastern Europe. In light of these political frictions, Tooze posed the question: Is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? To properly answer this question, Tooze argued that we must look back to the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I.

He focused on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk—the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine—and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after.

In the Brest treaty, Russia lost territories inhabited by 55 million people, one third of its agricultural land, more than half of its industrial undertakings, and 90 percent of its coal mines. Whereas conventional narratives view these developments either as an expression of German ultra imperialism or as the ultimate demonstration of Lenin’s revolutionary realism, Tooze drew attention to Brest as the first international venue to recognize the independence of Ukraine in the modern era.

“The map that was created at Brest, the existence side by side within separate dispensations of a fragile and independent Ukraine alongside a battered, reduced and resentful Russia, is strikingly reminiscent of that which we have taken for granted since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.”

Tooze argued that Brest is the only historical precedent for the structure that the international community is seeking to defend today in Ukraine. In turn, “the first good peace gone bad was not Versailles, but Brest. Furthermore, it is not just that Versailles echoes Brest, but Brest actually directly conditioned the more familiar story of Versailles. And after acts one and two, after Brest and Versailles, there was a third act in which between 1919 and 1923 the search for a truly comprehensive peace in Europe, a peace that would embrace eastern as well as western Europe, unleashed a violent see-sawing movement that did not finally come to rest until Europe relapsed into exhausted division in 1924.”

Tooze drew insights from the period between 1917 and 1923 to draw conclusions about the stability of the world order that has largely been taken for granted since 1991.

“What the current crisis makes clear is that if we want to disarm Russian nationalism, we need to find some way of addressing the trauma of 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismembering of its component parts. If we do not want to entrench a new cold war, we need to make a serious effort to reconcile Moscow to the new order that must otherwise seem like a Brest Litovsk set in stone.”

The Second Lecture

In his second lecture, “Hegemony: Europe, America and the problem of financial reconstruction 1916-1933,” Tooze reflected on the rearrangements in the transatlantic power structure in the aftermath of World War I. Having established itself in the 19^th century as the financial center of the world, Europe’s sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing transatlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe, but also the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world.

Tooze began by discussing the vast efforts that were made to restore European economies to prewar normality—and in particular, to restore gold and gold-backed currency as the basis of the international financial system—in the immediate aftermath of 1919.

Yet, these efforts culminated not in prosperity but in unprecedented deflation, unemployment and trading disruptions: “The result, by 1933 was a truly catastrophic disintegration, which marks a caesura in the history of capitalism and in world politics. The demons of imperialism, racism and nationalism were unleashed.”

To this day, Tooze pointed out, there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of these economic developments. Conventional interpretations view the interwar period either as an era of trans-historic hegemonic succession or as time when global economic cooperation disintegrated, yet Tooze argued that neither account gives adequate importance to the actual impact of World War I. According to Tooze, the war abruptly changed the nature of the international cooperation by laying the foundations of a new world system that centered on the public debt of the major entente allies: Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.

“Within that new system, from 1918 a new game of politicized global finance was played out, a power game in which the United States emerged from November 1916 as the central actor…Once we acknowledge this shift in the functioning of the international financial system, then the politics of that crucial moment in 1931 appear rather different.”

Tooze argued that the political issue of the settlement of war debts played a central role in shaping the groundwork for each nation’s return to the gold standard between 1924 and 1930. Two complementary power plays emerged and began to define what became a “self-equilibrating” system: the strategy of persistent surplus and the strategy of persistent deficit.

According to Tooze, the absence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe’s economic fate during this period. “What was catastrophic was America’s failure to commit to any of its former partners in the war, in leading a joint effort to create a new order.”

These developments hold major lessons for our understanding of world politics today, because many of the current imbalances in the global economy stem from national strategies that resonate strongly with the politics of the interwar era.

The Third Lecture

In his third and final lecture, “Unsettled lands: the interwar crisis of agrarian Europe,” Tooze laid out an ambitious agenda for a new agrarian history of the interwar crisis by drawing on “the strange entangled” micro history of an agrarian cooperative in Wuerttemberg.

Lost in scholars’ preoccupation with the study of the industrial revolution, Tooze reminded us, is the stark fact that until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. Europe’s agrarian population peaked as late as in the 1930s at roughly 250 million people. Roughly 110 million lived in the Soviet Union while the remainder inhabited the rest of Europe, pursuing occupations as rural laborers, sharecroppers, long-term tenants and peasant proprietors.

The interwar era heralded major shifts and dislocations in the organization of agrarian life in Europe. During this period, “more than in any other sector millions of small scale producers were caught up in the turmoil of early globalization.” Opportunities for migration and movement to industrial work were limited during the interwar period, producing overcrowding and severe distress. Additionally, rural struggles over the distribution of land—in Russia, Italy, Spain, and much of Central and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War I—routinely spilled over into violent confrontation.

And yet, Tooze observed, the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, have tended to ignore these agrarian developments, focusing instead on workers, businessmen, politicians and soldiers.

An alternate approach that studies the ebbs and flows of agrarian life in Europe during the interwar period promises to shed new light on the historical political economy of the period. Tooze’s proposal was to eschew considerations of the “macrostructures of modern history” but to instead delve into a micro history of “the more intimate networks through which the interwar crisis was understood and lived.” His goal was “to reconstruct the experience of structural change, to reconstruct how Europeans came to terms with this trajectory, how they sought to resist, to deflect to shape or to accommodate themselves to it.”

Tooze’s micro history pertained to Haeusern, a tiny Wuerttemberg hamlet containing nine homesteads that was situated 2 kilometers away from the village of Ummendorf, on the rail-line connecting the medieval market town of Biberach to Stuttgart.

“There were thousands of cooperatives across Europe, for all sorts of things, but amongst specialists this unlikely place came to stand in agronomical debates at the mid-century for a special kind of agrarian modernity…It was in fact to become an improbable model for global development policy.”

By delving into the micro history of Haeusern—which is to become the foundation for his latest research agenda— Tooze attempted to illustrate how brining the peasantry “back in” has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the “Bloodlands” to the wider world.

Video recordings of these lectures can be found on The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World webpage.

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history. Tooze’s latest book, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931, will be released in Summer 2014 in the United Kingdom and in Fall 2014 in the United States.

Europe is benefiting from tough, painful economic reforms in the wake of the 2008 downturn, according to the leader of the European Union.

"Europe had to evolve dramatically because reality forced it to," said José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, in a May 1 talk on campus. "This change came about with the economic and financial crisis initiated with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers back in 2008, and that has caused me many sleepless nights."

The title of Barroso's presentation was "Global Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific." The event was co-sponsored by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, The Europe Center and the Center for Russia, East European and Eurasian Studies. The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union.

Barroso acknowledged that the financial meltdown hit Europe especially hard, given the "serious flaws" in the way some countries were running their economies, living beyond their means and lacking the competitiveness required in a globalized world.

The crisis revealed, he added, the "economic interdependence inside Europe," and the fact that the 28-member union did not have the capability to handle large-scale financial emergencies or prevent unsound policies on the part of member nations like Greece.

"So we had to adapt and reform as we have done many times in the European Union," Barroso said.

Economic reforms, regulations

And so, the European Union adopted a more extensive system of economic and budgetary governance to ensure member states stick to their financial commitments and become more competitive. Today, each country sends their national budget to the EU headquarters in Brussels before approving it at the national level, he said.

Barroso added that the EU created a "European stability mechanism," or safety net, worth about $1 trillion to help member states adopt key reforms and assist them in times of crisis. There are also more detailed banking regulations that give the EU more authority over national banks.

"Now the control is exercised at European level through the European Central Bank and there are common rules for banks so that we avoid having to use taxpayers' money to rescue them," he said.

Barroso dismissed criticism that the EU moves too slowly, saying that is inevitable in a system that depends on the will of national governments and citizens to work together rather than coercion.

Still, high unemployment persists in Europe, especially among the young, he said. But he is hopeful about Europe's prospects in the long run.

He added, "We have now returned to growth after some painful but necessary reforms."

Upheaval in Ukraine

With the situation in Ukraine worsening by the day, Barroso said that Europe "stands ready" to support that country in becoming a democratic, prosperous and independent country. He described the Ukrainian crisis as the "biggest threat to Europe's stability and security since the fall of the Berlin Wall."

He said the people of Ukraine expressed a "clear wish to take their future into their own hands and come closer to the European Union" through an agreement that would have given them political association and economic integration.

"Instead of accepting the sovereign choices of Ukraine, Russia decided to interfere, to destabilize and to occupy part of the territory of a neighboring country in a gesture that we hoped was long buried in history books," said Barroso.

He noted, "Europe cannot accept nor condone this type of behavior." Russia's aggression will carry political, diplomatic and economic costs, he said, adding that the issue looms larger than Europe, the United States or even the G7.

"It should concern the rest of the world as well, as it is a direct threat to international law and to international peace," he said.

Barroso served as the prime minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004. He has been the president of the European Commission for the past 10 years.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.