FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
Jozef Bátora is full professor at the Department of Political Science, Comenius University in Bratislava. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Oslo (2006). His work experience includes positions as associate professor and director at the Institute of European Studies and International Relations at Comenius University (2009 – 2015), visiting professor at The Europe Center, FSI, Stanford University (2013), research fellow at the Institute for European Integration Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (2006 – 2009), senior researcher at ARENA – Centre of European Studies at the University of Oslo (2006), and visiting scholar at Scancor, Stanford University (2003 – 2004). His research interests encompass international institutions and their change, organization theory, diplomacy, EU foreign policy, EU governance and security. He has published in a number of leading peer reviewed journals including Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, West European Politics, International Relations, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy and Cambridge Review of International Affairs. In the period 2012-2015, he served as coordinating editor of Journal of International Relations and Development (www.palgrave-journals.com/jird). His latest book isThe European External Action Service: European Diplomacy Post-Westphalia? (Palgrave 2015).
On July 8th, 2013, the United States and the European Union started negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), which is to create a free trade area. In this working paper, Tim Josling and Christophe Crombez study the prospects for such a transatlantic free trade area, starting with the background behind why the T-TIP is on the agenda now and what areas of trade are being negotiated. They analyze who stands to benefit from such a trade and investment agreement, how long it might take to reach such an agreement, and what factors might influence its acceptability to legislators.
Transparency in the multilateral trade system is fundamental. Monitoring the compliance of WTO members with their obligations is an important part of that transparency, and timeliness in the notification of compliance is crucial. In the case of domestic support to agriculture, the notifications of compliance with obligations has been slow and opaque. But another database exists that could both illuminate the extent to which policy instruments are correctly notified and provide a convenient way to ensure timely ‘pre-notifications’ in the event that delays occur in the future. This note shows how the OECD database can be used, for example, to shed light on the extent to which payments to producers that require production as a matter of eligibility are presently notified to the WTO as having no effect on production. We also demonstrate the feasibility of using OECD data to construct ‘pre-notifications’ by calculating the (as yet un-notified) domestic support notifications for the EU for the years 2009/10 and 2010/11.
Docudrama based on real events about a nearly illiterate woman who becomes one of the founders of Poland's Solidarity union. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff and filmed in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk.
Dr. Robert Rakove, Stanford University lecturer in the Program in International Relations, will introduce the film and lead a post-screening discussion.
Part of the 2013 ICA Summer Film Festival, "Enacting Change: Stories of Courage and Resistance" offering films from around the world depicting stories of individuals who challenge the status quo, facing adversity with bravery.
Sponsored by the Program in International Relations and The Europe Center
The Europe Center's 2-day multidisciplinary dialogue on migration -- the subject of great and growing consequence in the contemporary world. Conference participants from a wide range of theoretical, case-study, and comparative approaches will address the phenomenon of population movement and the experience of migration in its various qualities.
The agenda for this conference is below.
Co-sponsored by the University of Vienna, the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation
The Europe Center, through its Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region, has forged partnerships with those who bring visionary solutions to the challenge of diversity and reconciliation in our increasingly globalized world. “Harbor of Hope: a special evening celebrating Sweden’s diverse cultures” held on May 6th is the latest effort by the Europe Center to disseminate this new way of thinking. The participation of Sweden’s leading documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten, and Sweden’s cultural entrepreneur Ozan Sunar, resulted in an unprecedented pairing and an evening of motivating insight for a large public audience. The program included the screening of Gertten’s documentary “Harbour of Hope”, a multi-media presentation by Sunar and an opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion with both of these special guests.
The evening opened with a welcome by the Europe Center’s director, Professor Amir Eshel, who highlighted the support of the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation for making possible the Europe Center’s Sweden Program and this research. The center’s Associate Director, Dr. Roland Hsu then framed the thinking behind inviting these particular two guest speakers, Gertten and Sunar.
“This evening”, said Hsu, “we gather for a special look at the challenge to meet and embrace difference. In today’s globalized world, market economies, and educational opportunities, but also war and persecution send unprecedented numbers of peoples across borders, away from home cultures, and into new host neighborhoods.
In the US and in Europe we share the concern and opportunity to learn what drives people far from home. Tonight, we focus our gaze on the city of Malmo, a city whose neighborhoods contain extraordinary diversity. Such diversity has a history, which we shall see on film, and it has a future, thanks in large part to the cultural programing we will learn about after the film.
Our challenge is to learn from the experience of families, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, and children, displaced from the familiar, and replaced in new settings. e will look at this challenge through the eyes of two visionary artists who have touched us with their works, and who are bridging divides across competing memories, and across growing diversity of today’s mobile and global West.”
Hsu’s introduction of Magnus Gertten and Gertten’s documentary film “Harbour of Hope” included a line from a NY Times review of Gertten’s art which he felt echoed throughout the evening’s program: “it seems as if the past is intruding on and sometimes overwhelming the present.” “Harbour of Hope” includes footage from the original archival film shot on April 28, 1945, the day that 30,000 survivors of German concentration camps arrived in Malmo, Sweden to begin their lives over again. This powerful and unforgettable film is about the life stories of 3 of the survivors seen on this footage: Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg.
Following the viewing of “Harbour of Hope”, Hsu introduced the next guest Ozan Sunar by saying “In Mr. Sunar’s cultural programming, we may see not the past overwhelming the present, but instead the present clearing the way for its future.” Sunar, with a long career in the fields of arts, media and integration politics, blazed a path for those seeking new ways to include artistic values from diverse origins into Sweden’s contemporary culture. He is currently the founding and artistic director of the international cultural house Moriska Paviljongen in Malmo. Sunar’s presentation and the subsequent discussion on his work uniting heretofore communities in conflict through culture were both inspiring and provocative.
Harbor of Hope: a special evening celebrating Sweden's diverses cultures; May 6, 2013, Stanford University:
The Europe Center was pleased to host Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy and Vice President of the European Commission (HRVP), at Stanford University on May 7th. HRVP Ashton’s address to a capacity audience of Stanford senior scholars is part of the Europe Center’s program focused on European and EU regional and global relations. The event co-sponsors - the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Hoover Institution, and the - speaks to the esteem and the interest that multiple partners share in engaging the European Union’s highest foreign policy official.
The Europe Center’s director Amir Eshel opened the session, followed by President Gerhard Casper, director and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, who delivered a formal introduction of Ashton. HRVP Ashton spoke at length and in considerable detail on the mission of the office of EU High Representative, and addressed a number of the critical foreign policy challenges that we face today.
Three pillars of EU foreign policy In her talk, Lady Ashton highlighted three pillars of EU foreign policy:
Europe assumes primary responsibility for bringing and safeguarding peace in its “neighborhood”. Ashton proposed that the European Union – in terms of its status as a foreign policy actor – should be judged by the record of its mission to foster post-conflict resolution, and promote long-term stability and growth throughout its own member states, and in neighboring regions of North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, and Eastern and Baltic regions of former Soviet societies.
European Union foreign policy should promote what Ashton termed “Deep Democracy”. This includes reformed and transparent judiciary, police, and representative governing institutions that safeguard the well-being and individual emancipation of citizens, and women’s and human rights.
European Union international relations prioritize effective and long-term cooperative missions with “strategic partners” beginning with the United States, as well as Russia and China. Ashton emphasized that the EU also prioritizes long-term relations and strategic missions with regional and supra-national institutions beginning with the United Nations, and including the African Union, ASEAN, and the Arab League.
“Deep Democracy”: the long-term challenge Of special note was Ashton’s significant elaboration on the priority for “deep democracy”. When asked about the case of Mali, and what the vision was for what comes after the current French and European military intervention, she emphasized the following points of policy and tactics.
The EU views the military engagement against Jihadist forces in Mali, within a larger regional view of the “Sahel Arc”. The EU is deeply engaged in the “Arab Awakening” movements – and the attendant security, political, and civil crises in each country of the region, and in terms of displaced populations across borders.
In the case of Mali, the office of the EU High Representative invited the country’s leadership to Brussels for close coordination of policy.
The EU foreign policy has been set to closely support the Malian government’s own road map for peace, territorial sovereignty, internal cohesion, and development.
In remote districts of northern Mali, residents have seen little evidence of the value of government. The EU foreign policy of engagement in Mali includes programs to deliver primary health care (i.e. immunization and women’s reproductive health) and infrastructure (i.e. transportation and employment in local economic initiatives) to demonstrate the efficacy and value of state institutions.
The decision to commit troops from Europe to foreign soil remains, Ashton emphatically stated, the responsibility of the individual sovereign states, and of their democratically elected representatives who, in making such commitments, are ultimately responsible to their citizens.
Individual European nations are invited to meet with the governments and civil society leaders of countries undergoing transformations, to tell their distinct histories of democratic development.
Ashton delivered her insights in response to questions from the audience on a number of topics, including the growing magnitude of displaced regional refugees, EU-US military cooperation, and the support and criticism of the EU within European nations.
Using novel data on 50,000 Norwegian men, we study the effect of wealth on the probability of internal or international migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), a time when the US maintained an open border to European immigrants. We do so by exploiting variation in parental wealth and in expected inheritance by birth order, gender composition of siblings, and region. We find that wealth discouraged migration in this era, suggesting that the poor could be more likely to move if migration restrictions were lifted today. We discuss the implications of these historical findings to developing countries.
Catherine Ashton will be introduced by Gerhard Casper.
Co-sponsored by CISAC, Hoover Institution and CREEES.
CISAC Conference Room
Catherine Ashton
High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union; Vice-President of the European Commission
Speaker
FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
