Security

FSI scholars produce research aimed at creating a safer world and examing the consequences of security policies on institutions and society. They look at longstanding issues including nuclear nonproliferation and the conflicts between countries like North and South Korea. But their research also examines new and emerging areas that transcend traditional borders – the drug war in Mexico and expanding terrorism networks. FSI researchers look at the changing methods of warfare with a focus on biosecurity and nuclear risk. They tackle cybersecurity with an eye toward privacy concerns and explore the implications of new actors like hackers.

Along with the changing face of conflict, terrorism and crime, FSI researchers study food security. They tackle the global problems of hunger, poverty and environmental degradation by generating knowledge and policy-relevant solutions. 

Conference Agenda for Day 1, October 8, 2014:

 

9:00 AM

  • Welcome Remarks – Eric T. Wakin, Robert H. Malott Director of Hoover Institution Library & Archives

  • Opening Remarks – Amir Weiner, Stanford University

9:15-10:45 AM – Chair: Amir Weiner

  • Toomas Hiio, Estonian War Museum. Multi-ethnic (or Multi-national) Student Body of the University of Tartu and the WW I: Choices, Political Movements, Volunteers, Mobilizations, and Postwar Consequences

  • Darius Staliunas, Lithuanian Institute of History. Anti-Jewish Violence in Lithuania at the Turn of the 20th Century

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Chair: Aivars Stranga, The University of Latvia

  • Ēriks Jēkabsons, University of Latvia. The War for Independence of Latvia and the United States

  • Tomas Balkelis, Vilnius University. Paramilitarism in Lithuania: Violence, Civic Activism and Nation-making, 1918–1920

  • Bert Patenaude, Stanford University. “Yankee Doodle: American Attitudes toward Baltic Independence, 1918–1921”

 

Conference organizers:  Professors Lazar Fleishman (Slavic Department) and Amir Weiner (History Department)

Sponsored by: Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Office of the Provost, Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford Global Studies Division, The Europe Center, Stanford University Libraries, Division of Literatures, Cultures, & Languages, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of History, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Stauffer Auditorium, Hoover Institution

Conferences

This project examines the  “contemporary” with a focus on defining moments such as: 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001. In recent years the concept of the contemporary has been taken up within limited disciplinary discourses and in the context of distinct geographical settings. The horizon of this project, however, is the global. We employ a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the hybrid term “contemporary” as it intersects various fields and serves as a heuristic device to understand phenomena in politics, culture, and the arts.

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an "open borders" United States absorbed millions of European immigrants in one of the largest mass migrations ever. New research by Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky challenges the perception that immigrants lagged behind native-born Americans in job pay and career growth.
 

BY CLIFTON B. PARKER

European immigrants to America during the country's largest migration wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had earnings comparable to native-born Americans, contrary to the popular perception, according to new Stanford research.

"Our paper challenges conventional wisdom and prior research about immigrant assimilation during this period," said Ran Abramitzky, an associate professor of economics at Stanford, faculty affiliate of The Europe Center and author of the research paper in the Journal of Political Economy.

New research challenges conventional wisdom about immigrant assimilation during the bygone era of open borders and mass migration.
Photo Credit: Lewis Hine/Library of Congress

New research challenges conventional wisdom about immigrant assimilation during the bygone era of open borders and mass migration.

Abramitzky and his colleagues found the average immigrant in that period did not face a substantial "earnings penalty" – lower pay than native-born workers – upon their arrival.

"The initial earnings penalty is overstated," said Abramitzky.

He said the conventional view is that the average European immigrants held substantially lower-paying jobs than native-born Americans upon first arrival and caught up with natives' earnings after spending some time in the United States. But that perception does not hold up to the facts, he said.

Abramitzky's co-authors include Leah Platt Boustan from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Katherine Eriksson from California Polytechnic State University.

The researchers examined records on 21,000 natives and immigrants from 16 European countries in U.S. Census Bureau data from 1900 to 1910 to 1920.

"Even when U.S. borders were open, the average immigrant who ended up settling in the United States over the long term held occupations that commanded pay similar to that of U.S. natives upon first arrival," Abramitzky said.

In that bygone era of "open borders," Abramitzky said, native-born Americans were concerned that immigrants were not assimilating properly into society – yet, on the whole, this concern appears to be unfounded. "Such concerns are echoed in today's debate over immigration policy," he added.

At the same time, Abramitzky said that immigrants from poorer countries started out with lower paid occupations relative to natives and did not manage to close this gap over time.

"This pattern casts doubt on the conventional view that, in the past, immigrants who arrived with few skills were able to invest in themselves and succeed in the U.S. economy within a single generation," Abramitzky and his colleagues wrote.

Age of migration

America took in more than 30 million immigrants during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), a period when the country had open borders. By 1910, 22 percent of the U.S. labor force – and 38 percent of workers in non-southern cities – was foreign-born (compared with 17 percent today).

As the research showed, immigrants then were more likely than natives to settle in states with a high-paying mix of occupations. Location choice was an important strategy they used to achieve occupational parity with native-born Americans.

"This Age of Mass Migration not only is of interest in itself, as one of the largest migration waves in modern history, but also is informative about the process of immigrant assimilation in a world without migration restrictions," Abramitzky said.

Over time, many of the immigrants came from the poorer regions of southern and eastern Europe.

Abramitzky pointed out that native-born Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were concerned about poverty in immigrant neighborhoods and low levels of education among children, many of whom left school early to work in industry.

Consequently, American political progressives championed a series of reforms, including U.S. child labor laws and compulsory schooling requirements.

Still, some natives believed that new arrivals would never fit into American society. And so, in 1924, Congress set a strict quota of 150,000 immigrant arrivals per year, with more slots allocated to immigrants from northern and western European countries than those from southern and eastern Europe.

But those early-20th-century fears of unassimilated immigrants were baseless, according to Abramitzky.

"Our results indicate that these concerns were unfounded: The average long-term immigrants in this era arrived with skills similar to those of natives and experienced identical rates of occupational upgrading over their life cycle," he wrote.

How does this lesson apply to today's immigration policy discussion? Should the numbers of immigrants and their countries of origin be limited and those with higher skills be given more entry slots?

Abramitzky said stereotyping immigrants has affected the political nature of the contemporary debate.

"These successful outcomes suggest that migration restrictions are not always necessary to ensure strong migrants' performance in the labor market," he said.

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First sight of New York Bay--arrival of a European steamer.
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Distinguished Austrian Chair Professor (2013-2014)
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Manfred Nowak graduated from the Vienna Law School (Dr. iur. 1973) and from Columbia University New York (LL.M. 1975). He has been professor at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Vienna since 1986. He was member of the Austrian Delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (1986 and 1993) as well as director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989). In 1989, he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna and coordinated NGO-parallel events during the 1993 UN Conference for Human Rights in Vienna while he also was Professor of Law at the Austrian Federal Academy of Public Administration in Vienna until 2002.

As U.N. expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia he started a process aiming at the identification of missing persons through exhumation of mortal remains between 1994 and 1997.

From 1996-2003, Manfred Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. Since 2000, he is head of an independent human rights commission at the Austrian Interior Ministry. From 2002 to 2003 he was visiting professor at the Raoul Wallenberg of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Lund. He has been a UN expert on legal questions on enforced disappearances since 2002 and was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004 with a mandate until 2010.

In addition, Manfred Nowak is also Chairperson of the European Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation (since 2000). Manfred Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007.

 

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This study conducted by professors Massimiliano Gaetano Onorato (IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca), Kenneth Scheve (Stanford University) and David Stasavage (New York University) is the first systematic examination of the determinents of military mobilization over a very long time period. Looking at a new data set from thirteen great powers between 1600 and 2000, the authors argue that changes in transportation and communication technology were the most important factors influencing the size of armies.

For a more information, please visit the publication's webpage by clicking on the article title below.

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This article investigates how technology has influenced the size of armies. During the nineteenth century, the development of the railroad made it possible to field and support mass armies, significantly increasing the observed size of military forces. During the late twentieth century, further advances in technology made it possible to deliver explosive force from a distance and with precision, making mass armies less desirable. The authors find support for their technological account using a new data set covering thirteen great powers between 1600 and 2000. They find little evidence that the French Revolution was a watershed in terms of levels of mobilization.

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Recap:  The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

 
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.
 
Image of Yale's Barton M. Briggs Professor of History Adam Tooze, speaking at Stanford University, May 2, 2014Tooze 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.
 
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
 
 

Recap:  European Commission President José Barroso Visits Stanford

 
José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, delivered a lecture entitled, “Global Europe: From the Atlantic to the Pacific,” before an audience at Stanford on May 1, 2014. 
 
Barroso discussed at length the political and economic consequences of the global financial crisis of 2008 for European affairs. He acknowledged that the crisis revealed “serious flaws” in the economic management of some national economies, but stressed that the 28-member union adapted and reformed to handle the fallout from the crisis. For example, he explained how banking supervision is now controlled at the “European level through the European Central Bank,” and that “there are common rules for banks so that we avoid having to use taxpayers' money to rescue them." 
 
Barroso also discussed various political and security aspects related to the ongoing upheaval in Ukraine, and affirmed that Europe “stands ready” to support the country as it comes “closer to the European Union.” He added that Russia’s decision “to interfere, to destabilize, and to occupy part of the territory of a neighboring country” was a “gesture that we hoped was long buried in history books.”
 
Image of José Manuel Barroso, President of the European CommissionBarroso 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.
 
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
 
 

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

 
On May 9, 2014 and May 10, 2014, The Europe Center will host the Fourth Annual Workshop on Comparative Approaches to the Study of Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion.
 
Speakers draw from a range of national and international universities and include Jens Hainmueller, Dominik Hangartner, Efrén Pérez, Lauren Prather, Jorge Bravo,  Giovanni Facchini, Cecilia Testa, Harris Mylonas, Rahsaan Maxwell, Ali Valenzuela, Mark Helbling, Rob Ford, Matthew Wright, Karen Jusko, Maggie Peters, Justin Gest, Rafaela M. Dancygier, and Yotam Margalit.
 
The all-day workshop will begin at 8:30 am on Friday and at 9:15 am on Saturday, and will be held in the CISAC Conference Room in Encina Hall. Visitors are cordially invited to attend. 
 
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
 
 

Spring 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition Winners Announced

 
Please join us in congratulating the winners of The Europe Center Spring 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition:
 
Lisa Barge, German Studies, “Beyond Objectivity: Questioning Shifting Scientific Paradigms in Erwin Schrödinger's Thought”
 
Michela Giorcelli, Economics, “Transfer of Production and Management Model Across National Borders:  Evidence from the Technical Assistance and Productivity Program”
 
Benjamin Hein, Modern European History, “Capitalism Dispersed: Frankfurt and the European Stock Exchanges, 1880-1960”
 
Michelle Kahn, Modern European History, “Everyday Integration: Turks, Germans, and the Boundaries of Europe”
 
Friederike Knüpling, German Studies, “Kleist vom Ende lesen”
 
Orysia Kulick, History, “Politics, Power, and Informal Networks in Soviet Ukraine”
 
Claire Rydell, U.S. History, “Inventing an American Liberal Tradition: How England's John Locke Became ‘America's Philosopher’, 1700-2000”
 
Lena Tahmassian, Iberian and Latin American Cultures, “Post-Utopian Visions: Modes of Countercultural Discourse of the Spanish Transition to Democracy”
 
Donni Wang, Classics, “Illich Seminar”
 
Lori Weekes, Anthropology & Law, “Nation Building in the Post-Soviet Baltics as a Legal, Institutional, and Ethno-Cultural Project”
 
The Spring Grant Competition winners will join 16 graduate students who were awarded competitive research grants by the Center in Fall 2013. The Center regularly supports graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates 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 Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Additionally, 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. 
 
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
 
 

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Vibeke Kieding Banik

 
In each newsletter, The Europe Center would like to introduce you to a visiting scholar or collaborator at the Center. We welcome you to visit the Center and get to know our guests.
 
Image of Vibeke Banik, Visiting Scholar at The Europe Center, Stanford UniversityVibeke 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  

 
The Europe Center invites you to attend the talks of speakers in the following workshop series: 
 

Europe and the Global Economy

 
May 15, 2014
Christina Davis, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
“Membership Conditionality and Institutional Reform: The Case of the OECD”  
RSVP by May 12, 2014
 

European Governance

 
May 22, 2014
Wolfgang Ischinger, Former German Ambassador to the U.S.; Chairman, Munich Security Conference
“The Future of European Security & Defence” 
RSVP by May 19, 2014
 
May 29, 2014
Simon Hug, Professor of Political Science, University of Geneva
“The European Parliament after Lisbon (and before)” 
RSVP by May 26, 2014
 
 

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

 
We invite you to attend the following events sponsored or co-sponsored by The Europe Center:
 
May 16 and May 17, 2014
“Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality”
A Stanford University Conference
Margaret Jacks Hall: Terrace Room
 
May 29, 2014
Josef Joffe, FSI Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Research Fellow, and Publisher/Editor of Die Zeit
“The Myth of America's Decline: Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophecies”
Oksenberg Conference Room
 
Jun 3, 2014
Tommaso Piffer, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University and University of Cambridge
“The Allies, the European Resistance and the Origins of the Cold War in Europe”
History Corner, Room 307
 
 

Other Events

 
The Europe Center also invites you to attend the following event of interest:
 
May 12, 2014
Latvian Cultural Evening: Sustaining a Memory of the Future
Cubberley Auditorium
 

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

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2014 Undergraduate Internship Program Winners Announced

 
A key priority of The Europe Center is to provide Stanford’s undergraduate student community with opportunities to develop a deep understanding of contemporary European society and affairs.  By promoting knowledge about the opportunities and challenges facing one of the world’s most economically and politically integrated regions, the Center strives to equip our future leaders with the tools necessary to tackle complex problems related to governance and economic interdependence both in Europe and in the world more broadly.
 
To this end, the Center recently spearheaded a new initiative, The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.  The Center is sponsoring four undergraduate student internships with leading think tanks and international organizations in Europe in Summer 2014.  Laura Conigliaro (International Relations, 2015) will join the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), where she will work on a policy-related research project.  Additionally, Elsa Brown (Political Science, 2015), Noah Garcia (BA International Relations and MA Public Policy, 2015), and Jana Persky (Public Policy, 2016) will be joining Bruegel, a leading European think tank, where they will work on public policy briefs for the new European Union Commission that will take office in Fall 2014.  The Center is actively seeking to develop ties with business, governmental, and non-governmental organizations in Europe that can participate in The Europe Center Undergraduate Internship Program in future years.
 
 

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

 
On May 9, 2014 and May 10, 2014, The Europe Center hosted the Fourth Annual Workshop on Comparative Approaches to the Study of Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion.  Speakers drew from a range of national and international universities.  Some of the papers presented included:
 
“Does Naturalization Foster the Political Integration of Immigrants?  Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design in Switzerland,” Jens Hainmueller (Stanford) & Dominik Hangartner (LSE).
 
“The Rhetoric of Closed Borders:  Quotas, Lax Enforcement and Illegal Migration,” Giovanni Facchini (Nottingham) & Cecilia Testa (Royal Holloway).
 
“How State Support of Religion Shapes Religious Attitudes Toward Muslims,” Mark Helbling (WZB Berlin).
 
“Opposition to Race Targeted Policies -- Ideology or Racism?  Particular or Universal?  Experimental Evidence from Britain,” Robert Ford (Manchester).
 
“Nature over Nurture:  Explaining Muslim Integration Discrepancies in Britain, France, and the United States,” Justin Gest (Harvard).
 
Other speakers included:  Efrén Pérez (Vanderbilt), Lauren Prather (Stanford), Jorge Bravo (Rutgers), Harris Mylonas (George Washington), Harris Mylonas (George Washington), Rahsaan Maxwell (UNC-Chapel Hill), and Matthew Wright (American).
 
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
 
 

Recordings of The Europe Center Special Events Available Online

 
On May 29, 2014, Josef Joffe, FSI Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution Research Fellow, and publisher/editor of the German weekly Die Zeit, talked about his latest book, The Myth of America’s Decline:  Politics, Economics, and a Half Century of False Prophesies.  Stephen Krasner and Kathyrn Stoner served as discussants.  We welcome you to visit our website for an audio recording of the event. 
 
On April 30, May 1, and May 2, 2014, Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History at Yale University, delivered The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World.  This series of three lectures focused successively on diplomatic, economic, and social aspects of the troubled interwar history of Europe and its relationship with the wider world.  Video recordings of the lectures are available for viewing on our website.
 
 

Student Scholar Profile:  Jessie Marino

 
The Europe Center regularly sponsors the research of undergraduate and graduate students through our research grant, internship, and scholarly exchange programs.  We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working.  Our featured student this month has been sponsored by the Center’s Program on Sweden, Scandinavia, and the Baltic Region.
 
 
Image of Serge Vuille and Mark Knoop performing Jessie Marino's original piece Jessie Marino, a DMA candidate in Composition at Stanford, recently returned from Copenhagen’s SPOR festival, where she was selected as one of five artists from a field of 140 (representing 34 nationalities) to perform her original work, titled “Heartfelt bird, vivid and great in style.”  “I was commissioned by the SPOR Festival to compose a new piece featuring percussionist Serge Vuille and pianist Mark Knoop (photo inset) which was featured in a concert of all world premiere works,” writes Marino.  “This event allowed me to meet new musicians, artists, curators, and composers who are working under similar guises and to exchange ideas about how our art can expand and develop in the 21st century.” 
 
Image of Stanford PhD student Jessie MarinoMarino (inset) is also a recipient of a summer travel grant from the Center’s Graduate Student Grant Program.  She will be traveling to Germany to attend the 2014 Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music.  Marino writes that the opportunity will give her the chance to “practice and perform my own compositions,” to “work and develop new ideas with composers and academics,” and to “attend lectures on current research, developments and discoveries in sound production and music technology.”
 
 
 
 

Featured Faculty Research:  David Laitin

 
The Europe Center serves as a research hub bringing together Stanford faculty members, students, and researchers conducting cutting-edge research on topics related to Europe.  Our faculty affiliates draw from the humanities, social sciences, and business and legal traditions, and are at the forefront of scholarly debates on Europe-focused themes.  The Center regularly highlights new research by faculty affiliates that is of interest to the broader community.  
 
 
Image of David Laitin, Stanford UniversityDavid Laitin and his co-author Rafaela Dancygier’s article in the Annual Review of Political Science, “Immigration into Europe: Economic Discrimination, Violence, and Public Policy,” investigates and reviews recent research on changing Western European demographic patterns, and its implications for labor-market discrimination, immigrant-state relations, and immigrant-native violence.  The authors “discuss some of the methodological challenges that scholars have not fully confronted in trying to identify the causes and consequences of discrimination and violence,” and propose pathways to resolve contradictory results in existing studies regarding the economic consequences of immigration policymaking.  Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  
 
Additional information about The Europe Center’s research program on migration can be found here, and a copy of the research article can be found here.  
 
   

Events 

 
The regular seminar series sponsored by The Europe Center will be on break during the summer months.  We invite you to attend the following event of interest:
 
August 20, 2014
7:00 pm -- 9:00 pm
Film Screening 
Forasters (Outsiders), dir. Ventura Pona
Joan Ramon Resina, Director of The Europe Center’s Iberian Studies Program, will lead a Q&A session after the film.  The screening is part of the summer film series, “Beyond Boundaries:  Race, Gender and Culture Across the Globe,” organized by the Stanford Global Studies Division.
Braun Corner (Building 320), Room 105
 

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.  Here is wishing you a pleasant and productive summer.

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Recap: Pascal Lamy Lecture, “World Trade and Global Governance”

 
On February 10, 2014, Pascal Lamy, the former Director-General of the World Trade Organization, visited Stanford University as a special guest of The Europe Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. During his two-term tenure at the helm of the WTO (from 2005 to 2013), Mr. Lamy successfully guided the organization through complex changes in the regulation of international trade. Among his many achievements, he oversaw the systematic integration of developing countries into positions of political leadership in the world economic order. Prior to the WTO, Mr. Lamy served as the European Commissioner for Trade, the CEO of the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, and in the French civil service. 
 
At Stanford, Mr. Lamy first participated in a lunchtime question and answer roundtable with students that was moderated by Stephen Stedman, Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Among other topics, he spoke about the necessary mix of economic, social, and political policies that determine the efficacy of free trade as an engine of global economic growth. 
 
 

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Mr. Lamy then delivered a public lecture on “World Trade and Global Governance” before an audience of over a hundred members of the Stanford community. In this talk, Mr. Lamy outlined a statement of his thinking about the future of global governance, focusing on three overarching points. First, despite some setbacks, governments and international organizations have achieved major successes in regulating the liberalization of global trade. Tariffs are on average lower than ever before, and governments did not raise tariffs during the recent financial crisis as they did during the Great Depression. Second, a new feature of the global economy is that protectionism based on economic objectives has been replaced by ‘precautionism’ based on normative prerogatives. For example, competing national perspectives on product standards such as those related to safety or labor norms thwart efforts to achieve consensus on trade regulation. Third, in order to achieve regulatory convergence, we need to bring together stakeholders from the public and private sector to build coalitions that jointly negotiate conflicts in matters of global governance. For example, the “C20-C30-C40 Coalition of the Working” that comprises countries, companies, and cities is currently striving to overcome regulatory gridlock on climate change.
 
We welcome you to visit our website for additional details about this event.
 
 
 

Save the Date: The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

 
Please mark your calendars for the inaugural annual lectures in this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University. 
 
Dates: April 30, May 1, and May 2, 2014
 
 
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Image of Adam Tooze
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.
 

 

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Manfred Nowak 

 
In each newsletter, The Europe Center would like to introduce you to a visiting scholar or collaborator at the Center. We welcome you to visit the Center and get to know our guests.
 
 
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Image of Manfred Nowak, Visiting Austrian Chair Professor 2013-2014, Stanford University
Manfred Nowak (LL.M., Columbia University, 1975) is Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor; Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School; and, Professor of Law, University of Vienna. One of the world’s most renowned human rights scholars and legal theorists, Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was the Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989), and he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in 1989. From 1996-2003, Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. He has also served as a U.N. legal expert on missing persons and enforced disappearances, and was appointed the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004. 
 
Manfred Nowak was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007.
 
 
 

Workshop Schedules  

 
The Europe Center invites you to attend the talks of speakers in the following workshop series: 
 

Europe and the Global Economy

 
February 20, 2014
Alan Deardorff, John W. Sweetland Professor of International Economics & Prof. of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan
RSVP by Feb 19, 2014
 
Mar 6, 2014
Sophie Meunier, Research Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School and Co-Director, EU Program at Princeton, Princeton University
RSVP by Mar 3, 2014
 
Mar 13, 2014
Randy Stone, Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester
RSVP by Mar 10, 2014
 
Apr 3, 2014
Kåre Vernby, Associate Professor, Department of Government, Uppsala University
RSVP by Mar 31, 2014
 
Apr 17, 2014
Mark Hallerberg, Professor of Public Management and Political Economy, Hertie School of Governance 
RSVP by Apr 4, 2014
 
May 15, 2014
Christina Davis, Prof. of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
RSVP by May 12, 2014
 

European Governance

 
May 22, 2014
Wolfgang Ischinger, Former German Ambassador to the U.S.; Chairman, Munich Security Conference
RSVP by May 19, 2014
 
May 29, 2014
Simon Hug, Professor of Political Science, University of Geneva
RSVP by May 26, 2014
 
 

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

 
We invite you to attend the following events sponsored or co-sponsored by The Europe Center:
 
March 6, 2014
“Promise and Critique of Capitalism: Changing Discourses Since the 18th Century”
Jürgen Kocka, Professor and Former President of the Social Science Research Center, Berlin
Location: Watt Room, Stanford Humanities Center
 
March 6 and 7, 2014
Indian Ocean Conference
“Connecting Continents: Setting an Agenda for a Historical Archaeology of the Indian Ocean World”
Location: Stanford Archaeology Center, Building 500, 488 Escondido Mall
 
March 31, 2014
Simon Hix, Professor of European and Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political Science
Political Science Comparative Politics Workshop
Location: Encina Hall West Room 400
 
April 15, 2014
Ulrich Wilhelm, Director General, Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation
“Assessing the Impact of the NSA Spy Scandal on American-European Relations” 
The Europe Center and FSI Stanford Special Event
Location: Oksenberg Conference Room, Encina Hall
RSVP by April 10, 2014
 
 

Other Events

 
The Europe Center also invites you to attend the following events of interest:
 
February 20, 2014
Gregory Shaffer, Melvin C. Steen Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School
“How the WTO Shapes Regulatory Governance”
Room 185, Stanford Law School
 
European Entrepreneurship & Innovation @Stanford Engineering
February 24, 2014
    “Switzerland and Turkey - Venture Capital and Product Design Firms”
    Giuseppe Zocco, Founding Partner, Index Ventures; Emrah Yalaz, CEO, Spring Ventures
March 3, 2014
    “Flanders and Sweden - Enterprise Software and VC Funds”
    Lieven Vermaele, CEO, SDNsquare; Martin Hauge, Founding Partner, Creandum
March 10, 2014
    “Hungary and Italy - Digital Infrastructure Startups and ‘Maker’ Movements”
    Gyula Feher, CTO & Co-Founder, Ustream
Location: Hewlett 201 Auditorium, Engineering School
 

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

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Screening of the film Forasters (Outsiders) directed by Catalan film director Ventura Pona, and followed by a Q&A session led by Joan Ramon Resina.  Dr. Resina is a professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and Comparative Literature, and the director of the Iberian Studies Program and research affiliate of The Europe Center.

Forasters portrays a family's experiences with two traumatic events, with a forty year gap between them, and how they affect family members as well as their ideal of social harmony. 

Forasters received eight nominations at the 2009 Gaudi Awards, including Best Film in Catalan Language, Best Director (Ventura Pons), and Best Screenplay (Ventura Pons).  Anna Lizaran received the Gaudi Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of the family matriarch Emma.

This screening is part of the summer film series "Beyond Boundaries: Race, Gender and Culture Across the Globe" organized by the Stanford Global Studies Division (SGS).

Braun Corner (Building 320), Room 105
450 Serra Mall

Pigott Hall, Bldg 260, Room 224
Stanford, CA 94305-2014

(650)723-3800 (650) 725-9255
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Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Professor Comparative Literature
RSD07-041-007.jpg PhD

Dr. Joan Ramon Resina, professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, and Comparative Literature, is also director of the Iberian Studies Program and research affiliate of The Europe Center. He specializes in European literature generally and on Spanish and Catalan culture in particular, with emphasis in the modern period.

His interests are amply comparative, with a strong cultural component, ranging from urban studies to the collective memory and issues of political and social scale, such as the relation between the local and the global. More generally, his interests include modern and contemporary European narrative, literary theory, history of ideas, film studies, and Iberian cultural and political history. Currently, he is editing a volume on the relation between economics and the humanities and working on a book on philosophy and the cinema of Luchino Visconti.

He is the author of seven books, most recently The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool University Press, 2017. He has edited eleven volumes and published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, and Modern Language Quarterly, and has contributed to critical volumes. He was Editor of Diacritics and is on the board of various national and international journals. Awards received include the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and fellowships at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne and the Stanford Humanities Center. He is the recipient of St. George’s Cross, a merit award from the Government of Catalonia.

Director of the Iberian Studies Program
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Joan Ramon Resina Speaker
Film Screenings
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