The logic of partitioning the land has dominated the various attempts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several developments in the last few years cast serious doubts regarding the feasibility of partition. This talk seeks to critically explore alternatives to partition in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, it seeks to examine feasible, reasonable, and fairly just alternatives to partition that would secure the national and individual rights, interests and identities of Arabs and Jews alike.

Bashir Bashir is a research fellow at The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and a Civic Education and Leadership Fellow at Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He holds a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics, Sociology and Anthropology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has taught Political Theory at the London School of Economics, Queen's University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  His primary research interests are democratic theories of inclusion, multiculturalism, civic education, conflict resolution and the politics of reconciliation, historical injustices, Palestinian nationalism, and Israeli politics.  Among Bashir's publications is: Will Kymlicka and Bashir Bashir (eds.), The Politics of Reconciliation in Multicultural Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Prince Hans-Adam II has dedicated his reign to bring Liechtenstein into the modern international community. Under his leadership Liechtenstein has joined the United Nations and the European Economic Area with the European Union.

In 2003 Prince Hans-Adam II was able to accomplish the monarchy’s constitutional reform, after the failure of parliamentary negociation, with a plebiscite outcome of a majority of voters in favor of the Princely House’s constitutional proposal.

Having appointed Hereditary Prince Alois his permanent deputy for exercising the duties of Head of State of the Principality of Liechtenstein, Prince Hans-Adam II has returned to devoting himself more to managing the assets of the Princely House.

Event Synopsis:

HRH Prince Hans-Adam II asserts that to survive, states must reflect a new model geared toward preventing wars, serving not only the privileged but the whole population, promoting democracy and the rule of law, and being globally competitive. To achieve this, the state must operate like a service company. It must avoid behaving like a monopoly, including with regards to its territory. The prince cites legislation he introduced to allow each of Liechtenstein's 11 communities to vote on whether to remain with or leave the principality and outlines other relevant examples from Europe. In the "service company" model of states, defense spending fueled by taxpayer money will be unnecessary. Many current government functions would be privatized or transferred to local communities, with the exception of foreign policy, law and order, education, and state finances. He details all four of these areas, discusses ways in which they intersect, and outlines suggested reforms to legislative systems to achieve these goals.

The prince makes a special case for private education funded by state vouchers to parents; for indirect taxation by the state and the opportunity for local communities to impose direct taxes; and for using tax surpluses and proceeds from selling unwanted state property to pay down the national debt. Above all, he emphasizes a "lean and transparent" state that can be financed by only a small fraction of GDP, with funds flowing directly to local communities. In conclusion, he predicts that the state - and even monarchies - will survive the millennium, but not in the traditional model or large, centralized states.

A discussion session raised such questions as: Who "owns" a state operating like a service company? What options exist to deal with the growing global imbalance of wealth? Should healthcare and waste disposal/natural resource management be provided by the state or privatized? Does Lichtenstein derive any direct benefits from its association with the European Economic Community? Is Liechtenstein large enough to have an impact on world politics with its foreign policy, or is foreign policy an area better handled at a higher level like that of the EU? What is the current situation of minorities in Europe?

Soviet policy in Eastern Europe during the final year and immediate aftermath of World War II had a profound impact on global politics. By reassessing Soviet aims and concrete actions in Eastern Europe from the mid-1940s through the early 1950s, Kramer’s essay touches on larger questions about the origins and intensity of the Cold War. The essay shows that domestic politics and postwar exigencies in the USSR, along with Iosif Stalin’s external ambitions, decisively shaped Soviet ties with Eastern Europe. Stalin’s adoption of increasingly repressive and xenophobic policies at home, and his determination to quell armed insurgencies in areas annexed by the USSR at the end of the war, were matched by his embrace of a harder line vis-à-vis Eastern Europe. This internal-external dynamic was not wholly divorced from the larger East-West context, but it was, to a certain degree, independent of it. At the same time, the shift in Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe was bound to have a detrimental impact on Soviet relations with the leading Western countries, which had tried to avert the imposition of Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. The final breakdown of the USSR’s erstwhile alliance with the United States and Great Britain was, for Stalin, an unwelcome but acceptable price to pay.

Mark Kramer is Director of the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has taught at Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities and was formerly an Academy Scholar in Harvard's Academy of International and Area Studies and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Professor Kramer is the author of Crisis in Czechoslovakia, 1968: The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion; Soldier and State in Poland: Civil-Military Relations and Institutional Change After Communism; Crisis in the Communist World, 1956: De-Stalinization, the Soviet Union, and Upheavals in Poland and Hungary; The Collapse of the Soviet Union; and Income Distribution and Social Transfer Policies in the Post-Communist Transition: Changing Patterns of Inequality. He is completing another book titled From Dominance to Hegemony to Collapse: Soviet Policy in East-Central Europe, 1945-1991, which, like his earlier books on the Soviet bloc, draws heavily on new archival sources from the former Communist world.

Co-sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.