The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University. On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures 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 advances a powerful explanation of 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 and the Pacific. These lectures will present 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 today.

Titles and venues are listed below.

Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”
Recent events in Ukraine pose the question, is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? This lecture will address the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I. In light of current events the lecture will focus 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. Returning to the period 1917-1923 suggests sobering conclusions about the stability of the order that we have taken for granted since 1991.

Thursday, May 1, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”
Having established itself in the 19th century as the financial center of the world, Europe's sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing trans-Atlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe but the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world. But, to this day there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of the disaster. Was it American leadership or a failure of cooperation that was to blame? This lecture will argue the case for a revised and historicized version of the hegemonic failure thesis. The absence presence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe's fate.

Friday, May 2, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center
Followed by a reeception, 5:30 pm - 6:15 pm
“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”
Until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. And yet the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed as they were by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, tended to ignore this evident fact, focusing instead on workers and business-men, politicians and soldiers. This lecture will 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.

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.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: While the overall record of compliance with interstate territorial agreement since 1815 is quite high, Europe experienced a disproportionate share of treaty failures compared to other regions of the world. In Europe, treaties were frequently made and frequently broken; everywhere else, the dominant pattern has been for treaties to be rarely made and rarely broken. I argue that this pattern arose due to multilateral and hierarchical nature of border settlements in Europe, which was heavily influenced by the region’s great powers. Although great powers often imposed treaty terms on other states, enforcement was, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, actively undermined by their own actions. Using a new data set on interstate territorial conflicts and agreements, I show that the fates of border settlements in Europe were highly interdependent and vulnerable to contagion, either failing or succeeding en masse. By contrast, in other regions, where border settlements tended to be bilaterally determined, treaty failures were less likely to cluster in time. In addition to their implications for the study of treaty compliance and conflict contagion, these results speak to the promise and dangers of externally-imposed peace agreements.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Kenneth A. Schultz is professor of political science at Stanford University and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. His research examines international conflict and conflict resolution, with a particular focus on the domestic political influences on foreign policy choices. His most recent work deals with the origins and resolution of territorial conflicts between states. He is the author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2001), World Politics: Interests, Interactions, and Institutions (with David Lake and Jeffry Frieden, Norton, 2013), as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. He was the recipient the 2003 Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Studies Association, and a Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, given by Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

How do political institutions shape the costs of responding to financial crises? Previous research contends that policy-makers in democracies choose policies less costly to taxpayers than politicians in autocracies. In this research note we re-evaluate Keefer's (2007) contribution to this body of research using an updated theoretical model as well as updated fiscal costs data, which is his dependent variable. We argue that political institutions shapes when politicians spend, rather than how much they spend, in response to financial crises.  In the updated theoretical model we include the possibility that politicians can shift crisis response costs into the future by using policies that create contingent liabilities. Politicians facing removal pressures--such as elections--have incentives to create contingent, rather than immediately realized liabilities. Empirically we illustrate this dynamic by first updating Keefer (2007) using new data on the fiscal costs of financial crises. We further substantiate our argument with Eurostat's detailed yearly, cross-country comparable data from the late 2000s financial crisis to show that politicians in democracies tend to increase contingent liabilities,  while also decreasing realized liabilities, before elections.

*PLEASE NOTE:  The room for this seminar has been changed to the Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall East, 2nd floor.

Bjørn Høyland will present his joint work with Sara B. Hobolt and Simon Hix titled "Career Ambitions and Legislative Participation: The Moderating Effect of Electoral Institutions".  In multi-level political systems politicians are faced with several possible career paths, as they can advance their careers at either the lower (state) or higher (federal) level.  Career ambitions lead representatives to carefully adapt their behavior to maximize their chances of being re-elected and promoted to higher office at their preferred level of government.  Høyland, Hobolt and Hix argue that the design of the electoral institutions influences how politicians respond to these incentives.  Analyzing a unique dataset of both ‘stated’ and ‘realized’ career ambitions of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) they find that politicians seeking high political office in their home state reduce their legislative participation in the European Parliament, whereas politicians who seek to further their careers at the European level increase their legislative engagement.  In addition, they find that this latter effect is strongest for politicians elected in party-centered electoral systems.  This finding has implications for the literature on electoral institutions and legislative behavior.

This seminar is part of TEC's "European Governance" program seminar series.

Bjørn Høyland (PhD, London School of Economics, 2005) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is currently visiting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at the Europe Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford. The focus of his research is European Union politics and comparative legislative politics. Professor Høyland’s list of journal publications includes the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and European Union Politics. His textbook (with Simon Hix) The Political System of the European Union (3^rd ed) is the standard text for advanced courses on the European Union. 

The process of joining an IO may cause liberalization before membership. Thus studies that only evaluate compliance after membership underestimate the effects. Conditional membership may be one of the most important sources of leverage for IOs.  The rule-makers establish rules that don't go far beyond what they would otherwise do, but rule-takers often must accept a broad range of policy reforms they would not otherwise consider. The influence of accession conditions has been studied in the context of EU and NATO, where sizeable benefits and formal conditions motivate major concessions by applicants. This paper proposes to examine a much less powerful organization, the OECD. Here the qualifications for membership are ambiguous and leave open room for informal pressure for a range of economic reforms. The politics of joining organizations touch closely on concerns about status and legitimacy as well as functional demands for cooperation in complex issue areas. I will examine how OECD membership has motivated specific reforms in regulatory policies and trade in a comparison of the East European transition economies accession with that of Japan, Mexico, and Korea. Statistical analysis of patterns of when countries apply for membership will test for the role of economic and political conditions as well as the political relations among members.