The workshop is premised on the view that we are now entering a new phase in the development of post-Soviet Europe. Clearly, further NATO enlargement and EU expansion are unlikely to take place in the next few years, creating a zone of insecurity and potential instability dividing those countries which succeeded in winning integration into the EU and into NATO in recent years from those countries that have sought membership without any immediate prospects of achieving it.  Moreover, even among countries that have been successful in achieving membership in recent years there remains continuing anxiety about the degree to which their new European partners are prepared to support their economic viability and guarantee their security, particularly in light of increased assertiveness from Moscow.

The central purpose of this workshop series is to analyze the new dynamics emerging within this region, focusing on the external influences exerted by Moscow and Brussels and how they interact with the internal dynamics of the “corridor” countries, and to explore possible scenarios for future stabilization and development.

This workshop will be held November 5 and 6, 2009 at Stanford.  The primary focus will be the “corridor” of countries consisting of the Baltic and Central European members of the EU and NATO, together with Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. Moscow and Brussels will enter as driving outside influences. The participants will include analysts and policymakers from the region itself as well as scholars from the relevant scholarly communities.

Ambassador Simons will seek to honor the broad scholarship of his friend Alexander Dallin by situating a discussion of emerging states within a vision of Eurasia as a world region equally shaped and driven by its own internal dynamic(s). Simons will argue that across the region shared experience and shared features are just as weighty as differences: civil societies are weak, markets are distorted or incomplete, politics features struggle among elites over resources and tends toward semi-authoritarian rule even where democratic forms take hold. Yet there is cause for hope. Simons focuses on states, but he sees states consolidating almost everywhere, so that as resurgent Russia presses on its neighbors, they can now press back. Stable development of strong state institutions within which new civil societies can take root and grow is possible and should be the top priority, but it will come only if the nationalism that gives content to these new states is civic and inclusionary rather than ethno-religious on the East Central European model. The U.S. can help or hinder its emergence everywhere in Eurasia, but if it wishes to help it must realize that in this part of the world the path to democracy leads through state development, and that it can best act as a City on the Hill if its policy centers on today's emerging new states, since they must be the incubators of tomorrow's new civil societies.

The Annual Alexander Dallin Lecture was founded in 1998 to honor Professor of History and Political Science Alexander Dallin, a founder of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Stanford and CREEES director, 1985-89 and 1992-94. The Dallin Lecture is co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

It is commonly believed that America and Europe are very different societies, and growing apart. A look at the data shows that the anecdotes are misleading and that the differences across the Atlantic have been overstated.

Peter Baldwin, Professor of History at UCLA, is author of several books on the comparative history of European and American state building, most recently, Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS.

Introduction by FSI Senior Fellow Josef Joffe.

In her presentation "Russian Science Policy: Before and During the Economic Crisis," Irina Dezhina will outline the major characteristics of the R&D sector in Russia and offer an analysis of government science policy on the eve of the global financial crisis. She will also discuss the various reactions to the financial crisis in Russia, both by the federal government and the science sector, including companies investing in R&D. Finally, Dezhina will analyze the effectiveness of the Russian government's anti-crisis policy in terms of its impact on supporting science and innovation.

Irina Dezhina is a Head of Division at the Institute for the World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. She also teaches the course of “Modern Problems of Russian Science and Innovation Policy” at the State University – Higher School of Economics. Dezhina earned her candidate degree in science and technology policy studies in 1992 from the Institute of National Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and doctorate degree – in 2007 from the Institute for the World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

She was Senior Research Fellow at the Analytical Center on Science and Industrial Policy, a think tank for the Russian Ministry of Science and Technology Policy and State Committee on Industrial Policy (1993-1995). Dezhina was also a Fulbright Scholar at the MIT Program “Science, Technology, and Society” (1997), and worked as Science Policy Analyst at Stanford Research Institute International, Washington, DC, USA (1998-1999). For twelve years (1995-2007) she worked at the Institute for the Economy in Transition (Moscow), a Russian think-tank. She has served as a consultant for the World Bank, OECD, and New Eurasia Foundation, and the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (since 1999). Dezhina has more then 150 publications including 6 monographs.

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europea and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.