TEC will be canceling all public events and seminars until at least April 15th due to ongoing developments associated with COVID-19.

 

How do we explain that the European Union gained so much authority, especially in economic areas? Most explanations of the EU usually start off by misdescribing how much authority it exerts over its member-states. Classic IR theorists in realist or liberal traditions describe the EU as a strong international regime, allowing them to explain it simply as a response to especially-strong regional versions of the exogenously-given conditions that ostensibly favor international cooperation elsewhere. Even more endogenously-inclined theorists who explain the EU as an ideational or institutionally path-dependent project tend to describe it as a quasi-federation that still falls well short of a “United States of Europe.” But if the EU certainly lacks some important powers of federal states, in some core areas it has surpassed them. Employing a comparison of the EU to three Anglo-Saxon federations (United States, Canada, Australia), we show that today’s EU actively exercises authority over states’ market openness and fiscal discipline that these federations have never claimed. This re-description of the EU outcome displays just how far Europe has departed from the expectations of classic IR theories, and highlights the kind of strongly endogenous ideational and institutional explanation it requires. Co-author: Craig Parsons, University of Oregon.

 

Matthias Matthijs is associate professor of international political economy. His research focuses on the politics of economic crises, the role of economic ideas in economic policymaking, the politics of inequality, and the democratic limits of regional integration. He was one of the inaugural recipients in 2015 of a Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, in recognition of his work as a promising early-career investigator. He teaches courses in international relations, comparative politics, and international economics, and was twice awarded the Max M. Fisher Prize for Excellence in Teaching, in 2011 and 2015.

Since the summer of 2019, he is also a Senior Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He also currently serves as the Chair of the Executive Committee of the European Union Studies Association (EUSA).

Matthijs is the editor (with Mark Blyth) of the book The Future of the Euro published by Oxford University Press in 2015, and author of Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005), published by Routledge in 2011. The latter is based on his doctoral dissertation, which received the Samuel H. Beer Prize for Best Dissertation in British Politics by a North American scholar, awarded by the British Politics Group of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 2010.

In 2018, he won the Best Paper Award from APSA’s European Politics and Society section for “When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons?” (co-authored with Mark Blyth). Among various other research and writing projects, he is currently working on a book-length manuscript that delves into the collapse of national elite consensus around European integration.

Dr. Matthijs received his BSc in applied economics with magna cum laude from the University of Antwerp in Belgium, and his MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

 

Brexit will forever change the way we understand the European Union. But the farewell of the United Kingdom hides a more complex reality. It is not an isolated malaise. In many states, the rise of authoritarianism and the consequences of the economic crisis are generating important tensions.  In some cases —as in France or Catalonia— those tensions have joined the wave of protests that the world has seen in the second half of 2019.

 

This event is now full and we are unable to take any further reservations. However, if you would like to be added to the waitlist, please email us at sj1874@stanford.edu.

The Cold War division of Europe was not inevitable―the acclaimed author of Stalin’s Genocides shows how postwar Europeans fought to determine their own destinies.

 

 

Norman M. Naimark received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D (1972) from Stanford University. He spent fifteen years as Professor at Boston University and Research Fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard before returning to Stanford in 1988. He is presently Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies in the History Department at Stanford University, and is Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute. Earlier he served as Chair of the Department of History, Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program, and Fisher Director of Stanford Global Studies.

A selection of his books include The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Germany (Harvard 1995); Fires of Hatred; Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe (Harvard 2001); Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton 2010), Genocide: A World History (Oxford 2017), and, most recently Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Struggle for Sovereignty (Harvard 2019).

Naimark has been awarded the Officer’s Cross First Class of the German Federal Republic. He twice received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching at Stanford. He also received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies from ASEEES in 2011-12.

 

Discussants:

David Holloway is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor in International History, Professor of Political Science, and Senior Fellow at FSI, Emeritus. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has been co-director of CISAC (1991-1997) and director of FSI (1998-2003). He is the author of Stalin and the Bomb: the Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale U. P., 1994) among other works.

Robert Rakove is Lecturer in International Relations. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia and is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World.  Rakove studies U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Cold War era.

Amir Weiner is Associate Professor of Soviet History and the director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.

 

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

 

This event is now full and we are unable to take any further reservations. However, if you would like to be added to the waitlist, please email us at sj1874@stanford.edu.

Human capital is fleeing Russia. Since President Vladimir Putin’s ascent to the presidency, between 1.6 and 2 million Russians – out of a total population of 145 million – have left for Western democracies. This emigration sped up with Putin’s return as president in 2012, followed by a weakening economy and growing repressions. It soon began to look like a politically driven brain drain, causing increasing concern among Russian and international observers. In this pioneering study, the Council’s Eurasia Center offers a comprehensive analysis of the Putin Exodus and its implications for Russia and the West. Based on the findings from focus groups and surveys in four key locations in the United States and Europe, it also examines the cultural and political values and attitudes of the new Russian émigrés.

 

Sergei Erofeev is currently a lecturer at Rutgers University and the Principal Investigator of the project Tectonic Value Shifts in Post-Soviet Societies (Narxoz University, Almaty). He has been involved in the internationalization of universities in Russia since the early 1990s. Previously, Dr. Erofeev served as a vice president for international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, the dean of international programs at the European University at Saint Petersburg, and the director of the Center for Sociology of Culture at Kazan Federal University in Russia. He has also been a Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at the University of Washington. Prior to his career in academia, Dr. Erofeev was a concert pianist, and has worked in the area of the sociology of the arts.

 

 

 

Co-sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and the: