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The Europe Center February 2016 Newsletter

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Event Recap: Human Rights and Refugees in Europe

 

Panel: Human Rights and Refugees in EuropePictured: Kenneth Scheve, Jenny Martinez, Emily Arnold-Fernàndez, and James Cavallaro.
Amidst the reimposition of border controls in some Schengen states, daily reports of new arrivals to Europe, and the marked rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric, the European refugee crisis poses significant challenges to Europe. In her January visit to Stanford, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access, Emily Arnold-Fernàndez discussed the crisis in the context of the global plight of refugees. She noted that with an estimated 20 million refugees worldwide, and an additional estimated 40 million internally displaced persons, we are witnessing the largest population displacement since World War II. Arnold-Fernàndez explained that the rights of refugees and state obligations to refugees are enshrined in international law. In addition to the protections against being returned to an unsafe country of origin ("non-refoulement"), she noted that the Refugee Convention provides refugees with many rights on par with "the most favorable treatment accorded to nationals of a foreign country" and, in some cases, on par with those granted to nationals of the receiving state. These rights include the right of association, access to courts, access to wage-earning and self employment, and the freedom of movement. She explained, however, that states frequently fail to provide many of these rights to refugees, something Arnold-Fernàndez attributes in part to insufficient enforcement. As a result, where refugees are routinely prohibited from participating in the first country of arrival, they are likely to move on to alternative destinations. This, in part, is driving the current influx of refugees to Europe. This reality, according to Arnold-Fernàndez, elucidates at least one method of both assisting refugees and alleviating the flows of refugees to Europe: promoting policy change to ensure that refugee rights are protected and upheld in countries of first arrival. This approach, she explained, is in marked contrast to the predominant approaches to refugee assistance, which include humanitarian aid and development solutions (such as on the job training). While the first is not a long-term solution, the second is only likely to be effective if refugees are first permitted to participate in society.

Following the talk, The Europe Center Director, Kenneth Scheve, led a discussion featuring commentary by Stanford Law professors James Cavallaro and Jenny Martinez. Cavallaro spoke of the need to think more broadly about human migration and the potential deleterious effects of state immigration controls on both human rights and security. Martinez noted the tension between the clarity of the non-refoulement principle and the ambiguity of safe third country principles, and questioned the ability of legal norms to compel states to change policy or reallocate resources. To watch this event in full, please visit our website.

Featured Faculty Research: Cécile Alduy

We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center's faculty affiliates. Our featured faculty member this month is Cécile Alduy, who is an Associate Professor of French literature and culture and the Director of the French and Italian Department at Stanford University.

Cécile AlduyCécile earned her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in France in 2003 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. Her research interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric, the relations between cultural, literary, and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema, and contemporary French literature. Cécile's most recent book, Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste [Marine Le Pen taken to her words. Decoding the new national front discourse], co-authored with Stephanie Wahnich, examines the rhetoric used by the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and compares it to that of her father and former National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Casual observation of far right politics in France suggests that there has been a significant change in the National Front program following the 2011 leadership change to Marine Le Pen from Jean-Marie Le Pen and his 2015 ouster from the party. Marine Le Pen has taken great efforts to distance herself from her father, who infamously and repeatedly characterized gas chambers as "a detail in the history of World War II." The party has also enjoyed increasing electoral support in recent years. Against this backdrop, the book examines two fundamental questions: what is Marine Le Pen actually saying, and why does her speech resonate with French society today? To answer these questions, Alduy and Wahnich have analyzed over 500 speeches given by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen. This analysis reveals that there is significant continuity between the political agenda and ideological content of the Le Pens. In contrast with her father's blatantly radical speech, however, the younger Le Pen employs careful phraseology, replete with allusions, ambiguities, and double entendres, in order to "de-demonize" the party and make its platform appear more palatable to a modern French audience. In spite of programmatic continuity, this rhetorical rebranding appears to have facilitated greater electoral support for the National Front. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots has received significant media coverage, including a feature in Le Monde [article in French] and on NPR. In her ongoing research, supported in part by The Europe Center, Cécile is building upon the methodologies devised for Marine Le Pen prise aux mots and examining the development of political discourse of French political parties across the ideological spectrum in the period leading up to the 2017 presidential election. The initial results of this study will be published by Seuil in 2017 in a book preliminarily entitled Les Mots des présidentiables. Sémantique d'une triangulaire annoncée [The words of presidential candidates. Semantics of a three-candidate race]. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Alduy, Cécile, and Stephanie Wahnich. 2015. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage de nouveau discours frontiste. Paris: Seuil.

Featured Graduate Student Research: Camilla Mazzucato

We would like to introduce you to some of the graduate students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured graduate student this month is Camilla Mazzucato (Anthropology). Camilla is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. Before beginning her Ph.D. studies at Stanford, Camilla earned a BA and an MA in Archaeology from the University of Bologna and an MSc in GIS and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology from the University College London.

Camilla MazzucatoCamilla is an anthropologist who is interested in using network analysis to examine the social arrangements "mega-sites" - large settlements that originated with small, settled hunter-gatherer communities - during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and Pottery Neolithic periods. In her current research, Camilla is evaluating these social arrangements with new evidence from Çatalhöyük, a dense agglomeration of mudbrick houses occupied for 1,400 years and located in modern-day Turkey. Approximately the size of a town, Çatalhöyük lacks many of the characteristics of a modern town, including specialized areas, communal buildings, and centralized functions. Moreover, the spatial arrangement differs significantly from other PPNB settlements. In summer 2015, Camilla conducted field research, partially funded by The Europe Center, at the site of Çatalhöyük. During her four weeks at the site, she explored ways of modeling the site's networks by collecting data focused on patterns of similarity of material culture features. This data will be used to examine the site's internal organization as well as the arrangements of social relationships therein. In addition, she spent time studying some of the recently-excavated buildings, using architectural features to study ties among entities.

Reminder: The Europe Center will be accepting applications for the Graduate Student Grand Competition March 28, 2016 - April 15, 2016. For more information please visit our website.

The Europe Center Programs: Minor in European Studies

As previously announced, The Europe Center and Stanford Global Studies are offering a minor in Global Studies with a concentration in European Studies. The minor is designed for undergraduate students who have an interdisciplinary interest in the history, culture, politics, societies, and institutions of Europe, past and present. The requirements of the minor include coursework, advanced proficiency in a modern European language, and a capstone experience such as a research paper with a focus on European Studies, completion of an overseas study program in Europe, or completion of an overseas internship in Europe.

This quarter, Christophe Crombez, Consulting Professor at The Europe Center, is offering the minor's core seminar class: Introduction to European Studies. In this survey course, students are introduced to important themes in the study of European politics, economics, and culture. The course begins with a discussion of European identity and culture, focusing on what makes Europe unique and how recent history has shaped this identity. In the second section, students analyze European politics by learning about Europe's predominant political institutions - parliamentary government and proportional representation electoral systems - and examining the effect of these institutions on public policy. The course then turns to the economy and understanding the challenges and opportunities that European economies face today. The fourth section focuses on the European Union, including its history, functioning, and policies. In the final section, the class discusses transatlantic relations.

We invite you to visit our website for more information about the Minor in European Studies.

Visiting Student Researcher: Lina Eriksson

Lina ErikssonThe Europe Center is pleased to introduce to you Lina Eriksson, a Fulbright Scholar who is visiting Stanford University from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Lina holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. She is broadly interested in the politics of natural disasters. In her dissertation, entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics, Lina examines the electoral effects of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Storm Gudrun on Swedish parliamentary elections. Part of this research, forthcoming in Electoral Studies, finds that the Swedish Social Democratic Party's poor crisis response to Storm Gudrun resulted in a significant decrease in support for the Social Democratic Party in the affected regions, leading to the largest change in partisan support in Swedish history. We invite you to visit our website for additional information about this research.

Publication Details: Eriksson, Lina M. 2016. "Winds of Change: Voter Blame and Storm Gudrun in the 2006 Swedish Parliamentary Election." Electoral Studies 41(1): 129-142.

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

February 18-19, 2016 
8:00AM - 5:00PM 
Workshop: Heritage Bureaucracies: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives 
Stanford Archaeology Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and The Mediterranean Studies Forum.
Please visit our website for more information.

March 28, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Adam Tooze, Columbia University 
NATO Expansion and the Swap Lines: the Unspoken Geopolitics of the Financial Crisis in Europe, 2007-2013
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall East 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 24, 2016.

April 25, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Torben Iversen, Harvard University 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Save the Date: April 28-29, 2016 
9:00AM - 5:00PM 
Conference: Networks of European Enlightenment 
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center 
This conference is co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the French Cultural Workshop, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

May 9, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Monica Martinez-Bravo, Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros (CEMFI), Madrid 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

May 16, 2016 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Daniel Stegmueller, University of Mannheim 
Workshop Title TBD 
Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge), Encina Hall West 
No RSVP required. 
This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

European Security Initiative Events

March 3, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Vygaudas Ušackas, European Union Ambassador to Russia 
Russia and the West: Handling the Clash of World Views 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 1, 2016.

March 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University 
Resurrected? The Domestic Determinants of Russia's Conduct Abroad 
Room E008 (Ground Floor Conference Room), Encina Hall East 
RSVP by 5:00PM March 9, 2016.

 

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Heritage Bureaucracies: Theoretical and Practical Perspectives (Day 2)

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This conference aims to further our understanding of the institutional cultures, funding schemes and power structures underlying transnational institutions, with a particular focus on heritage bureaucracies. We bring together scholars working at the intersection of archaeology, anthropology, sociology and law to offer a broader understanding of the intricacies of multilateral institutions and global civic society in shaping contemporary heritage governance. Speakers will provide ethnographic perspectives on the study of international organizations, such as the UN and EU, in an effort to show the entanglement of political and technical decision-making.

A 2-day international conference organized by Claudia Liuzza and Gertjan Plets.

Speakers:

Brigitta Hauser-Shäublin (Institute of Ethnology, Göttingen University)
Ellen Hertz (Institute of Ethnology, University of Neuchâtel)
Miyako Inoue (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Claudia Liuzza (Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)
Brigit Müller (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Elisabeth Niklason (Department of Archeaology, Stockholm University)
Gertjan Plets (Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University)
Cris Shore (Department of Anthropology, The University of Auckland)
Ana Vrdoljak (Department of Law, University of Technology, Sydney)

Co-sponsored by Stanford Archaeology Center, Cantor Arts Center, Department of Anthropology, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, The Europe Center, France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Mediterranean Studies Forum.

Contact: heritagebur@gmail.com

Heritage Bureaucracies Conference Flyer
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Stanford Archaeology Center (BLDG 500)
488 Escondido Mall
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Workshops

Winds of Change: Voter Blame and Storm Gudrun in the 2006 Swedish Parliamentary Election

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Can a natural disaster shift long-standing party support for the long-term? Studies of political behavior indicate that, as elections approach, voters punish or credit governments based on their responses to severe weather phenomena. It may still be considered an open question, however, if poor crisis response could trigger more durable shifts in long-standing party support. I provide empirical evidence suggesting that it could. I exploit a crucial case for the study of change in party support, Storm Gudrun (Erwin), to examine long lasting punishment effects over crisis response. The estimated effect is of a magnitude that equals the largest block-transfer of voters in Swedish history and can be seen over three parliamentary elections (2006, 2010 and 2014).

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Electoral Studies
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Lina M. Eriksson

* Cancelled * Seminar with Daniel Stegmueller

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This workshop talk has been cancelled.

 

Daniel Stegmueller is a Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences at the Graduate School of Social and Economic Sciences, University of Mannheim. He is  also an associate member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and of CAGE, University of Warwick.

His research lies at the intersection of political economy and political behavior. He studies political preferences and choices in advanced industrialized societies, specifically individuals' preferences for redistribution and redistributive voting. He is interested in how these are shaped by social structure and institutions, but also by basic individual characteristics, such as cognitive and non-cognitive skills.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Daniel Stegmueller Professor of Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences Speaker University of Mannheim
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**Cancelled** Seminar with Torben Iversen

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**This event has been cancelled**

 

Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge UP 1999), and co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale UP, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge UP 2000) and has published more than three dozen articles in leading journals and edited volumes. His work has won numerous American Political Science Association prizes including the Victoria Schuck Award, Best Book on European Politics and Society Award, the Luebbert Best Article Award, and the Gabriel Almond Best Dissertation Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently completing a book-length project with David Soskice on the political representation of economic interests in historical perspective.

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Torben Iversen Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy Speaker Harvard University
Lectures

"The Legacy of War on Fiscal Capacity" with Didac Queralt

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States make war, and wars make states. The second clause of Tilly's dictum assumes that the fiscal effort that states exert to wage war persists over time. This paper investigates the effect of war on long-term fiscal capacity as a function of two types of war financing instruments: taxes and loans. Tax-waged wars are argued to exert lasting effects on state capacity, as new taxes require enhancements of the state apparatus as well as complementary fiscal innovations. Loan-waged wars may not contribute to long-term state capacity, as countries might default once the war is over, thus preempting any persistent fiscal effect. Importantly, the way war is waged might be endogenous. To cope with this possibility, I exploit unanticipated crashes in the nineteenth-century international capital markets, which temporarily banned warring states from borrowing regardless of their (un)observed characteristics. The analysis shows that countries that fought wars while the international credit markets were down have today higher fiscal capacity, measured by income tax ratios as well as the size of the tax administration. Altogether, the paper advances the conditions under which wars exert positive and lasting effects on state building.

 

Didac Queralt is a junior professor at the Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG) in Barcelona. He received his Ph.D. from the NYU Politics Department in September 2012.

His research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and international relations, with a focus on the political economy of fiscal capacity building in Europe (East and West) and the Americas. Using formal methods, he investigates tax compliance in scenarios of low fiscal capacity, as well as the replacement of old forms of taxation (e.g. trade taxes) by modern extractive technologies (e.g. income taxation) that result from deliberate investment in the tax administration. He analyzes the theoretical predictions using contemporary data from developing economies in Latin America and Eastern Europe, as well as historical data for European powers in the pre-modern era.

In addition, he investigates the origins of direct taxation in the Western World, both with macro- and micro-data, as well as the electoral politics underlying the expansion of the fiscal state. Currently, he is involved in a quasi-experimental test of the legacy of pre-modern wars on state capacity, and an field experiment on tax progressivity in Colombia,

 

This seminar is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop in the Department of Political Science and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

Encina Hall West, Room 400 (Graham Stuart Lounge)

Didac Queralt Junior Professor Speaker Institute of Political Economy and Governance (IPEG), Barcelona
Seminars

Marine Le Pen Prise aux Mots: Decryptage du Nouveau Discours Frontiste

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At a time when Marine Le Pen gained momentum on the political and media scene and has garnered unprecedented electoral results, it is urgent to decipher the logic of her father's speech and the foundations of its rhetorical efficiency. For the first time, a lexical analysis and statistical literature of a corpus of nearly five hundred texts can measure the originality of this new Frontist word. Public speeches, editorials and interviews of two successive presidents of the National Front are screened with a double processing, IT and rhetoric, to identify as close continuities and differences. The battle of words is central to the strategy of "demonization" initiated by the new President of the National Front since 2011.

Yet is the speech of the girl so different from that of the father? Jean-Marie Le Pen is not sure it is enough to adopt the lexicon of the Republic to bring real values. Beyond the lexical dust, deep structures and underlying national novel continue to the sources of a long literary tradition and extreme right politics. This book begins to dismantle the springs of Marinist speech and to enlighten this new tributienne word that meets real needs for meaning and values ​​in a context of deep economic and identity crisis.

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French and European Publications Inc
Authors
Cécile Alduy
Number
978-2021172102

Geography and Gridlock in the United States

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"Geography and Gridlock in the United States" is chapter 7 of the book Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily and published by the Cambridge University Press.

Political polarization dominates discussions of contemporary American politics. Despite widespread agreement that the dysfunction in the political system can be attributed to political polarization, commentators cannot come to a consensus on what that means. The coarseness of our political discourse, the ideological distance between opposing partisans, and, most of all, an inability to pass much-needed and widely supported policies all stem from the polarization in our politics. This volume assembles several of the nation's top analysts of American politics to focus on solutions to polarization. The proposals range from constitutional change to good- government reforms to measures to strengthen political parties. Each tackles one or more aspects of America's polarization problem. This book begins a serious dialogue about reform proposals to address the obstacles that polarization poses for contemporary governance.

 

 

 

 

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Solutions to Political Polarization in America, edited by Nathaniel Persily
Authors
Jonathan Rodden
Number
978-1107451919

Sarah Cormack-Patton

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305
 

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Post-doctoral Fellow at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Sarah Cormack-Patton received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh in August 2015. She is a political economist working at the nexus of comparative politics and international relations with a focus on European politics. Sarah is interested in how the cross-border movement of goods, capital, and people impacts the domestic policy-making process, and how domestic politics affect these cross-border flows. In her current research, Sarah examines these questions through the lens of international migration. Sarah's doctoral dissertation examined the ways in which varying bundles of migrant rights affect domestic preferences over immigration, the effect of these rights on the policy-making coalitions that form over immigration, and how these preferences aggregate in various institutional environments. In addition to her Ph.D., Sarah holds a BS in International Affairs and Modern Languages (French) and MS in International Affairs from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a MA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.

 

Lina M. Eriksson

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA  94305-6165

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Visiting Student Researcher at The Europe Center, 2015-2016
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Lina M. Eriksson is a Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Ms. Eriksson is visiting the Europe Center for 9 months, September 1, 2015 – May 31, 2016, to work under the supervision of Jens Hainmueller. Ms. Eriksson holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. At the moment, she is working on her dissertation entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics. The focus of her dissertation concerns two natural disasters and three sequential elections. The 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the 2005 Storm Gudrun and the 2006, 2010 and 2014 Swedish Parliamentary Elections. The overall aim of her dissertation is to investigate accountability in regards to the crises management of these two natural disasters and, specifically, if it has occurred in the form of reduced vote support for the 2006 Social democratic incumbent.

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