The Europe Center is jointly housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Global Studies Division.
The 1400 page Lexikon der Geisteswissenschaften (Encyclopedia of the Humanities) offers a co
European leaders converged in Brussels to figure a way out of a worsening debt crisis and agreed to greater financial oversight and centralization. England refuses to go along with the plan, and Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama says he expects some countries will start bailing out of the eurozone.
“The political difficulties of deepening any fiscal union are so great that I wouldn’t bet on that happening,” says Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellowat Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a resident at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. “The easier path is going to be for countries to begin exiting.”
Fukuyama talks about the summit, the euro’s chances of survival and what’s at stake for America if the currency collapses.
What does the Brussels agreement mean for Europe’s debt crisis?
We will have to see how much of a binding constraint this agreement actually is. It’s just an informal agreement at this point. Political leaders can promise anything at this kind of summit and fail to deliver.
I think the most interesting thing going on is the eurozone – the 17 countries that participate in the euro – is actually splitting off from the greater EU. The reason that’s happening is that in order to save the eurozone, they need to make certain decisions on this type of deepening control. And countries like Britain will never go along with this. The 17 countries have to create their own unit that can make decisions at the expense of the larger EU.
Explain Britain’s refusal to have its budget reviewed by the European Commission
The UK is like the United States – they’ve always been jealous of their sovereignty. If you go to England and talk about crossing the Channel, they’ll say, “Oh, so you’re going to go to Europe.” While an American would say “England is a part of Europe.”
There’s a strong strain – especially within the conservative party – that really does not want to give up authority to what they regard as a bunch of French socialists in Brussels. That’s their vision of what the EU really represents. So they’re resistant about being dragged into any German scheme to deepen the powers in Brussels to include control over national budgets because that is a core element of sovereignty. The majority of people in Britain will say that will happen over their dead bodies.
What is the likelihood that countries will begin exiting the eurozone?
I don’t think it makes sense for a country like Greece to stay in the eurozone. It’s a matter of national pride that they don’t want to be the first country out, but it’s very hard to see how they actually return to growth under a system that links them to Germany in terms of the price of their currency. Long before there’s any kind of centralized fiscal reform that’s imposed on Greece, Portugal and these other peripheral countries, I think it’s more likely that they’ll exit. The euro will probably remain, but it will be at the core of the more stable countries.
What mechanism is there for countries to exit the eurozone?
There is no mechanism. Not only is there no legal way of exiting, there’s no disciplining mechanism. You have a stability pact where countries agreed they wouldn’t run a budget deficit greater than 3 percent, and Germany was really one of the first counties to violate that. But there were no sanctions. That’s the problem right now – there’s neither discipline nor an exit mechanism. That’s why everyone is fearing a disorderly, messy breakup of the EU, which would be extremely damaging.
President Obama has said the U.S. “stands ready to do our part" to help Europe resolve its crisis. What can America really do?
It’s an indication of how far we’ve fallen, but there’s really nothing concretely we can do apart from possibly increasing our International Monetary Fund share. But the IMF doesn’t have the ammunition to really help at all in this particular crisis. So all we can do is sit on the sidelines and try to get the Europeans to take our advice, which a lot of them are not inclined to do given the mess that happened on Wall Street three years ago. It’s a mark of the diminishment of overall American influence that we’re simply relegated to the sidelines of this crisis.
What’s at stake for America in the wake of a total European financial meltdown?
There’s a lot at stake. We are slowly crawling out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. The one thing that could really send us back into a second leg of a recession is collapse of the European financial system and panic in Europe. If Europe doesn’t do well, the United States isn’t going to do well.
Italy is the 8th biggest national economy in the world and the 3rd biggest in the Euro zone after Germany and France. Although it holds the third-largest gold reserves in the world, enjoys a high living standard with comparatively low private debts and is technologically innovative, as for example the recent takeover of parts of the U.S. car industry during the financial crisis 2008-11 underscored, it is currently considered to be the most vulnerable national economy threatened by the European debt crisis because of its huge public debt which reached 118% of the GDP in 2011. Although Italy is considered as "too big to fail" because it could hardly be saved by the European rescue funding programme with a GDP of more than 2.1 trillion Euro, there are fears that a further loss of trust by the international money markets could trigger an unprecedented crisis. Interest rates payed for Italian public debt rose to record numbers in fall 2011 due to the downgrading by leading rating agencies since summer 2011. The seminar gives a concise overview over the current state of affairs in Italy, including its debt and economic crises, and discusses their potential interweavement with the social crisis the country is undergoing in the view of international observers. In the age of media democracy, contextual political factors like social and cultural psychology, public appearances and symbolic events are increasingly impacting Italian politics and economics in ambivalent ways.
A podcast of this talk will soon be made available.
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Conference organizer: Nancy Ruttenburg
What is conscience, what was conscience, and what is its future?
The purpose of the conference is to examine the authority of conscience as it is presently invoked in various arenas of contemporary life—including law, medicine, journalism, and politics—and as its meaning is inflected by scholarly debates in the fields of history, literature, religious studies, psychology, and philosophy. From their various fields of expertise and interest, participants will address the central question the conference raises: in our post-Freudian and post-Nietzschean age, to what degree does conscience possess the kind of authority that an earlier and less secular age reserved for first things? This question entails a host of others. Do our invocations of conscience reveal it to be the still-vital residue of a kind of certainty linked to infallible authority from which we cannot alienate ourselves even when we’d like to? If so, is the enduring vitality of conscience a sign that the process of secularization remains incomplete, even in secular rationalists, those who might consider themselves to be exempt from the religiosity that distinguishes United States culture from those of other modern Western democracies? Do we regard conscience as a type of knowledge? Or is it possible to understand conscience ontologically, as a category of self or mind that—insofar as it speaks to all humanity by means of a "small, still voice" issuing from each human heart—bridges the gap between individual and corporate being? Whether or not underwritten by a discipline or a tradition, conscience is commonly invoked to justify a range of acts and behaviors: what relation do these invocations of moral law, even when unexamined, bear to the burgeoning interest in ethics we see across the humanities disciplines and into the legal, medical, and journalistic fields? Between the extremes of authoritarianism and anarchy, where do we place conscience in American political life and how do we understand its peculiar agency?
CONFERENCE VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDINGS:
Please click on the panel titles and the keynote speaker's name below to view videos and listen to audios of each:
November 8, 2012
Panel 1: The Pre-Revolutionary Conscience: From Religious Burden to Natural Right (video)
Panel 2: MIA: Conscience and the First Amendment (video)
Panel 3: Roundtable: The Religious Conscience in Modernity (audio only)
Panel 4: Conscience/Ethics: The Secular Conscience (audio only)
November 9, 2012
Panel 5: Conscience and Reportage (video)
Panel 6: Roundtable: Embodied Conscience (video)
Panel 7: Roundtable: Conscientious Objection (video)
Keynote: Anne Aghion, award-winning documentary filmmaker (video)
PROGRAM AND PARTICIPANTS:
Opening Event: Wednesday, November 7, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Screening of keynote speaker Anne Aghion’s documentary film, My Neighbor, My Killer, to be introduced by the filmmaker. Will be held in the Oksenberg Conference Room, Encina Hall Central, 3rd floor.
For more information on the film, please visit this event listing on our website by clicking <here>.
Thursday, November 8, 9:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m:
Conscience and its Conceptual Evolution: Religion/Rights/Ethics
Thursday Morning Panels: What Was Conscience? The American Context
1) Andrew Murphy, Associate Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University, author of Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America and Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11.
2) Mark Valeri, E. T. Thompson Professor of Church History, Union Presbyterian Seminary. Among the editors of the multi-volume Works of Jonathan Edwards, he is the author most recently of Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America.
Stanford Respondent: Caroline Winterer, Professor of History, Professor by courtesy of Classics
1) Jack Rakove, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford, where has taught since 1980. He is the author of six books, including Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), which received the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010), which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize. He is currently at work on Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion, which will be part of the Oxford University Press series on Inalienable Rights.
2) Michael J. Perry, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, and Senior Fellow for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University School of Law. Author most recently of The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy; Constitutional Rights, Moral Controversy, and the Supreme Court; Toward a Theory of Human Rights: Religion, Law, Courts; and Under God?: Religious Faith and Liberal Democracy.
Stanford Respondent: Derek Webb, Fellow, Constitutional Law Center, Stanford
Thursday Afternoon Panels: What Is Conscience: The Secular/Religious Divide
1) Nathan Chapman, Executive Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center who joined the Law School as a Fellow in 2010. After clerking for the Honorable Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Court, he practiced with WilmerHale in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Duke University School of Law and Duke Divinity School in 2007. His most recent publications include Disentangling Conscience and Religion, 2013 U. Ill. L. Rev. (forthcoming) and Due Process As Separation of Powers, 121 Yale L. J. 1672 (2012) (with Michael W. McConnell).
2) Steven Knapp, President of the George Washington University since August 2007, former Dean of Arts and Sciences and subsequently Provost at Johns Hopkins University, and Professor of English at UC Berkeley. Author most recently with Philip Clayton of The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith. A specialist in Romanticism, literary theory, and the relation of literature to philosophy and religion, Dr. Knapp earned his doctorate and masters degrees from Cornell University and his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University.
3) Arnold Eisen, Chancellor, Jewish Theological Seminary, NYC. Author most recently of Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community and Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America.
Stanford Moderator: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Professor by Courtesy of Comparative Literature and Slavic, Director, Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel
1) Jay M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor, New School for Social Research. Author most recently of Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting; Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics; and a co-authored volume published through UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center entitled Art and Aesthetics After Adorno.
2) Kent Greenawalt, University Professor, former Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review, Columbia Law School. Author, among many other works, of Religion and the Constitution: Vol. I: Free Exercise and Fairness and Vol. II: Establishment and Fairness, as well as Does God Belong in Public Schools? and Private Consciences and Public Reasons.
Stanford Respondent: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, Professor by Courtesy of Comparative Literature and Slavic, Director of Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel
Friday, November 9, 9:00 a.m. - 6:45 p.m.
Contemporary Casuistry: Cases of Conscience in Action
Friday Morning Panels: Narrating Conscience: Modes of Witnessing
1) Dr. Sheri Fink, M.D., Ph.D., 2010 Pulitzer Prize- and National Magazine Award-winner in investigative journalism for “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” about difficult choices made at a New Orleans hospital during the aftermath of Katrina; contributor to ProPublica who has reported globally on health, medicine, and science; senior fellow with the New America Foundation and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; author of War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (2003) during the Balkan crisis, winner of the American Medical Writer’s Association special book award and finalist for PEN Martha Albrand awards.
2) Colin Dayan, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, Vanderbilt, and expert in literary, legal, and religious studies of the Americas; books include Haiti, History, and the Gods (1998); The Story of Cruel and Unusual (2007); and, most recently, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, selected as a Choice top-25 "outstanding academic book of 2011."
Stanford Respondent: David Palumbo-Liu, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor, Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor by courtesy of English
1) Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of the novel Cutting for Stone (2010)as well as the non-fiction works, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1995)about his experience as a physician working in rural Tennessee at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss (1998). Currently Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, Stanford.
2) Mark Johnson, Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon. Author most recently of The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (co-authored with George Lakoff); Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics; and a second edition of Metaphors We Live By (co-authored with George Lakoff).
3) Dr. Fady Joudah, Internal Medicine and Palestinian-American poet; former practitioner with Doctors Without Borders in Darfur, Sudan and Zambia; translator of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Zaqtan, and 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for The Earth in the Attic (2008).
Stanford Moderator: Blakey Vermeule, Professor of English
Friday Afternoon Panels: Conscience in the World: Problems of Toleration and Intervention
1) Air Force Reserve Col. Steven Kleinman, Senior Intelligence Officer, U.S. Air Force; a widely recognized subject matter expert with extensive experience in human intelligence operations, special operations, strategic interrogation, and resistance to interrogation; Senior Advisor to the Intelligence Science Board’s study “Educing Information” which issued guidelines for improving the government’s interrogation techniques. Publicly opposed “enhanced interrogation” techniques for battling the war on terror in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Judiciary Committee. Authored numerous articles laying out his argument against torture published in several peer-reviewed professional journals, the law review of the City University of New York and Valparaiso University law schools, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
2) Eyal Press, author of Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks, and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times and Absolute Convictions; contributor to several journals, including The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Atlantic Monthly, and others.
3) Yusef Komunyakaa: Global Distinguished Professor of English, NYU, Vietnam veteran and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose collections include The Chameleon Couch, Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Pleasure Dome and many others.
Stanford Moderator: Debra Satz, Associate Dean of Humanities, Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society; Professor of Philosophy and by courtesy Political Science; Research Affiliate, Program on Global Justice
4:45 – 6:45: KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ANNE AGHION
For her work on the gacaca trials in post-genocide Rwanda, documentary filmmaker Anne Aghion won the UNESCO Fellini Prize, an Emmy Award, the Human Rights Watch 2009 Nestor Almendros Prize, and she was a nominee for the 2009 Gotham Award. Her feature-length documentary, My Neighbor, My Killer, was one of the few documentaries to be an Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival.
Bechtel Conference Center
The second conference in the multi-year TEC-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute project on the reconciliation of divided regions and societies.
Conference Summary
By Roland Hsu, Associate Director, the Europe Center, and Kathryn Ciancia, (Ph.D., Stanford).
The Europe Center, with project partner the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, hosted the major international conference at Stanford University (May 17-18, 2012), dedicated to “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions”. This conference was aimed to deepen our understanding of disputes over history, and to find ways towards resolving conflictual memory. Participants – all leaders in their field, and representing voices from U.S., European, Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab worlds – were challenged to answer:
Participants included:
Khalil, Gregory (Telos Group)
Göçek, Müge (Univ. of Michigan)
Milani, Abbas (Stanford)
Bashir, Bashir (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Barkan, Elazar (Columbia)
Karayanni, Michael (The Hebrew University)
Confino, Alon (University of Virginia)
Bartov, Omer (Brown)
Cohen, Mitchell (Baruch)
Eshel, Amir (Stanford)
Glendinning, Simon (LSE)
Motzkin, Gabriel (The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute)
Naimark, Norman (Stanford)
Penslar, Derek (Toronto)
Rouhana, Nadim (Tufts)
Uhl, Heidemarie (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Zerubavel, Yael (Rutgers)
Zipperstein, Steven (Stanford)
Notes and Highlights
In his opening remarks, Amir Eshel, Director of The Europe Center, situated the conference within its wider context—a series under the title “Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies,” which began with a conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” in Jerusalem in May 2011. Eshel posed the question of why Stanford’s Europe Center should focus on issues relating to the wider Middle East, particularly the historic and ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In answering his own question, Eshel argued that the European Union had begun to look closely at its own neighborhood, with a particular emphasis on the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED), which explores questions of migration, religion, and civil society in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. As such questions are important in both Europe and the EUROMED region, scholars who work on Europe need to think within a broader geographical context that stretches beyond Old Europe or even the European Union.
Amir Eshel also introduced some of the key ideas that informed the conference. Questions of memory and history have been central to academic discourse over the past three decades. Indeed, memory and history have taken on a crucial, even obsessive, dynamic. Where are we today in this global interdisciplinary conversation? Can the study of memory help us to understand the conflicted societies of the greater Middle East? Can the huge scholarly interest in such subjects help us to think in new ways about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? Can the European experience of dealing with difficult memories aid us as we try to understand Israeli and Palestinian memories of the 1948 Nakba? What is the role of historical research, on the one hand, and cultural remembrance, on the other, in promoting reconciliation and cohabitation? Since the conference aimed to focus less on the peace process in the Middle East and more on attempts at reconciliation and cohabitation, he urged participants to consider how Israelis and Palestinians might live together
In order to highlight work that had recently been undertaken, Eshel then focused on the fields of historical research and cultural discourse. Over the past few decades, he argued, narratives have become increasingly crucial in the historiography, much of the impetus coming from so-called critical historiography. For instance, the last decade has witnessed the publication of Motti Golani and Adel Manna’s Two Sides of the Coin, which presents two narratives of the Nakba of 1948. In this multi-perspective narrative, the conflict is presented as one of both territory and historical memory. Similarly, Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss’s Haifa Before and After 1948 was co-authored by Israelis and Palestinians and features fourteen different narratives. A further collection, entitled Zoom In: Palestinian Refugees of 1948, Remembrances, deals with contemporary memories of the Nakba. All three books were published by the Institute For Historical Justice and Reconciliation and the Republic of Letters, while the Van Leer Institute and Al-Quds University in Palestinian East Jerusalem have also published a series of schoolbooks that present similar multi-perspective narratives.
In addition to the changes in the historiography, there has been a shift in the cultural discourse, exemplified by the Israeli novelist Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani (2012), which details the experiences of one Palestinian family and includes a map of Jaffa-Tel Aviv featuring Palestinian sites that vanished in 1948. The fact that Hilu’s novel received critical acclaim and was commercially successful indicates a new willingness on the part of Israelis to learn about the Palestinian experience. Eshel has himself just completed a book comparing post-Second World War German and Austrian cultural memory with Israeli cultural memory of 1948. Since Palestinians and Israelis are bound to live together, Eshel argued that the solutions depend on narratives of the past, with history at the center of the discussion. Throughout the conference, participants were urged to ask themselves two questions: Can we do more? Can we do better?
Video casts of select sessions of the conference are available on Stanford YouTube.
Titles of the sessions are:
Plans for the Next Conference
The final session involved a Round Table discussion in which participants had the opportunity to reflect on the larger themes of the conference and to suggest ways in which the dialogue could be fruitfully continued. Three of the conference organizers began with their own reflections on the conference before the discussion was opened up to all participants. Norman Naimark pointed to three key ideas that he had learned from the proceedings. The first was the concept that history and memory should not necessarily be seen as distinct entities. Second, Naimark pointed to the importance of comparative approaches, citing Derek Penslar’s presentation as a good example. While the conference did not deal with the fields of Eastern European, Russian, and German history, external scholarly interjections into these fields have made them places of stimulating debate. Finally, since there is much that we do not know about 1948, Naimark urged the creation of a history that would place those events within a much broader chronological context, just as Omer Bartov is doing for the town of Buczacz. In his remarks, Gabriel Motzkin focused on the relationship between memory and the ongoing political process in Israel. He expressed agreement with Nadim Rouhana that Jewish Israelis need to recognize Palestinian memories, but added that Palestinians have to acknowledge the Jewish religious project in which the land of Israel occupies the same place that salvation does for Christians. Finally, Amir Eshel urged participants to consider the role of the “practical past”—how do we use the past in order to engage the present and imagine the future? He suggested that there are a variety of possible political solutions, but that there is also a long list of actions that the present Israeli government could take in order to aid reconciliation, including acts of apology and acknowledgment.
The organizers express their deep appreciation to the conference participants. They also support the keen interest in continuing the work on this subject and the larger project, with follow-up programming. The next conference in this series, from the Europe Center-Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, will be announced at The Europe Center website.
Landau Economics Building
Lucas Room 134(A)
The Europe Center announces its upcoming international conference on “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions.” With European and Van Leer Jerusalem Institute partnership, the conference is part of the Center’s multi-year series on Reconciliation, seeking insight and answers to regional and civil conflict in today’s world of nationality, resource, and territory disputes, as well as multicultural communities and global immigration and mobility. The conference on “History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions” is the second of the Center’s international conferences in the series; the first was on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity.”
Details on The Europe Center’s series on “Reconciliation”, the conference on “History and Memory,” and the conference on “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” are available at The Europe Center’s events pages.
Video and podcast presentations conference will be available soon on these pages.
Co-sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and The Europe Center
Event Synopsis:
The End of Hungarian Democracy? International Implications
October 21, 2011
After an introduction by Professor Dornbach, Professor Wittenberg asserts that while a spirit of bipartisan ship is a nice feature of the U.S. legislature, it is not a fundamental requirement of democracy and has historically not characterized the Hungarian parliament. He traces a decades-long tradition of ruling parties using Parliament to limit the presence and influence of minority parties. The current Fidesz government, which ended up with 2/3 of the seats after the 2012 election, now has a supermajority necessary to alter the constitution. Professor Wittenberg attributes Fidesz’s victory to three factors: the incompetence of older right wing parties, partly resulting from lack of governing experience during last four decades of Socialist rule; 2) the arrogance of the Socialist party; and 3) a simple lack of alternatives for voters. Wittenberg points out that Hungary’s complex electoral system resulted in more Fidesz parliamentary seats than the party’s actual popularity with voters would predict. He concludes that the 70% of parliamentary vote won, cumulatively, by extreme nationalist parties, does not bode well for the future of liberal politics in Hungary.
Professor Scheppele describes how the Fidesz party under the leadership of (Victor) Orban has taken its victory as a “mandate to change everything,” often in ways that will allow Fidesz to stay in power in the future. The constitution was amended 10 times during the party’s first year in power. Key changes included reducing the size and jurisdiction of constitutional courts, limiting media activities, allowing election commission representatives to be appointed with a 2/3 majority, and fast tracking the process of voting on new laws to approximately 3 days, leaving little room for discussion and debate. Scheppele echoes Professor Wittenberg’s argument that many voters simply did not have an attractive alternative to Fidesz, which would be less of a danger if the country’s constitution were not so easy to amend. She predicts that Hungary’s current situation should offer lessons to other countries on how to design constitutions.
Professor Halmai concludes the panel by crediting the arrogance (and corruption) of the Socialist coalition with the success of Fidesz in the 2010 elections. He highlights three central problems with the new constitution: 1) It leaves questions regarding who is to be subject to the constitution – for example, does this include the Roma population within Hungary, or Hungarian-Americans living within the United States? 2) The constitution intervenes in the private lives of Hungarians with respect to religion, marriage, abortion, etc. 3) It limits constitutional courts to narrower jurisdictions. He also laments the lack of consensus within the Hungarian government on a set of liberal democratic values.
A discussion session raised such questions as: What prospects are there for pushback from the European Union against some of the recent constraints on rule of law in Hungary? Does the fact that the Hungarian constitution considers the 1.4 million Hungarian-Americans in the United States as Hungarian citizens raise any legal challenge from the U.S.? Does the fact that Hungary has to operates within the frameworks of the European Union and NATO put constraints on its actions with regards to democracy and the constitution? Where does Fidesz’s funding come from?
CISAC Conference Room
Audio Synopsis:
First, Professor Joffe asserts that the introduction of a common European currency was politically rather than economically motivated, pursued on the basis that it would protect Germany's strong export-oriented economy and ensure monetary discipline throughout the Euro zone without the need for heavy political management. However, good political intentions were not enough, and a disregard for sound economic principles has led to the current crisis.
In discussing causes of the crisis, Professor Joffe cites high spending and rapidly growing labor costs in the Mediterranean countries. A common currency gave an impression to lenders of equal risk between Euro zone countries, who had little incentive for responsible monetary policies when they could borrow cheaply. Although northern countries like France and Germany also violated deficit rules prior to the crisis, they were better able to "devalue from within," cutting costs and wages, and lengthening work weeks to control unemployment. Professor Joffe uses the analogy of a steam-powered train to illustrate the challenges of the monetary union: each country represents a train car, and to move together there are three options - 1) drivers can impose discipline on other cars to ensure they don't burn too much coal; 2) when one car runs out of coal, others can share their resources; or 3) the cars can break apart, forcing out those who don't follow the speed limit.
Professor Joffe then offers several insights for the future. He reflects that the dominant system in the EU lately has been a “transfer union” (option #2 in the above train analogy). He predicts that this system will likely prevent a default until at least Spring 2012. While the crisis suggests that the monetary union should not have been forced, Joffe asserts that the desire to save the Euro is universal and a complete collapse is unimaginable. In conclusion, Professor Joffe discusses the different political challenges facing Europe and the United States, and cites several encouraging factors, including that democracy remains stable even during the economic crisis.
A discussion session following the talk address issues such as: the potential for the continued political integration of Europe to force less disciplined countries to "shape up"; how the EU hierarchy may change after the crisis; Ireland's role in the crisis; the validity of proposals to strengthen the European Parliament and implement a transactions tax; the potential for an "Arab Spring" uprising among Greek youth; and prospects for transatlantic relations.
*NEW LOCATION*
Due to the number of RSVPs, this event has been moved to a larger venue:
Gunn - SIEPR Building
The Koret-Taube Conference Center, Room 130
366 Galvez Street
Stanford University
