**Cancelled** President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing: The Future of Europe
**This event has been cancelled.**
This event is co-sponsored by: The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The Europe Center, The Hoover Institution, Stanford Global Studies, The French and Italian Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and The Stanford Humanities Center.
Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street
Stanford
Christophe Crombez
Encina Hall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
Christophe Crombez is a political economist who specializes in European Union (EU) politics and business-government relations in Europe. His research focuses on EU institutions and their impact on policies, EU institutional reform, lobbying, party politics, and parliamentary government.
Crombez is Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (since 1999). He teaches Introduction to European Studies and The Future of the EU in Stanford’s International Relations Program, and is responsible for the Minor in European Studies and the Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe.
Furthermore, Crombez is Professor of Political Economy at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven in Belgium (since 1994). His teaching responsibilities in Leuven include Political Business Strategy and Applied Game Theory. He is Vice-Chair for Research at the Department for Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation.
Crombez has also held visiting positions at the following universities and research institutes: the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, in Florence, Italy, in Spring 2008; the Department of Political Science at the University of Florence, Italy, in Spring 2004; the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, in Winter 2003; the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, Illinois, in Spring 1998; the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Summer 1998; the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in Spring 1997; the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in Spring 1996; and Leti University in St. Petersburg, Russia, in Fall 1995.
Crombez obtained a B.A. in Applied Economics, Finance, from KU Leuven in 1989, and a Ph.D. in Business, Political Economics, from Stanford University in 1994.
Peter Koudijs
Knight Management Center
Stanford University
655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305-7298
Peter Koudijs is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches History of Financial Crises in the MBA program. He joined the GSB in August 2011. Peter received a Bachelor’s degree, cum laude, in Economics from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He earned a PhD degree, summa cum laude, in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011. Peter has obtained various grants and fellowships from the European Union, the Economic History Association and different Dutch and Spanish scholarship programs.
Cécile 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 
Camilla 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.
The 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 
Working in conjunction with the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, The Europe Center is pleased to announce a talk by Emily Arnold-Fernández, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access. During her visit to Stanford, Ms. Arnold-Fernández will discuss the rights of refugees and obligations of states under international law more generally before focusing on how European Union law affects these rights and obligations. Discussants James Cavallaro and Jenny S. Martinez, both of whom are professors of law at Stanford Law School, will further explore how international law has influenced the ways in which Europe and the larger international community has addressed the latest refugee crisis.
Peter earned his Ph.D. in Economics, Finance, and Management from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. In his research, Peter uses historical evidence to shed light on the functioning of financial markets, focusing specifically on asset prices in the short and long run and on the role of bankruptcy protection on risk taking and investment. His recent article in the
Leonardo is a historian who is interested in the emergence and historical development of peripheral regions of empire. His current research uses the case of the Portuguese empire to examine the mechanisms that European empires developed to administer their colonies in the Early Modern period. The European colonial powers created vast imperial structures designed to administer distant parts of their empires. Yet the communication technology of the time resulted in both leaders in the imperial capital and administrators in far-flung territories making decisions in the absence of complete information. Scholars have sought to understand the decision-making process of authorities under these conditions of inconsistent communication and unreliable information, and some have argued that this led decision-makers to be indifferent to local knowledge. In research at Lisbon's Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, National Archive Torre do Tombo, and Biblioteca Nacional, partially supported by The Europe Center, Leonardo uncovered evidence to the contrary. His archival research suggests that local knowledge - transmitted to the imperial capital via letters from litigants seeking dispute settlements in distant parts of the empire or petitions to the king by mobile vassals - served as an important source of information for those administering faraway domains.
Europe is facing a dynamic and evolving geopolitical situation, with conflicts on two fronts. To the east, Russia seeks to expand both its territory and its power; to the south, the Syrian civil war continues to generate refugee flows into Europe. In his November visit to Stanford, General Philip M. Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, spoke about these threats and discussed the central role of NATO in buttressing European security. General Breedlove drew attention to the nexus of these two security threats, positing that Russian involvement in Syria is intended to promote the image of Russia as a world power and to foster in the region regimes supportive of Russia. While Russia argues that its intervention in Syria is intended to promote global peace by helping to end the Syrian conflict, General Breedlove suggests that the sincerity of this claim is undermined by Russian intransigence over Georgia and Ukraine. Ultimately, he argued that maintaining security in the contemporary geopolitical context requires a continued commitment to NATO and the Transatlantic security apparatus. Following his presentation, General Breedlove engaged in a lively question and answer session with the audience, fielding questions on topics such as the ability of NATO member states to meet their 2 percent military spending commitment, how to engage with Russia without playing into the narrative that the west is surrounding them, and the prospects for Afghanistan. To watch General Breedlove's talk and the following question and answer period in full, please visit our 
The Europe Center is delighted to welcome Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, to Stanford University. Dr. Pauer-Studer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna and her research interests include ethics, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Salzburg. During her time at Stanford University, Dr. Pauer-Studer will be teaching in the Department of Philosophy and working on a book about the normative distortions in the National Socialist legal system, focusing on the period 1933-1939. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Pauer-Studer to The Europe Center and Stanford University.