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The Europe Center October 2016 Newsletter

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Report Published by Students Participating in The Europe Center's Undergraduate Internship Program

 

Baltics in the Balance CoverEach summer, The Europe Center sponsors Stanford undergraduate students to complete internships with partner organizations in Europe. For summer 2016, TEC and the European Security Initiative sponsored two internships with the International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS), a think-tank in Tallinn, Estonia, devoted to developing cutting-edge knowledge and analysis of international security and defense issues. During their time at ICDS, Caitlyn Littlepage and Sarah Manney worked on a project examining the implications of the U.S. presidential election for Transatlantic security relations. Based on this research, Caitlyn and Sarah wrote a policy analysis paper that was subsequently published by ICDS.

Executive Summary
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a maximalist both in political background and campaign rhetoric, is likely to maintain the status quo of U.S. NATO assistance and possibly increase allied presence along NATO’s eastern flank to deter Russian aggression. Surrounded by a team of hawkish foreign policy advisors and partnered with a traditionally pro-NATO Congress, the former Secretary of State should face few obstacles to advancing deterrence and responding decisively in the event of a crisis. In contrast, Republican nominee Donald Trump vacillates between two dangerous extremes: hair-trigger impulsivity and sycophantic flattery of Vladimir Putin. The former is an unfortunate personality quirk with the potential to spark international incidents without warning while the latter is actively encouraged by Trump’s entourage. The candidate and his core team of advisors share deep economic and personal interests in Russia and appear to prioritize the country over established U.S. allies. While Clinton presents NATO’s borders as inviolable, Trump indicates that anything is negotiable, putting the onus on NATO members to prove their worth rather than on Russia to justify its actions. The Kremlin appears to have received the message. When discussing the candidates, the Russian media primarily praises Trump and derides Clinton for their respective security policies likely because Trump’s enables Putin to more easily carry out his aggressive foreign policy objectives while they believe Clinton’s are more likely to tie their hands. For NATO members along the eastern border with Russia, a future with President Clinton is the preferable option. However, as the race is yet to be decided both these states and NATO as an entity must plan for the expected security implications of President Trump.

The full report is available for download on the ICDS website.

For more information about The Europe Center's Undergraduate Internship Program in Europe, please visit our website.

Brexit: What's Next for the UK and Europe?

Please mark your calendars for a panel discussion featuring Nicholas Bloom (William Eberle Professor of Economics and Senior Fellow at SIEPR; Co-Director, Productivity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Program at NBER) and Christophe Crombez (Senior Research Scholar at The Europe Center; Professor of Political Economy at KU Leuven, Belgium).

Date: October 10, 2016 
Time: 12:00PM to 1:30PM 
Location: The Oksenberg Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor
RSVP by 5:00PM October 6, 2016.

What's next for the UK and Europe? One thing is clear: Brexit will have far-reaching political and economic consequences. Please join us for a panel discussion featuring Stanford faculty members Nick Bloom and Christophe Crombez who will lead a discussion about the future of the UK's relationship with Europe and Brexit's most important political and economic consequences. For more information about this exciting and timely event, please visit our website.

Featured Faculty Research: Anna Grzymala-Busse

We would like to introduce you to some of The Europe Center’s faculty affiliates and the projects on which they are working. Our featured faculty member this month is Anna Grzymala-Busse, who is a Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Anna Grzymala-BusseAnna earned her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2000 and joined the faculty at Stanford University this year. In her research, Anna is interested in political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics. Her most recent book, Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy, Anna examines the conditions under which churches are able to exert influence on public policy. Using the cases of Ireland and Italy, Poland and Croatia, and the United States and Canada, she demonstrates that neither religiosity nor public demand for church influence in the state nor any of several alternative factors can explain why the church exerts strong influence on public policy in Ireland, Poland, and the United States, but not in Italy, Croatia, and Canada. Rather, she finds that churches are able to influence policy when they have direct institutional access. Gaining institutional access, however, requires that national and religious identities are intertwined such that the church is identified with the national interest. Such fusion between national and religious identities occurred where the church came to the defense of the nation, as the Catholic Church did in both Ireland and Poland. Anna won the 2016 Best Book Award for the European Politics and Society Section of the American Political Science Association for Nations under God. Anna is currently working on a project entitled “The Dictator's Curse? Authoritarian Party Collapse and the Nation State,” for which she received a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2015. Nations under God: How Churches Use Moral Authority to Influence Policy. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.

Featured Graduate Student Research: Lindsay Der

Lindsay DerWe 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 Lindsay Der (Anthropology). Lindsay earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology (Archaeology track) at Stanford University in summer 2016. She is currently working as a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and is a Researcher with the Çatalhöyük Research Project.

Anthropomorphic Figurine
In her research, Lindsay is interested in the relationship between humans and animals and the societal implications of that relationship, particularly at the origins of agriculture. Her doctoral thesis, The Role of Human-Animal Relations in the Social and Material Organization of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, examined the effect of changing human-animal relations on the social structure and eventual abandoment of the Neolithic prehistoric town of Çatalhöyük (7400-6000 BC), located in modern-day Turkey. Çatalhöyük is an ideal location to study this relationship: this densely-populated and typically egalitarian town was continuously inhabited for over 1,000 years during period of transition of increasing reliance on agriculture and a decreasing emphasis on hunting and gathering. By examining art and evidence of social interactions excavated at the site, Lindsay found that the domestication of wild animals precipitated a shift in human-animal relations that fundamentally altered Çatalhöyük's social structure, contributing to emergent social inequality and Çatalhöyük's eventual abandoment.
 

Quadruped Figurine
Supported by The Europe Center, Lindsay conducted field research at Çatalhöyük in June and July 2016 during which she found evidence that midway through the site's Neolithic period (or, late Stone Age) art featuring animals shifted from predominantly depicting wild animals to depicting domesticated animals, as well as anthropomorphic figurines. Importantly for Lindsay's argument, this sets the scene for the site's later Chalcolithic period (a transitional period from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age) during which humans increasingly see animals less like people and more like things. Pictured is one such anthropomorphic figurine (top left) and one quadruped (bottom left), both of which were discovered during Lindsay's time at Çatalhöyük. Lindsay plans to return to Çatalhöyük at least twice in the next couple of years. In her ongoing research, Lindsay intends to build upon the work in her dissertation by examining other sites that pre- and post-date Çatalhöyük, but are stratigraphically related, to further expand understanding of animal symbolism both regionally and chronologically.

For more information about The Europe Center's Graduate Student Grant program, please visit our website.

Call for Proposals: Graduate Student Grant Competition

Accepting Applications: September 26, 2016 - October 21, 2016

The Europe Center invites applications from graduate and professional students at Stanford University whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Additionally, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. For more information please visit our website.

Visiting Student Researcher: Jaakko Meriläinen

Jaakko MeriläinenWe are pleased to introduce Jaakko Meriläinen, a Visiting Student Researcher from the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Jaakko is a political economist who is interested in the relationship between political representation, political participation, and economics, economic and political history, and immigration. His current research concerns political careers, economic consequences of political representation, historical development of voting behavior, and the historical impact of time-saving technologies on women's participation in the labor force and in politics. Please join us in welcoming Jaakko to Stanford.

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

October 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Nick Bloom, Department of Economics 
Christophe Crombez, The Europe Center 
Brexit: What's next for the UK and Europe? 
This event is now full.  Please write to khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.

November 10, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Markus Tepe, University of Oldenburg 
What's happening with Germany's party system? Exploring the emergence of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor 
RSVP by 5:00PM November 6, 2016.

Save the Date: November 14, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Yaniss Aiche, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton, LLP 
Jacques Derenne, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter, & Hampton, LLP 
The Future of Multi-National Corporate Taxation in the European Union: Impact of On-Going EU State Aid Investigations 
Reuben Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor

Save the Date: January 17, 2017 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University 
The Oksenberg Room, Encina Hall, 3rd Floor

Save the Date: February 27, 2017 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Amie Kreppel, University of Florida 
CISAC Central Conference Room, Encina Hall, 2nd Floor

Save the Date: April 3, 2017 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Guido Tabellini, Bocconi University
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 24, 2017 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Torun Dewan, London School of Economics
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: June 5, 2017 
11:30AM - 1:00PM 
Daniel Stegmuller, University of Mannheim
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

Save the Date: October 26, 2016 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
John Emerson, United States Ambassador to Germany 
RSVP by 5:00PM October 23, 2016.

Save the Date:  November 10, 2016
12:00PM - 1:30PM
Sergei Kislyak, Russian Ambassador to the US
Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

Save the Date: January 26, 2017 
12:00PM - 1:30PM 
Andrei Kozyrev, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Russian Federation
Co-sponsored by the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Save the Date: April 10, 2017 
Time TBA 
Ivan Krastev, Center for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

 

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Edgar Salin and Social Theory in the Circle around Stefan George.

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Trying to extract political messages from poetry when political statements are not immediately self-evident can lead one quickly to speculative and even contradictory results. The temptation for critics to seize the oppottunity to imprint their own agendas onto a poetic oeuvre can be nearly irresistible. Thus Armin Mohler claimed to be able to categorize Stefan George and his group within the field of the Conservative Revolution, the anti-democratic intellectuals of the interwar period, thereby projecting his own political allegiances onto George and the very diverse group of thinkers around him. In contrast, in his radio speech on poetry and society, Theodor Adorno famously read one of George’s poems as signaling an emancipatory condition for an undivided humanity, “the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen,” hardly a conservative position. Both readings imply a revolutionary George, but the different revolutionary agendas of right and left, Mohler and Adorno, could not be further apart. The distance between them marks the difference between the two readers, but it also leaves the challenge of describing the political location (or locations) of the George group unresolved.
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Closeness and manuscript culture

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Why devote a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies to closeness and manuscript culture? What, we might ask, can the medieval period teach us about questions of technology, practice, mediation, proximity and the self that cannot be adequately addressed through an examination of the contemporary? What can medieval books teach us about the growing suite of technologies by which we now give shape to and reckon with our world?

One might reasonably imagine that there is little to be learned from our medieval ancestors. Our learned habit, when we look to the distant past at all, is to turn to the classical period for guidance and then, perhaps with a bit less enthusiasm, to the Renaissance. It is a story of genius and rediscovery, separated by a centuries-long gulf of darkness and superstition. And while for the Iberian Peninsula this story has held less influence thanks in large measure to Andalusi achievements (and those who make them known), there is yet a strong sense that a world such as ours can have no real connection to that of ibn Quzmān or Ramon Llull. The medieval world, we are told, is a centered and stable world, and God is everywhere. Ours, on the other hand, is largely unprecedented and contingent: God has vanished, only to be replaced by simultaneity, genocide, climate change, mass migration, techno-biopolitics and the theoretically endless state of exception generated by global (and intersecting) wars on drugs, poverty and terror.

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The French Enlightenment Network

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“What was the Enlightenment” is a question scholars have been asking since the eighteenth century, but far less often has it been asked who the Enlightenment was. Who were the members of the social, professional, and academic classes that made up the Enlightenment? Who was in and, by extension, who was out? Much is known about the primary producers of Enlightenment works, from the famed philosophes to some of the lesser-known authors (e.g., in France, the Encyclopédistes, the Grub Street writers, or the libellistes).1 Studies have also revealed some of the readers of Enlightenment texts and explored some of its social institutions. And a certain degree of attention has been paid to the major patrons and political supporters of the philosophes: Mme de Pompadour, Frederick the Great, and other influential governmental officials such as Malesherbes. But rarely, if ever, have the different participants of the Enlightenment been considered together as a single entity, or, as we would say today, a network.

That is the goal of this article: to study the social composition of the French Enlightenment network. What sectors of eighteenth-century society were most present? How involved was the government? What role did the aristocracy play? Which intellectual disciplines and fields were most represented? Which ones were not? What was the role of women? And, perhaps most critically, how did it function as a network? These are the kinds of questions we raise, and we seek to answer them by means of a hybrid quantitative and qualitative methodology. We use basic statistical calculations to provide rough estimates of the size and importance of different social groups; given the nature of our data, however, we do not analyze them with standard social network analysis (SNA) methods. Rather, we corroborate, refine, and defend our findings through comparisons with arguments from the secondary literature. While our reasons for this approach are largely driven by the shape of our data (which make most SNA metrics unfeasible), we also advocate a method of network analysis that does not rely on mapping relationships between nodes and calculating such metrics as betweenness centrality or clustering coefficients; rather, it focuses on the relative size of, and overlap between, different subgroups in order to understand the overall structure and social composition of a historical network.

While some of our findings, detailed in full below, will not come as a surprise to specialists (the network is, for instance, overwhelmingly male), the overall picture of the French Enlightenment network that emerges from this study is nonetheless striking. Two features in particular stand out. First, men and women of science are significantly underrepresented. The scholars and writers we find in this network were largely gens de lettres, much more engaged with history, philosophy, political economy, and literature than with mathematics, medicine, or astronomy. Second, the elite segments of society, be they aristocratic, social, or governmental, are remarkably overrepresented. The French Enlightenment network incorporates the crème de la crème of the French state and high society. The presence of so many notables in this network suggests that French Enlightenment authors were more likely to be engaged in collaborative, reformist efforts than in subversive plots; conversely, it also hints at the existence of a fairly extensive and well-represented (at different levels of social hierarchy) parti philosophique within the French state itself.

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Anna Grzymała-Busse

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA  94305

 

(650) 723-4270
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies
Professor of Political Science
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
anna_gb_4_2022.jpg

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Competing Narratives on Syria amid International Escalation

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ABSTRACT

By now, those following the news on Syria have been saturated with analysis, data, information, and misinformation on developments there since 2011. Yet we observe an increasing gravitation to mutually exclusive narratives that adorn websites and publications on the situation in Syria: (a) the narrative of pure and consistent revolution versus that of (b) external conspiracy/designs on Syria. Both narratives carry grains of truth, but are encumbered by maximalist claims and fundamental blindspots that forfeit various potentials for enduring cease-fires and/or transitions, let alone mutual understanding. This talk will address these competing narratives in the context of international escalation marked by increasing US-Russian tension and continued multi-layered conflicts on the battlefield. It closes with addressing a framework for understanding and gauging potential prospects despite conflicting declarations by all parties involved.

 

SPEAKER BIO

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Bassam Haddad is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor at the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs (SPGIA) at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and Co-Editor of Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Bassam serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal a peer-reviewed research publication and is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of a critically acclaimed film series on Arabs and Terrorism, based on extensive field research/interviews. Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and the Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute, an umbrella for five organizations dealing with knowledge production on the Middle East. He serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Journal.

 

 

*This event is supported by the Stanford Initiative for Religious and Ethnic Understanding and Coexistence

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Reuben Hills Conference Room
2nd Floor East Wing E207
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, California 94305

Bassam Haddad Associate Professor George Mason University
Seminars
Arab Reform and Democracy Speaker Series

"In Search of Perfect Consonance"

Twenty-five years ago, China was at war with Vietnam, the Chinese and the Japanese were at loggerheads and relations across the Taiwan Strait were frosty.

Directed by Oscar® winner Ruby Yang, In Search of Perfect Consonance profiles the Asian Youth Orchestra, established against this historical backdrop with the aim of connecting the region’s young people through music. 

As we watch the budding musicians of today’s Asia learn to work together, we are reminded of the higher ideals that music inspires.

 

Official Website: consonance-movie.com

For more information, please email to perfectconsonance.movie@gmail.com

 

Film Screenings

Gerald Sim

616 Serra StreetEncina Hall E301Stanford, CA94305-6055
(650) 723-8429 (650) 723-6530
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gerald_sim.jpg Ph.D.
Gerald Sim joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center for the Autumn 2016 quarter from Florida Atlantic University's School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, where he is an associate professor of film and media studies. He arrived in Palo Alto immediately after a summer as Visiting Senior Research Fellow funded by the Luce Foundation, at the Asia Research Institute's Inter-Asia Engagements cluster in Singapore. It was his second stint at ARI; he was also a Fellow in the Cultural Studies cluster in 2013. During his time at Shorenstein APARC as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, he will be researching and writing for his current book tentatively titled, Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, contracted with Indiana University Press. The book uses the region's unique colonial history to conceive of postcolonial aesthetics beyond the usual tropes of hybridity and syncretism, while attending to an understudied but thriving segment of world cinema. Individual chapters explore Singapore's spatial imagination, Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesian cinema's relationship to genre. Sim is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), a Neo-Marxian evaluation of film studies' engagements with race. His other writing on diverse topics such as Japanese cinema, film music theory, Edward Said, digital cinematography, and CNBC personality Jim Cramer have been published in Asian Cinema, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Discourse, Projections, and Rethinking Marxism.  He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, and a BS in Biology from Duke.
Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, 2016-17
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Walder receives award for Cultural Revolution research

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Portrait of Prof. Andrew Walder

Stanford professor Andrew Walder has been awarded the Founder’s Prize from the journal Social Science History for his paper, “Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971.” The journal’s editorial board selects one recipient annually for exemplary scholarly work.

Using data from 2,213 historical county and city annals, the paper charts the breadth of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, its evolution through time and the repression through which state structures were rebuilt in the post-Mao era.

Walder, who is a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director emeritus of the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has long studied the sources of conflict, stability and change in communist regimes. He recently published China under Mao, a book that explores the rise and fall of Mao Zedong’s radical socialism.

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