The ongoing crisis in Georgia has catapulted relations with Russia to a top place on the foreign-policy agenda. It has presented the United States-and the West more generally-with important policy decisions, and it has brought to a head a debate that has been taking place for many years about how to deal with Russia. One side in that debate believes that post-Communist Russia has taken the wrong path of development and should therefore be isolated and punished; the other advocates a continuing search for cooperation with Russia on a range of important issues such as nuclear disarmament, global warming, energy, and Iran's nuclear ambitions. The crisis in Georgia has clearly strengthened those who want to isolate Russia; it is not so clear, however, that that would be a wise policy.

It now seems unlikely that anyone will benefit from the war in Georgia. Georgia has been humiliated and its prospects for economic and political development have been seriously set back. Russia has acted brutally as a great power bullying a small neighbor, and its relations with other states will suffer as a result (the speedy signing of the U.S.-Polish agreement on missile defense is an indication of that). The strong rhetoric coming from Washington cannot hide the U.S. failure to prevent Russia's intervention in Georgia and its inability to come directly to the aid of a state that looks to it for support.

The Georgian crisis requires a reassessment of U.S. policy toward Russia. To put that in context, consider the enormous upheaval Russia has gone through in the past twenty years. The Soviet Union was dissolved at the end of 1991, creating fifteen new states where previously there had been one. This geopolitical transformation, which took place with far less loss of life than many feared, was for Russians a severe blow to their sense of national pride, and it left some simmering disputes, especially in the Caucasus, not only in Georgia but also within Russia (Chechnya), as well as in neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan.

At home, too, Russia has been transformed. The 1990s were a period of political freedom in Russia, but they also brought economic collapse and social turmoil, with widespread deprivation and great anxiety about the future. When the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president in 2000, he adopted the goal of restoring the power of the Russian state. He tamed the oligarchs and increased state control over the economy. He also curbed the mass media and repressed political opposition. Russia today is far from being the democracy that many people hoped for ten or fifteen years ago, but it is also far from being a reincarnation of the Soviet Union. It now has a capitalist economy, and there is much greater freedom than in Soviet times.

Putin has been a popular leader, thanks in large measure to the economic turnaround that has taken place since he became president. The economy has grown steadily, at rates of 6-7 percent a year, and much of the population has benefited-even if the benefits have been very unequally distributed. The rising price of oil helps to account for this growth, but economic reforms put in place by Yeltsin and Putin have played their role too. Economic growth has allowed Russia to reassert its regional interests and its status as a great power.

Many Americans have been greatly disappointed by Russia's development over the past twenty years: Why, they ask, has Russia not become a democratic state? And why has it become so antagonistic to the United States-opposing the deployment of missile defenses in Europe, for example, and now sending its troops into Georgia?

Russians, too, are disillusioned by recent history, but for different reasons. Many Russians are willing to give Putin some credit not only for raising living standards but also for introducing a degree of stability into political life. According to the same polls, however, they are also profoundly unhappy about the level of corruption, the arbitrary behavior of law-enforcement agencies, and the failure of the government to provide services in an efficient and effective manner.

Russians' disillusionment springs also from a sense that they have not been treated fairly by the rest of the world. The current Russian leadership feels, rightly or wrongly, that Russia's interests have been ignored by the United States for the past fifteen years, and that feeling appears to be widely shared by the Russian public. There is a standard litany of complaints about the way in which the West is said to have taken advantage of Russia's weakness: NATO enlargement; NATO intervention in Kosovo and the recognition of Kosovo's independence; U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty; support for the "color" revolutions in Georgia (Rose) and Ukraine (Orange). Russian leaders see this as geopolitical encirclement by countries that speak of partnership but ignore Russia's interests.

Early last year Putin launched a harsh attack on American policy for failing to take Russia's interests into account. His goal was to recalibrate the U.S.-Russian relationship in a way that would give Russia a greater voice in international politics. Russia's improved economic performance, as well as U.S. difficulties in Iraq, made it seem an opportune time for Russia to return to what it regards as its proper place in the world.

This is the context in which Russia has acted in Georgia. It has made it perfectly clear for some time that it did not want to see Georgia join NATO. After the recognition of Kosovo's independence early this year, Russia stepped up its control over the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili's reckless decision to use military force to try to seize Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, gave Russia the pretext to introduce more troops into Georgia (in addition to those it already had in South Ossetia and Abkhazia).

If Russia had not responded with military force, its claims to a more assertive role in international politics would have lost credibility. But Russia has not only expelled Georgian troops from South Ossetia; it has also sent its forces into the rest of Georgia to destroy Georgia's war-making potential. This has led to widespreaed uncertainty about Russia's ultimate goals in Georgia, and indeed in the former Soviet Union more generally.

For all its recent assertiveness, Russia is weak internally and restricted in its options abroad. Its domestic problems are severe: its economy is too dependent on the energy sector; the inadequate health system needs to be rebuilt; failing infrastructure requires heavy investment; the population is declining rapidly as a result of the low birth rate and low life expectancy. The list of domestic problems is long and impressive, and the political class knows that Russia needs to deal with them if it is to secure its status as a great power. Russia today is not the Soviet Union, either ideologically or in terms of military strength, but it does retain the capacity to create difficulties by mobilizing Russian minorities living outside Russia or by manipulating oil and gas supplies to U.S. allies.

In dealing with the aftermath of the Georgian crisis, the United States should pursue three goals. The first is to help Georgia recover economically and politically from the war and also to play whatever role it can in creating conditions that will allow Georgia to become a stable and prosperous democracy. That will inevitably involve working through international organizations such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union to try to resolve the complex conflicts that exist in the Caucasus. It will also involve engaging with Russia, which has interests of its own as well as a powerful position in the region.

The second is to provide reassurance to other former Soviet republics and satellites (the Baltic states and Poland, for example) that their position as independent states is secure. That is most easily done for those states that are already members of the European Union and of NATO. The most delicate case is that of Ukraine. A secure and prosperous Ukraine is extremely important for the West (as well as for Ukrainians of course), but Russia may have some leverage there through the large Russian-speaking population in the eastern part of the country. The West should focus on the economic and political integration of Ukraine into Europe rather than on its admission to NATO.

The third is to seek cooperation with Russia in such areas as the reduction of nuclear weapons, curbing the rise of Iranian power and influence, defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan, and tackling the issues of energy supply and global warming. These three goals may appear to be in tension, but they are to some degree complementary. A deep antagonism between the United States and Russia is not likely to further American interests; nor is it likely to help either Georgia or Ukraine.

If there's a consensus about the confrontation between Russia and Georgia, it's that the conflict has seriously strained the relationship between Moscow and its Western counterparts--namely, the United States and NATO. Now that the worst of the conflict seems over, it appears that the harshest measures suggested in the first days of the conflict, i.e., expelling Russia from the G-8, won't materialize. Despite all of the disagreements and mistrust, each party seems to understand that severing ties between Russia and the West isn't realistic.

The problem is that while G-8 membership is highly visible and symbolic, it isn't the most important element of the partnership between Russia and the West. This partnership is only as strong as the network of concrete agreements and bureaucratic arrangements that allow governments to work closely together, creating what someone aptly named "habits of cooperation." Today's sorry U.S.-Russian relationship is a direct result of Washington and Moscow neglecting in recent years the few existing cooperative arrangements between the countries.

We should try to remember that cooperation isn't a reward for good behavior. Rather, 'the habits of cooperation' are important building blocks of an equitable and trusting relationship that would make conflicts such as the one in Georgia impossible."
The danger is that in the emotional atmosphere of the aftermath of the Georgia conflict, the United States and Russia could damage the foundation of their relationship further, strengthening elements in both countries that are either indifferent or hostile to the idea of a partnership. Already, the early signs seem to indicate that we're moving in that direction.

Military cooperation between NATO and Russia may be the conflict's first political victim. For instance, Moscow has decided to halt joint military-to-military projects with NATO--a move that would cancel about 10 joint exercises scheduled for this year. And while both NATO and Moscow are leaving some room for normalization, the mood in the Kremlin seems to be that Russia has nothing to lose if it severs all ties with NATO.

The U.S.-Russian agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation is another likely casualty of the conflict. Although the agreement probably wouldn't have entered into force during the Bush administration--the administration got the timing wrong--now it's probable that Congress will pass a resolution explicitly rejecting it, making it difficult for the next administration to bring the agreement back--even if that administration decides that the agreement is an important means in which to cooperate and secure a powerful Russian ally, Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. I should note that Rosatom representatives are upset that the conflict in Georgia could potentially prevent the agreement from becoming a reality.

It's also unlikely that any of the proposals for transparency or cooperation regarding European missile defense will get a chance--especially given that the Georgia conflict quickly led to Washington and Warsaw finalizing a deal that would feature Poland hosting missile defense interceptors. Russian generals responded by threatening to add Poland to Moscow's nuclear target lists--a particularly ominous threat.

At this point, no one knows the full extent of the fallout from the Georgia conflict. Some pessimists have gone so far as to ask if Russia will pull out of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program and other efforts to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons or curtail access to the International Space Station. Personally, I don't envision this happening--precisely because these are established programs that have substantial internal support in Russia.

Of course, setbacks are inevitable--it's difficult to make a case for continuing a partnership in the midst of a crisis. But we should try to remember that cooperation isn't a reward for good behavior or a bargaining chip. Rather, "the habits of cooperation" are important building blocks of a stable, trusting, and equitable relationship that would make conflicts such as the one in Georgia impossible.

Prominent conflicts such as the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the conflict on the Korean Peninsula highlight the need for peaceful solutions to violent territorial disputes. Although the effectiveness of negotiated legal solutions to such conflicts is often questioned, a new Stanford study suggests that treaties that resolve territorial conflicts “work”— in the sense that they are associated with a large reduction in the probability of subsequent conflict.

The study by Kenneth A. Schultz, associate professor of political science, and Jennifer Jones, research fellow at the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation (SCICN), examined 141 pairs of states (dyads) that experienced at least one militarized territorial conflict between 1816 and 2001. Two-thirds (94) of these dyads made at least one legal commitment to resolve the territorial conflict. Two-thirds of those treaties “worked”; they were never followed by militarized conflict over the territory addressed in the agreement. A multiple regression analysis revealed that a legally binding agreement on territory is associated with a roughly 70 percent reduction in the probability of a subsequent militarized conflict.

Realist accounts of international relations predict that such treaties would work in preventing violence insofar as they allocate disputed territory in accordance with the prevailing balance of power between the affected states. Schultz and Jones’s study reveals that this “distributional” factor alone does not account for the reduced likelihood of subsequent militarized conflict. Some other variables must be at play in creating the “treaty effect."

The study accordingly examined whether the existence of a territorial treaty could itself constrain states from resorting to force to revise the agreement. In this view, the treaty effect stems from the unwillingness of the states involved to incur the costs — such as external sanctions or domestic outrage — that would stem from breaking a previously agreed-upon arrangement. Although tests indirectly support this hypothesis, the more frequent violation of simple nonaggression pacts suggests that treaties are not major constraints on state behavior. More research is necessary to determine exactly what types of salient constraints treaties place on states.

A third explanation for the treaty effect considers the domestic political costs of surrendering a state’s legal claim to territory allocated to the other party under a treaty when the claim itself is valuable, e.g., the claim to ownership over a whole piece of territory, as in Kashmir, or the claim to territory based on religious rights, as in Israel. In this view, a state would be reluctant to sign a treaty when the value of the claim to the disputed territory is particularly high. Treaties, then, serve as screening mechanisms — only those states that place a relatively low value on a claim to disputed territory will sign treaties. In this view, the treaty effect arises because states enter into treaties only when they do not want to keep fighting over disputed territory, rather than because of the inherent constraints of the treaty itself.

Although the results of the study are consistent with the view that territorial treaties work because they serve as screening mechanisms, the evidence remains unclear. There is no direct evidence that states employ a claimsbased rationale when declining to sign a treaty. Schultz and Jones are, however, working on creative ways to observe the role of this rationale for the treaty effect and expect future results to be more specific.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of European integration. This year FCE has conducted a series of seminars and international conferences to bring European authors and policy leaders together with forum researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the challenges of social integration. The series has combined the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations, crime and social conflict, and European models of universal citizenship. The directors of the forum plan multiple publications. Here is a preview of the forthcoming anthology on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe (Stanford University Press) edited and with an introduction by FCE Assistant Director Roland Hsu.

In periods of EU expansion and economic contraction, European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for membership and for accommodating the free movement of citizens. With the lowering of internal borders, member nations have asked whether a European passport is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local communities. Addressing the European Parliament on the eve of the 1994 vote on the European Constitution, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, defined national membership in terms of a particular tradition of civic values:

The European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity, which over 2,000 years evolved into what we recognize today as the foundations of modern democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This set of values has its own clear moral foundation and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether modern man admits it or not.

Havel’s claim for the continuing efficacy of Greco- Roman and Christian values can be read as a prescription for founding policy and even sociability. In today’s multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated, but also challenged, in debates over the most effective response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict. For those who endorse or reject Havel’s binding moral roots, this new anthology reveals surprising positions.

The scale of change since Havel’s 1994 speech challenges confidence in European traditions for new Europe. During 1995–2005, EU immigration grew at more than double the annual rate of the previous decade. European immigrant employment statistics are difficult to aggregate but show a steep downward trend. EU Eurostat figures show the Muslim community is the fastest growing resident minority.

The violence in recent years also presses us to revise theory and practice. In the east: How will Balkan communities resume relations after massacres and ethnic cleansing? Does EU recognition of Kosovo validate claims for Flanders independence and Basque ethnic heritage? Can Roma immigrants look to Italian governments to enforce ethnic safeguards? In the west, the widespread riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of mainly North and West African descent against military police have ruptured public security and social cohesion. France’s official response was aimed more to excise rather than reintegrate the protesters. In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced “zero tolerance” for those he termed racaille (scum). The descriptor was effectively deployed to shape public opinion and the ministry declared a national state of emergency, invoking a law dating from the 1954–1962 War of Algerian independence, applied previously only against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New Caledonia, for searches, detainments, house arrests, and press censorship without court warrant.

Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence did not catch the government by complete surprise. Researchers, including Alec Hargreaves in Ethnicity in Today’s Europe, have revealed a study conducted in 2004 by the French interior ministry that documented more than 2 million citizens living in districts of social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor community policing. The ministry’s document admits that youth unemployment in what journalists referred to as quartiers chauds (neighborhoods boiling over) surpassed 50 percent. Constitutionally barred from conducting ethnic surveys, the report nevertheless acknowledges what most already understood: that the majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth were French-born whose parents or grandparents were of African descent.

Post-war era immigration, from the 1950s European reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization, is best defined as post-colonial migration. European governments created neighborhoods for immigrants who moved from periphery to metropole. The new residents’ education, language, and collective memory were shaped by colonial administrations, and that background was roughly familiar to the host communities. Since 1990, however, based on projections in this anthology, we have entered a period, for lack of a better name, of post-post-colonial diaspora.

The peoples immigrating to Europe are increasingly coming from lands without characteristic European colonial heritage. While few countries of origin have no instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago and sub- Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic trend takes Europe, and the larger trans-Atlantic west, into an era not well served by existing models.

In this anthology, nine prominent authors substantiate this shift. The essays create an unusual and productive dialogue between social scientist modeling and humanist cultural studies to confront assumptions about immigrant origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance. Bassam Tibi (International Relations, University of Gottingen/Cornell) criticizes European multiculturalism, which, he argues, inadvertently enables European Islamist fundamentalism. Tibi’s essay challenges his fellow Muslim immigrants to embrace traditional European civic values (which he dates neither from antiquity nor the Christian era, but rather from the French Revolution) as the foundation not for multiculturalism, but for a cultural pluralism that fosters social integration. The result, in his terms, would replace Islamist fundamentalism with a Euro-Islam capable of Euro-integration. Kadar Konuk (German Studies, University of Michigan) sets Tibi’s insight on European- Muslim ethnicity into the history of European-Turkish relations. Readers questioning Turkey’s EU candidacy will find that the two essays shift the common critique of Turkish policy toward a more pressing question of Europe’s social capacity to integrate prospective Turkish-EU citizens.

Contributions by Alec Hargreaves (French Studies, Florida State), Rogers Brubaker (Sociology, UCLA), and Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia) — all leading authors on European political culture and social theory — rethink Western European responses to minority integration. Articles by Carole Fink (History, Ohio State), Leslie Adelson (German Studies, Cornell), and Salvador Cardús Ros (Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona) reveal cultural expressions that are often overlooked in studies of European minority identity. The final article by Pavle Levi (Art and Art History, Stanford University) focuses on the case of post-ethnic war Balkans, to test the ability of mass media and film to influence the creation of cross-border inclusive cultures.

Ethnicity in Today’s Europe was developed from the fall 2007 conference on the topic sponsored by FCE and the Stanford Humanities Center.

To sign up for upcoming FCE programming, and for an alert from the Stanford University Press when this anthology and works on this topic are released, plese visit the Stanford University Press website.