This paper written by political scientists Michael Bechtel, Jens Hainmueller and Yotam Margalit, is the first systematic analysis of the question of why European Union voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries.

Jens Hainmueller is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Stanford and a Europe Center Faculty Affiliate.

For a more information, please visit the publication's webpage by clicking on the article title below.

FSI/TEC Consulting Professor Christophe Crombez and co-author Professor Simon Hix (London School of Economics and Political Science) recently published their research on European Union (EU) policy making in the June 2014 British Journal of Political Science.  In their article, "Legislative Activity and Gridlock in the European Union," they develop a game-theoretical model of EU policy making that suggests that the amount of legislative activity depends on the size of the gridlock interval.

Christophe Crombez is also Professor of Economics at the University of Leuven.

For a more information, please visit the publication's webpage by clicking on the article title below.

Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah, a consulting professor at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is leaving Stanford at the end of this academic year to pursue research in Islamic studies in the United Kingdom.

Ben Abdallah joined CDDRL – a center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies – as a visiting scholar in 2007, and then became a consulting professor. In 2010, Ben Abdallah worked with CDDRL Director Larry Diamond to launch one of the center’s principal research programs, the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD). Examining political and democratic reform in the Arab world, ARD is a multidisciplinary program that brings together policy-makers, academics and civil society members to advance policy-relevant research.

“We are very proud to have been able to engage Prince Moulay Hicham and provide him an intellectual home during this past formative period for the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, and for his own scholarship and reflection. He has had a profound and enduring impact in helping to launch and shape a significant program of research on Arab politics and society at Stanford, and through that in stimulating the broader growth of Arab studies at Stanford,” said Diamond. “In giving so generously of his time, knowledge, and resources to our students, he has also supported and inspired many of them to make what I expect will be a lifelong commitment to study of and engagement with the Arab World. We wish him every success in this next phase of his intellectual journey.”

Written during his residence at CDDRL, Ben Abdallah's memoir entitled Journal d’un Prince Banni or the Diary of a Banished Prince debuted this spring. The autobiography shares his life story as a member of Morocco's royal family. The first cousin of Morocco's King Mohammed VI, Diary of a Banished Prince traces Ben Abdallah's evolution as a political activist against the historical backdrop of Morocco's authoritarian politics.

“At CDDRL, I found an intellectual community that was tightly knit, yet diverse enough to foster the cross-fertilization of ideas," said Ben Abdallah "Its cutting-edge research and classical scholarly debates provided an environment that broadened my expertise and offered opportunities to engage in real introspection.. All these elements were crucial in allowing me to write my book as well as explore new frontiers of research.”

Ben Abdallah has served on the FSI advisory board since November 2009, and has stepped down from that role this year.

Ben Abdallah will continue to stay engaged at Stanford through his role on the board of advisors for the American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford, a student group on campus. He will also stay involved with the ARD program as a principal advisor and supporter of the initiative.

Recap:  The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy(2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history. His latest book, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931, will be released in Summer 2014 in the United Kingdom and in Fall 2014 in the United States.

Recap:  European Commission President José Barroso Visits Stanford

Barroso was named President of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) of Portugal in 1999, following which he was re-elected three times. He was appointed Prime Minister of Portugal in 2002. He remained in office until July 2004 when he was elected by the European Parliament to the post of President of the European Commission. He was re-elected to a second term as President of the European Commission by an absolute majority in the European Parliament in September 2009.

Workshop:  Comparative Approaches to the Study of Immigration, Ethnicity, and Religion

Spring 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition Winners Announced

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Vibeke Kieding Banik

Vibeke Kieding Banik is currently affiliated as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, at the University of Oslo. Her main focus of research is on the history of minorities in Scandinavia, particularly Jews, with an emphasis on migration and integration. Her research interests also include gender history, and her current project investigates whether there was a gendered integration strategy among Scandinavian Jews in the period 1900-1940. Dr. Banik has authored several articles on Jewish life in Norway, Jewish historiography, and on the Norwegian women’s suffragette movement. She has taught extensively on Jewish history and is currently writing a book on the history of the Norwegian Jews, scheduled to be published in 2015.

Workshop Schedules  

Europe and the Global Economy

European Governance

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We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

Special Event:  Pascal Lamy Lecture

“World Trade and Global Governance”

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Date: February 10, 2014 

Meet our Visiting Scholars:  Bjørn Høyland 

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n Høyland (PhD, London School of Economics, 2005) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is currently visiting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at The Europe Center, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Global. The focus of his research is European Union politics and comparative legislative politics. Professor Høyland’s list of journal publications includes the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, and European Union Politics. His textbook (with Simon Hix) The Political System of the European Union (3rd ed) is the standard text for advanced courses on the European Union.

Workshop Schedules  

Europe and the Global Economy

European Governance

Other Events

The electoral eruption of anti-European Union populism is a reflection of structural flaws in that body but does not represent a fatal political blow, according to Stanford scholars.

In the May 25 elections for the European Parliament, anti-immigration parties won 140 of the 751 seats, well short of control, but enough to rattle supporters of the EU, which has 28 member nations. In Britain, Denmark, France and Greece, the political fringe vote totals stunned the political establishments.

Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama said the rise of extremism and anti-elitism is not surprising in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn and subsequent high levels of unemployment throughout Europe. In one sense, the EU elites have themselves to blame, he said.

"The elites who designed the EU and the eurozone failed in a major way," he said. "There was a structural flaw in the design of the euro (monetary union absent fiscal union, and the method of disciplining countries once in the zone)," said Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Research Afflilate at The Europe Center.

Some have argued that the European Union should adopt a form of fiscal union because without one, decisions about taxes and spending remain at the national level.

As Fukuyama points out, this becomes a problem, as in the case of a debt-ridden Greece, which he believes should not have qualified for EU membership in the first place. In fact, he said, it would have been better for Greece itself to leave the euro at the outset of the 2008 crisis.

Still, Fukuyama said the big picture behind the recent election is clear – it was a confluence of issues and timing.

"It is a bit like an off-year election in the U.S., where activists are more likely to vote than ordinary citizens," he said.

Fukuyama believes the EU will survive this electoral crisis. "I think the EU will be resilient. It has weathered other rejections in the past. The costs of really exiting the EU are too high in the end, and the elites will adjust, having been given this message," he said.

Meanwhile, the populist parties in the different countries are not unified or intent on building coalitions with each other.

"Other than being anti-EU, most of them have little in common," Fukuyama said. "They differ with regard to specific positions on immigration, economic policy, and they respond to different social bases."

Ongoing anger

Dan Edelstein, a professor of French, said the largest factor for success by extremist candidates was "ongoing anger toward the austerity policy imposed by the EU," primarily by Germany.

Edelstein estimates that a large majority of French voters are still generally supportive of the EU. For the time being, the anti-EU faction does not have a majority, though they now have much more representation in the European Parliament.

Edelstein noted existing strains among the anti-EU parties – for example, the UK Independence Party in Britain has stated that it would not form an alliance with the National Front party in France.

Immigration remains a thorny issue for some Europeans, Edelstein said.

"'Immigration' in most European political debates, tends to be a synonym for 'Islam.' While there are some countries, such as Britain, that are primarily worried about the economic costs of immigration, in most continental European countries, the fears are cultural," he said.

As Edelstein put it, Muslims are perceived as a "demographic threat" to white or Christian Europe. However, he is optimistic in the long run.

"It seems a little early to be writing the obituary of the EU. Should economic conditions improve over the next few years, as they are predicted to, we will likely see this high-water mark of populist anger recede," said Edelstein.

Cécile Alduy, an associate professor of French, writes in the May 28 issue of The Nation about how the ultra-right-wing National Front came in first place in France's election.

"This outcome was also the logical conclusion of a string of political betrayals, scandals and mismanagement that were only compounded by the persistent economic and social morass that has plunged France into perpetual gloom," she wrote.

Historian J.P. Daughton said that like elsewhere in the world, immigration often becomes a contentious issue in Europe in times of economic difficulties.  

"High unemployment and painful austerity measures in many parts of Europe have led extremist parties to blame immigrants for taking jobs and sapping already limited social programs," he said.

Anti-immigration rhetoric plays particularly well in EU elections, Daughton said. "Extremist parties portray European integration as a threat not only to national sovereignty, but also to national identity.

Edelstein, Alduy and Daughton are all Faculty Affiliates of The Europe Center.

Wake-up call

Russell A. Berman, a professor of German studies and comparative literature, said many Europeans perceive the EU as "somehow impenetrable, far from the civic politics of the nation states."

As a result, people resent regulations issued by an "intangible bureaucracy," and have come to believe that the European Parliament has not grappled with major issues such as mustering a coherent foreign policy voice, he said.

"The EU can be great on details but pretty weak on the big picture," said Berman, who is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Faculty Affiliate of The Europe Center. "It is this discrepancy that feeds the dissatisfaction."

Yet he points out that the extremist vote surged in only 14 nations of the EU – in the other 14, there was "negligible extremism," as he describes it.

"We're a long way from talking about a fatal blow, but the vote is indeed a wake-up call to the centrists that they have to make a better case for Europe," Berman said.