Stanford University

“Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain”

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Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies (CREEES), the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), The Europe Center and the German Studies department

About the topic:  This talk presents an unconventional look at the creation of a deadly barrier between East and West Germany.  It reveals how the Iron Curtain was not simply imposed by communism, but had been emerging haphazardly in both East and West long before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.  From the end of the Third Reich, ad hoc enforcement of the tenuous border between the two Germanys led to the creation of difference where there was no difference, institutionalization of violence among neighbors, popular participation in a system that was deeply unpopular--and people normalizing a monstrosity in their midst.

About the Speaker: Edith Sheffer is assistant professor of Modern European History at Stanford. Edith Sheffer came to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008 and joined the History Department faculty in 2010.  She recently completed Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, and was the winner of the 2011 Fraenkel Prize, awarded by the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History, London. 

Her future research will also examine the intersection of public events and private choices, from Germans’ “zero Hour” diaries in 1945 to the development and dissemination of corporate cultures.  Research and teaching interests span modern Europe and Germany, especially the social and cultural history of the twentieth century.

CISAC Conference Room

Edith Sheffer

Department of History 200-120

(650) 724-0074
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Former Assistant Professor of Modern European History
Former Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies
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Edith Sheffer joined the History Department faculty in 2010, having come to Stanford as an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities in 2008.  Her first book, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011), challenges the moral myth of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War’s central symbol. It reveals how the barrier between East and West did not simply arise overnight from communism in Berlin in 1961, but that a longer, lethal 1,393 kilometer fence had been developing haphazardly between the two Germanys since 1945.

Her current book, Soulless Children of the Reich: Hans Asperger and the Nazi Origins of Autism, investigates Hans Asperger’s creation of the autism diagnosis in Nazi Vienna, examining Nazi psychiatry's emphasis on social spirit and Asperger's involvement in the euthanasia program that murdered disabled children. A related project through Stanford's Spatial History Lab, "Forming Selves: The Creation of Child Psychiatry from Red Vienna to the Third Reich and Abroad," maps the transnational development of child psychiatry as a discipline, tracing linkages among its pioneers in Vienna in the 1930s through their emigration from the Third Reich and establishment of different practices in the 1940s in England and the United States. Sheffer's next book project, Hidden Front: Switzerland and World War Two, tells an in-depth history of a nation whose pivotal role remains unexposed--yet was decisive in the course of the Second World War.

Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
Edith Sheffer Assistant Professor of Modern European History, The Europe Center Research Affiliate Speaker
Seminars

Q&A: Stanford’s Fukuyama on European debt crisis

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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.

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The Obama Administration’s North Korea Policy: An Assessment

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In the fourth and final year of the Obama administration's first term, North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Critics call U.S. policy a "failure." Why did the Obama administration adopt the approach it did? Does the policy have any prospect of eventual success? Is the administration likely to change its approach this year, especially with new leadership in North Korea, or next year, if re-elected? Korean Studies Program associate director David Straub, a former State Department Korea country director, will analyze the people, processes, and parameters of Obama administration policy toward North Korea.

David Straub was named associate director of the Korean Studies Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center on July 1, 2008. Prior to that he was a 2007–08 Pantech Fellow at the Center. An educator and commentator on current Northeast Asian affairs, Straub retired in 2006 from the U.S. Department of State as a senior foreign service officer after a 30-year career focused on Northeast Asian affairs. 

This event is made possible by the generous support from the Koret Foundation.

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Philippines Conference Room

David Straub

No longer in residence.

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Associate Director of the Korea Program
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David Straub was named associate director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) on July 1, 2008. Prior to that he was a 2007–08 Pantech Fellow at the Center. Straub is the author of the book, Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea, published in 2015.

An educator and commentator on current Northeast Asian affairs, Straub retired in 2006 from his role as a U.S. Department of State senior foreign service officer after a 30-year career focused on Northeast Asian affairs. He worked over 12 years on Korean affairs, first arriving in Seoul in 1979.

Straub served as head of the political section at the U.S. embassy in Seoul from 1999 to 2002 during popular protests against the United States, and he played a key working-level role in the Six-Party Talks on North Korea's nuclear program as the State Department's Korea country desk director from 2002 to 2004. He also served eight years at the U.S. embassy in Japan. His final assignment was as the State Department's Japan country desk director from 2004 to 2006, when he was co-leader of the U.S. delegation to talks with Japan on the realignment of the U.S.-Japan alliance and of U.S. military bases in Japan.

After leaving the Department of State, Straub taught U.S.-Korean relations at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in the fall of 2006 and at the Graduate School of International Studies of Seoul National University in spring 2007. He has published a number of papers on U.S.-Korean relations. His foreign languages are Korean, Japanese, and German.

David Straub Associate Director of Korean Studies Program (KSP) Speaker the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
Seminars
Korean Studies Colloquium Series

The Transition to Afghan Sovereignty: Assessing Progress and Identifying Challenges

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Ten years into the war in Afghanistan, Payne Distinguished Lecturer Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and the former Commander of the American-led Coalition Forces there, set out to examine the transition to Afghan sovereignty.   Eikenberry laid out  three broad sets of questions: How well are we doing in the campaign in Afghanistan, what are the significant challenges we’ll face in achieving our goals and objectives, and what are the implications for American power and influence in the 21st century.

Watch the video below.

Bechtel Conference Center

Karl Eikenberry Payne Distinguished Lecturer; Retired United States Army Lieutenant General; Former United States Ambassador to Afghanistan Speaker
Lectures
Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Lecture Series

India's Multiple Revolutions

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Abstract: 

India has been in the throes of four major transformations since the 1980s. They are in the arenas of foreign policy, economic development strategies, the process of social mobilization and the growing challenges to Indian secularism. Exogenous shocks, in considerable measure, explain the dramatic and closely linked changes in the realms of foreign and security policies. The spurt in social mobilization, however, stemmed from mostly domestic sources and specifically the deepening of adult franchise.  It represents one important facet of the maturation of India’s democracy. Finally, the very success of social mobilization, in part, accounts for the assault on Indian secularism. The first two, of course represent conscious policy choices. The second two, however, can be traced to a complex interplay of various social forces. The evolution of these four features of India’s democracy will, in large measure, shape the future of the country in this new century.

Speaker Bio: 

Sumit Ganguly is a professor of political science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has previously taught at James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Ganguly has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University, a Guest Scholar at the Center for Cooperative Monitoring in Albuquerque and a Visiting Scholar at the German Institute for International and Area Studies in Hamburg.

He was also the holder of the Ngee Ann Chair in International Politics at the Rajaratnam School for International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in the spring term of 2010.  Additionally, he is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Professor Ganguly serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Security, Asian Survey, Current History, the Journal of Democracy, International Security and Security Studies. A specialist on the contemporary politics of South Asia is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 20 books on the region.  

His most recent books are India Since 1980 (with Rahul Mukherji), published by Cambridge University Press and Asian Rivalries: Conflict, Escalation and Limitations on Two-Level Games (with William Thompson) published by Stanford University Press. He is currently at work on a new book, Deadly Impasse: India-Pakistan Relations at the Dawn of a New Century for Cambridge University Press.

His article on corruption in India was just published in the January 2012 issue of the Journal of Democracy, and he is currently writing a new book with Bill Thompson entitled The State of India (for Columbia University Press) which seeks to assess India's prospects and limitations of emerging as a great power.

CISAC Conference Room

Sumit Ganguly Professor of Political Science Speaker Indiana University, Bloomington
Seminars

Building a Rule of Law in Afghanistan

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Karl Eikenberry is the Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University (FSI).   Within FSI he is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and an affiliated researcher with the Europe Center.

Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he served as the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011, where he led the civilian surge directed by President Obama to reverse insurgent momentum and set the conditions for transition to full Afghan sovereignty.

Before appointment as Chief of Mission in Kabul, Ambassador Eikenberry had a thirty-five year career in the United States Army, retiring in April 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General.  His military operational posts included commander and staff officer with mechanized, light, airborne, and ranger infantry units in the continental U.S., Hawaii, Korea, Italy, and Afghanistan as the Commander of the American-led Coalition forces from 2005-2007.

He has served in various policy and political-military positions, including Deputy Chairman of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Military Committee in Brussels, Belgium; Director for Strategic Planning and Policy for U.S. Pacific Command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; U.S. Security Coordinator and Chief of the Office of Military Cooperation in Kabul, Afghanistan; Assistant Army and later Defense Attaché at the United States Embassy in Beijing, China; Senior Country Director for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and Deputy Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy on the Army Staff.

He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, has master’s degrees from Harvard University in East Asian Studies and Stanford University in Political Science, and was a National Security Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. 

Ambassador Eikenberry earned an Interpreter’s Certificate in Mandarin Chinese from the British Foreign Commonwealth Office while studying at the  United Kingdom Ministry of Defense Chinese Language School in Hong Kong and has an Advanced Degree in Chinese History from Nanjing University in the People’s Republic of China.

His military awards include the Defense Distinguished and Superior Service Medals, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, Ranger Tab, Combat and Expert Infantryman badges, and master parachutist wings.  He has received the Department of State Distinguished, Superior, and Meritorious Honor Awards, Director of Central Intelligence Award, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Distinguished Civilian Service and Department of the Army Meritorious Civilian Service Awards.  His foreign and international decorations include the Canadian Meritorious Service Cross, French Legion of Honor, Czech Republic Meritorious Cross, Hungarian Alliance Medal, Afghanistan’s Ghazi Amir Amanullah Khan and Akbar Khan Medals, and NATO Meritorious Service Medal.

Ambassador Eikenberry serves as a Trustee for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relation, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the Council of American Ambassadors, and was previously the President of the Foreign Area Officers Association.  He has published numerous articles on U.S. military training, tactics, and strategy, and on Chinese ancient military history and Asia-Pacific security issues.  He has a commercial pilot’s license and instrument rating, and also enjoys sailing and scuba diving.  He is married to Ching Eikenberry.

CISAC Conference Room

Karl Eikenberry Payne Distinguished Lecturer Speaker FSI
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What to Do about Flu? A Public Health Challenge

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Infectious diseases, especially those transmitted from person to person through the respiratory route, continue to pose a threat to the global community. Public health surveillance systems and the International Health Regulations are intended to facilitate the recognition of and rapid response to infectious diseases that pose the risk of developing into a pandemic, but the response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic illustrates the continuing challenges to implementing appropriate prevention and control measures. The response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic will be discussed and its implications examined.

Speaker biography:

Arthur Reingold, MD is Professor and Head of the Division of Epidemiology and Associate Dean for Research in the School of Public Health (SPH) at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB). He holds concurrent appointments in Medicine and in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He completed his BA and MD degrees at the University of Chicago and then completed a residency in internal medicine at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is board certified in internal medicine and holds a current medical license in California, but has devoted the last 25 years to the study and prevention of infectious diseases in the U.S and in developing countries throughout the world.

He began his career as an infectious disease epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), working there for eight years. While at CDC, he worked domestically on Toxic Shock Syndrome, Legionnaires’ disease, bacterial meningitis, fungal infections, and non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections and internationally on epidemic meningitis in West Africa and Nepal.

Since joining the faculty at UCB in 1987, he has worked on a variety of emerging and re-emerging infections in the U.S.; on acute rheumatic fever in New Zealand; and on AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and acute respiraatory infections in Brazil, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe, India and Indonesia. He has directed the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program at UCB/UCSF since its inception in 1988; co-directed (with Dr. Duc Vugia of the California Department of Health Services), the CDC-funded California Emerging Infections Program since its inception in 1994; and served as the Principal Investigator of the UCB Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness (CIDP) since its inception in 2002.

He also has ongoing research projects concerning malaria in Uganda; HIV/AIDS and related conditions in Brazil; and tuberculosis in India.  He regularly teaches courses on epidemiologic methods, outbreak investigation, and the application of epidemiologic methods in developing countries, among others. He also teaches annual short courses on similar topics in Hong Kong, Brazil, Switzerland, and other countries.

He has been elected to membership in the American Epidemiological Society; fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Infectious Diseases Society of America; and membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. In Hong Kong, He has a close working relationship with Chinese University, particularly with its School of Public Health and its Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases. Dr. Reingold gives short courses at the School of Public Health each year and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Emerging Infectious diseases.

Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Arthur Reingold Professor of Epidemiology and Associate Dean of Research Speaker UC Berkeley School of Public Health
Seminars

Anoop K. Sarbahi

616 Serra Street
Encina Hall West, Room 462
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6044

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Affiliated Postdoctoral Scholar
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Anoop Sarbahi is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Political Science at Stanford. Previously, in addition to being a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, Anoop has also held pre- and post-doctoral positions at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his PhD in Political Science from UCLA in December 2011. He also holds an MPhil degree in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.

Anoop’s PhD dissertation is stimulated by the prevalence of a multitude of long-enduring ethnic insurgencies in a vast stretch of landmass extending between Northeast India and the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Drawing from these cases, which are often referred to as peripheral civil wars, his dissertation offers a nuanced understanding of civil war outcomes. His findings – based on a new dataset on 166 peripheral rebel groups and in-depth analysis of three ethnic secessionist movements in Northeast India – demonstrates that the social embeddedness of a peripheral rebel group is a better predictor of conflict outcome than more commonly studied correlates. He is currently revising the dissertation into a book manuscript and the cross-case empirical analysis presented in this work is forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies.

Sarbahi’s expertise is particularly in geospatial and geostatistical analysis involving satellite imagery and geographical information systems (GIS). His research on drone strikes in Pakistan, co-authored with Patrick Johnston at RAND, has been widely cited in academic, policy and media publications. His other current research projects involve investigating the determinants of rebel recruitment, the effects of the post-World War II occupation and division of Germany, the impact of development on conflict dynamics in India and identifying and accounting for peripheral groups and regions within countries.

Sarbahi's research has received recognition and support from numerous sources, including the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the Institute of Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) at the University of California, San Diego, and UCLA’s International Institute and Asia Institute.

Distinguished scholar Robert Harrison delivers The Europe Center “Europe Now” Lecture

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The Fall 2011 Europe Center distinguished “Europe Now” speaker, Robert Harrison is a research affiliate at the Center.  At Stanford University, Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature.  A profound thinker on medieval Italian literature, Harrison has also established himself as one of our preeminent analysts of western culture, and its preocupation through literature, religion, and mythology in the interchange of secular and sacred realms.

Professor Harrison's publications are as prodigious as they are influential.  In his first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988; editions in English and Japanese) Harrison writes of medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova.  This was followed by Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, (1992; editions in English, French, Italian, German,  Japanese, and Korean), in which he deals with the multiple and complex ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology.  Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? (1994; editions in French, Italian, and German) takes the creative form of dialogues between two characters and deals with various topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society.  His next book, Dominion of the Dead Dominion of the Dead, (2003; editions in German, French, and Italian) focuses on the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms.  Professor Harrison's most recent book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2008; editions in English and French).

Known widely among students and the engaged public, Robert Harrison has hosted the lively and meaningful literary talk show on Stanford KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions". The show features wonderful hour-long conversation with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.  To be a student of Professor Harrison is to be mentored by one of the world’s preeminent scholars who also embodies the ideal of his humanist subjects.   To be chosen for Robert Harrison’s radio interview is to be engaged in the rich experience of making the humanities matter to our world’s deepest concerns.  In his spare time, Robert Harrison is also lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.

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European and Global Economic Crisis Series: "The Italian Economic and Social Crisis"

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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

Roland Benedikter Speaker
Seminars
European and Global Economic Crisis Series
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