This event is sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for European Studies, and Center for Russian, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies.

 

Event Summary:

Professor Koll's presentation describes the "dekulakization" process in Estonia during the 1940s as a systematic class struggle campaign aimed at breaking up the cohesion of the perceived ruling rural bourgeoisie, so as to make Soviet influence in the region easier. Tools of the campaign included taxation, forced reduction in farm size, redistribution of livestock and equipment, political persecution, severe social stigmatization, and in some cases deportation to Siberia. The difficulty in identifying "kulaks" from an egalitarian countryside full of similarly small farms was addressed by enlisting locals to identify, to a surprising extent, perceived kulak members of their own communities. These were often neighbors, and sometimes family. Still, there remained a hazy line between perpetrators and victims, as Koll illustrates with a case study toward the end of her talk. Koll also discusses the role of German occupation during the early 1940s, and the German POW camps that followed, in the dekulakization process. In her concluding comments, Professor Koll notes the ambiguous nature of a campaign aimed at dividing a population across invisible lines, which nonetheless left no option for passive observation and made everyone choose a side. Koll notes that the effects of class warfare persist to this day among the rural Estonian population, in the pervasiveness of alcoholism and strong distrust between neighbors.

A discussion session following the presentation raised such issues as how locals came to be in the position of identifying kulaks; whether there were regional variations in deportation rates; what aspects of the Estonian environment facilitated dekulakization; where the Estonian case falls on a continuum of collectivization; and what the success rates was of appeals by families accused of being kulaks.

In the context of authoritarian states the internet has always been viewed as an unambiguous force for good, allowing citizens of such states to mobilise around particular political and social issues, and gain access to previously banned materials. However, many authoritarian governments are now actively exploiting cyberspace for their own purposes; some of them appear to be succeeding in subverting the internet's democratising potential. Have we overestimated the internet's ability to bring democratic change and underestimated? Drawing on numerous recent examples from Russia, China, and Iran, the talk will illustrate the darker side the use of social media in these countries.

Evgeny Morozov is a leading thinker and commentator on the political implications of the Internet. He is a contributing editor to Foreign Policy and runs the magazine's influential and widely-quoted "Net Effect" blog about the Internet's impact on global politics (neteffect.foreignpolicy.com). Morozov is currently a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's E.A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Prior to his appointment to Georgetown, he was a fellow at George Soros's Open Society Institute, where he remains on the board of the Information Program (one of the leading and most experimental funders for technology projects that have an impact on open society and human rights). Before moving to the US, Morozov was based in Berlin and Prague, where he was Director of New Media at Transitions Online.

• Morozov, Evgeny. "Texting Toward Utopia. Does the Internet spread democracy?" (via Boston Review)

• Morozov, Evgeny. "The Internet: A Room of Our Own?" (via Dissent magazine)

In recent years, the United States and its European Union partners have often diverged in their policy outlooks towards the wider European periphery—the diverse region stretching from the Balkans and Turkey, to the Westernmost former-Soviet republics and Russia. Whether a temporary hiatus or a more profound strategic divergence, this state of affairs reflects a departure from the mission of extending peace, freedom and prosperity to the European continent that the two sides have pursued in the post-Cold War period.

Fabrizio Tassinari, PhD, is Head of Foreign Policy and EU Studies Unit at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. He is also a non-resident Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels and at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins’ SAIS in Washington, DC. He has written extensively on European security and integration. His book, Why Europe Fears Its Neighbors, was published on September 30, 2009.

 

Event Synopsis:

Dr. Tassinari's talk draws upon his recent book, "Why Europe Fears its Neighbors" (Praeger Security International, 2009), which attempts to survey and quantify the many challenges facing Europe with respect to its borders. Tassinari describes Europe's position toward neighbor countries as being influenced by the threat of immigration. He describes a "security-integration nexus" in progress since 1945, involving a gradual economic opening of Europe's borders to promote stability. While the EU today maintains to some degree its enlargement policy toward Turkey and the Western Balkans, other border-region states are classified under a "European neighborhood policy" with no prospects for EU membership. Recent policy discourse has decoupled security concerns from integration. The neighborhood approach, undermines EU policy by keeping neighbor states at too great a distance.

Next Tassinari offers Turkey and Russia as case studies. The debate within Turkey is leaning away from EU membership as the primary path toward modernization. Recent dialogue focuses less on meeting technical standards for EU membership and more on reckoning with issues of religion, identity and history within Turkey. With regards to Russia, in the past decade the country has become more assertive abroad and moved away from cooperation with the EU, preferring not to be grouped with countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia in the EU's approach to foreign policy.

In addressing the transatlantic relationship, Dr. Tassinari reflects that the US and EU have long disagreed about EU membership for Turkey, the direction of state building in the Balkans, and integration of some of Europe's neighbor states into NATO.

Finally, responding to the question of whether this divergence comes from a conflict over the "European power constellation" or rather is simply the result of issue-specific philosophical differences, Dr. Tassinari offers three arguments:

1. Strategic: EU policy reflects multi-level integration, wherein countries can be "more than partners and less than members." Tassinari believes even countries with no prospect for membership should be integrated as much as possible. 
2. Normative - in reality, the US and EU share goals for Europe's "neighborhood" - promoting democracy, human rights, and other values. Despite this, each side's initiatives are viewed with suspicion by the other. 
3. Institution - US policymakers buy in to the EU enlargement policy, with its firm commitments and well-rehearsed conditionality process, and don't see alternative policies such as the "neighborhood" approach as being useful. 

A Q&A session following the talk raised such issues as: Will the EU’s problems with “deepening” its relationships with neighbors hurt its prospects for “widening” through enlargement? What are the reasons for the mixed signals to Turkey from the EU? Do arguments about the EU’s denial of Turkey’s membership being based on racism hold any merit? If the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, what cross-border policy areas will remain the prerogative of nation-states and which might fall under EU Commission jurisdiction?

 

Twenty years ago, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded – not with a bang, but with a whimper. In circumstances eerily reminiscent of our own day, the establishments in Eastern Europe had borrowed large huge amounts of money (in hard currency), which they had no way to pay back (except by taking more hard currency loans). As the loan crisis deepened, they did . . . nothing.

Stephen Kotkin teaches history and international affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of "Armageddon Averted: the Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000" (new edition 2008).

Jan T. Gross also teaches history at Princeton. He is the author of the acclaimed "Neighbors" (2001) and, most recently, "Fear" (2006).

Jointly sponsored by the Forum on Contemporary Europe, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for European Studies.

Jakob Tolstrup is a CDDRL visiting scholar from August-December 2009 and will be doing research on his dissertation External Actors and Democratization: Russia and the EU Competing for Influence in Moldova, Ukraine, and Belarus. He expects to obtain his PhD from Aarhus University, Denmark, in 2011.

Prior to coming to CDDRL, he worked as an interpreter (Russian-Danish) and interned in the office of Anne E. Jensen, Danish Member of the European Parliament (on EU-Russia and EU-Belarus relations).

Tolstrup received a B.A. in Russian language and a B.A. in Social Science, both from Aarhus University.