Steven Pifer is a Senior Adviser with the Center for Strategic & International Studies. A retired Foreign Service Officer, his more than 25 years with the State Department focused on U.S. relations with the former Soviet Union and Europe, as well as arms control and security issues. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, with responsibility for Russia and Ukraine (2001-2004), U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (1998-2000), and Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia on the National Security Council (1996-1997). He also served at the U.S. Embassies in Warsaw, Moscow, and London, and is advisor on the U.S. delegation to the negotiations on intermediate-range nuclear forces in Geneva.

Richard L. Morningstar served as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, appointed under President Bill Clinton in April 1999. His diplomatic career has included service as Special Advisor to the President and the Secretary of State for Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy (1998), and special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State on Assistance to the New Independent States of the former Soviet Union (1995-1998). Presently, he is teaching both at the Kennedy School at Harvard and the Stanford Law School. In addition, he is the senior director at Stonebridge International LLC, a global business strategy firm, and is senior council at the law firm of Nixon Peabody.

Lorenz M. Lüthi is an Assistant Professor of the History of International Relations at the History Department at McGill University. Professor Lüthi's teaching interests include the History of International Relations, Cold War, Communist World, Soviet Union, and Communist China. In August of 2006, Professor Lüthi finished a manuscript on the Sino-Soviet Split which is based on Chinese sources and archival research in the former East Bloc and will be published with Princeton University Press in 2007. His current book project addresses the rise of the post-Cold War world in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.

This seminar is a special International History event cosponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Department of History.

About the Event:

President George W. Bush has called the decade before September 11 the "years of sabbatical." The popular misconception that America was too distracted to focus on foreign policy obscures the significant debates both inside and outside government to define a new purpose for the world's lone superpower. The end of the Cold War had a profound impact on the Democratic and Republican parties, and a reexamination of the efforts across the political spectrum to articulate a new grand strategy after containment is instructive for understanding how American elites think about issues like democracy promotion, the role of international institutions, and the use of force.

About the Speaker

James Goldgeier is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. In 2005-06, he held the Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress. He taught previously at Cornell University, and he has been a visiting scholar at Brookings and Stanford. In 1995-96, he was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow serving at the State Department and National Security Council Staff. His most recent book, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War, co-authored with Michael McFaul, received the 2004 Georgetown University Lepgold book prize in international relations. He is also the author of Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Brookings, 1999) and Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins, 1994), which received the Edgar Furniss book award in national and international security. He graduated magna cum laude in government from Harvard University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley. He is currently co-authoring a book for Public Affairs on American foreign policy from 1989 to 2001.

Peter Maurer is Switzerland's first Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations, assuming the position in September 2004, when Switzerland became the body's 190th member. He was a leader of the ultimately successful effort to establish the Human Rights Council in early 2006.

Maurer studied history, political science and international law at universities in Berne and Perugia, obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Berne in 1983. After lecturing at the university's Institute for Contemporary History, he joined Switzerland diplomatic service in 1987. He was immediately posted to Switzerland's embassy in South Africa. There he witnessed the violent last throes of the Botha regime, and the first steps towards reforming and ultimately eliminating apartheid.

Maurer returned to Switzerland and became Secretary to the State Secretary for Foreign Affairs. In 1996 he was posted to New York where he served as Deputy Permanent Observer of the Swiss Mission to the UN. In May 2000 he assumed the rank of Ambassador and returned to Berne to become head of Political Affairs Division IV (Human Security). In that capacity, Maurer managed Switzerland's increasingly robust and innovative human rights diplomacy, launching, among other initiatives, the Berne process, a grouping of countries engaged in human rights dialogues with China.

Ambassador Maurer will talk about the UN Human Rights Council, of which Switzerland was in the forefront of creating. He will address questions related to Europe: how European human rights and security issues are being treated within the UN, and will attempt to answer the question of why the Swiss people have embraced the UN but have been reluctant to join the European Union.

Sponsored by Forum on Contemporary Europe and Stanford Law School.

Event Synopsis:

Ambassador Maurer describes Switzerland's decision to join the United Nations and outlines the achievements it has made in the 5 years since gaining membership. These achievements encompass a broad human security agenda and include developing mine detection technology, combatting small arms dealing, improving natural disaster preparedness, and promoting accountability for crimes against humanity and for the actions of UN peacekeeping troops. Switzerland was a strong supporter of the International Criminal Court and has pushed for improvements to the UN's mediation processes. It has also shaped discussion about the reform of the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Ambassador Maurer then offers prospects for issues such as engagement with North Korea, trans-regional alliances on issues of human rights, and the future of the Human Rights Council. He also describes recent cooperation with China and Russia on the topic of human rights. Moving forward, Ambassador Maurer believes Switzerland's best option for making its voice heard on the international stage will be to expand existing partnerships with European universities and to mobilize applied scientific research to help solve the world's most pressing issues.

A discussion session following the talk raised such issues as: What is Switzerland's approach to the areas of the world, for example those under Sharia law, where international human rights are not a common value? How will the western and non-western parts of the world bridge their very different approaches to human rights? Can cultural influence be more effective than formal multilateral institutions like the UN on certain issues? Should existing organizations like the ICRC deal with refugees from environmental degradation (like rising sea levels)? Is there conflict between different international organizations who deal with the same agenda items, such as between the EU and UN?

In 2006, under the auspices of the Program on Democracy, CDDRL initiated a project called "Waves and Troughs of Post Communist Reform." The project is led jointly by Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss. The idea is to look over a fifteen plus year span at the ups and downs of post-communist democratic development since 1989. Why have some countries transited relatively smoothly to consolidated democracy (like Poland, for example), while others, like Belarus languish in authoritarianism? Why did some countries in the region experience a second wave of democratic reform beginning in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004, while others, like Russia suffered notable slips back from democracy toward autocracy by 2005?

McFaul and Stoner-Weiss assembled a group of scholars to compare country experiences in the former communist world, but more specifically to compare the interplay of two factors that have been downplayed so far in the political science work done on democratic transitions: the power of mass mobilization, and the influence of international actors on democratic transitions.

The project hopes to contribute a greater understanding to what makes democratic

transitions stick, and why some democracies fail to consolidate, by examining in greater

detail these previously overlooked variables in comparison to others like level of economic development, for example. In this way, the project should help further a more general and complete understanding of democratic transition worldwide.

Participants in the project include scholars and policy makers from North America and

Europe, as well as from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Papers from this workshop are available as CDDRL Working Papers.