The most heated historical debates in post-Communist Poland have been provoked by two books, Neighbors from 2000 and Fear from 2008. The author of these books, Jan T. Gross, challenged the Poles’ view of themselves as solely innocent victims of German Nazism, showing that anti-Semitism could and did lead Poles to kill Jews, both during and after the war. In her presentation, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa scrutinizes the Polish reactions to these books, analyses the rhetoric in Gross’ writings and discusses his role as “mnemonic actor” in Poland. She points out that the case of Gross raises the general question of the role of historical scholarship in society.

Barbara Törnquist-Plewa is professor of Central and Eastern European Studies and director of the Centre for European Studies at Lund University, Sweden. She leads the international research network “In Search for Transcultural Memory in Europe” financed by the EU. Her research focus is nationalism, collective memory, myth and symbols in Central and Eastern Europe as well cultural integration in Europe. She publishes extensively on these subjects.  She recently contributed to and edited two collections of essays entitled Cultural Transformations after Communism. Central and Eastern Europe in Focus (2011) and Painful Pasts and Useful Memories. Remembering and Forgetting in Europe (2012).

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies

The ability of governments to raise revenue to finance spending varies greatly across the industrialized democracies. Despite the prediction of the globalization thesis, variation in budget deficits and public debt has actually increased. While a developed literature has attempted to explain fiscal performance, there has been little attention to the role of that the welfare state might have.  Meanwhile, the welfare state literature has focused on welfare spending with less attention to how such spending is financed.  This presentation shows that the two are linked.  Governments can use taxes not only as a source of revenue but also as a means to achieve redistributive goals directly by targeting tax relief to specific groups.  Using quantitative data and a case study of Japan and Sweden, this study shows how governments combine welfare and tax policies, i.e., the “tax-welfare mix,” shapes their long-term extractive capacity.

Gene Park is an assistant professor in the department of political science at Loyola Marymount University (LMU).  Prior to arriving at LMU, he taught at Baruch College, City University of New York. Previously, Dr. Park was Shorenstein Fellow at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance’s Policy Research Institute.  He specializes in comparative political economy and has an area interest in Japan.  His research focuses on the politics of public spending and taxation.  He is the author of Spending without Taxation: FILP and the Politics of Public Finance in Japan (Stanford University Press, 2011). He is currently working on a comparative study of fiscal consolidation and a comparative study of state extractive capacity.

Is the Eurozone crisis undermining European democratic socialism? Why the current economic and fiscal crisis is cause for concern and opportunity, not alarm nor decline, for the future of the European Left.

This is part of the Europe Center's series on the "European and Global Economic Crisis". 

Pia Olsen Dyhr was appointed Minister for Trade and Investment in  October 2011. Pia Olsen Dyhr became member of the Danish Parliament (Folketing) for The Socialist People’s Party in 2007. Before joining Parliament, she worked with policy, international relations, trade, and environmental issues at the non-governmental organizations CARE Denmark and the Danish Society for the Conservation of Nature. She carries a MA in Political Science from University of Copenhagen.

Abstract
Ever since we started to organize ourselves socially, we have thought hard and long about how to ensure that we can develop checks on the power that we entrust to some in our organization, and how we can ensure that this power is not abused or misused in different ways. There are several different ways to accomplish this goal - from balancing power between different institutions to limiting it in time. One particularly effective and interesting way to accomplish this goal has always been transparency. If we as members of an organization, citizens in a state or just human beings gain insight into how power is used, and how decisions are made, we can review the exercise of power and act on what we find.

But designing transparency is hard, and requires careful thought. As in all institutional design, the end result needs to reflect the set of relationships in the society we live in, and it needs to change when our circumstances materially change as well. In this essay I will argue that we need to examine what it would mean to change from passive access as the goal of our transparency design to active disclosure, and what new institutional challenges that will present us with.

Nicklas Lundblad is senior policy counsel and head of public policy for Google in Mountain View where he leads a small team of policy experts in analyzing and advising on public policy. He has worked with tech policy since he wrote his first article on the politics of crypto in 1994. Prior to joining Google he was senior executive vice president of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and co-founded Swedishcurrent affairs magazine Neo.. He currently serves on the Swedish ICT-council, advising the Swedish ICT-minister, works as a member of Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt's reference group on Internet Freedom and has been a member of several corporate and organizational boards. Nicklas was recently elected member of the Royal Engineering Academy in Sweden and is an Eisenhower fellow. In 2009 he was recognized as ICT-person of the year by the two largest computer and business publications in Sweden. He holds a B.A. in philosophy, a L.LM and a PhD in applied information technology. He has served on the e-Europe Advisory Board advising then-ICT-commissioner Reding on i2010 as well as represented Google in the OECD, ICC and WTO.

Abstract
At the end of February 2012, the number of mobile subscribers topped 1 billion in China, an average of around four out of every five people, and this number never stops increasing. What are the consequences of such popularity of a communication technology in China, the largest authoritarian state in the world? Among many things, the ubiquity of mobile phones in China, as in other authoritarian states, dramatically changes the way people experience and cope with everyday communication activities, offering unprecedented opportunities for them to expose discontent, air grievances, and coordinate online/offline collective resistance—in short, nourishing changes in political culture and power structure.

My study explores how people appropriate and use their mobile phones to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective resistance and popular protests in contemporary China. Specifically, my presentation will focus on mobile phone rumor as an emerging form of public resistance at the grassroots level in contemporary China. By focusing on several concrete case studies with 80+ in-depth interviews, my study observes that the low-cost and user-friendly mobile device lowers the average protest threshold, creating an opportunity for people, especially those without complicated communication skills, to organize or participate in resistance. The mutual visibility of meta-communication through mobile network greatly increases both credibility of information and sense of security for participation. Additionally, the synchronous mobile communication accumulates rumor discourse into resistance in a very short time. As a kind of contentious politics, rumor communication via mobile phones shows the opposition to government censorship and control of communications, and most important, the resistance against the use of the accusation of “rumor” by authorities to stifle any different voices.

Finally, I will highlight that both the Party-state mass media and the Internet in China tend to focus our gaze too much on “public” communications flows and their related public sphere, ignoring invisible but relevant interpersonal communication as well as the fact that the motivation and actions of human beingsare rooted in the experiences of everyday life.

Jun Liu just finished his Ph.D. study at University of Copenhagen and is currentlya visiting researcher in Stanford University. His research interest covers the relationship between media, contemporary culture, and political and social change in China with particular attention to the importance of new media andcommunications technologies including the Internet and mobile phones. He has a Ph.D. in Chinese studies. He has articles published and forthcoming in several academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.