Conventional wisdom holds that the OPEC oil cartel has the world in its grasp. It can manipulate prices by tinkering with supplies. Last month OPEC released a new study on world oil demand that seemed to signal the cartel was readying to tighten the taps because higher prices were slaking the world's thirst for oil. The American Petroleum Institute released fresh data showing that demand for oil products in the United States (the world's largest market) dropped a whopping 3 percent from the year earlier. The news about lower demand has caused oil prices to fall a bit, and all eyes are on OPEC's wizards to tighten supplies.

But the conventional wisdom is mostly wrong. OPEC (which stands for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) is no wizard. For the most part, its actions lag behind fundamental changes in oil supply and demand rather than lead them. OPEC looks like a masterful cartel when, in fact, it is mainly just riding the waves.

It is hard to figure out exactly what goes on behind's OPEC's closed doors, but glimpses are possible by probing what the cartel members say about prices and how they set quotas. Over the last five years, OPEC members have announced ever-higher price goals only after the market had already delivered those high prices. As the market has soared, OPEC has followed. Only in the last few months has Saudi Arabia suggested that the cartel would be better off if prices reversed because high prices would encourage the world's big oil consumers to wean themselves from oil. It proffered $125 a barrel. The markets shrugged and kept on rising until real facts about slowing demand revealed that fundamentals were changing.

OPEC also sets quotas so that each member knows its role. Throughout its history, OPEC has faced the difficult task of holding the cartel in the face of strong incentives by each member to cheat. Today's oil market makes that job easy because nearly every member, except Saudi Arabia, is producing at full capacity. OPEC, more or less, has nothing to do.

In fact, the last time OPEC made a major adjustment to its quotas—September 2007—it jiggered them to reflect what its members were already pumping. Algeria got a big boost because it was already supplying nearly 50 percent more than its quota. Kuwait, Libya and Qatar also got boosts that aligned their OPEC quotas with existing reality. OPEC also set, for the first time, a quota on Angola's output. Since then, Angola has attracted a steady stream of new production projects, which makes it inevitable that OPEC will adjust Angola's quota to reflect the new reality. (Iraq has no quota; it has troubles enough without pretending to align its oil output to OPEC strictures.)

Nigeria and Venezuela got haircuts because their political troubles meant they were already producing far less than their quotas. Indonesia also cut its quota and a few months later left OPEC because it realized that as a big oil user it actually had more in common with oil importers than its fellow OPEC members. These changes in quotas were reflections of political realities that OPEC doesn't control.

Today's oil cartel, even more than in the past, is really about Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia also is no wizard at the controls of the world market. The Saudis can adjust their output a bit since they control nearly all of spare capacity in the world market. (Earlier this month they pledged another 200,000 barrels per day to dampen pressure from the United States and other governments that are reeling from high oil prices. But that move was more symbolic than real as the markets were already expecting the new supplies.)

Saudi Arabia is on the front lines of the new reality in world oil supply. It is proving much harder and more costly to bring on more supplies. The Saudis have an ambitious plan to increase output about one third over the coming decade, but they are finding that will be a stretch. Their fellow OPEC members are in a similar situation, and those hard facts also produce high oil prices. In fact, the Middle East members of OPEC are, today, producing at just the same level as they were three decades ago because none of them invested much in finding and producing new supplies. High prices into the future reflect these fundamental facts rather than the assumption that OPEC is a masterful cartel.

Conventional wisdom holds that because OPEC is raking in more cash than ever, it has never been stronger than it is today. In fact, OPEC has rarely been weaker. It is the accidental beneficiary of forces that have caused today's high prices, and it will be nearly as powerless when prices come down.

The real solutions to today's high oil prices require more attention to demand. Blaming OPEC, while good political theater, won't have much impact. Legislation now working its way through the U.S. Congress would actually attempt to break up the oil cartel. Such schemes won't work, and the political effort would be better spent on policies that redouble the nation's efficiency, producing more oil from diverse sources here at home, and in finding ways to move beyond oil altogether.

The Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) is sponsoring long-term research on questions of European integration. This year FCE has conducted a series of seminars and international conferences to bring European authors and policy leaders together with forum researchers and Stanford centers to investigate the challenges of social integration. The series has combined the study of European Union (EU) policy toward its newest members, East-West and trans-Atlantic relations, crime and social conflict, and European models of universal citizenship. The directors of the forum plan multiple publications. Here is a preview of the forthcoming anthology on Ethnicity in Today’s Europe (Stanford University Press) edited and with an introduction by FCE Assistant Director Roland Hsu.

In periods of EU expansion and economic contraction, European leaders have been pressed to define the basis for membership and for accommodating the free movement of citizens. With the lowering of internal borders, member nations have asked whether a European passport is sufficient to integrate mobile populations into local communities. Addressing the European Parliament on the eve of the 1994 vote on the European Constitution, Vaclav Havel, then president of the Czech Republic, defined national membership in terms of a particular tradition of civic values:

The European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and in Christianity, which over 2,000 years evolved into what we recognize today as the foundations of modern democracy, the rule of law and civil society. This set of values has its own clear moral foundation and its obvious metaphysical roots, whether modern man admits it or not.

Havel’s claim for the continuing efficacy of Greco- Roman and Christian values can be read as a prescription for founding policy and even sociability. In today’s multicultural Europe his definition has been repeated, but also challenged, in debates over the most effective response to increasing heterogeneity and social conflict. For those who endorse or reject Havel’s binding moral roots, this new anthology reveals surprising positions.

The scale of change since Havel’s 1994 speech challenges confidence in European traditions for new Europe. During 1995–2005, EU immigration grew at more than double the annual rate of the previous decade. European immigrant employment statistics are difficult to aggregate but show a steep downward trend. EU Eurostat figures show the Muslim community is the fastest growing resident minority.

The violence in recent years also presses us to revise theory and practice. In the east: How will Balkan communities resume relations after massacres and ethnic cleansing? Does EU recognition of Kosovo validate claims for Flanders independence and Basque ethnic heritage? Can Roma immigrants look to Italian governments to enforce ethnic safeguards? In the west, the widespread riots in France in 2005 and 2007 by urban youths of mainly North and West African descent against military police have ruptured public security and social cohesion. France’s official response was aimed more to excise rather than reintegrate the protesters. In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy announced “zero tolerance” for those he termed racaille (scum). The descriptor was effectively deployed to shape public opinion and the ministry declared a national state of emergency, invoking a law dating from the 1954–1962 War of Algerian independence, applied previously only against ethnic uprisings in French Algeria and New Caledonia, for searches, detainments, house arrests, and press censorship without court warrant.

Based on the ministry’s own records, the violence did not catch the government by complete surprise. Researchers, including Alec Hargreaves in Ethnicity in Today’s Europe, have revealed a study conducted in 2004 by the French interior ministry that documented more than 2 million citizens living in districts of social alienation, racial discrimination, and poor community policing. The ministry’s document admits that youth unemployment in what journalists referred to as quartiers chauds (neighborhoods boiling over) surpassed 50 percent. Constitutionally barred from conducting ethnic surveys, the report nevertheless acknowledges what most already understood: that the majority of the unemployed and disenfranchised youth were French-born whose parents or grandparents were of African descent.

Post-war era immigration, from the 1950s European reconstruction through the 1960s and 1970s decolonization, is best defined as post-colonial migration. European governments created neighborhoods for immigrants who moved from periphery to metropole. The new residents’ education, language, and collective memory were shaped by colonial administrations, and that background was roughly familiar to the host communities. Since 1990, however, based on projections in this anthology, we have entered a period, for lack of a better name, of post-post-colonial diaspora.

The peoples immigrating to Europe are increasingly coming from lands without characteristic European colonial heritage. While few countries of origin have no instance of European intervention, the new arrivals are adding rapidly growing numbers of émigrés of global diasporas from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Israel, as well as the Indonesian archipelago and sub- Saharan and East Africa. This most recent demographic trend takes Europe, and the larger trans-Atlantic west, into an era not well served by existing models.

In this anthology, nine prominent authors substantiate this shift. The essays create an unusual and productive dialogue between social scientist modeling and humanist cultural studies to confront assumptions about immigrant origin, European identity, and policies of tolerance. Bassam Tibi (International Relations, University of Gottingen/Cornell) criticizes European multiculturalism, which, he argues, inadvertently enables European Islamist fundamentalism. Tibi’s essay challenges his fellow Muslim immigrants to embrace traditional European civic values (which he dates neither from antiquity nor the Christian era, but rather from the French Revolution) as the foundation not for multiculturalism, but for a cultural pluralism that fosters social integration. The result, in his terms, would replace Islamist fundamentalism with a Euro-Islam capable of Euro-integration. Kadar Konuk (German Studies, University of Michigan) sets Tibi’s insight on European- Muslim ethnicity into the history of European-Turkish relations. Readers questioning Turkey’s EU candidacy will find that the two essays shift the common critique of Turkish policy toward a more pressing question of Europe’s social capacity to integrate prospective Turkish-EU citizens.

Contributions by Alec Hargreaves (French Studies, Florida State), Rogers Brubaker (Sociology, UCLA), and Saskia Sassen (Sociology, Columbia) — all leading authors on European political culture and social theory — rethink Western European responses to minority integration. Articles by Carole Fink (History, Ohio State), Leslie Adelson (German Studies, Cornell), and Salvador Cardús Ros (Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona) reveal cultural expressions that are often overlooked in studies of European minority identity. The final article by Pavle Levi (Art and Art History, Stanford University) focuses on the case of post-ethnic war Balkans, to test the ability of mass media and film to influence the creation of cross-border inclusive cultures.

Ethnicity in Today’s Europe was developed from the fall 2007 conference on the topic sponsored by FCE and the Stanford Humanities Center.

To sign up for upcoming FCE programming, and for an alert from the Stanford University Press when this anthology and works on this topic are released, plese visit the Stanford University Press website.

Martha Crenshaw is a pioneer in terrorism studies, one of a handful of scholars worldwide who started investigating the subject long before Sept. 11, 2001.

Crenshaw, who joined CISAC this year as a senior fellow at FSI and a political science professor by courtesy, brings three decades of study to her current agenda of examining distinctions between so-called old and new terrorism, how terrorism ends, and why the United States is the target of terrorism.

"We are very fortunate to have Martha Crenshaw join CISAC as a senior fellow," said Scott Sagan, CISAC co-director. "Her detailed knowledge of the inside workings of terrorist organizations and her deep understanding of earlier counter-terrorist campaigns have brought much-needed historical perspective to contemporary policy debates after 9/11."

Associate professor of law Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, who led the search that resulted in Crenshaw's hiring, said her "combination of attention to historical detail, interdisciplinary methods, and knowledge of institutional context has made her one of the nation's foremost scholars of terrorism. Her appointment is great news for CISAC and Stanford, where she will strengthen an already significant scholarly community working on homeland security and terrorism."

Coming to Stanford from Wesleyan University, where she was the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of Global Issues and Democratic Thought and a government professor, Crenshaw said she found the opportunity to join an interdisciplinary research center a welcome change.

"CISAC's and my interests merged perfectly," she said, as the center was looking to build its research expertise in terrorism. She said she looks forward to teaching graduate students in the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies as well as working with research colleagues at CISAC and across campus.

Crenshaw's terrorism studies began with a graduate seminar paper she wrote on actions by the FLN, or National Liberation Front, during Algeria's war for independence from France in the 1950s and 60s. She arrived at the topic the way many professors advise students to do--she noted in a study of Vietnam-era guerrilla warfare the comment that "no one has studied terrorism."

That seminar paper inspired her dissertation, which formed the basis of her 1978 book, Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria, 1954-1962, a case study in the strategic use of terrorism by a revolutionary nationalist movement.

Having written numerous articles and edited four books on terrorism, Crenshaw is now editing a book tentatively titled The Consequences of Counterterrorist Policies in Democracies. The Russell Sage Foundation supported the research, which Crenshaw said illuminates issues such as "the strength of executive power, effects of counterterrorism legislation on minorities, and unintended consequences of counterterrorism policies."

As a lead investigator with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, Crenshaw is also researching why the United States is the target of terrorism, a study that could be especially useful in informing counterterrorism policy.

Crenshaw "trace[s] the evolution of anti-American terrorism over time--since the mid-1960s," she said, comparing groups that used terrorism to others with similar ideas that have not resorted to terrorism. Comparing case studies, she explained, allows her to "analyze incentives for the use of terrorism."

In "The Debate over 'New' versus 'Old' Terrorism," a paper Crenshaw presented at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in September--and which will be published as a chapter in an edited volume, she questions oft-heard claims that terrorism in recent years has taken on a new character to become more religious and lethal. She found the distinctions too hastily drawn and possibly dangerous.

"There is no fundamental difference between 'old' and 'new' terrorism," she said.

"Rejecting our accumulated knowledge of terrorism by dismissing it as 'obsolete'" would be a mistake that could lead to bad policy choices, she added. Before 9/ll, assumptions that "new" terrorism would forsake the "old" technique of hijacking and turn to weapons of mass destruction turned out to be wrong, she pointed out.

Crenshaw said researchers and policymakers should "ask why some groups cause large numbers of civilian casualties and others do not, rather than assuming that religious beliefs are the explanation for lethality."