Synopsis:

Robin Niblett, Director of Chatham House, delivered the following talk in The Europe Center series “The European and Global Economic Crisis”.

With measured optimism about the prospect for a way out of the current Eurozone crisis, Dr. Niblett argues that the introduction of the common Euro, seen by many in past years as a vanguard tool for European integration, is now potentially a functional wedge between ‘debtor’ and strongly capitalized nations.  

Dr. Niblett, arriving directly from participating in the World Economic Forum in Dubai, and based on Chatham House research, described the “perfect storm” of the past two decades of credit-driven growth, divergence within the EU, rising debt-to GDP ratios of member nations especially in the cases of Italy and Greece.  His analysis combines these economic details with the following:

• Demographics – high levels of unassimilated immigrants
• European welfare economies still distributing resources at twentieth-century levels now in the twenty-first century
• The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-free-trade populist parties
• The weakening of Europe’s center parties
• The “Russification” of Europe’s East – especially in recent events in Ukraine
• The stalled integration of Turkey into the EU

The totality of the above paints a grim portrait of Europe under the weight of nearly impossible conditions.   And yet, Dr. Niblett underlines evidence for measured optimism:

• Ireland is making strides to reform its economy
• Ireland’s educated and yet unemployed workforce does have the possibility to immigrate to Europe
• The UK is finally rebalancing its state budget and market liberalization
• France is facing, albeit with massive labor protest, its state budget levels
• Spain will likely turn over its government in the face of its massive youth protest
• Italy is evaluating in its political process a series of budget reforms

These are the structural side of what Dr. Niblett sees as Europe’s tools for recovery.

On the side of European practice, the Franco-German proposals for European Central Bank “bailout funds” include new rules for transparency of internal government operations. This promises innovation to make the EU into an area of political and financial transparency, and to enable the EU to engage in direct investment, as evidence is beginning to show, in the world’s emerging economies.  In this sense, Dr. Niblett sees for Europe a competitive edge over the US in engaging in world markets.

Perhaps most sanguine of Dr. Niblett’s analysis is his reading of the Eurozone crisis as a force to push the member nations of Europe further towards supra-national economic strategies.  In order to participate in the investment in emerging markets, the Benelux countries, not to mention France, Germany, and neighboring European states, are responding to the crisis by considering policy that promotes investment and outsourcing for service-sector employment, instead of export commodities which have been undercut in recent years.

There is a risk, in Dr. Niblett’s view, that Europe will respond to the Eurozone crisis by fracturing into rival “clubs” of small and large or debt-restructuring and creditor nation-states.  But the European nations, especially those currently participating in the Eurozone, have untapped capacities for growth:

• Educated youth
• Underemployed female laborers
• Outstanding higher educational institutions
• Pent-up small- and medium-enterprise markets
• Potential for growth in the service sector labor market
• Room for more tightly integrating and rationalizing the region’s energy market.

Those interested in further detail and analysis are invited to visit the work and productivity at:

The Europe Center, at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies: http://tec.fsi.stanford.edu

Chatham House, at the Royal Institute for International Studies: http://www.chathamhouse.org/

Speaker bio:

Robin Niblett became the Director of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International
Affairs) in January 2007. Before joining Chatham House, from 2001 to 2006, Dr. Niblett
was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Washington based
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). During his last two years at CSIS, he
also served as Director of the CSIS Europe Program and its Initiative for a Renewed
Transatlantic Partnership.

Most recently Dr. Niblett is the author of the Chatham House Report Playing to its
Strengths: Rethinking the UK’s Role in a Changing World (Chatham House, 2010) and
Ready to Lead? Rethinking America’s Role in a Changed World (Chatham House,
2009), and editor and contributing author to America and a Changed World: A Question
of Leadership (Chatham House/Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). He is also the author or
contributor to a number of CSIS reports on transatlantic relations and is contributing
author and co-editor with William Wallace of the book Rethinking European Order
(Palgrave, 2001). Dr Niblett is a frequent panellist at conferences on transatlantic
relations. He has testified on a number of occasions to the House of Commons Defence
Select Committee and Foreign Affairs Committee as well as US Senate and House
Committees on European Affairs.

Dr Niblett is a Non-Executive Director of Fidelity European Values Investment Trust. He
is a Council member of the Overseas Development Institute, a member of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Global Institutional Governance and the
Chairman of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Europe.

He received his BA in Modern Languages and MPhil and DPhil from New College,
Oxford.

Antibiotics have represented the primary line of defense for treating bacterial infections since 1935 when the first sulfur-containing compounds were introduced. Many antibiotic compounds are produced naturally by microorganisms while some more recently developed antibiotics are chemically designed based on a knowledge of susceptible biochemical pathways or physiological processes in pathogenic bacteria. Ciprofloxacin (“cipro”), a synthetic broad-spectrum antibiotic, functions by interfering with DNA replication.

Increased use and mis-use of antibiotics has led to increased numbers of pathogenic bacteria that are resistant to one or more antibiotics. Some resistant microbes possess mechanisms that allow continued growth in the presence of multiple antibiotics. These multiply drug-resistant pathogenic bacteria may also possess pathogenic properties that result in significantly more severe disease than their drug-sensitive cousins. Medical misuse of antibiotics – prescribing antibiotics for viral infections, failure of patients to complete treatment with the full regiment of antibiotics, or application of antibiotics based on inaccurate or incomplete tests can lead to selection of antibiotic resistant bacteria that can then cause infections that cannot be treated with the antibiotic(s) to which they are resistant. Multiple drug resistance can quickly reduce or eliminate all antibiotic-based treatment options. Infections caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria are very difficult to treat and can sometimes lead to death of the patient.

Antibiotic resistance can also result from selection based on exposure to antibiotics present in the environment. More than 70% of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used as supplements to animal feed. The intestinal bacteria in the animals provided with such feed often show resistance to the antibiotics in the feed and, in some documented cases, have transferred this resistance to pathogenic microbes with which they share the environment.

A brief of history of antibiotic use and the medical and public policy factors that are, in part, responsible for increased antibiotic resistance in pathogenic microbes and for a decrease in the development of new antibiotics will be presented. An introduction to new directions that are being taken to develop a next generation of antibiotic compounds will also be provided.

Speaker Biography:

Paul Jackson received his Bachelor's of Science degree from the University of Washington in Cellular Biology and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah in Molecular Biology. He became a CISAC Visiting Scholar in September 2011. He was previously a CISAC affiliate.

For the past 18 years he has been studying bacterial pathogens, first working to develop DNA-based methods of detecting these microbes and their remnants in environmental and laboratory samples, then developing methods to differentiate among different strains of the same pathogenic species. Research interests include the study of different methods of interrogating biological samples for detection and characterization of content, and development of bioforensic tools that provide detailed information about biothreat isolates including full interrogation of samples for strain content and other genetic traits.

Methods he developed have been applied to forensic analysis of samples and aid in identifying the source of disease outbreaks. He contributed to analysis of the Bacillus anthracis present in the 2001 Amerithrax letters and conducted detailed analyses of human tissue samples preserved from the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, providing evidence that was inconsistent with Soviet government claims of a natural anthrax outbreak.

His current work continues to focus on development of assays that rapidly detect specific signatures including antibiotic resistance in threat agents and other pathogens. More recent activities include identification and characterization of new antimicrobial compounds that are based on the pathogens' own genes and the products they encode. These include development of such materials as therapeutic antimicrobials, their application to remediate high value contaminated sites and materials, and their use to destroy large cultures and preparations of different bacterial threat agents. Efforts to address issues of antibiotic resistance and treatment of resistant organisms have recently been expanded to look at non-threat agent pathogens that cause problematic nosocomial or community-acquired infections of particular interest to the military.

Paul spent 24 years as a Technical Staff Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory where he was heavily involved in development of the biological threat reduction efforts there. He was appointed a Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos in recognition of his efforts. He moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2005 where he is presently Senior Scientist in the Global Security and Physical and Life Sciences Directorates. In addition to his work at the National Laboratories, he has served on the FBI's Scientific Working Group for Microbial Forensics, on NIH study sections and review panels, and continues to serve on steering and oversight committees for other federal agencies.

Nuclear energy is politically sensitive. For its proponents, nuclear energy is clean and highly efficient and indeed is the only alternative to fossil fuels in providing a base supply of electricity. For its opponents, nuclear energy is nothing but trouble, a symbol of war and weaponry par excellence, and one that creates environmental problems for mankind today and in the future. What is remarkable in this highly emotional debate is the general division between developed and developing countries. Asian and Gulf states are more active than many in other continents in expanding or developing their nuclear energy capacities. China is leading this expansion with 27 reactors under construction now.

Nuclear development in China highlights a series of objectives many developing countries try to balance – energy and economy, energy and development, energy and environment, energy and security, and the need for both clean energy and adequate and reliable energy supplies. It tells a counterintuitive story about Chinese politics – a single-party authoritarian political system with an extremely fragmented institutional structure in nuclear energy policy making, implementation and regulation and with highly competitive market forces in play. It provides a cautionary tale about the Chinese as well as global nuclear future. This paper discusses the challenges of nuclear energy development, using China as an example. It asks who drives it, what technology is selected and adopted, how human capital is developed, what the rules of the games are, and more importantly, which institutions are responsible for issuing licenses, regulating standards, and overseeing the compliance, and what forms of regulation do they use. At the core of these questions is if and how countries can ensure safe, secure and sustainable nuclear development.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Xu Yi-chong is a research professor of politics and public policy at Griffith University. Before joining Griffith University in January 2007, Xu was professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. She is author of The Politics of Nuclear Energy in China (2010); Electricity Reform in China, India and Russia: The World Bank Template and the Politics of Power (2004); Powering China: Reforming the electric power industry in China (2002); co-author of Inside the World Bank: Exploding the Myth of the Monolithic Bank (with Patrick Weller 2009) and The Governance of World Trade: International Civil Servants and the GATT/WTO, (with Patrick Weller 2004); and editor of Nuclear Energy Development in Asia (2011) and The Political Economy of Sovereign Wealth Funds (2010). All these projects were supported by the research grants from either Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) or Australian Research Council.