One of the key policy debates in Europe centers on how best to integrate immigrants. The issue is particularly salient in Switzerland where immigrants make up almost 25% of the population. New research from scholars at Stanford and the University of Zurich demonstrates that naturalization substantially improves the political integration of immigrants.
Between 1970 and 2003 residents decided on naturalization applications in secret ballot referendumsin some Swiss municipalities. The researchers compare immigrants who just barely won a referendum with those that just barely lost, and the resulting natural experiment provides a treatment and control group that are almost identical.
"In some cases, the difference between them was merely a few votes, which turned 49% into 51%. It was down to luck whether people received Swiss citizenship or not," says Professor Hainmueller.
And because the researchers were able to survey immigrants 15 years after their naturalization decisions, the study provides one of the first unbiased estimates of the causal impact of naturalization on the long-term integration of immigrants.
In Switzerland, where immigrants must wait twelve years to apply for citizenship, the study suggests that reducing this waiting period could improve immigrant integration and positively impact Swiss society.
The Cold War began in Europe in the mid-1940s and ended there in 1989. Notions of a “global Cold War” are useful in describing the wide impact and scope of the East-West divide after World War II, but first and foremost the Cold War was about the standoff in Europe. The Soviet Union established a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s that later became institutionalized in the Warsaw Pact, an organization that was offset by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led by the United States. The fundamental division of Europe persisted for forty years, coming to an end only when Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe dissolved. Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989, edited by Mark Kramer and Vít Smetana, consists of cutting-edge essays by distinguished experts who discuss the Cold War in Europe from beginning to end, with a particular focus on the countries that were behind the iron curtain. The contributors take account of structural conditions that helped generate the Cold War schism in Europe, but they also ascribe agency to local actors as well as to the superpowers. The chapters dealing with the end of the Cold War in Europe explain not only why it ended but also why the events leading to that outcome occurred almost entirely peacefully.
Douglas Lute, America’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said Washington and Moscow found a way to collaborate since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that has changed under President Vladimir Putin, he said.
“It’s clear today that we don’t have the partnership with Russia that we had for two decades,” Lute said. “NATO does not wish to be an enemy of Russia, but Russia has to understand that it will defend its 27 allies.”
He warned Russia that the tactics being used in Crimea “don’t play on NATO territory; these allies will be defended as the treaty demands.”
Lute’s talk on Tuesday capped his two-day visit at Stanford. He spent the day before lecturing in the International Policy Studies course “America’s War in Afghanistan: Multiple Actors and Divergent Strategies” taught by Karl Eikenberry. Eikenberry, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, is now a consulting professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and an affiliate of several of the institute’s centers.
Ambassador Lute spoke to the class about the White House and National Security Council perspective on the war in Afghanistan, drawing on his experience in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
During his talk on Tuesday, Lute said that as NATO celebrates its 66th year, it is transitioning to an alliance that must now face “hybrid warfare,” such as cyber attacks and unconventional forces.
That will call for a Special Forces-type base in Europe that can defend the 28 nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance from hybrid assaults, he said.
“A cyber attack on a NATO ally could rise to the level of requiring a mutual defense response,” he said.
Lute’s talk was sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, The Europe Center, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
Is democracy heading toward a depression? CDDRL Director Larry Diamond answers in a recent Foreign Policy piece, assessing the challenges of overcoming a global, decade-long democratic recession. With much of the world losing faith in the model of liberal democracy, Diamond believes the key to setting democracy back on track involves heavy reform in America, serious crackdowns on corruption, and a reassessment of how the West approaches its support for democratic development abroad.
Katherine R. Jolluck is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of the Public History/Public Service Track in the Department of History at Stanford University. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice. She has also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey. A specialist on the history of twentieth-century Eastern Europe and Russia, she focuses on the topics of women and war, women in communist societies, nationalism, the Soviet Gulag, and human trafficking. Her books include: Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during WWII, and Gulag Voices: Oral Histories of Soviet Incarceration and Exile (with Jehanne M Gheith). She has also written articles on Poland in World War II, antisemitism, and human trafficking in Europe. Jolluck serves on the Faculty Steering Committee of the Haas Center for Public Service, offers service-learning courses, and is active in the Bay Area anti-trafficking community. She is a Steering Committee member of No Traffick Ahead, a multi-county, multi-disciplinary workgroup dedicated to combating human trafficking in all forms.
Affiliated Senior Lecturer at The Europe Center
Affiliated Senior Lecturer at the Program on Human Rights
About the topic: PSI is a global social marketing NGO that approaches clients as consumers in 60 developing countries. What do the private sector and marketing have to teach us about saving and improving the lives of the most vulnerable? A lot, it turns out.
About the speaker: Karl Hofmann is the President and CEO of PSI (Population Services International), a non-profit global health organization based in Washington, D.C. PSI operates in 60 countries worldwide, with programs in family planning and reproductive health, malaria, child survival, HIV, maternal and child health, and non-communicable diseases. Prior to joining PSI, Mr. Hofmann was a career American diplomat. He served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Togo, and Executive Secretary of the Department of State.
Cosponsors: Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, Stanford Center for International Development
*Please note the date has changed from September 23 to September 22*
A talk by Arnold Suppan, author of Hitler - Beneš - Tito: Conflict, War and Genocide in East Central and South East Europe. The monograph explores the development of the political, legal, economic, social, cultural and military “communities of conflict” within Austria-Hungary (especially in the Bohemian and South Slav lands); the convulsion of World War I and the Czech, Slovak and South Slav break with the Habsburg Monarchy; the difficult formation of successor states and the strong discussions at Paris 1919/20; the domestic and foreign policies of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the question of national minorities (Sudeten Germans, Magyars in Slovakia and the Vojvodina, Danube Swabians, Germans in Slovenia); Hitler’s destruction of the Versailles order; the Nazi policies of conquest and occupation in Bohemia, Moravia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia; the genocide committed against the Jews in the Protectorate, Slovakia, the Ustaša-state and Serbia; the collaboration of the Tiso- and Pavelić-regime with Nazi Germany; the retaliation against and expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; and finally the issue of history and memory east and west of the Iron Curtain as well as in the post-communist states at the end of the 20th century.
Sponsored by The Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Department of History.
Free and open to the public.
Pigott Hall (Building 260) Room113
Arnold Suppan
Professor of History
University of Vienna
Manfred Nowak graduated from the Vienna Law School (Dr. iur. 1973) and from Columbia University New York (LL.M. 1975). He has been professor at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law at the University of Vienna since 1986. He was member of the Austrian Delegation to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights (1986 and 1993) as well as director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the University of Utrecht (1987-1989). In 1989, he founded the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights in Vienna and coordinated NGO-parallel events during the 1993 UN Conference for Human Rights in Vienna while he also was Professor of Law at the Austrian Federal Academy of Public Administration in Vienna until 2002.
As U.N. expert on missing persons in the former Yugoslavia he started a process aiming at the identification of missing persons through exhumation of mortal remains between 1994 and 1997.
From 1996-2003, Manfred Nowak was a judge at the Human Rights Chamber in Bosnia. Since 2000, he is head of an independent human rights commission at the Austrian Interior Ministry. From 2002 to 2003 he was visiting professor at the Raoul Wallenberg of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the University of Lund. He has been a UN expert on legal questions on enforced disappearances since 2002 and was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment in 2004 with a mandate until 2010.
In addition, Manfred Nowak is also Chairperson of the European Masters Degree in Human Rights and Democratisation (since 2000). Manfred Nowak has published more than 400 books and articles on international, constitutional, administrative, and human rights law, including the standard commentary on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. He was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights in 1994 and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights in 2007.
The Obama administration’s policy of “re-balance” toward Asia, that began as early as 2009, is now increasingly under stress, as those in the region question American staying power and China emerges as a challenger to U.S. dominance. As the territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas in recent months have demonstrated, China’s relations with the region and the United States have become visibly strained, bringing the U.S. re-balance policy into question and raising concerns about security tensions and the danger of conflict.
U.S.-China relations are heading, for the foreseeable future, into “a very scratchy time,” predicted Kenneth Lieberthal, a respected senior China scholar at The Brookings Institution, in his keynote speech delivered at the annual Oksenberg Lecture on June 3 at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
Lieberthal told a standing room audience in Encina Hall that while the U.S. attempt to temper its relations with China and others has “worked quite well over time,” now, “at a geostrategic level, we seem to be sliding with increasing speed toward an inflection point in U.S.-China relations.”
The discussion was part of the Oksenberg Lecture, an annual dialogue that functions as a policy workshop on U.S.-Asia relations, named in honor of late professor and senior fellow Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001). Oksenberg was a noted China specialist, who served as a senior member of the National Security Council and is credited as the architect of the normalization of relations with China under the Carter administration in the late 1970s.
Points of tension in the U.S.-China relationship have been increasingly visible. Senior American officials have assailed China for its aggressive actions toward its neighbors over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and in South China Sea, including its latest altercations with Vietnam and the Philippines. The United States recently indicted five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army for carrying out cyber espionage against U.S. technology companies.
Incidents like these have prompted both countries to throw harsh words at each other, leading to a situation of brinkmanship. However, Lieberthal pointed out that tense relations between the United States and China are certainly not new. Most notably, relations took a nosedive in 1989 when China cracked down on democratization protests at Tiananmen Square, in 1999 after the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia, and in 2008, in response to the global financial crisis.
The U.S.-China relationship has been riddled with periods of distrust in the past. But now, “the speed and scale of China’s economic growth, especially over the last two decades, has also increased concerns, on all sides, that the evolving distribution of power may create new frictions and suspicions,” Lieberthal said.
Yet, refusing to work with each other is not an option, the senior scholar, who also served in the Clinton administration, told the audience. Without the United States and China in conversation, progress in multilateral areas such as climate change and trade would falter, he argued. Given the two countries’ position as the world’s largest economies, the international system would effectively be constrained if the two were entrenched in long-term bitterness.
Lieberthal recognized the common admonition, “if we treat China as an enemy, it will surely become one,” saying this warning could be applied to both sides. China and the United States must make greater efforts to manage and mitigate tensions.
“The question is whether we can prevent bad things, not only specific conflicts, but the political tensions and politics that make cooperation on major issues very, very difficult at best.”
He then outlined a few steps that could help China and the United States sort out their disputes. His recommendations began with the need for strong determination on the part of top political leaders to move things forward and the importance of clear, consistent use of vocabulary when discussing issues.
As a final point, but one that was offered as a contingent factor to success, Lieberthal said U.S.-China relations and both countries’ roles in greater Asia will depend on “how effective each of us is in dealing with domestic reforms,” because, “that will determine how dynamic, how vibrant, how innovative, and how secure we feel.”
During the lecture, Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry shared his observations from the Shangri-La Dialogue, an inter-governmental security forum held from May 30 – June 1 in Singapore. The Dialogue has in recent years become a gathering of premiere defense ministers to discuss security issues in Track I and “quasi-track” meetings.
Afterward, Eikenberry talked with Shorenstein APARC about key highlights and implications that emerged from the Dialogue:
Shangri-La Dialogue
Photo credit: Flickr/The International Institute for Strategic Studies
Media reported a tense environment overlaid the Dialogue. What was the general atmosphere there?
The remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue by Japanese Prime Minister Abe and U.S. Defense Secretary Hagel on the one hand, and Chinese General Wang Guanzhong, made clear very different views on the causes for tension surrounding various maritime sovereignty claims in the East and South China Seas. Still, if you read the full text of all three speeches and the Q&As that followed, there is still great emphasis placed on dialogue and common interests. And in the many meetings that took place between national delegations on the margins of the conference events, the emphasis was on cooperation.
What revelations at the Dialogue were surprising?
I think the degree to which dissatisfaction with China’s assertive behavior in pursuing its maritime claims was expressed by many of the participants – not just the United States and Japan. Vietnam, the Philippines and India were explicit. Analysts have said the only China (through threatening behavior) could contain China by catalyzing a counterbalancing response. From the results of the Dialogue, I think this is correct.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe emphasized values and international law throughout his keynote speech. What is your take on this?
The Prime Minister did emphasize both democracy and rule of law during his prepared remarks and answers to questions from conference participants. He was drawing an obvious distinction between Japan’s and China’s political systems and commitment to approaches to resolving territorial disputes. I think the Prime Minister is trying to establish Japan as a leader in East and Southeast Asia, and wanted to make clear what he views as important differences between the Japanese and Chinese “models.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel referenced China’s suspension of the U.S.-China Cyber Working Group. What direction do you think the cybersecurity dialogue will go now?
It was unfortunate that China suspended its participation in the U.S.-China Cyber Working Group after the U.S. Government’s indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers for alleged cyber theft. The U.S. Government has been providing the PRC Government with evidence of cyber theft being conducted by entities in China and has failed to receive any meaningful response so the indictments seem warranted. It would seem that the Cyber Working Group is precisely the forum to discuss this matter and the many related to managing the cyber domain with agreed rules and procedures. Working Groups provide a forum to address disagreement and disputes. I think China’s response was counterproductive and hope the government will indicate a willingness to resume the dialogues in the near future.
Where do you see the regional security conversation heading next?
The risk is that security dialogues will be divided into two camps – one led by the United States and its close allies and partners, and the other by China – somewhat isolated at this time but seeking to entice Asian nations to bandwagon to its side. Perhaps further regional economic integration can facilitate a more common approach to security, but this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue is perhaps a warning that trends, for now, are not heading in a positive direction.
Shangri-La Dialogue