The electoral eruption of anti-European Union populism is a reflection of structural flaws in that body but does not represent a fatal political blow, according to Stanford scholars.

In the May 25 elections for the European Parliament, anti-immigration parties won 140 of the 751 seats, well short of control, but enough to rattle supporters of the EU, which has 28 member nations. In Britain, Denmark, France and Greece, the political fringe vote totals stunned the political establishments.

Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama said the rise of extremism and anti-elitism is not surprising in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn and subsequent high levels of unemployment throughout Europe. In one sense, the EU elites have themselves to blame, he said.

"The elites who designed the EU and the eurozone failed in a major way," he said. "There was a structural flaw in the design of the euro (monetary union absent fiscal union, and the method of disciplining countries once in the zone)," said Fukuyama, the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and Research Afflilate at The Europe Center.

Some have argued that the European Union should adopt a form of fiscal union because without one, decisions about taxes and spending remain at the national level.

As Fukuyama points out, this becomes a problem, as in the case of a debt-ridden Greece, which he believes should not have qualified for EU membership in the first place. In fact, he said, it would have been better for Greece itself to leave the euro at the outset of the 2008 crisis.

Still, Fukuyama said the big picture behind the recent election is clear – it was a confluence of issues and timing.

"It is a bit like an off-year election in the U.S., where activists are more likely to vote than ordinary citizens," he said.

Fukuyama believes the EU will survive this electoral crisis. "I think the EU will be resilient. It has weathered other rejections in the past. The costs of really exiting the EU are too high in the end, and the elites will adjust, having been given this message," he said.

Meanwhile, the populist parties in the different countries are not unified or intent on building coalitions with each other.

"Other than being anti-EU, most of them have little in common," Fukuyama said. "They differ with regard to specific positions on immigration, economic policy, and they respond to different social bases."

Ongoing anger

Dan Edelstein, a professor of French, said the largest factor for success by extremist candidates was "ongoing anger toward the austerity policy imposed by the EU," primarily by Germany.

Edelstein estimates that a large majority of French voters are still generally supportive of the EU. For the time being, the anti-EU faction does not have a majority, though they now have much more representation in the European Parliament.

Edelstein noted existing strains among the anti-EU parties – for example, the UK Independence Party in Britain has stated that it would not form an alliance with the National Front party in France.

Immigration remains a thorny issue for some Europeans, Edelstein said.

"'Immigration' in most European political debates, tends to be a synonym for 'Islam.' While there are some countries, such as Britain, that are primarily worried about the economic costs of immigration, in most continental European countries, the fears are cultural," he said.

As Edelstein put it, Muslims are perceived as a "demographic threat" to white or Christian Europe. However, he is optimistic in the long run.

"It seems a little early to be writing the obituary of the EU. Should economic conditions improve over the next few years, as they are predicted to, we will likely see this high-water mark of populist anger recede," said Edelstein.

Cécile Alduy, an associate professor of French, writes in the May 28 issue of The Nation about how the ultra-right-wing National Front came in first place in France's election.

"This outcome was also the logical conclusion of a string of political betrayals, scandals and mismanagement that were only compounded by the persistent economic and social morass that has plunged France into perpetual gloom," she wrote.

Historian J.P. Daughton said that like elsewhere in the world, immigration often becomes a contentious issue in Europe in times of economic difficulties.  

"High unemployment and painful austerity measures in many parts of Europe have led extremist parties to blame immigrants for taking jobs and sapping already limited social programs," he said.

Anti-immigration rhetoric plays particularly well in EU elections, Daughton said. "Extremist parties portray European integration as a threat not only to national sovereignty, but also to national identity.

Edelstein, Alduy and Daughton are all Faculty Affiliates of The Europe Center.

Wake-up call

Russell A. Berman, a professor of German studies and comparative literature, said many Europeans perceive the EU as "somehow impenetrable, far from the civic politics of the nation states."

As a result, people resent regulations issued by an "intangible bureaucracy," and have come to believe that the European Parliament has not grappled with major issues such as mustering a coherent foreign policy voice, he said.

"The EU can be great on details but pretty weak on the big picture," said Berman, who is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Faculty Affiliate of The Europe Center. "It is this discrepancy that feeds the dissatisfaction."

Yet he points out that the extremist vote surged in only 14 nations of the EU – in the other 14, there was "negligible extremism," as he describes it.

"We're a long way from talking about a fatal blow, but the vote is indeed a wake-up call to the centrists that they have to make a better case for Europe," Berman said.

New research from Stanford scientists shows that farmers in Europe will see crop yields affected as global temperatures rise, but that adaptation can help slow the decline for some crops.

A new study by Stanford Ph.D. student Frances Moore and professor David Lobell finds that with the average 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming expected by 2040, yields of wheat and barley across Europe are expected to be more than 20% lower than they would be without warming.  For corn, the loss is roughly 10% less than without warming. Farmers of these crops have already seen yield growth slow down since 1980 as temperatures have risen, although other policy and economic factors have also played a role.

 ”The results clearly showed that modest amounts of climate change can have a big impact on yields of several crops in Europe,” said Moore, a Ph.D. student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources at Stanford. “This is a little surprising because the region is fairly cool, so you might think it would benefit from moderate amounts of warming. Our next step was to actually measure the potential of European farmers to adapt to these impacts."

Moore and Lobell analyzed yield and profit records from thousands of farms between 1989 and 2009, from the European Union's annual Farmer Accountancy Data Network survey. Combining detailed climate records with the farm data, they were able to understand how yields and profits have changed over time. By comparing yields in warmer and cooler parts of Europe, they could predict how adaptation may help European farmers in the coming decades.

“By adaptation, we mean a range of options based on existing technologies, such as switching varieties of a crop, installing irrigation, or growing a different crop to one better suited to warmer temperatures” said Lobell, associate professor of Environmental Earth System Science and the associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford. “These things have been talked about for a long time, but the novelty of this study was using past data to quantify the actual potential of adaptation to reduce climate change impacts. We find that in some cases adaptation could substantially reduce impacts, but in other cases the potential may be very limited with current technologies.”

According to the new analysis, corn has the highest adaptation potential. Moore and Lobell predict that corn farmers can reduce yield losses by as much as 87% through long-term adaptation. 

As Moore points out, three key areas of uncertainty make it difficult to predict the future of crop yields in Europe. Most scientists focus on the uncertainty around future climate conditions, but the Stanford team found that the biggest issue is often how quickly farmers in Europe will adapt to climate change (adaptation uncertainty), and how crop yields will respond to climate change (response uncertainty).

In future research, Moore and Lobell hope to focus on measuring how quickly farmers are adapting to changing temperatures.  

“This paper has shown that crops in Europe are sensitive to warming and that adaptation can be important in reducing that impact,” said Moore. “The next question is how quickly farmers will use the available options for adapting. Europe has already seen a lot of warming, so we should expect to already see adaptation if farmers are quick to respond to climate signals.”

The full study is available from Nature Climate Change. 

Laura Seaman is the Communications and External Relations Manager at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, a joint initiative of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. 

On April 30, May 1, and May 2, 2014, Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History at Yale University, delivered in three parts "The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World", the first of an annual series.

With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War as his backdrop, Tooze spoke about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. He advanced a powerful explanation for why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States.

The three lectures focused successively on diplomatic, economic, and social aspects of the troubled interwar history of Europe and its relationship with the wider world. Over the course of the lectures, he presented an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world even today.

Tooze also participated in a lunchtime question-and-answer roundtable with graduate students from the History department.

The First Lecture

Tooze motivated his first lecture, entitled, “Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles,” by the recent political developments in Ukraine, Crimea, and in Eastern Europe. In light of these political frictions, Tooze posed the question: Is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? To properly answer this question, Tooze argued that we must look back to the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I.

He focused on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk—the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine—and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after.

In the Brest treaty, Russia lost territories inhabited by 55 million people, one third of its agricultural land, more than half of its industrial undertakings, and 90 percent of its coal mines. Whereas conventional narratives view these developments either as an expression of German ultra imperialism or as the ultimate demonstration of Lenin’s revolutionary realism, Tooze drew attention to Brest as the first international venue to recognize the independence of Ukraine in the modern era.

“The map that was created at Brest, the existence side by side within separate dispensations of a fragile and independent Ukraine alongside a battered, reduced and resentful Russia, is strikingly reminiscent of that which we have taken for granted since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.”

Tooze argued that Brest is the only historical precedent for the structure that the international community is seeking to defend today in Ukraine. In turn, “the first good peace gone bad was not Versailles, but Brest. Furthermore, it is not just that Versailles echoes Brest, but Brest actually directly conditioned the more familiar story of Versailles. And after acts one and two, after Brest and Versailles, there was a third act in which between 1919 and 1923 the search for a truly comprehensive peace in Europe, a peace that would embrace eastern as well as western Europe, unleashed a violent see-sawing movement that did not finally come to rest until Europe relapsed into exhausted division in 1924.”

Tooze drew insights from the period between 1917 and 1923 to draw conclusions about the stability of the world order that has largely been taken for granted since 1991.

“What the current crisis makes clear is that if we want to disarm Russian nationalism, we need to find some way of addressing the trauma of 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismembering of its component parts. If we do not want to entrench a new cold war, we need to make a serious effort to reconcile Moscow to the new order that must otherwise seem like a Brest Litovsk set in stone.”

The Second Lecture

In his second lecture, “Hegemony: Europe, America and the problem of financial reconstruction 1916-1933,” Tooze reflected on the rearrangements in the transatlantic power structure in the aftermath of World War I. Having established itself in the 19^th century as the financial center of the world, Europe’s sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing transatlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe, but also the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world.

Tooze began by discussing the vast efforts that were made to restore European economies to prewar normality—and in particular, to restore gold and gold-backed currency as the basis of the international financial system—in the immediate aftermath of 1919.

Yet, these efforts culminated not in prosperity but in unprecedented deflation, unemployment and trading disruptions: “The result, by 1933 was a truly catastrophic disintegration, which marks a caesura in the history of capitalism and in world politics. The demons of imperialism, racism and nationalism were unleashed.”

To this day, Tooze pointed out, there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of these economic developments. Conventional interpretations view the interwar period either as an era of trans-historic hegemonic succession or as time when global economic cooperation disintegrated, yet Tooze argued that neither account gives adequate importance to the actual impact of World War I. According to Tooze, the war abruptly changed the nature of the international cooperation by laying the foundations of a new world system that centered on the public debt of the major entente allies: Britain, France, Russia, and the United States.

“Within that new system, from 1918 a new game of politicized global finance was played out, a power game in which the United States emerged from November 1916 as the central actor…Once we acknowledge this shift in the functioning of the international financial system, then the politics of that crucial moment in 1931 appear rather different.”

Tooze argued that the political issue of the settlement of war debts played a central role in shaping the groundwork for each nation’s return to the gold standard between 1924 and 1930. Two complementary power plays emerged and began to define what became a “self-equilibrating” system: the strategy of persistent surplus and the strategy of persistent deficit.

According to Tooze, the absence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe’s economic fate during this period. “What was catastrophic was America’s failure to commit to any of its former partners in the war, in leading a joint effort to create a new order.”

These developments hold major lessons for our understanding of world politics today, because many of the current imbalances in the global economy stem from national strategies that resonate strongly with the politics of the interwar era.

The Third Lecture

In his third and final lecture, “Unsettled lands: the interwar crisis of agrarian Europe,” Tooze laid out an ambitious agenda for a new agrarian history of the interwar crisis by drawing on “the strange entangled” micro history of an agrarian cooperative in Wuerttemberg.

Lost in scholars’ preoccupation with the study of the industrial revolution, Tooze reminded us, is the stark fact that until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. Europe’s agrarian population peaked as late as in the 1930s at roughly 250 million people. Roughly 110 million lived in the Soviet Union while the remainder inhabited the rest of Europe, pursuing occupations as rural laborers, sharecroppers, long-term tenants and peasant proprietors.

The interwar era heralded major shifts and dislocations in the organization of agrarian life in Europe. During this period, “more than in any other sector millions of small scale producers were caught up in the turmoil of early globalization.” Opportunities for migration and movement to industrial work were limited during the interwar period, producing overcrowding and severe distress. Additionally, rural struggles over the distribution of land—in Russia, Italy, Spain, and much of Central and Eastern Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War I—routinely spilled over into violent confrontation.

And yet, Tooze observed, the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, have tended to ignore these agrarian developments, focusing instead on workers, businessmen, politicians and soldiers.

An alternate approach that studies the ebbs and flows of agrarian life in Europe during the interwar period promises to shed new light on the historical political economy of the period. Tooze’s proposal was to eschew considerations of the “macrostructures of modern history” but to instead delve into a micro history of “the more intimate networks through which the interwar crisis was understood and lived.” His goal was “to reconstruct the experience of structural change, to reconstruct how Europeans came to terms with this trajectory, how they sought to resist, to deflect to shape or to accommodate themselves to it.”

Tooze’s micro history pertained to Haeusern, a tiny Wuerttemberg hamlet containing nine homesteads that was situated 2 kilometers away from the village of Ummendorf, on the rail-line connecting the medieval market town of Biberach to Stuttgart.

“There were thousands of cooperatives across Europe, for all sorts of things, but amongst specialists this unlikely place came to stand in agronomical debates at the mid-century for a special kind of agrarian modernity…It was in fact to become an improbable model for global development policy.”

By delving into the micro history of Haeusern—which is to become the foundation for his latest research agenda— Tooze attempted to illustrate how brining the peasantry “back in” has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the “Bloodlands” to the wider world.

Video recordings of these lectures can be found on The Europe Center Lectureship on Europe and the World webpage.

Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history. Tooze’s latest book, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931, will be released in Summer 2014 in the United Kingdom and in Fall 2014 in the United States.

Former President George W. Bush met with Stanford students for an hourlong conversation that touched on many of the defining moments and policies of his presidency.

In a relaxed and sometimes self-deprecating exchange on May 5, Bush talked about the limits of congressional power and his relationships and personal diplomacy with other world leaders. His tone was more serious when discussing what he described as universal desires for freedom, his military strategies following 9/11, and his commitment to addressing Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, director of the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, moderated the session. Stanford President John Hennessy and Condoleezza Rice – Bush’s secretary of state and national security adviser who has returned to teaching political science and business at Stanford – joined the conversation.

"FSI has a terrific track record of convening leaders at Stanford, from the head of the International Monetary Fund to prime ministers and presidents,” Cuéllar said. “On this occasion, we wanted our students to have an opportunity for a candid conversation with one of the key policymakers of the early 21^st century, and we think such experiences will further prepare them for leadership in a complex world."

About 30 students were invited to the session at Encina Hall, but they didn’t know they were meeting Bush until the 43^rd president walked into the room.

“I suspect he misses this sort of engagement,” said Gregory Schweizer, a second-year law school student who was part of the discussion that also covered immigration reform, national education policies and the Edward Snowden affair.

“The media always portrays him as being disengaged from current affairs,” Schweizer said. “But I’m impressed with how interested and engaged he still is.”

Along with representatives from Stanford Law School, other students were invited from the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies. Honors students from FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law also joined the conversation.

Bush’s visit was arranged with the help of  Brad Freeman, a former university trustee and Ronald Spogli, who is currently on Stanford's board of trustees. Freeman and Spogli are longtime friends of the former president and philanthropists who donated a naming gift to FSI in 2005. Bush appointed Spogli as ambassador to Italy in 2005 and as ambassador to San Marino a year later. 

Stanford has a tradition of hosting current and former heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev – both of whom visited in 2010.

Europe is benefiting from tough, painful economic reforms in the wake of the 2008 downturn, according to the leader of the European Union.

"Europe had to evolve dramatically because reality forced it to," said José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, in a May 1 talk on campus. "This change came about with the economic and financial crisis initiated with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers back in 2008, and that has caused me many sleepless nights."

The title of Barroso's presentation was "Global Europe, from the Atlantic to the Pacific." The event was co-sponsored by Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, The Europe Center and the Center for Russia, East European and Eurasian Studies. The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union.

Barroso acknowledged that the financial meltdown hit Europe especially hard, given the "serious flaws" in the way some countries were running their economies, living beyond their means and lacking the competitiveness required in a globalized world.

The crisis revealed, he added, the "economic interdependence inside Europe," and the fact that the 28-member union did not have the capability to handle large-scale financial emergencies or prevent unsound policies on the part of member nations like Greece.

"So we had to adapt and reform as we have done many times in the European Union," Barroso said.

Economic reforms, regulations

And so, the European Union adopted a more extensive system of economic and budgetary governance to ensure member states stick to their financial commitments and become more competitive. Today, each country sends their national budget to the EU headquarters in Brussels before approving it at the national level, he said.

Barroso added that the EU created a "European stability mechanism," or safety net, worth about $1 trillion to help member states adopt key reforms and assist them in times of crisis. There are also more detailed banking regulations that give the EU more authority over national banks.

"Now the control is exercised at European level through the European Central Bank and there are common rules for banks so that we avoid having to use taxpayers' money to rescue them," he said.

Barroso dismissed criticism that the EU moves too slowly, saying that is inevitable in a system that depends on the will of national governments and citizens to work together rather than coercion.

Still, high unemployment persists in Europe, especially among the young, he said. But he is hopeful about Europe's prospects in the long run.

He added, "We have now returned to growth after some painful but necessary reforms."

Upheaval in Ukraine

With the situation in Ukraine worsening by the day, Barroso said that Europe "stands ready" to support that country in becoming a democratic, prosperous and independent country. He described the Ukrainian crisis as the "biggest threat to Europe's stability and security since the fall of the Berlin Wall."

He said the people of Ukraine expressed a "clear wish to take their future into their own hands and come closer to the European Union" through an agreement that would have given them political association and economic integration.

"Instead of accepting the sovereign choices of Ukraine, Russia decided to interfere, to destabilize and to occupy part of the territory of a neighboring country in a gesture that we hoped was long buried in history books," said Barroso.

He noted, "Europe cannot accept nor condone this type of behavior." Russia's aggression will carry political, diplomatic and economic costs, he said, adding that the issue looms larger than Europe, the United States or even the G7.

"It should concern the rest of the world as well, as it is a direct threat to international law and to international peace," he said.

Barroso served as the prime minister of Portugal from 2002 to 2004. He has been the president of the European Commission for the past 10 years.

Clifton B. Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.