The presentation summarizes preliminary findings of my research project on Allied policy towards resistance groups during World War II and its impact on post-war political and ideological divisions.

The research is linked with a multiplicity of historical problems: the western Allies’ balance of political and military considerations during World War II; the Anglo-American cooperation and competition in the field of intelligence; the use of special operations as an instrument of foreign policy, especially in regard to countries where the development of resistance movements had a strong impact on post-war settlement (e.g. Yugoslavia, Greece and Poland); the politics of communist movements between war and revolution in Central and Eastern Europe; the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union and the Allies’ perception of the latter.

The particular contribution of the project is to bring together aspects which are usually addressed separately: the different national scenarios, whose connections and mutual influence will be investigated; the two Western intelligence agencies, which have been researched mostly in separate ways by scholars of the corresponding nationalities; the Soviet and Western allies’ policies.

Tommaso Piffer is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge. Among his publications is a biography of Alfredo Pizzoni, the political chief of the Italian Resistance (Il Banchiere della Resistenza, 2005), an account of the relationship between the Allies and the Italian Resistance during World War II (Gli Alleati e la Resistenza Italiana, 2010) as well as several essays. He also edited a book in memory of Victor Zaslavsky on Totalitarian societies and democratic transition (Società totalitarie e transizione alla democrazia, 2011, with Vladislav Zubok) and the collection of essays on the political mass murder of Porzus (Porzus. Violenza e resistenza sul confine orientale, 2012). He is an affiliate at the Harvard Center for European Studies and a contributor to the cultural insert of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Open to Stanford affiliates

Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center

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Abstract:

Scholars of state development have paid insufficient attention to the question of regionalism; too often modeling state-building as the extension of the authority of a 'center' over peripheral territories, and too often linking regionalism to cultural or ethnic heterogeneity. A purely spatial account of the challenges to central control shows that even in the absence of cultural fractionalization, the presence of economically powerful and politically salient regions undermines political development. Three analytically distinct mechanisms - divergent public good preferences, economic self-sufficiency, and institutional design - underlie this relationship. I explore these issues through a region-wide analysis of Latin America, and case studies of the United States, Ecuador, Colombia, and early modern Poland.

Speaker Bio:

Hillel David Soifer earned his PhD in the Government Department at Harvard, and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research has been centered in Latin America, with a focus on political development and state capacity, and has been published in journals including Latin American Research Review and Comparative Political Studies. He is currently completing a book on the long-term divergence in state capacity in Latin America which contrasts the cases of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

This seminar is part of the "Europe and the Global Economy" series.

How do political institutions shape the costs of responding to financial crises? Previous research contends that policy-makers in democracies choose policies less costly to taxpayers than politicians in autocracies. In this research note we re-evaluate Keefer's (2007) contribution to this body of research using an updated theoretical model as well as updated fiscal costs data, which is his dependent variable. We argue that political institutions shapes when politicians spend, rather than how much they spend, in response to financial crises.  In the updated theoretical model we include the possibility that politicians can shift crisis response costs into the future by using policies that create contingent liabilities. Politicians facing removal pressures--such as elections--have incentives to create contingent, rather than immediately realized liabilities. Empirically we illustrate this dynamic by first updating Keefer (2007) using new data on the fiscal costs of financial crises. We further substantiate our argument with Eurostat's detailed yearly, cross-country comparable data from the late 2000s financial crisis to show that politicians in democracies tend to increase contingent liabilities,  while also decreasing realized liabilities, before elections.

Docudrama based on real events about a nearly illiterate woman who becomes one of the founders of Poland's Solidarity union. Directed by Volker Schlöndorff and filmed in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk.

Dr. Robert Rakove, Stanford University lecturer in the Program in International Relations, will introduce the film and lead a post-screening discussion.

Part of the 2013 ICA Summer Film Festival, "Enacting Change: Stories of Courage and Resistance" offering films from around the world depicting stories of individuals who challenge the status quo, facing adversity with bravery.

Sponsored by the Program in International Relations and The Europe Center

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

Professor Marci Shore will discuss her project that focuses on Husserl's phenomenology, and later Heidegger's (and Sartre's) existentialism as these philosophical currents took shape in Eastern Europe, primarily but not only Czechoslovakia and Poland.  The project is structured around philosophical personalities, exploring their encounters and their dialogues and relationships with one another.  It's also a project about how the stakes of the questions they pose change, how epistemological questions become ontological questions and later explicitly ethical questions.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Department of History, and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages

36th Annual Stanford - Berkeley Conference on Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies

 From Prague Spring to Arab Spring:  Global and Comparative Perspectives on Protest and Revolution,

1968-2012

 Friday, March 2, 2012

9:30 am - 5:00 pm

McCaw Hall, Arrillaga Alumni Center, Stanford 

9:30 a.m.

Coffee

9:45 a.m.

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Robert Crews (Director, Stanford CREEES)

 10:-00 – 11:45

Panel One – Who Makes Revolutions?

Chair:  Katherine Jolluck (Stanford) 

Jane Curry (Santa Clara Univ.), “Media - New and Old:  How It Has Made Protest and Revolutions” 

Joel Beinin (Stanford), “Working Classes and Regime Change in Egypt and Poland” 

Edith Sheffer (Stanford), “Global 1989?”  

1:00 – 3:00

Panel Two – How (Some) Revolutionaries Prevail and Others Fail

Chair: Gail Lapidus  (Stanford)

 Cihan Tuğal (UCB), “Islam and Neoliberalism in the Revolutionary Process”

 Sean Hanretta (Stanford), “The Arab Spring and West Africa: Influences and Consequences” 

Djordje Padejski (Stanford), “Serbian Fall:  Lessons from a Democratic Revolution”  

Natalya Koulinka (Stanford), “A Revolution that Persistently Fails:  The Case of Belarus” 

3:00-3:15

Break 

3:15 - 4:45

Panel Three – Interpreting Protest Movements

Chair: John Dunlop (Stanford)

Jason Wittenberg (UCB), “Political Protest and Democratic Consolidation in Hungary” 

Kathryn Stoner-Weiss (Stanford), “Arab Spring, Slavic Winter?” 

Edward Walker (UCB), “The Collapse of Soviet Socialism and the Arab Spring Compared” 

4:45-5:00

Closing Remarks

Yuri Slezkine (Director, UCB ISEEES) 

Co-sponsored by: the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies at Stanford University, with funding from the U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers program