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The very essence of IES is its commitment to the primacy of its
ever-evolving research agenda. IES research activities directly
serve the faculty and graduate students as well as indirectly
serving undergraduates and the general public. The Institute
enriches and supports the research agenda of its faculty through
a faculty
colloquium series. For individual research projects, IES offers
20 Individual Research Assistantships to faculty working on European
topics. In addition to these internally funded projects, the Institute
has demonstrated its ability to attract outside funding from the
Pew Charitable Trusts, Social Science Research Council, Department
of Education, Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and others.
The dominant
focus, however, has been on collaborative interdisciplinary research projects
that originated in CGES. In the last five years,
these research projects, known as Research Convenor Groups, and
involving up to 20 faculty members per project, have been organized
in four thematic areas of European Studies:
- The Political Economy of International Finance
- European Political Relations and Institutions research
- European Society and Culture
- Comparative Immigration and Integration
Within the above thematic areas, the Institute supports collaborative
faculty and graduate student research and funds conferences and
workshops in an effort to disseminate such research to educational,
business, and policy-making groups. Each of the Convenor groups
produces research findings that are subsequently published in
the IES Working Paper Series. In 2002 the series catalog was reorganized
and a new working paper numbering system was introduced.
These new working papers can be found online.
Past convenor groups have focused on a variety of issues, including
the increasing pressures of globalization on Europe, the role
of Europe in the international financial system, the trend toward
regionalism, the emerging cultural influence of immigrants in
Europe, and the required changes in European foreign policy. These
research groups, together with IES' proseminar program provide
a substantive intellectual focus for many of the short-term exchanges
between U.S. and European scholars. Below is a list of past and
presently functioning convenor groups.
The Political Economy of International
Finance research group
is chaired by Barry Eichengreen, Jeffry Frieden, and Andrew Rose.
This research group is jointly sponsored by the Weatherhead Center
and the Institute of European Studies' Center for German and
European Studies with the goal of promoting cross-disciplinary research
on the causes and consequences of international monetary and
financial relations. Its meetings, which alternate between Harvard and
Berkeley, bring together prominent scholars from social science disciplines
with an interest in political-economic analyses of international
money and finance. Meetings feature the presentation and discussion
of research in progress by group members.
The Political Relations
and Institutions research group takes
a more historical and institutional approach to the current changes
in Europe. Its past core faculty have included: Anthony Adamthwaite
(History, Berkeley), Arend Lijphart (Political Science, UC San
Diego), Ronnie D. Lipschutz, (Board of Politics, UC Santa Cruz),
Guiseppe Di Palma, Vinod Aggarwal, and Steve Weber (Political
Science, Berkeley), Matthew Shugart (Political Science UC San
Diego), Susanne Lohmann (Political Science, UCLA), Daniel Hallin
(Communications, UC San Diego), Victoria Bonnell (Sociology, Berkeley),
and Alec Stone and Wayne Sandholtz (Political Science, UC Irvine).
Research interests of the members of this subgroup were divided
into six thematic areas:
- The historical analogies and roots of political change
in Europe, with particular attention to the impact of integration
of the foreign policies of member states
- Environmental issues as a central aspect of foreign and domestic policy
- The historic change in Europe's security environment and institutions
- The process of liberalization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union
- The building of new institutional architecture in Europe
after the Cold War
- Challenges to sovereignty in both East and West Europe in the 1990s and beyond. These groups ran sequentially,
simultaneously, and in overlapping years, as indicated below.
Currently, the Institute has put out an official call for
new proposals in this convener group.
European Society and Culture
The founders of CGES recognized that Europe's transformation
would be characterized by dissolving and contested political,
ideological, and territorial boundaries that would have a profound
impact on European society and culture. Two of the most important
of these include the process of rapidly changing political identities
and the rise of a multicultural Europe. The study group convened
by Hinrich Seeba (German Department, Berkeley), Gail Finney (Comparative
Literature, UC Davis), and Martin Jay (History, Berkeley), examined
changing identities in post-Cold War and post-communist Europe
in comparative and historical perspective. The Study Group on
multicultural Europe, convened by Renate Holub (Undergraduate
Studies, Berkeley) looks at how immigrants have changed and diversified
culture in European societies.
Socio-Economic Integration
Europe is now simultaneously contending with the problems of
national integration into the European Community, as well as
the social integration of first- and second-generation immigrants
from North Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. For the
first time, all of the major industrial countries have become "net" immigration
countries. The issues surrounding will also affect politics and
society in fundamental ways. France, there
has been a defection of working voters from Socialist party Communist
to far-right National Front, largely as result job wage competition
North African immigrants, who account for 20 30 percent population
urban industrial areas.
This research group (1991-present), convened
by Philip Martin (Agricultural Economics, UC Davis), Wayne Cornelius
(U.S.-Mexican
Studies, UC San Diego), and Roger Waldinger (Sociology, UCLA)
investigates the benefits and costs of immigrant workers from
a comparative perspective, and examines how immigration will
affect legal, social, and aid policies in England, France, and,
in particular,
Germany. Projects in this group focus on the impact of immigration
on labor markets, on education, and on family policies, and the
prospects for the integration of immigrants into European societies. |
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