Europe’s Evolving Identity
The underlying theme of our programs,
Europe’s Evolving Identities: Transforming European Politics, Economics, Culture, and International Relations, takes shape through the many research projects IES fosters and sustains.
IES has mobilized UCB’s singular research and teaching resources to examine this identity shift and train a new generation of scholars in innovative ways of seeing and teaching Europe. During the 2007-08 academic year, IES held workshops, colloquia, public conferences, and lectures on the various facets of this theme, generating both scholarly publications and teacher training materials. With this outreach strategy, IES has given structure, focus, and coherence to Berkeley’s rich array of European Studies resources, and deployed them in a manner that speaks to the concerns of the post-September 11 world.
Research, Study Groups & Conferences
Faculty and graduate student research sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, the National Resource Center for West European Studies, and the newly inaugurated European Union Center of Excellence is the heart of IES activity. Much of the research that IES initiates and sponsors takes place in focused faculty research groups, each led by a principal investigator or “convener.” These convener groups are comprised of faculty from UC Berkeley, other University of California campuses, and other prominent scholars from Europe. Each project spans one to two years during which participants conduct research, meet together in closed workshops and working groups to discuss preliminary findings, and hold a major research conference at the conclusion of the project. Research results are published in the institute’s Working Paper Series and later collected in an edited volume or as a special issue of a major scholarly journal. The conveners of these projects, together with the country program chairs, constitute the institute’s core faculty.
In addition to these long-term research projects, IES is home to a number of shorter-term study group conferences and series of lectures on particular themes. During the 2007-08 academic year, research projects, study groups, conferences, and lecture series addressed the theme of Europe’s Changing Economic, Political, Strategic, and Cultural Identity. Conveners covered a broad array of topics including European identity in an era of globalization, Europe’s strategic identity as a region confronting problems in the Middle East, the impact of migration on Europe’s cultural identity, the role of financial integration, international trade, and EU enlargement, the role of history in identity formation, the future of the transatlantic alliance, and more. What follows is a description of these projects and their activities.
Europe’s Changing Political Identity
Revolutions of 1989: Seen from Twenty Years After
In March 2008 IES contributed Title VI funds to a collaborative historical workshop organized by History Professors John Connelly of UC Berkeley and Amir Weiner of Stanford. This workshop was the first historical retrospective on a central event that profoundly reshaped both domestic and international politics in European history during the second half of the twentieth century. The conference featured such talks as “Overview of Europe ’89” by Charles Maier of Harvard University; “Overview of Twenty Years Later” by Timothy Garton-Ash of Oxford University; “Grass-Root Organizations” by Padriac Kenney of Indiana University; “Socialism/Nationalism or Rural Economies/Populations” by Kathry Verdery from CUNY; and “1989 as Revolution with a View to Recent Literature on Revolutions” by James Krapfl of McGill University. Selected papers from this workshop will be compiled into a special issue of Contemporary European History, to be published in 2009.
Immigration, Migration, and Integration
Migration has posed perhaps the deepest challenge to European Identity since the Second World War. Not only has Europe’s Muslim population grown, challenging Europe’s Judeo-Christian identity, but EU enlargement has opened Western Europe to migrants from East and Central Europe.
Comparative Immigration and Integration Program
In 2007-08, IES continued its support for the UC-wide Comparative Immigration and Integration Program (CIIP), based at UC Davis. Under the leadership of UC Davis Professor Philip Martin CIIP develops the data and analysis necessary for rational decision-making on emotionally charged migration issues on both sides of the Atlantic. CIIP has two major activities: 1) organizing seminars for UC faculty and graduate students and European scholars to discuss completed and in-progress migration research on the US and Europe; 2) producing and distributing Migration News (migration.ucdavis.edu) the leading analytic newsletter with information about significant migration developments around the world. About 3500 subscribers receive the email edition, and 100 the paper edition; the web site receives approximately 10,000 visitors daily. In 2007-08 IES funds supported the production of four new issues of Migration News.
SOYUZ — Sixteenth Annual Symposium
In April 2008, SOYUZ, the Research Network of Postsocialist Cultural Studies, held a three-day conference entitled “Contemporary Critical Inquiry through the Lens of Postsocialism.” This conference gathered national and inter-national scholars at UC Berkeley to examine the impact of the disintegration of Soviet and Eastern European socialisms, not only in the former socialist states but also in areas extending well beyond their boundaries.
Three presentations focused upon issues relevant to West European Studies. In “Producing Feminist Knowledge in Post-socialism,” Marianne Liljeström of the Center for Women’s Studies, University of Turku, Finland, compared the growing debate among Russian feminists about the implementation of Gender Studies in Russian universities to the discipline’s institutionalization in the Nordic countries. In so doing she examined the way the West is constructed in the process of establishing Gender Studies as a legitimate Russian academic field. In “Post-Soviet Labor Migration and New Geographies of Power and Intimacy,” Alexia Bloch of the University of British Columbia conducted ethnographic research among post-Soviet migrants in Turkey, who are mostly women. She argued that in order to better understand the context of a growing worldwide gendered migration, it is necessary to examine the articulation of “strategic intimacy,” the role of the state, and broad patterns of gendered labor flows. In “Producing Affects: Migrant Domestic Workers of Postsocialism in Turkey,” Ayse Akalin, PhD candidate at the City University of New York, examined the demand for migrant domestic workers coming from proximate postsocialist countries to work in Turkish urban middle-class homes.
Lecture Series on Europe’s Evolving Political Identity
New migration patterns, human rights issues, competing social identities, the growing importance of the EU, the entrance of former Communist countries into the EU, the legacy of the Cold War, violence, and national sovereignity have all had a decisive impact on Europe’s political identity. Lectures in this series explored these themes.
Michael Minkenburg of New York and Viadrina Universities delivered a talk entitled “Anti-Immigration Politics in Western Europe”; Eric Weitz of the University of Minnesota gave a lecture titled “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and the Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions”; Jürgen Neyer of the European University Institute discussed “Justice and Democracy in International Politics”; Jiri Priban of Cardiff University gave a lecture entitled “Is There the Spirit of European Laws? Critical Remarks on EU Constitution-Making, Enlargement, and Political Culture”; Emmanuel J. Roucounas of the University of Athens spoke about “The Council of Europe and Human Rights: An Insider’s View”; Dijana Pleština of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration of the Republic of Croatia presented a lecture on “Kosovo’s Bid for Independence: A New Crisis in the Balkans?”; Louise Richardson of the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, delivered a talk entitled “What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat“; Ellen Immergut of Humboldt University, Berlin, examined “Historical Institutionalism and West European Politics”; Tobias Bergulund of Uppsala University, Sweden, discussed “The Rise and Fall of the Swedish Welfare State”; and Dana Villa of the University of Notre Dame spoke about “Hannah Arendt: The Autonomy of the Political Reconsidered.”
Europe’s Changing Economic Identity
The Bellagio Group
On behalf of IES and the EU Center, Professor Barry Eichengreen organizes and convenes the Bellagio Group, which meets annually in Europe, bringing together G-10 deputies (deputy finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of Ten countries, seven of which are European).
New Convener Groups
Two convener groups on Europe’s evolving economic identity were launched this year. Professor Vinod Aggarwal of UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School and Department of Political Science has established a research group to examine changing US and EU trade policies towards Asia, and the implications of new forms of economic agreements for the global trading system. Although both the US and the EU initially resisted the new global trend toward bilateral trade agreements (preferring instead to pursue “interregional agreements” linking the EU to other free trade areas and customs unions), they have now begun to actively pursue bilateral accords with a variety of Asian countries. The group investigates the political, economic, and strategic issues stemming from these shifts, including, but not limited to, the potential threats posed to existing global trade systems, differences in factors driving the US, EU, and Asian countries to construct bilateral accords, and relationships between such arrangements and broader trade, foreign policy, and economic objectives. Housed at IES and cosponsored by the Institutes of East Asian Studies and International Studies, the group includes faculty from all the UC campuses as well as scholars from Europe. Two working conferences are planned, followed by a summary conference that will in turn lead to an edited collection of selected papers. In Summer 2008 the group held its first workshop to discuss the political impact of bilateralism on European and US trade policies. Papers discussed security implications of the rise of bilateralism, political threats to the global trading system, and EU-US competition in Asia.
IES funds also supported an interdisciplinary project directed by Professor David Vogel of UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School and cosponsored with the Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) and the Center on Institutions and Governance (CIG). Entitled the California-EU Regulatory Coöperation Project, this project aims to create a California-EU task force exploring the relationship between the regulatory policies of California and the European Union. This project consists of two workshops and two conferences in Europe and the United States, and engages faculty from American and European universities, business practitioners, non-governmental organizations, and policy makers in discussions aimed at promoting additional opportunities for regulatory coöperation, learning, and dissemination between California and the EU. Topics examined include the emergence of the EU as a global regulatory policy leader; the relationship between national and EU policy-making; the impact (“soft power”) of the EU on international, national, and state regulatory policies; and the relationship between California and European regulatory policies with special focus on their impact on both public and corporate policies. These conferences will produce both individual policy papers and an edited volume that combined will provide a comprehensive published survey of the issues examined and conclusions reached during the project’s tenure. In February 2008 the group held an initial workshop to explore these themes and organize future research on additional opportunities for regulatory coöperation, learning, and emulation between California and the EU. The workshop included not only academics, but activists, business managers and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic. Topics discussed included pesticide regulation in the EU and California, carbon emissions, biodiversity, the role of nanotechnology, and “green chemistry.”
Lecture Series on Europe’s Evolving Economic Identity
IES hosted two lectures on the topic of Europe’s evolving economic identity in 2007-08. In October 2007 Walter Russell Mead, a foreign policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, delivered a talk entitled “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World.” Mead argued that the ideology of individualism of Anglo-American religions combined with capitalism to propel Britain and the US to global dominance. This convergence of forces and ideologies enabled the two nations to create the liberal democratic system that continues in the present day to expand its economic and social influence around the world. In May 2008 Economics Professor Theodore Pelagidis of the University of Piraeus discussed the Euro’s impact on daily life in a talk entitled “Expensive Living under the Euro with a Focus on Greece.”
Europe’s Changing Cultural Identity
Nationalization, Conflict and Cultural Crisis: Making Italians (1870-1914)
In October 2007, IES contributed funds to a conference organized by the Department of Italian Studies entitled “Nationalization, Conflict, and Cultural Crisis: Making Italians (1870-1914).” This conference aimed to provide a fuller historical picture of Italy’s formation as a modern nation, thereby mapping the heretofore ignored Italian liberal era onto both Anglo-American historiography and Italian collective consciousness. To this end, scholars of international repute from Italy, Great Britain, and the United States gathered together to explore the ways in which the building of a common Italian identity, begun in 1870 with Italy’s formal unification, was put in place through the construction of common political myths, literary practices, and new intellectual enterprises. Speakers included Walter Adamson of Emory University, Roberto Dainotto of Duke University, Christopher Duggan of the University of Reading, Mario Isnenghi of Universita Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, Lucia Re of UCLA, and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg of Brown University.
Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition Fifty Years Later
In March 2008 IES hosted a conference directed by IES-affiliated Professor Hans Sluga of UC Berkeley’s Philosophy Department entitled “Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition Fifty Years Later.” Examining one of Hannah Arendt’s most important contributions to political philosophy and theory — her 1958 book The Human Condition — the conference’s guiding premise was that fifty years after the book’s publication, we must once again engage Arendt’s 1958 proposal “to rethink politics in light of the West’s most recent experiences.” The program began with a roundtable discussion between the participants. The following day was devoted to individual presentations by Andrew Norris of UC Santa Barbara on “Public Action”; Hans Sluga of Berkeley on “ ‘The Danger that Politics may Vanish Entirely from the World’ ”; Dana Villa of the University of Notre Dame on “The Autonomy of the Political Reconsidered”; and Frederick Dolan of the California College of the Arts on “Politics and Science.”
Modern Sport and the Formation of European Identities
In April 2008 IES hosted a conference organized by Director John Efron entitled “Modern Sport and the Formation of European Identities.” Taking as a departure point nineteenth-century Europe’s central role in the invention of modern sport, the symposium investigated the peculiarities of contemporary European sports cultures and their impact on societies past and present. Through the category of identity formation at the local, national, and global levels, this symposium addressed the ways various sports have been instrumental in creating, promoting, and sustaining particularistic identities, especially in an era characterized by the homogenizing forces of globalization. Lectures covered a range of topics such as modern Alpinism, the Tour de France, cricket and English Identity, Olympic aspirations in the GDR, and the global and local dimensions of hegemonic sport cultures.
Muslims and Jews in Christian Europe
In June 2008 IES collaborated with the University of Munich (LMU) on a conference entitled “Muslims and Jews in Christian Europe” at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria, Germany. Its aim was to explore in a comparative way historical and contemporary themes concerning Jewish and Muslim social and intellectual acculturation into European society. Organized around the assumption that only through the force of multiple influences through Judaism and Islam did Europe become what is often misleadingly called the “Christian Occident.” Conference papers showed the broad spectrum of mutual influences and the historical intertwining of the cultures. Participants were young academics from Europe, North America, and the Middle East as well as leading figures including philosopher Jürgen Habermas, LMU sociologist Ulrich Beck, philosopher and President of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem Sari Nusseibeh, author Ian Buruma, Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, and renowned historians of Jewish and Islamic history, John Efron, Michael Brenner, Dan Diner, Mark Cohen, Emmanuel Sivan, and David Ruderman.
Lecture Series on Europe’s Evolving Cultural Identity
Complementing these conferences were lectures on diverse topics in European cultural history, ranging from post-WWII European cosmopolitanism to contemporary European education policy. A highlight from this series occurred in March 2008 when Atina Grossmann, professor of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union, New York, delivered a talk entitled “Close Encounters: Jews, Germans, and Allies in Occupied Germany.” Professor Grossmann’s lecture related the little-known story of the “close encounters” in Allied-occupied Germany between Jewish survivors of the Nazis’ Final Solution and the defeated Germans with whom they continually interacted. Focusing on the social and gender histories of the highly diverse surviving remnant of European Jewry who gathered in defeated Germany, the lecture brought together stories of Jews, Germans, and Allies that are generally addressed separately, while also highlighting research areas typically neglected both in historiography and popular memory.
Other lectures included Heinrich August-Winkler of Berlin Humboldt University on “Still a Community of Values? Historical Reflections on the Normative Basis of the West”; Natan Szneider of the Academic College of Tel Aviv on “The Constitution of Cosmopolitan Europe after the War: The Recontres Internationales of 1946”; Janis Tomlinson of the University of Delaware on “After the Hero: Goya in Context, 1814-1824” (held in conjunction with the conference “The End of the Old Regime in the Iberian World” cosponsored by the Spanish & Portuguese Studies Programs); Jan Nederveen Petersee of the University of Illinois on “How European is Europe?”; European author José Ovejero on “European Identity: Between Politics and Fiction”; and Michel Giraud of the Université Antilles-Guyane, Martinique, on “The Memory of Slavery among French Antilleans: Silence or Amnesia?”
IES also sponsored a theatrical performance and three panel discussions on various facets of Europe’s cultural identity. In March 2008 State Secretary Jens Revold of Norway’s Ministry of Research and Education, State Secretary Peter Honeth of Sweden’s Ministry of Research and Education, and Professor Judson King, Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, participated in a panel entitled “Higher Education Policy in an Age of Globalization: Challenges and Opportunities.” In April 2008 the Department of German Studies hosted a comedy performance by Nursel Kiibr (the blond-at-heart Teutonic Sultana, shining like and Bollywood star) and Serpil Pak (the Oriental Valkyrie, trans-sex-cultural multiple-personality word-acrobat) entitled “Hoffentlich Verschliert (Hopefully Veiled).” This performance was followed by a discussion on humor as strategy with UC Berkeley Professor Deniz Goktürk. In April 2008 Susan Saarinen, landscape architect and daughter of Eero Saarinen, and Mark Coir, Director of Archives at the Cranbrook Educational Community in Michigan, discussed the Saarinen design legacy in Finland and the United States; and Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada and Turkish-German writer Zafer Şenocak spoke on a panel entitled “Where Europe Continues . . . Translingual Writers and the Cosmopolitan Imagination.”
Europe’s Evolving Strategic Identity
Conference: Climate Change: How Do We Know What We Know?
In April 2008 IES cosponsored a conference on climate change research together with the Technical University of Dresden and the Goethe Institute in San Francisco. In the context of the Nobel Peace Prize awarded in 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for providing conclusive proof of global warming and the assessment of its far-reaching consequences for humans and the earth, this German-American conference addressed the needs and challenges of managing climate research. William Collins of UC Berkeley presented the Keynote Address entitled “Collaboration in Climate Research: The Age of Assessments.”
Papers covered a wide range of topics such as “Big Science” vs. “Little Science,” the complex organization of simulation-based research in climate modeling, the difficulties in achieving scientific consensus, and the professionalization of research management in the United States and the European Union. A concluding panel focused on the policy implications of climate-change research as a new form of science.
Lecture Series on Europe’s Evolving Strategic Identity
In January 2008 Dutch Ambassador to the United States Christiaan Mark Johan Kröner delivered a talk entitled “Climate Change: Efforts of California, the EU, and the Netherlands.” In April 2008 Israeli Consul General David Akov and German Consul General Rolf Schuette met for a public discussion entitled “Israel and Germany: Six Decades of Unique Partnership”; Heinrich Hartmann, post-doctoral researcher of the Center for French Studies at the Free University in Berlin gave a lecture entitled “Population Statistics and the Construction of Military Power in Europe”; and Benjamin Kienzle, PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, discussed “The EU at the UN: Effective Multilateralism?” In May 2008 Father Pierre de Charentenay, SJ, editor of Études, scholar, and former director of the Catholic Office of Information and Initiative for Europe, presented a documentary slideshow and lecture entitled “The Last Christians of Iraq.”
