"To survive, democracy requires at least two democratic political parties. We currently only have one. If this doesn’t change, our growing democratic disorder risks mutating into an even more extreme form," comments Daniel Ziblatt in a Harvard Gazette article on what impeachment may mean for the presidency and the future of American democracy.
Any geopolitical order based on cities must depend upon the partial dismantling of the territorial state order and thus of the notion of a unitary sovereignty as it developed from the Renaissance until very recently. Is that really plausible in this day and age? – Charles Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History & CES Resident Faculty
By talking up ethnic nationalism but not delivering, they opened up space for the radical right, say CES Resident Faculty Bart Bonikowski and Daniel Ziblatt in their introduction to a six-part article series commissioned by The Washington Post's Monkey Cage. This series of articles resulted from a 2018 Weatherhead Center for International Affairs conference and was edited by Bonikowski and Ziblatt.
Former French Ambassador to the United States Pierre N. Vimont discussed the future of European foreign policy with diplomats and Harvard affiliates ia conversation hosted by Harvard’s Center for European Studies Friday.
Former Polish leader Walesa points to economic disruption and rise of nationalism in Europe as the U.S. retreats from its global leadership role at the Forum discussion with CES Director Grzegorz Ekiert.
With the rise of populist right-wing groups in Europe, gender politics are in play. Increasingly and in what may be viewed as a counter-intuitive move, gender equality, has been taken up as a rallying cause by conservative groups, opening up new questions about the definition of gender and putting gender studies under attack. Kathrin Zippel and Myra Marx Ferree raised these issues in a recent workshop "Troubling Times for Gender Equality Politics."
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Judy Vichniac on October 22. Judy was a friend and a vital member of our CES community since 1972. One of her enduring legacies at CES is the “Visiting Scholars Seminar: New Research on Europe,” which she started in the early 1990s during her tenure as acting director of the Center.
Recently, CES Director Grzegorz Ekiert gave a lecture, entitled "Civil Society & Democracy – A Reconsideration," to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the election of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Poland's first non-Communist prime minister.
When Sergey Lagodinsky, HKS ’03, recently gave the Guido Goldman Lecture on Germany at CES, the newly elected member of the European Parliament broached topics far beyond those of his adopted country to encompass Europe and the world at large. “I wanted to be part of German politics,” he said. “German society and German politics are still not sure what role they want to play in the world.” By running for office, he saw “a chance to be part of it, to join forces in looking for those new roles.”
With the German economy close to recession, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has rightly urged eurozone governments to provide more fiscal stimulus. And acknowledging the interaction between fiscal and monetary policy would leave critics much less room for ECB-bashing, argues Hans-Helmut Kotz in recent piece in Project Syndicate. "In influencing economic activity, fiscal and monetary policy interact inexorably. Their joint impact is mediated through what the great economist James Tobin called a “common funnel”. In the eurozone, however, the policy debate regularly ignores this interaction between one monetary policy and 19 fiscal policies. Acknowledging it, however, would leave critics with much less room for ECB-bashing."
