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This talk will be in Hungarian.

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Multiculturalism is not doing well. In country after country, politicians intone its shortcomings and pledge to do things differently. The result has been a turn to “civic integration” policies aimed at shoring up social cohesion. Our paper offers a different prognosis. While multiculturalism has indeed been rejected by political actors spanning the ideological spectrum, we detect important vital signs: in the Netherlands, local authorities continue to implement existing policies based on multicultural principles of group recognition and are busy devising new approaches to issues such as honour related violence through consultations with representatives of ethno-religious groups; in Germany, the previous CDU-SPD Grand Coalition’s overt rejection of multiculturalism did not stop it from pursuing consultation with representatives of Muslim faith communities through a series of “Islam conferences.” Drawing on these and other examples, we maintain that multiculturalism is enjoying a renaissance of sorts. The difficulty for many lies in understanding what this new form of multiculturalism is. We argue that multiculturalism is best thought of as an institutional logic, holding that the accommodation of religious and cultural pluralism should be pursued via negotiations between representatives of the state and target groups. This Institutional logic is meant to serve the principal aim of integration, which is to encourage social cohesion based on liberal democratic principles. Far from being the opposing logics they once were thought to be, multiculturalism and integration have become complementary means to the end of social cohesion.

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The Stalinist Gulag camps fostered research, but little is known about this aspect of life in places of confinement. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1968 novel The First Circle made one vehicle for research in the Gulag, the sharashka or research institute behind barbed wire famous. The novel portrays a research culture debased by Stalinism and distorted by informants and violence.

Archival evidence reveals a research culture beyond the sharashka in many Gulag outposts in remote regions of the Soviet Far North and East. The need to preserve prisoners’ “labour capacity” for economic purposes motivated medical research into curative waters, vitamin sources and disease patterns. In this paper I examine the institutional context of Gulag medicine and the ideas and people shaping this research, and then explore two major areas of investigation: pellagra (vitamin B² deficiency) treatment and “labour therapy.” The knowledge created by Gulag inmates and free physicians in clinics and laboratories seldom escaped the Gulag, but doing research became part of Gulag routines. Medical research in the Soviet camps significantly distinguished them from the Nazi analogues to which they are so often compared.

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Oxana Shevel is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tufts University specializing in comparative politics. Her research and teaching focuses on the post-Communist Europe and issues such as nation- and state-building, the politics of citizenship and migration, and the influence of international institutions on democratization. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript, to be published by Cambridge University Press, that examines how the politics of national identity and strategies of the UNHCR shape refugee admission policies in the post-Communist region. Professor Shevel is also working on her second book-length project – a comparative study of the sources of citizenship policies in fifteen former Soviet republics. Her research has appeared in Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Political Science Quarterly, Nationality Papers, and in edited volumes. Prior to coming to Tufts, Prof. Shevel taught at Purdue University and held post-doctoral appointments at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in England, and a BA in English and French from Kyiv State University in Ukraine.

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By the mid-1880s, the phylloxera epidemic had spread through much of Russia’s Black Sea wine belt, from the Caucasus in the east to Bessarabia in the west. Despite news from Bordeaux of a proven cure, the chief architect of Russia’s anti-phylloxera campaign, the evolutionary embryologist Alexander Kovalevskii, continued for many years to espouse treatments that were plainly ineffective. Why Kovalevskii was wrong is a story that stretches from government halls in St. Petersburg and Odessa, to laboratories in Marseilles and Montpellier. But mostly, it is about the blinding romance of scientific progress.

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How susceptible are people in post-conflict societies to alternative narratives of the conflict? In this paper I report the results of a laboratory experiment conducted in July-August 2009 in Azerbaijan, a country that fought a brutal fratricidal war with neighbouring Armenia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, an event that has left a deep impression on both populations. Subjects were exposed to three narratives about the conflict that attribute blame to different actors. Narratives were presented either in written format or in the context of a group discussion. The results suggest that attitudes formed out of many years of exposure to a monolithic discourse are indeed sticky, but that certain appeals—and formats—are more effective than others. I find, counterintuitively, that exposure to narratives that are consistent with pre-existing views or that redirect blame away from an adversary and toward a third party are more effective in altering attitudes in a conciliatory direction than narratives that invoke ideas of mutual understanding and common identity. Narratives presented and discussed in a social context are more effective than ones in a written format that involve no discussion.

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The transatlantic community arose in the middle of the twentieth century as a response to external threats posed by authoritarian states and the crisis of capitalism produced by the Great Depression. Over time, it has successfully integrated into the international order former authoritarian powers, most notably Germany and Japan, as well as newer democracies in Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. How will it fare with its latest challenge—the “rise of the rest” and particularly the rise of China? Arguably, the best way to respond to the global shift is to demonstrate that our democratic systems are capable of continuing to adjust and adapt to the myriad of problems our societies face internally, regionally, and globally, including fiscal constraints, demographic changes, environmental degradation, rising social and economic inequalities, and political gridlock. We also need more effectively and creatively to refurbish and globalize the institutions of the community and advance a comparable program to work with others to make international institutions more effective, accountable, and representative.

9:00 am
Introduction
Jeffrey Kopstein (University of Toronto), Stephen Szabo (Transatlantic Academy)

9:15 am
Panel 1: Security, Transatlantic Threats and the Global Commons
Chair: Stephen Szabo (Transatlantic Academy)
Speakers: James Goldgeier (George Washington University), Iskander Rehman (Science Po)
Respondents: Janice Stein (University of Toronto), Ron Deibert (University of Toronto), Emanuel Adler (University of Toronto)

11:00 am
Panel 2: Economics: Trade, Finance, and Investment
Chair: Jean-Yves Haine (University of Toronto)
Speakers: Stefan Schirm (Ruhr University of Bochum), Steffen Kern (DeutscheBank), Soo Yeon Kim (National University of Singapore)
Respondent: Alan Alexandroff (University of Toronto)

2:15 pm
Panel 3: Values and Global Governance
Chair: Jeffrey Kopstein (University of Toronto)
Speakers: Hanns Maull (University of Trier), Daniel Deudney (Johns Hopkins University)
Respondents: Steven Bernstein (University of Toronto), Jean-Yves Haine (University of Toronto), Joseph Wong (University of Toronto)

The Transatlantic Academy
The Transatlantic Academy was conceived as a partnership between the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the ZEIT Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. The Transatlantic Academy serves as a forum for research and dialogue, a place where scholars, policy experts, and authors from both sides of the Atlantic and from different disciplinary perspectives come together and develop a common agenda for dealing with the mutual challenges facing transatlantic relations in the coming years. Four senior fellows and two junior scholars, three from Europe and three from North America, spend ten months working in a collaborative environment in which they present their own research, react to the work of their colleagues and discuss their research with policy makers, nongovernmental organizations and other policy oriented institutions, both in the United States and Europe. With the addition of the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the partial support of the Compagnia di San Paolo and the Joachim Herz Stiftung, the Academy has come to represent a truly transatlantic institution.

The research theme for this year is the “Global Shift: The Transatlantic Community and the new Global Politics,” which examines the ongoing transfer of geopolitical power from the West to East, with a particular focus on political, military and economic developments in China. Fellows examine how Europeans and Americans view this shift and whether a common transatlantic approach is possible in such key policy areas as climate change and energy security, security threats in Asia and trade and financial policy.

The Canada Centre for Global Security Studies
The Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs was established in spring 2010 with a grant of $25 million from the Government of Canada. Areas of interdisciplinary study include the intersection between global security and cyber espionage, global health and region-specific concerns, such as the Arctic, post-Soviet Europe, the new Asian powers, and the changing face of the Americas. The Centre draws on the expertise of scholars at the faculties of law, engineering, and medicine, and the Rotman School of Management.

The Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
The Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies is one of North America’s leading academic institutes for the study of the member countries of the European Union, the countries of the former Soviet Union, and Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing upon the expertise of more than fifteen departments and dozens of faculty members, CERES sponsors an undergraduate degree program in European Studies and a Master’s degree program in European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies. Through its intensive relations with the European Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service, the wider local community in Toronto, and institutions of higher learning across Europe, CERES supports the exchange of ideas and scholars across the Atlantic.

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PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS TALK WILL BE IN UKRAINIAN.

This presentation will provide an analysis and compare Ukrainian and Russian state policies and ideologies regarding history from 2005 to 2010. Its focal point will be the official interpretation of Ukrainian-Russian relations in the past within the context of broader politico-ideological trends. It will first examine a consistent, long-established and wide-ranging Russian “industry” of official declarations; powerful media influences; textbook production; a strong and specialized network of scholarly institutions and think tanks; and mass-market book publishing and film making. The counterpoint to this is the unsuccessful attempt at a mass reconfiguration of Ukrainian attitudes toward their own history attempted during Viktor Yushchenko’s term in office, and the fundamental shift in interpreting the past that began in 2010 in the wake of Viktor Yanukovych’s election. The speaker, an active participant in community initiatives as well as plans by scholars, a publicist and critic, will attempt to assess the systemic failures of 2005–2009 and the likely prospects of the tendencies that came to the fore in 2010.

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The history of Hungarian-Jewish relations is that of contradictions and complications, of a nearly ideal co-existence, nay of mutual assimilation, but also of cruel rejection on the part of the non-Jewish majority.

Ultimately, neither the good nor the bad prevailed: to be a Hungarian was beneficial to many Jews and tragically harmful to many other Jews. On the other hand, it can be asserted with confidence that the historical presence of the Jews in their midst was more beneficial than not to the non-Jewish majority. Unfortunately, many non-Jews perceived, and even today perceive the Jewish presence as a catastrophe.

In his presentation, Prof. Deák will illustrate Jewish-Hungarian relations or rather, Christian-Hungarian and Jewish-Hungarian relations with examples taken from history, moving from two separate existences in the feudal world to the fervent embrace of the idea of mutually beneficial co-operation in a modernizing society during the 19th century. What followed in the first half of the 20th century were the societal rejection of Jewish-non-Jewish symbiosis and the wholesale expropriation as well as the partial extermination of the Hungarian Jews. Today’s not-so-secret tension between non-Jews and what is left of the Jewish community is a reflection of society’s inability to cope with the legacy of the Holocaust.

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The screening will be followed by Q&A and discussion, mediated by Yuri Shevchuk, the Ukrainian Film Club’s director. Film TBA

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How did rock music and other products of Western culture come to pervade youth culture in Brezhnev—era Dniepropetrovsk, a Ukrainian city essentially closed to outsiders and heavily policed by the KGB? In Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, Sergei I. Zhuk assesses the impact of Westernization on the city’s youth, examining the degree to which the consumption of Western music, movies, and literature ultimately challenged the ideological control maintained by state officials. One among many of his stories is how the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar led Dniepropetrovsk’s young people to embrace not just one, but two Soviet taboos: rock music and Christianity.This book is the first historical study — in any language — of the everyday lives of Soviet urban youth during the Brezhnev era. A longtime student and resident of Dniepropetrovsk, Zhuk began research for this project in the 1990s. Weaving together diaries, interviews, oral histories, and KGB and party archival documents, he provides a vivid account of how Soviet cultural repression and unrest during the Brezhnev period laid the groundwork for a resurgent Ukrainian nationalism in the 1980s. In so doing, he demonstrates the influence of Western cultural consumption on the formation of a post—Soviet national identity.

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The screening will be followed by Q&A and discussion, mediated by Yuri Shevchuk, the Ukrainian Film Club’s director.

The event is free and open to the public. The films will be shown in its Ukrainian or Russian language version with English subtitles. Refreshments will be served.

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Susan Gal received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently Mae & Sidney G. Metzl Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in the political economy of language, including linguistic nationalism, language and, gender, and especially the rhetorical and symbolic aspects of political transformation in contemporary Eastern Europe and post-socialism generally. Her work focuses as well on the construction of gender and discourses of reproduction. Professor Gal’s publications have appeared in Social Anthropology, East European Politics and Societies, The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and elsewhere. She is the author (with J. T. Irvine) of Making a Difference: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Differentiation (in preparation).

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Although the region has been geographically defined as consisting mostly of the sea itself, the perception of the Baltic Sea Region has changed continuously over time. While in the twelfth century Adam of Bremen envisioned the Baltic as a missionary field, for the Hansa and later the Dutch, it was mainly a trading area. At the same time, the emerging north European powers struggled for the dominance of the Baltic Sea. In the twentieth century the Soviet Union, after occupying and dominating the Eastern and Southern coast, labeled the Baltic Sea a “sea of peace”, despite heavily militarizing it. After the end of Soviet occupation, the Eastern European Enlargement of the EU finally made the Baltic area into a model of regional integration in Europe. This lecture will examine the causes and contexts of the different constructions of the Baltic Sea region and propose new perspectives for writing a “History of the Baltic”.

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Andrew Gentes was born and educated in the United States and holds graduate degrees in history from the University of California at Riverside and Brown University. He is the author of Exile to Siberia, 1590-1822 (Palgrave, 2008) and Exile, Murder and Madness in Siberia, 1823-61 (2010), and translator and editor of Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s “Sakhalin” (Anthem, 2009). He has held research fellowships at Hokkaido University’s Slavic Research Center and at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center. He teaches at Bradley University.

This talk concerns the influence that Russia’s possession and use of Siberia as a destination for criminals and other social deviants had on that country’s penal development. Other countries, for example England and France, used exile to remove criminals. But whereas Australia and New Caledonia were far removed from these countries, Siberia was contiguous to its imperial motherland, and so the problems exile created there directly affected European Russia. Moreover, in comparison to China’s use of Xinjiang, Russia exiled many more of its citizens over a longer period to Siberia. Besides focusing on the period 1590-1917, this talk provides historical context for the Soviet GULag as well as present-day Russian penality.

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Lecture: Contrary to expectations, the number and intensity of protests staged by Israel’s Arab citizens decreased after the al-Aqsa riots in October 2000. The paper tests the validity of competing theories of contentious action in explaining this outcome and suggests modification of the political opportunity model to include variables addressed in theories of international relations. Collective action and violence, especially in bi-national polities situated in unstable geo-strategic settings, is heavily influenced by geo-strategic factors and the way they impinge on the dominant community and the state elite. Within this modified framework, the cohesion of the state elite, long regarded as the major independent variable in explaining the level of protest and violence by the competing minority becomes an intervening factor. When the Israeli Arab inter-state conflict seemed to be ebbing, divisions within the dominant community deepened over the Palestinian issue, creating opportunities for Israel’s Arab citizens to achieve their goals through protest. The reemergence of the inter-state conflict in the past decade, with the rise of the Iranian-Hizballah and Hamas threat, has led to greater cohesion in the Jewish public with the result that Arab Israeli protests have also declined. The validity of this argument for other bi-national settings in troubled geo-strategic settings is also explored.

Speaker: Hillel Frisch is an associate professor in the departments of Political Science and Middle East Studies in Bar-Ilan University, and Senior Research Associate at the BESA Center for Strategic Studies. His latest books are The Palestinian Military: Between Militias and Armies (Routledge, 2008) and (co-edited with Efraim Inbar) Islamic Radicalism and International Security: Challenges and Response (Routledge, 2007). He has recently published in Studies of Conflict and Terrorism (2009) a commentary in International Security, which was reprinted in Contending with Terrorism: Roots, Strategies, and Responses (MIT Press, 2010), an article on Islamic radicalism and Arab nationalism in Critical Review (2010) and a forthcoming piece on the persistence of monarchies in the Middle East in the Review of International Studies. His book Israel’s Security and Its Arab Citizens will be published by Cambridge University Press. He can be contacted at hillel.frisch@gmail.com.

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In the fall of 1941, there were around 200,000 Jews in Odessa, a third of the city’s population. By the spring of 1944, an informal Soviet census counted 48 people left in the community. Drawing from his recent book ODESSA: GENIUS AND DEATH IN A CITY OF DREAMS (W. W. Norton, 2011), Charles King examines the fate of one of the Soviet Union’s most vibrant Jewish communities during the Second World War. Based on new research in the State Archives of the Odessa Region, the talk will pay particular attention to the practice of neighborly denunciation in the city and the role of the Romanian occupation forces which controlled the city throughout the war.

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Using the case of Tajikistan, this lecture offers some general lessons for development policy, against the background of academic research from economics, but, more so, practical experience with IMF-operations (which are explained along the way).

Luc Moers is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Guelph (Department of Economics), and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Central Asia, on Leave from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). His latest positions at the IMF were those of Senior Economist, and, from 2006 until 2010, Resident Representative in Tajikistan. Managing the Representative Office in this Central Asian country, he was the main liaison between IMF headquarters and Tajik authorities, both at the highest and the technical levels. As such, he worked on economic analysis, policy reforms, technical assistance, donor coordination, diplomatic relations, and outreach to civil society and media. He joined the IMF in 2000, concentrating on transition and developing countries (apart from Tajikistan, in particular Estonia, Senegal, Yemen, and Bangladesh). He also worked at the World Bank (Development Economics Research Group), Dutch central bank (Monetary and Economic Policy Department), and Tinbergen Institute/University of Amsterdam (Department of Economics), from which he obtained his PhD. His main research interests are still well summarized by the title of his PhD-thesis, ‘Institutions, economic performance, and transition’. He also studied economics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and has published in refereed journals such as Economic Systems, Post-Communist Economies, and Journal for Institutional Innovation, Development, and Transition.

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In March 2007, one year after the first Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis, the EU-27 member states have agreed upon the world’s most ambitious “integrated energy and climate policy” that seeks to balance the three objectives of the triangle of energy security, namely climate change and environmental sustainability, economic competitiveness and supply security. The presentation will analyse the EU’s evolving common energy and energy foreign policy in the broader context of the global energy megatrends and the interlinking geopolitical challenges, risks, and supply security vulnerabilities, climate change and its impacts on energy mix and strategies, the worldwide re-nationalisation trends of energy and other resource sectors and the increasing need for protection of critical energy infrastructures against old and new forms of attacks (Cyber threats). Special attention will also be paid to China’s energy demand and its implications for the global energy markets and its foreign, security and defence policies.

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Dr. Radu Carp was appointed Director General of the Romanian Diplomatic Institute (former “Diplomatic Academy”) on April 24, 2010, by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Romania, who is the formal President of RDI. Radu Carp is professor of political science at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Bucharest. PhD in Law at “Babes-Bolyai” University of Cluj, Romania (2002), MA in European Studies and International Relations at the European Institute of High International Studies, University of Nice, France (1996).

Light refreshments — A Taste of Romania — will be served.

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For further information: lilia.smale@gmail.com or 416-946-5899

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Robert Beachy’s forthcoming work, Gay Berlin (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), situates the origins of homosexual identity in debates about nationalism, politics, and masculinity in Germany from the 1860s through the 1920s. His current project, Long Knives, focuses on homosexuality under the Nazi regime. It suggests there was a complex evolution of policies toward homosexual political and social organizations inside and outside the Nazi party, ranging from open tolerance to persecution.

Beachy’s publications include The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840 (Brill, 2005); Who Ruled the Cities? Elite and Urban Power Structures, 1750-1940, co-edited with Ralf Roth (Ashgate Press, 2007); and Women in Business and Finance in Nineteenth Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, co-edited with Alastair Owens and Beatrice Craig (Berg Press 2006). He has a contracted book with Oxford University Press, co-authored with James Retallack, entitled German Civil Wars: Nation Building and Historical Memory, 1756-1914 (forthcoming 2013-14).

Beachy was a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2009-10. He has received other awards from the National Humanities Center, the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, and the American Philosophical Society.

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The talk will focus on the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986 and the current situation around the station and its surrounding areas. It will discuss initial and subsequent victims and health consequences, environmental impact, and the current state of the roof over the destroyed reactor. It will also comment on the impact on the nuclear industry in the former Soviet republics, as well as its current plans and new reactors. The talk is based on recent information from a wide variety of sources in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, and the archives of the former Ukrainian KGB.

David R. Marples is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of History & Classics and Director of the Stasiuk Program on Contemporary Ukraine, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta. He is author of thirteen books, including three on Chernobyl, and over 150 scholarly articles. He has been a consultant on the aftermath of the disaster for the governments of Canada and the United States, and has visited the plant and contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus. At the University of Alberta he has been the recipient of the university’s research prize–the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research–in 2003 and its highest award, the University Cup, in 2008.

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Heiner Bielefeldt (PhD, University of Tubingen, 1989) is Professor of Human Rights and Human Rights Politics at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg. In August 2010 he assumed his mandate as Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief of the United Nations. From 2003 to 2009 he was Director of Germany’s National Human Rights Institution. Mr. Bielefeldt’s research interests include various interdisciplinary facets of human rights theory and practice, with a focus on freedom of religion or belief.