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SPEAKER 1: This is a production of Cornell University.
GRACIELLE CABUNGCAL: Afternoon, honored guests, professors, and fellow students. Today, it is with great pleasure that I welcome you to Cornell International Affairs' inaugural event, celebrating the distribution of our journal's very first issue. We title today our inaugural, but in many ways, it is not so much a beginning as it is a long-awaited zenith, the culmination of months of preparation, dedication, and hard work in making the CIAR community as vibrant and far reaching as we see it here today.
It began with an idea. It was a shockingly mild autumn Ithaca day, and I had just gotten out of a grueling Government 181 lecture. My mind was swirling-- realism versus constructivism, Krauthammer said this, or was it Nye who refuted that? International situations in the Middle East or South Asia-- how did they effect me here at Cornell? Did I have an impact on them?
I needed to discuss these thoughts, these concerns. But other than office hours, I couldn't think of where to go. Where was our global forum so necessary for these international issues that truly needed discussion amongst our global community?
I pitched the idea to fill that niche to some of the brightest most motivated students that I knew, the current members of the Review's executive board. It was our mutual love for exploring the world beyond our local sphere and our desire to make Cornell University even greater than it is that brought us all together. With that, the Cornell International Affairs Review was born.
Meetings were held hours on end. The literary cycle ran beyond the semester into the summer months. But the energy, eagerness, and pure love for the intellectual discourse pushed forward. The snowball kept growing until the momentum of CIAR's actions, and more importantly, its dreams and ambitions, could not be stopped.
This impetus has made a clear path in the short yet fruitful history of CIAR. Last semester, we hosted our own talk featuring Mr. [? Edward ?] [INAUDIBLE] entitled "The Financial and Political Challenges of the European Integration." Working with other organizations and university departments, we've helped promote, as well as attended as a group, several internationally focused events. These include a panel discussion on the subject of the French elections, sponsored by the French department; the inaugural launch of the Lafayette exhibit last semester, sponsored by the Cornell University Library; [INAUDIBLE] talk on peace in the Middle East; and the EU Turkey accession debate, both sponsored by Einaudi Center.
This afternoon, we graciously host Professors Peter Katzenstein and Hubert Zimmerman. We thank you both for taking your time this afternoon to lead us in the exploration of today's topic, "Global Politics-- Will Regions Count in the 21st Century?" and hope to engage you further in this wonderfully salient issue following your comments. And finally, we offer our journal's first inaugural issue, the manifestation of CIAR's collaborative efforts to engage our greater community as equals, all effected by these questions and subjects, regardless of background, age, or citizenship. In its pages are written in one forum the thoughts of Cornell students, students from other universities, business professionals, and government officials. Through distribution of this journal at Cornell and worldwide, from university students' hands to policymakers' desks, we hope to bring this discourse to an even wider audience.
Such rapid and continual expansion of CIAR and its mission cannot go without the commitment and encouragement of many. The founding executive board, whose daily web mail checks consists of filtering through enumerable emails from yours truly, and whose leadership and inspiration-driven clarity has given CIAR its rock-solid foundations to carry it into its future. Our members, who have given enough faith to stick it through and whose dedication and enthusiasm make CIAR's dynamic as intellectually thriving as it is. Our advisor, Professor Ross Brann; our advisory board, Professor Katzenstein, Professor Kramnick, Professor [? Lee, ?] Professor [? Tanwell, ?] and Professor Zimmerman; the Einaudi Center; and all the contributors whose support and faith in our new organization has proven astonishingly generous and irreplaceable to CIAR. And last but not least, all who could join us at this afternoon and at all of our events, without whose intellectual interests we would not be able to discuss with, engage, an enlighten each other.
The English historian and philosopher Arnold Toynbee once said, "It is paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it." Earlier, I had suggested that this afternoon's event was a zenith, a peak. In truth, all goals reached and attained are precisely that. But as Toynbee claims, it is not an end.
Today, we are truly at our inauguration, beginning the journey in which we continually reach for the next goal, the next peak, beyond the next. And with it, we will stride our mountain range across boundaries in hopes of looking down from on high and seeing that we truly are one global world. Once again, thank you for joining us this afternoon. And please be welcome to refreshments and copies of the journal after the program. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
LUIS-FRANCOIS DE LENCQUESAING: Good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us tonight, this afternoon, on this sunny day at Cornell. Thank you very much.
Now, as our president Gracielle has said, this panel is in the Cornell International Affairs Review perspective of bringing together different visions of the world and rounds out the objectives we set for our publication and organization. Indeed, we believe in bringing together in an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary perspective the views of students, young idealists discovering the world-- students from different countries, students of economics, students of government, students of agriculture. We believe in bringing together the views of policymakers who have years-- who have 30 years of practice of power-- and the views of faculty, the views of academics, with their profound understanding of the international issues and challenges. We believe that an approach to studying foreign policy that takes into account the audacity of dreams, the audacity of hope, catalyzed by the experience of our mentors, offers tools to analyze the world in its complexities and nuances and opens our minds to new possibilities.
Now, a friend of mine was telling me earlier today that this is quite a mysterious theme-- "Global Politics-- Will Regions Count in the 21st Century?" So an easy explanation would be that most of our members-- members of our organization-- were in Professor Katzenstein's class last semester. We tried our best to understand the conceptual approaches he offered. And as we emerged from this difficult class, we remembered a few things-- world, 21st century, regions-- something like that.
[MURMURS AND LAUGHTER]
Yeah, very. So we tried to put all that together. We added a spice of global. We added a spice of politics. And we hoped it would all hang together.
Now, more seriously, this is a critical moment for foreign affairs. Of course, every student of international affairs has always said that their moment is a crucial moment for international affairs. But we nevertheless believe that this is an important moment, a moment where political challenges on all continents have the potential to destabilize the world, from the Middle East, to the conflicts in Africa, to the conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran. Add to this the issues of global warming, poverty, economic downturns, and it all looks pretty critical to me.
So at this critical moment, where from sea to shining sea the minds of our Ivy and elite leagues are all focused on health care issues, on the Iraq crisis, on Super Tuesdays, on Super Bowls, on super change, we believe it is important to step back from the national arena, to look at the broader dynamics of the world order, and to better reflect on the structural shifts that will determine the study of foreign policy in the next years. As the articles in our first publication underline, all regions-- in Asia, in the Slavic part of the world, in Europe, in Latin America-- all those regions are striving to take a full seat at the table of great powers. Thus, this panel will explore the emergence of regions as major actors.
A key theme of our publication is Europe with French Cabinet Minister Michel [INAUDIBLE] for the emergence of a political EU as a super national entity. So we will bounce off from that focus and center partly today on Europe. Will the European Union, with its 27 countries, its 500 million citizens, and its unmatched economic power-- will Europe, some say, Venus-- Europe, the center of fashion; Europe, the center of culture, of the good life, la belle vie; the center of laziness--
[LAUGHTER]
--to some extent; the center of diminishing religious fervor-- will Europe have the guts to unify politically and be an illustration of a multipolar world in which regions count, as actors and not only as spectators?
We hope to participate-- by this panel, by our publication-- in the intellectual vibrancy of the campus and today, by exploring those themes with Professor Katzenstein, Professor Zimmerman, who like many Cornell faculty have not only taught but inspired us. And now they will give us their visions of global politics. Will regions count in the 21st century? Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: All right. Thanks a lot. Hard to top. By the way, there are still chairs. So if somebody wants to move ahead--
LUIS-FRANCOIS DE LENCQUESAING: There's two chairs here.
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: Yeah. All right. Thanks a lot for the invitation. It's a real honor to be here. And apart from that, it also gives me the opportunity to wax a little bit generally about what happened in global politics in the year since I arrived at Cornell. So it will be a kind of overview.
Do regions count in the 21st century? Now, I can't answer that question authoritatively. I will rather narrow it down to my actual professional interest-- does Europe count in global politics? How much should a future US president care?
I argue a lot more than the current holder of the office, what's the name? I just haven't seen him for a while. So will a future president care? Well, probably not much more. I will mainly talk about the first claim that I'm making, that presidents should care, not about the second prediction that they will not really care, and we can leave that to the Q&A.
So when I came here, it was August 2003. The weather was better. But transatlantic relations and the state of Europe appeared to be far worse. Now, five years later, as my contract nears its end, Europe and the EU seem pretty healthy. And even US-European relations have vastly improved. Mission accomplished.
So what was the state of Europe in 2003? It really did not look like this region would count for an awful lot in the future of global politics. The Iraq war had exposed deep intra-European divisions on US-European relations and on the use of military power in global politics.
Economically, Europe seemed to stagnate. The so-called Lisbon Strategy of 2000-- the goal was to make Europe the most dynamic and knowledge-based economy in the world-- was widely ridiculed. Aging societies, bloated welfare states, and the challenges of immigration really made Europe not look like a continent in the rise but rather like a continent in terminal decline and certainly not one playing a dominant role in the global politics of the 21st century.
True in 2004, Europe enlarged to 25 nations and in 2007 to 27. But this also underlined the growing collective-action problems in Europe. How should a region leave a mark in global politics if member states had such different historical traditions, such diverse socioeconomic systems, and such incompatible institutional frameworks? How could there be purposeful actions if small member states that do not even cover a whole island, such as Greek Cyprus, can block the policy of the EU towards the vital Balkan region, as recently happened with respect to the independence of the Kosovo.
How could a region matter which for a peacekeeping mission in Chad to get off the ground had to borrow some helicopters from the Ukraine and from Russia? How can a region function which puts many years and tons of money into an effort to achieve a simplification of its decision-making process and to make them intelligible to the normal citizen-- the constitutional process-- and then finally, it ends up with a treaty which is every bit as cumbersome as its predecessors?
So I felt quite justified to entitle a lecture series that I organized in 2006 here at Cornell with appropriate gloom-- "Can the EU Survive?" Well, in the end, most of the speakers in this lecture series actually responded with a resounding yes, it can survive. And those that did not respond yes actually soon fled to George Mason University.
[LAUGHTER]
And I tend to agree with the "yes" fraction. And the reason is the following. If you look for purposeful action forward, this region performs not quite as bad as other regions. But it still looks rather limited and beset by all kinds of collective-action problems.
However, if you look at structural power that is shaping the conditions, norms, and perceptions under which others act, the record of the EU is quite impressive and, I argue, likely to grow. Some example-- recent research has shown that Europe has now overtaken the US as the major source of global standards. European precautionary standards seem to be more attractive to global consumers than the US tradition of doling out tough punishment after the crime has been committed. And that is not only true regarding product standards.
Second, two weeks ago, McKinsey published a report on global financial markets. And they suggested that Europe has actually now overtaken the US regarding the size of its financial markets. Witness how London replaces New York as the world's financial center. Certainly, the euro has to go a long way before it actually achieves parity with the dollar, but there are so many signs of a more bipolar currency system that the prediction seems not outlandish anymore that the euro will catch up very soon.
Third, Europe is the largest trading power in the world, according the influence. And it is also the largest donor of foreign aid in the world. Whether that is always distributed fairly or well is another question. Fourth, Europe also leads in environmental technology and in the reshaping of their socioeconomic systems to deal with climate change. And that is going to be an enormous competitive advantage in the next decade.
And finally, the much-hyped notion of Europe as a normative power, as a model-- we heard already a little bit about that. Well, if you look at European global activities, it is certainly quite hilarious to attribute any kind of saintliness to European activities and to Europe as a global power, as some Europhiles do. Or whether if you group the EU together with the US under Bush or Putin's Russia or China, things look quite a bit more positive.
Above all-- and I have noticed that more and more as I was staying here in the US-- the attractiveness of the European way of life is no empty phrase. Ask Cornell professors who've spent fellowships on the shores of Lake Como in Italy or the many Cornell students who told me enthusiastically about their studies abroad in Europe. Now, some of you might say, well, if you come from Ithaca and you're being sent to Paris, it's not surprising to end up in a kind of delirious state of mind.
[LAUGHTER]
But I think this would be unjust to Ithaca, which has a quite European feel. And I don't think it's surprising that this is the only place in upstate New York where housing prices are actually on the rise.
So to sum up, does Europe matter? I think it does indeed, despite all its faults. And a huge part of that attraction is due to the growing together of this region, which actually enhances the attractiveness and the style of life. And I predict that future US presidents will still make his or her first foreign visits to Europe and that this is going to stay like this for quite some time to come. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
PETER KATZENSTEIN: Well, I'm very glad to be here. But I must say, it's a little embarrassing. First of all, I show up late, not by European standards.
[LAUGHTER]
I was here at 4:45, which is Prussian punctuality. But by Japanese standards, you're supposed to be sitting in your chair 3 minutes before the meeting starts. The most embarrassing conference I ever attended was in my first meeting in Japan to walk into the meeting. It was a huge ballroom kind of affair. And there were 100 professors sitting around. It was 9 o'clock. I was there at 9 o'clock. There were 89 people in their chairs sitting, waiting. There wasn't a word spoken.
OK, I walked in. Then the proceedings started. I didn't speak any Japanese, by the way. This was not good.
And then secondly, I come under-dressed, which is no surprise, given the competition from Paris. So--
[APPLAUSE]
And finally, I'm informed as I walk in here that the title of the symposium is some bunch of random nouns taken out of one of my lectures. This certainly means that I'm vastly overpaid, and you are vastly underserved.
[LAUGHTER]
So but in any case, I'm glad to be here. And in some ways as present at the creation, which is the title of [INAUDIBLE] book talking about the post-war order. Here, it's present of the creation of a journal run by students, which connects the global to the local, with the national-- the French in particular-- in the middle.
So I think this is a great thing. And if those of you who are reading the articles on the global university in the New York Times, the last two, it's showing you something which is worthwhile thinking about it because globalization does create no new venues, new connections and very old-fashioned publications on paper. The next issue will be written by monks, OK, with quills. So but this will change, too, as we are entering the 21st century.
So I have one piece of advice, which I meant to offer to the organizers. But now realizing the size of the room, the crowd, and the bribe which goes with attending this, which is food and wine afterwards, that any student organization running a journal lasts an average of two years because the people who get the idea will graduate. And the last semester, they're not really up for doing much work.
So it rests on recruitment. And this organization starts off with a very strong base. It's a large organization. And recruiting the next generation is the most important thing, other than putting out the journal, OK?
We had a wonderful student publication on political and international affairs for more than a decade. And the secret was they made it work as a cohort, which would hand over each year to the next, OK? I hope you succeed in this.
All right, the title for my 12 and 1/2 to 15 minutes-- this was a Japanese script; I mean, we are very tightly programmed here-- I took from a printout. And then I looked very late on the program. So the printout says, "Will Regions Count in the 21st Century? Europe and the American [INAUDIBLE]."
The title actually is "Global Politics-- Will Regions Count in the 21st Century?" I think Hubert Zimmerman wasn't discovered yet as a speaker for today. So the Europe thumping now is there. We are pumping Europe up.
But there's, of course, something deeply baffling that is the topic. The first noun is global politics. And this is put together by the Cornell International Affairs Review.
Now, somebody was asleep at the wheel. It should be "International Politics-- Will Regions Count?" Or this would be the Cornell Global Affairs Review.
So my first point is around that difference-- global versus international. And related to it, what's the role of regions in space? And then I will go on to my second point, which is put a little cold water on Europe.
So in some ways, on the first point, global and international are almost synonyms for us. When I was in graduate school, which was in the last millennium, OK, neither term was used. The term used then was international interdependence.
And we were in the 1970s in the era of international interdependence. And we all studied as grad students how this interdependence in the '60s and the beginning of the '70s, in finance, in energy, how that compared to 1880 to 1914, when there were the bestsellers, like Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, published on the eve of World War I, saying international interdependence-- or what's now called globalization-- was at an all-time high. And it will be unprofitable to fight wars. We didn't have to worry about wars any longer. This was very much in the air, particularly around Wall Street in the 1990s, that worldview. And you can still encounter it occasionally in the editorial pages of the Financial Times.
But 9/11 changed that. 9/11 actually said, oh no, wait a minute. There is actually a world of international politics, where states are attacked, and states respond.
Now, in the case of 9/11, they were attacked. The United States was attacked by a non-state organization. That made it different from World War I.
So in some ways, globalization and internationalization-- they seem like similar concept. They describe a world of growing connection, of increases in dynamic density. And they seem to overlap. And yet, they are different. Where is the difference?
Internationalization or international affairs means exactly what the Latin root connotes-- between nations. It is the units which are acting are not effected dramatically other than they are being drawn together. That is the world of international politics, where the nation state continues to be the primary actor-- not the only actor, the primary actor.
The world of globalization chooses a different terminology because it sees-- the concept sees new connections, new actors, where the character or the identity of the basic units is being exchanged. It's no longer nation states. It's not that nation states are replaced or irrelevant. Something else is taking an important side role besides nation states. There, the character of the actors changes.
And if you take your courses in sociology and anthropology, the preferred way of conceptualizing the world is in terms of globalization-- the linkage between the global and the local, as very much in this journal, all right? If you take your social-science medication in the government department or in economics, the preferred conceptualization will be international. Economists don't think really about non-national markets. That's too hard.
The data on them, they don't think this way, OK? National markets is where the data tapes on the OECD and the IMF and UNR. And they're measuring national aggregates.
So the world, I assume, is a combination of both. And the political and intellectual task for us is to see these different strands, how they combine, and what difference it makes in their combination. So let me move to the second point under this first thing. What is the role of space or regions?
[BLOWING NOSE]
Excuse me.
Now, one is pretty obvious. The role of regions and the material aspects of world politics, like land or water, has been a staple of theorizing and acting in world politics for centuries, but for theorizing, only for the last 150 years. The tradition's called geopolitics. And it has been revived under the current administration.
There is a lot of [INAUDIBLE] policies indebted to geopolitical strategy. And it talks about water as dividing. You can't project your power across water as easily as across land, which sort of makes intuitive sense, until you discover that, of course, the Roman Empire was united and projected its power through water. The Mediterranean was a lake, which transported those soldiers, at low cost, to distant lands.
So water could do either one. It can unite, and it can divide. Water in modern transport is a very efficient and cheap way of transporting heavy goods-- aluminum ore, for example, or steel, OK? It's much better than any other form of transportation.
What about land? Well, land, in the history of world politics, there are buffer states. Well, buffer states can buffer world powers-- the Ottoman Empire, Russia, Britain, if you think about Afghanistan, something which is conceived of geopolitically by the present administration.
Well, it's been conceived of geopolitically for 150 years now. There's nothing new here, OK. It's an old fight.
But it can also be viewed-- land can be viewed also as an invitation to invasions, that it channels armies in a certain way. Think about the Fulda Gap in central Europe. So the material aspects of regions are under determining. They're clearly important. But they don't determine what's going to happen.
So what a second way of thinking about regions? And here, I invoke Ben Anderson, probably the most eminent professor in the government department, together with Martin [? Bernal ?] over the last generation. Neither of them is specialists in government. There's a message there, OK.
In his concept of imagined communities, nations as being something imagined-- so let's drop nations because we're talking about space and regions, and talk about Europe. And here is my personal vignette. I grew up studying Europe. Actually, I came to Cornell as the central European specialist.
That was quite an interesting concept to me. I had heard about it in Germany. It was-- and Germany's not quite legit to use as a category. It was not as bad as calling your first son Adolf. That was not good, OK.
But if you say it's central Europe, that evoked sort of political imagery of the beginning part of the 20th century, where there was [? Friedrich ?] [? Naumann. ?] And he said, well, we are actually good Germans. We don't fight wars. We conquer people through commerce and build a trade bloc, OK.
So I came to Cornell. And I was offered a position in central European politics because we had somebody who was teaching southern European politics. At that time, the Communist Party was very important in Italy and France. That was [? Cetero. ?] And we had another faculty member studying Britain. That was [? Targashuet. ?]
So I was going to round out the repertoire of European Studies at Cornell. That's how I arrived here. So I asked, before accepting the job offer, I say, well, what is central Europe?
And the answer was very compelling. Said, anything between Norway and Sicily. And I said, OK, I'm coming.
[LAUGHTER]
That seemed to be non-constraining. Europe in the 1970s was defined by this north-south axis, along the Iron Curtain. It made sense to me. I had spent a year in Vienna studying Austro-Hungarian history, OK. And I read all these strange things about places, which I didn't look up on the map, like Bratislava.
Bratislava is a tram ride from Vienna. It's about 45 minutes. Yah. So why did I not think of it? Because there was this Iron Curtain.
And the Iron Curtain was a speech. Churchill gave the speech at Fulton in 1946. But it had become, in the imagination, it had transformed from the imagination into the real world.
There was barbed wire there. You couldn't go there. You didn't have to know about it. That wasn't Europe.
Now comes 1989, November 11-- 9/11. Just to remind you that 9/11 for us, where we put the month first and the date second, means something quite different from 9/11 in Germany, where they put the month second and the date first. OK, November 9, 1989, the falling of the Berlin Wall-- it's one of those symbols where you can see that a symbol which supposedly in this global world means everything the same all over doesn't at all. 9/11 means two very different things in Germany and the United States.
Well, the wall falls. And suddenly, lo and behold, Europe is no longer defined from Norway to Sicily. It is now being defined as east versus west.
And that's the name of the game, which Europe has been playing-- he would mention it very briefly-- in the process of enlargement. Europe has grown to a continent, a political organization, of close to 500 million. OK, that's the east-west I mentioned.
Well, it required a lot of imagination and conceptual stretching to catch their politics. So besides the materiality of space, there is the imaginative part of space. And then finally, there's the third one-- the behavioral one.
It turns out to be true that if you're a devotee of regression analysis and you want to have really the best regressions in the world, location economics is it. You regress anything against space and distance, you get the tightest clusters-- 0.96, 0.97, 0.99. I read three volumes of Walter Isard's, who is a retired professor here at Cornell, Location Economics, 1955 to 1957.
Hundreds of graphs. You never find a correlation. He regressed everything again space-- anything you could think of. No regression less than 0.97. Unbelievable, OK.
Well, if you look now at gravity models of international trade, that's what economists say. Why is Canada so dependent on the United States? That has something to do with geographic proximity and the character of how the railway system evolved.
Now, if you now ask yourself, how active is the trade across the Canadian-American border compared to the-- now my geography gets stretched-- the trade between North and South Dakota and whatever it is on the Canadian side of the border-- those provinces-- it's a step level function more within the United States and within Canada than across the Canadian-US border. Political borders, even in North America, make a lot of difference. And that's part of the behavioral definition of regions.
So do regions matter in this global international world? Yes, they do but in very different ways. And in order to understand it, you have to be clear, not only about thinking how to disentangle globalization and internationalization, you also have to be clear about thinking, what aspect of space or spatiality do I want to track when I study world politics?
OK, let me be brief on the second one, putting cold water on Europe. This is an impolite way of doing this. But it will generate some intellectual tension, which is a good thing.
My prediction is-- and I'm willing to bet a bottle of wine, which Luis is going to provide, I'm going to drink, and Hubert is going to watch-- is that the American presidents in the next 40 years are going to take a whole lot more trips to Asia than to Europe. OK? That going to be my prediction. That has a lot to do, I think, with the demographic shift in this country-- if you just look at this audience-- and a lot with the revolution of world politics, which is happening in Asia.
There is something very important happening in Europe. I'm not doubting it. It is not a revolution. The revolution is happening in Asia.
And I think Europeans are so absorbed by the momentous changes which have come with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the enlargement process, and tendencies towards unification that they're a little bit too much engaged in navel-gazing. They take themselves just a tiny bit too serious. They still live in the world of the Mercator map.
Mercator was a German monk from the 16th century. And he created the map, which my generation stills remembers, which had central Europe in the middle of the universe, and it sort of thins out to the edges, OK. Africa and Latin America are very small compared to what they really are, OK?
I was in London at the end of the last semester after a very tough teaching semester trying to drill these three concepts into the unwilling heads of my undergraduate students. I walk into a map shop off Kensington Road. And I see this fabulous map hanging there. And it's a map produced in Kyoto in 1793. Only three exist-- this one in color, which was gorgeous, at 90,000 pounds-- yeah, and I couldn't buy it-- and two more in the Library of Congress.
And it focused on the Himalaya as the center of the universe, the religion part of it, right? Pretty accurate in characterizing the Philippines, Japan. Then there are these two little things in either corner.
Europe has the shape of it looks like a rhinoceros-- small rhinoceros, OK, tiny rhinoceros, floating. And then on the other side, [INAUDIBLE], he said, that's America. It had no shape at all whatsoever, OK.
Here was an imagined space but one which put, you know-- this is 1793. The history I was taught was that 1770 to 1820 was the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the British Empire. China outproduces Britain in virtually everything in 1790, OK? That map was very accurate. And I think Europeans will have to get with the message and restudy the map from 1793.
Now what is Europe as an actor? Luis wants to see Europe as a horse with a French rider. Will Europe get its act together and become an actor in a multipolar state with a Napoleon, Sarkozy president? It's not going to happen, Luis.
[LAUGHTER]
OK? The world is different. We are not going to recreate superpowers because we've got too many smart students in Ithaca creating lots of local connections. The political super structure isn't going to be there.
Europe is a polity of the kind which the Holy Roman Empire was. Very important. It provides a constitution, a normative framework of the kind which Hubert was saying. But creating another French state? Not a chance.
I won't say never. Never say never. After all, one quarter of the French spoke French at the time of the French Revolution.
And France became a nation state-- quite surprising, actually, right? So I won't say never, but I think the odds are really against it. And that's the Europe.
And then there is this America. I just went to the Lafayette exhibit. I had seen the one in city museum in New York, the Historical Society, which is wonderful. It's on Lafayette's tour, 1824-1825, where he makes a big tour before he dies throughout the United States.
There's one bookcase on the tour. But the rest is very important. Lafayette being one of six citizens-- foreign citizens-- granted honorary citizenship by Ronald Reagan or no, no-- by act of Congress in 2002, I think.
So here is Europe. And here is the United States. Here is Venus, and here is Mars.
Here are the people who do peace-keeping. And here are the people who are fighting wars. It seems like black and white, listening to my two previous speakers.
I think the two are gray and gray. They are sort of the same thing. And if you wanted to generalize, we would say, they are two variants of the West, one extreme West-- in Texas, you know-- and the other one a moderate West, not so moderate, actually.
If you go to Vienna, it's pretty extreme. They don't like Turkey. Turkey is not part of Europe.
I think the Viennese and the Texans-- they got a lot in common, OK? Why the Viennese? They never forgot about 1683, the siege of Vienna, OK?
So I see them as related, as I see the Japanese and Chinese related. That's East. That's Asia.
These are the two small games in town. Where is the big game? Where is the global civilization, the one which connects East and West? And that's Islam, a non-state form of global organization, which is now becoming much more important because it exists from Indonesia to North Africa and exists in diasporic form in most societies. And we'd better start thinking about it. And the concept of reason, which I used in the hybrid of globalization and internationalization are not bad ways of starting to think about Islam.
I think Europe needs to be put in its place. And it doesn't mean it needs to be diminished. It just needs to be put in context. And that context for me is broader.
So concepts like transatlantic relations, which seems so precise, are actually concealing our ignorance. They blame globalization and internationalization. And they don't get really to the core of what we mean when we say Europe or what we mean when we say United States.
How do we learn more?
[SLAPS PODIUM]
By writing articles and reading them in the Cornell International Affairs Review. It looks like a lusty baby. I'm into lusty babies these days. My first grandchild is about to be born. Congratulations.
[LAUGHTER]
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SPEAKER 2: All right. So we'd like to take questions if anybody's got any for-- no questions?
SPEAKER 3: For either of our speakers.
SPEAKER 2: For any of our speakers, yeah.
SPEAKER 3: OK.
SPEAKER 4: To the question of institutional organization, if there is still something to be gained from just-in-time production in certain manufacturing circles, then the land bridge does become the compelling one. And anything that facilitates movement between states on that front would create demand, I think, for an institutional framework above the national level, the one that Europhiles like to fantasize over when the dream of [INAUDIBLE] at night, right?
And I'm wondering, at least to the extent that we see regional groupings throughout virtually every continent or subcontinent of the world, to what extent this institutional map, this constitutional design at the supernational level will carry influence in this broader supernational reorganization.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: No doubt that markets have institutional structures. So where does the German railway system make its most money? Not in transporting people. In transporting goods through logistics.
The goods get carried in containers. The container travels in part over water and sometimes over land, OK. And you can now-- it's like your Federal Express message. You know, you've got your stuff in a container, like I want to [INAUDIBLE] or something.
I can track it on my computer-- where it is right now. Oh, Kansas, great. [? Colby, ?] oh fabulous, OK. I better get on the airplane to get to my [INAUDIBLE] furniture [INAUDIBLE].
So I think markets have created these institutional infrastructures. Multinational corporations have a whole lot more underwater cable than the CIA by a factor of 10 in the 1970s. I haven't studied how the technology has evolved since on the web or something. But I'm sure that the communication and transportation logistics infrastructure of markets is vastly more superior to what nation states come up with.
So I would say, yes, political conditions around those can be helpful. Or they can be hurtful. But right now, over the last 20 or 30 years, I'd say it's like water running down the mountain. I mean, the natural pull of gravity is market efficiencies and complementarities.
Politicians have a very hard time putting anything up to stop it. This is not to say that they've given up. And it's not to say that they couldn't. If you had a collapse in the financial system, for example, in the world, I think we would go back to another form of organizing markets. But right now, markets are largely self-organized.
SPEAKER 3: Yes.
SPEAKER 5: For either of you or I guess both of you, do you think that the EU will eventually accept Turkey's membership? If so, then when?
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: Oh, wow. Good question. I'm rather skeptical that the EU will actually accept Turkish membership. But I'm not-- I wouldn't say like with 90% certainty. So I wouldn't bet a lot on it because I think there are compelling reasons for the EU to actually accept Turkey.
One of the major reasons why the people tend to be skeptical is a concern with the functioning of the European Union. I don't think that that and further countries in the European Union will matter a lot. And since the EU anyway changed into the shape of differing kind of core Europes in different functional areas, it's not that grave.
So I also do not think that Europe will become a kind of closed super state or something like this. So I don't subscribe to that position of Europe growing to become a super state, but rather a kind of more diffuse, globalized actor, which shapes the world in this way with all the kind of-- however, regarding the religious reason, which is probably also into kind of historical reasons, with the Viennese still being very much worried, well, this is a topic which is very, very hot now.
And the question of religion is, of course, a kind of core question right now. But I think it can disappear as an essential factor as quickly as it's appeared so that the pressures that derive from economic integration or from migration and so on might easily kind of overcome these religious differences. And in the end, with Europe growing towards Eastern Europe and crossing the Iron Curtain, so to say, you've got a lot of religious divergence already within Europe.
So I think it will probably not become a member in the future. And it's not really damaging to Turkey to not become a member in the end. But I wouldn't bet on it. So I'm not completely negative about it. And I think it will be a good thing for the European Union.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: Let me put a little edge on that.
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: OK.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: Here is how the Europeans look at America, saying, what is this country? They believe in the virgin birth, and they don't believe in Darwin. This is crazy. The Americans are nuts, OK? They pray at meetings at the White House.
We are past that. We are the people of the cosmopolitanism, of enlightenment. Yeah, we did bad and evil things until World War II. But now we've mended our way, right? That's sort of the self-understanding of secular, progressive, cosmopolitan, liberal, multi-lateral-- put all the good adjectives in there-- Europe.
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So now comes religion in the last four or five years. And suddenly, we see that religion is a core part of how Europe defines itself. If you go-- you know, I did interviewing in the 1980s in Bonn-- it was still Bonn then-- and said, well, let's think about Yugoslavia. What's your view?
And they say, oh, very simple. And I say, what's simple about it? Because people were saying, what will happen after [INAUDIBLE], saying, Croatia is part of Europe. Serbia isn't.
I said, oh, and why is that? The Catholic church wasn't Croatia, and Serbs were Orthodox. It's very simple. Europe was defined-- the eastern border with [INAUDIBLE] Empire was defined by religion.
So the secularism is truly there. But Christianity as a cultural trope for self-understanding is very deep in Europe. And suddenly, it gets activated by a secularist Islamic democratic government, saying, eh, we'd like to get in, right.
And here, you can see how religion, within five years-- I mean, Danish cartoons on November 2005, the whole thing really in the last five years-- has the Europeans-- has made the Europeans more European than 50 years before of market integration. They know who they are not. That is the negative definition of who is not in is much more important than the positive one.
And there's one other negative. It's not just Turkey. They are not the old Europeans. They hate themselves in the past. That's almost as bad as being Turkish, OK?
So Europe as an identity is negatively defined, and you can see this in the last five years. You see it in survey research. You see it in elections. It's explosive not of the moment. It is constitutive of European identity.
So it comes right back to globalization versus internationalization. You're seeing identity being formed, not on very pleasant grounds. And I fully agree with you, but I think it would be much better for Europe to broaden out. After all, Islam was part of Europe.
If you think about the most advanced enlightened part of Europe, it was in southern Spain. You go to the [INAUDIBLE], there is nothing like it. And they didn't burn it down when they left-- they, uncivilized Muslims.
That was the center of Europe. You wanted to be as close to southern Spain as you could, if you were an intellectual in the 12th century. Time for another turn. Maybe Europe should grow.
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: Well, probably, I should add some skeptical notes to that because I don't--
PETER KATZENSTEIN: That's what we're supposed to do. So--
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: --agree for three reasons. First, you were mentioning southern Spain and the culture there. If you look at the three religions that you mentioned-- Catholicism, Orthodox-- they are all in some way also kind of Mediterranean religions. So there is also a kind of common ground-- also Judaism. So I wouldn't say the difference is in this stark way.
Also, you mention Serbia. You could have mentioned also Bosnia, Albania. They will eventually get in. I don't think they will be kept out over the long run, whether they are Muslim countries or not, which will also reduce the divide.
And then the European identity defined against something-- I think German identity for quite some time was defined against France. So that also vanished. So I wouldn't be so strict on the religious--
PETER KATZENSTEIN: No, no, you're an optimist. This is good.
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: No.
SPEAKER 3: Yes.
SPEAKER 6: I was just wondering if you could speak to the post-communism's effects, the Yogoslav wars, and how it's impacting the Kosovo decision, or why it's not impacting the Kosovo decision in a different way that the Balkanization has, like, taken [INAUDIBLE] direction.
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: [INAUDIBLE].
PETER KATZENSTEIN: [INAUDIBLE]
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: Go ahead.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: OK. So the question is about the post-communist Yugoslavia and what's up in Kosovo and Bosnia, right?
SPEAKER 6: Yeah. It just occurred to me that how different post-communism is here than it is in Europe. So--
PETER KATZENSTEIN: How post-communism is different where?
SPEAKER 6: In the US.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: In the US?
SPEAKER 6: As it is opposed to in Europe. It's very different.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: Post-communism in the US?
SPEAKER 6: Well, the idea of 1989--
PETER KATZENSTEIN: I see.
SPEAKER 6: --is much more profound in Europe than it is here.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: Yes, yes, right. So it's much more profound because Europe was divided, right? So that many European countries paid a heavy price.
First, they were conquered, occupied, raped, pillaged by the Nazis. And they were occupied by the Soviet Union, OK. So the fact that post-communism somehow has a much larger standing politically and matters more in Europe is not surprising.
But what's the effect in Yugoslavia? You know, if you go back to the onset of the Yugoslav wars, Yugoslavia didn't matter. Everyone was looking to Russia. What we do in Yugoslavia, will it set a precedent for the Soviet Union [INAUDIBLE]?
The process-- the self-- no, the national self-determination in the Balkans was viewed against the probability that it would have repercussions in the Soviet Union. And everybody in Europe said, uh-uh, we want the Soviet Union to hang together. Only when the Soviet Union broke apart did this recognition move then start, OK.
And the Europeans, particularly the Germans-- particularly the German foreign minister at the time-- was unencumbered by history, unencumbered by the notion of that wars are possible in Europe. And just, they just went ahead, OK. And they learned their lesson. They said, oh no, better be careful.
So now with Kosovo, everybody's looking at Russia, not the Soviet Union, Russia. How are the Russians reacting?
And the Russians don't like it. And so they're trying to compromise. They're trying to temporize. And they say, well, it depends on what the Serbian elections. They voted for the right guy by a plurality of 5% or 10%.
But everybody is extremely nervous because if you do it against Russia, Russia is going to harden its policy on energy and other things. That will have repercussions for Europe as it enlarges to the East. So Russia turns out to be important at the beginning and now but for very different reasons.
SPEAKER 3: We have time for one more question. OK.
SPEAKER 7: I-- so-- I'm sorry. Which one of us?
SPEAKER 3: I'm sorry. I think [INAUDIBLE].
SPEAKER 7: OK, sorry. So this was touched on a little bit earlier, that you mentioned a demographic shift in the US. While this room is not representative of the United States, I assume you're referring to the Asian population, which is around 4% and is not going to grow as rapidly as the Latin American population in the United States. Similarly in Europe, the demographics are that, you know, if you admit Turkey or if you don't admit Turkey, the Muslim population is going to increase much more rapidly than the existing European population.
The models of success for recent immigrants indicate that if you want to be successful in a new country, in a new culture, you don't challenge the established system. You work your way through the existing power structures. How do you see regionalism in Europe, and to some extent in North America and the changing demographics as far as their ability to come to grips with the major 21st-century issues? Is this change in demographics going to make it easier or harder?
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: Well, as regards Europe, the change in demographics, I think the first thing that has to be stated is it's probably a little bit exaggerated. And if you look at the statistics, you see that Muslim immigrants that are often reputed to have lots and lots of children who are suppose to overtake the Europeans very soon, if you look at the second generation, it's almost the same as the non-immigrant population. So there's still a long way of that kind of migrant impact becoming really a very, very extremely powerful force in Europe, something which is conjured up in all our [? missed ?] predictions, especially by American conservatives.
So what's the sense of your-- I mean, the final question again? Just to--
SPEAKER 7: Well, I guess, to the extent that the demographics are changing, will it make it easier or harder for regions, either as regions to function, or for the global aspect to bring about some change and to work on the major problems of the 21st century? Or is it going to be more restricted because of the change in demographics? I'm not sure if that's [INAUDIBLE].
HUBERT ZIMMERMAN: Yeah, I mean, I don't think that it's going to make a huge difference how the actual composition of people in Europe, at least, is going to be because it's anyway, it's a multinational community. And all the different European countries have their migrant communities and deal with them in different ways and had that for quite a long time. And it didn't make a difference in the way the region could actually act together or act [INAUDIBLE] abroad.
For the US, certainly, I mean, the connections with Latin America will become stronger, simply because people are linked there and because they are sending their remittances there. I think, however, that the American political system is not geared towards creating a functioning region, which means also giving up some sovereignty, which is similar to the way that the Europeans did it.
What you're going to have is a kind of similar thing that Peter Katzenstein described in his world of regions. The transnational networks are growing, will be growing together stronger in Latin America and in the United States. And that, of course, will have a huge impact. But I don't think that the international frame they are dealing with each other will become more kind of integrated in a regional way.
So it's the global thing will grow together but not the international component. That's my take.
PETER KATZENSTEIN: I think he was right. I always compare regions to Swiss cheese-- lots of holes, all right? And that's just saying it's a global and international world. But the interesting part of your question is, of course, what, given these demographic changes, which of the two parts of within the West, the United States or Europe, is better equipped for the future? And there, I think, if you look at the intensity of the politics in both parts right now about immigration in this country, which is tearing apart the Republican Party, and over the Turkish accession in Europe, both of them are confronting a very serious problem.
But in the longer term given, whites will be a minority in the United States by the year 2050. The Barack campaign-- the Obama campaign is a view of the future. And I think the United States has an easier time with multiculturalism than does Europe because the proportion of non-Europeans in Europe-- take Muslims, it's 20 million right now in a population of, what, 480 million or so. Now, that's being talked up by politicians about the Islamic bomb and everything.
But let's put this in proportion to the foreign-born population in the United States, OK. And I regard foreign-born as cultural capital in a world which will be increasingly plural. So I think the United States doesn't have to be afraid of Europe taking over the world.
SPEAKER 2: Thank you, professors.
SPEAKER 3: Thank you very much. Please stick around for refreshments in the back room.
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LUIS-FRANCOIS DE LENCQUESAING: If I can just hold your attention for another minute--
Whether the European Union or Asia will reign as the global regional power this century was the focus of a recent panel discussion to celebrate a new Cornell student journal, the Cornell International Affairs Review (CIAR).
At the panel discussion held Feb. 13 in the A.D. White House, an overflow audience listened to Peter Katzenstein and Hubert Zimmerman, both Cornell professors of government and members of CIAR's board of advisers, discuss "Global Politics: Will Regions Count in the 21st Century?"
"This is a critical moment for international affairs," said Luis-François de Lencquesaing '10, vice president of CIAR, who introduced the two professors. Both addressed the international power of Europe as a region and the individual nation-states constituting the European Union.
