Catalonia declares independence from Spain. Northern Italian regions vote on increasing autonomy from Rome. And these are just the latest secessionist and independence movements making news in Europe. We’ve invited a panel of experts to learn more about nationalism and secessionism and potential implications for the European Union. Join our panel of experts to learn more. In-person or remote participation in this virtual roundtable is possible, and audience questions are encouraged.

Moderator
Jae-Jae Spoon, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh

What is the power of study abroad for forging new identities? For this installment of our monthly Conversations on Europe series, we will look at the EU’s billion-dollar student and scholar exchange program called ERASMUS, which has reshaped higher education in Europe. With what results? How successful has the program been for the Europeanization of Europe’s college-aged youth? And what impact will Brexit have on the program?

Part of German Campus Week and the ESC's Participation and Democracy series for 2017-18.

Panelists:
Annika Schechinger, Deputy Director of the Information Center USA, German Embassy
Tarik Abou-Chadi, Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Humboldt-University Berlin
Mark Kayser, Professor of Applied Methods and Comparative Politics, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
Gregor Thum, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh

This interactive panel will discuss how displacement has affected employees and industries locally and globally. It will cover reasons for displacement and how different industries, regions, or countries tackle these issues.

Economic great powers export domestic regulatory policies and force the costs of adjustment onto foreign firms and governments. Such arguments about market power regularly examine economic great powers in isolation and, thus, have less to say about a world governed increasingly by economic multipolarity. In their paper, Dr. Newman and his associates argue that a great power’s ability to force foreign actors into adjusting is not only conditioned by their relative economic clout but also by the political institutions that govern their markets.

Few historians have asked about 'development' as an idea unfolding within one specific historical space and representing three big socioeconomic regimes: capitalism, developing/post-colonial economy and socialism. Witnessing transformation of Poland from a supply hinterland of Western Europe (and a space of economic exploitation under Nazi rule), into a modernizing socialist nation-state, Polish economists studied these socio-economic systems comparatively and in a world perspective.

This Graduate Student Workshop follows on the previous day's lecture on Culture and Security. Master's and Ph.D. students in GSPIA, History, and Political Science researching security issues are especially welcome. Participants will explore the emerging interdisciplinary field of culture and security studies through a set of readings distributed in advance and will discuss research projects. To sign up, please contact Zsuzsánna Magdó, Assistant Director for Partnerships and Programs.

Security studies have given surprisingly little attention to cultural diversity as a constituent factor in the overall dynamics of security management. A case in point is that securitization theory still refers to cultural differences mainly as a source for conflict and therefore as an object of securitization. So far, cultural codes, linguistic barriers, and processes of self-identification did not constitute an important aspect of analysis. Culture as a value based concept and as a group marker, however, is not per se a primary source of conflict.

The nineteenth century saw the explosion of questions: the Eastern, social, Jewish, Polish, worker and many other questions were hotly discussed in representative bodies, at treaty negotiations, and above all in the daily press. Over the course of the next century, these would be conglomerated into still bigger ones—the European, nationality, social, and agrarian questions—even as they fractured into countless smaller ones, like the Macedonian and Schleswig-Holstein questions, and made their way into various fields of human endeavor (there was cotton, oyster, and even a sugar question).