U.S. President George W. Bush came to power emphasizing that he did not regard nation-building as an appropriate activity for the U.S. military. As he prepares to run for re-election, the United States is engaged in two of the most ambitious nation-building projects in its history in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. undertook a lead role in part because of the circumstances in which the two conflicts commenced, but also as an extension of the present administration's more general opposition to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. Though the United States determined that it did not need the UN going into Iraq, however, it appears that it has belatedly realized it might need the UN in order to get out.

Simon Chesterman is Executive Director of the Institute for International Law and Justice at New York University School of Law. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Senior Associate at the International Peace Academy and Director of UN Relations at the International Crisis Group in New York. He had previously worked for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Belgrade and at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha.

He is the author of You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2001), which was awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit. He is the editor, with Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh Thakur, of Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance (United Nations University Press, forthcoming) and of Civilians in War (Lynne Rienner, 2001). He regularly contributes to international law and political science journals, as well as mass media publications such as the International Herald Tribune. His has taught at the Universities of Melbourne, Oxford, Southampton, and Columbia.

Francis Fukuyama is Dean of Faculty and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Fukuyama's book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. It made the bestseller lists in the United States, France, Japan, and Chile, and has been awarded the Los Angeles Times' Book Critics Award in the Current Interest category, as well as the Premio Capri for the Italian edition. He is also the author of Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995), The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (1999), and Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002). His book State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century will be published by Cornell University Press in the spring of 2004.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. He has, in recent years, focused on the role of culture and social capital in modern economic life, and on the social consequences of technological change.

A buffet lunch will be available to those who RSVP by 12:00 p.m. Monday, May 3 to Debbie Warren at dawarren@stanford.edu. Douglas H. Paal is the director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial instrument for U.S. relations with Taiwan. Previously, he was president of the Asia Pacific Policy Center (APPC), a nonprofit institution in Washington, DC, which advocated bipartisan policy in the promotion of trade and investment, as well as defense and security ties across the Pacific. Prior to forming the APPC, Mr. Paal was special assistant to President Bush for National Security Affairs and senior director for Asian Affairs on the National Security Council, where he also served in the Reagan Administration. Mr. Paal has worked in the State Department with the Policy Planning Staff and as a senior analyst for the CIA. He also served in the U.S. Embassies in Singapore and Beijing. He studied Asian history at Brown and Harvard Universities and the Japanese language in Tokyo. He has published frequently on Asian affairs and national security issues.

In this paper, I draw on the experience of the European Union (EU) to ask under what conditions economic integration furthers democratization. Scholars agree that incentives at the European level have helped democratic transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe. However, there is no agreement on (i) the exact causal mechanisms involved, (ii) the relative size of the effects, (iii) whether this success can be replicated outside or Europe. I address these issues by offering a theory of how integration furthers democratization. I argue economic integration can help citizens resolve the coordination dilemmas they face in holding their rulers accountable. Integration works in two ways: (a) through diffusion of civic culture, it enables citizens to second-guess each other's likely actions in the event of government abuse, (b) through credible conditionality, integration removes the ability of the ruler to lean on some support coalitions while abusing others. An empirical test of the theory strongly confirms that economic integration leads to democracy when its culture-spreading aspect is strongly backed by conditionality. An important aspects of the theory is that it generalizes. The theory and evidence suggest that there are substantial unexploited opportunities for encouraging democracy in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.