About the Event:

President George W. Bush has called the decade before September 11 the "years of sabbatical." The popular misconception that America was too distracted to focus on foreign policy obscures the significant debates both inside and outside government to define a new purpose for the world's lone superpower. The end of the Cold War had a profound impact on the Democratic and Republican parties, and a reexamination of the efforts across the political spectrum to articulate a new grand strategy after containment is instructive for understanding how American elites think about issues like democracy promotion, the role of international institutions, and the use of force.

About the Speaker

James Goldgeier is a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. In 2005-06, he held the Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Library of Congress. He taught previously at Cornell University, and he has been a visiting scholar at Brookings and Stanford. In 1995-96, he was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow serving at the State Department and National Security Council Staff. His most recent book, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War, co-authored with Michael McFaul, received the 2004 Georgetown University Lepgold book prize in international relations. He is also the author of Not Whether but When: The U.S. Decision to Enlarge NATO (Brookings, 1999) and Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins, 1994), which received the Edgar Furniss book award in national and international security. He graduated magna cum laude in government from Harvard University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley. He is currently co-authoring a book for Public Affairs on American foreign policy from 1989 to 2001.

About the Speaker:

Sheri Berman is Associate Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests focus on issues of comparative political development, European politics and history, globalization, social theory, and history of the Left. Some of her recent publications include: "The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Ideological Dynamics of the Twentieth Century" (2006, Cambridge University Press); "Violence, Conflict, and Civil Society," Mittelweg, Spring 2006 (academic paper); "Islamism, Revolution, and Civil Society," Perspectives on Politics, 1, 2, June 2003 (academic paper). Berman received her B.A. (1987) from Yale, and M.A. (1990) and PhD. (1994) from Harvard.

About the Event:

The best way to understand how stable, well-functioning democracies develop is to analyze the political trajectories such countries have actually taken. For the most part, this means looking at Western Europe and North America. When we look carefully at these cases we see that the political backstory of most democracies is one of struggle, conflict and even violence. Problems and even failures did not mean that democracy would be impossible to achieve some day; in fact, they can in retrospect often be seen to be integral parts of the long-term processes through which non-democratic institutions, elites, and cultures were delegitimized and eventually eliminated, and their democratic successors forged. An important reason many do not seem to realize this is because of a lack of historical perspective: contemporary analysts often ignore or misread the often messy and unattractive manner in which the current crop of stable democracies actually developed. Understanding past cases better is thus a crucial step toward putting today's democratization and democracy promotion discussions into proper intellectual and historical context.