- Hello everybody and welcome.
How is everybody today?
Great.
Well, I'm delighted to
have the opportunity
to be giving the DeVane Lectures.
And the DeVane Lectures, as you can tell,
from looking around you double as being
a regular Yale course for credit
that students can take for credit
and lectures that are open
to the general public.
These lectures are going to
deal with power and politics
in today's world and by today's world,
I'm gonna mean the 30 years since 1989
and the 30 years since 1989 are
and have been an incredibly
tumultuous period
of very great change.
And that's for xxx unusual.
For instance, if you compare
it to the previous 40 years
in most of the advanced
capitalist democracies,
they were a period of relative stability
after World War II.
In most countries, it was
an era of great prosperity
even countries recovering
from World War II
like the countries of
Europe were being rebuilt
with Marshal Plan aid and it was a period,
partly for demographic reasons,
of very great political stability
for people who grew up in that period.
Internationally, as well, it was a period
of very great stability because partly,
because of the Cold War.
It's true we had episodes
like the Cuban Missile Crisis
and the Vietnam War but as
the Vietnam War indicates,
most of the conflicts within the Cold War
were played out as you like, as proxy wars
in other parts of the world.
From the point of view of the citizens
of the Western democracies,
except for those who are
actually fighting in Vietnam,
it was a far-off war that
didn't have a great impact
on the stability of people's lives
and that is very different
from what has been experienced
since 1989; time, if you like,
has speeded up a great deal.
We've seen incredible
change in three decades.
And those are the three decades
that I am going to be exploring.
One pedagogical challenge that presents
is that for some of us in this room,
the last three decades
are etched into our minds
as like it was yesterday.
We experienced them in real time
but there are many people in this room
who were never born until long after that.
For them, whether it's the last 40 years
or the last 60 years,
40 years or the 60 years
after World War II, it's all history.
One of the first things I need to do
and I'm gonna try and make
this a regular practice
during the course is I
need to take everybody back
and to make people
understand who weren't there
what it was like and then to remind people
who've lived through it of things
that they might have forgotten.
So let's just go back to 1989 in Berlin.
- The Berlin Wall, once
it divided East from West,
now on its way to becoming
an artifact of history.
(upbeat music)
This the CBS Evening News.
Dan Rather, reporting
tonight from in front
of the Brandenburg Gate
in Berlin, Germany.
Good evening.
These are the sights and sounds
of the continuing celebration of Germans
about the symbolic, not the
literal, at least, not yet
but the symbolic tearing
down of the Berlin Wall.
It's impossible to completely describe
how deeply Germans feel
about what's happened here.
East German border guards tonight
were literally tearing down
portions of the wall itself,
not the whole wall but
portions of the wall
to make it easier for East
Germans to come into West Berlin
and as the joyous hordes of Berliners
were still streaming through the wall,
the East German communist government said
they can come and go permanently,
they can come into West
Berlin, have a look
and then come back home again
with no special documents required.
Today, what goes through
your mind and heart?
- Well, of course, I look
back to all those years
of hardship for the
families even more than
for the country as a whole and it's moving
to see families getting together again.
My feeling is that we are very close
to an end of the artificial
division of Berlin
and I also believe we
are close to the point
where the parts of Germany will
become much closer together.
This, of course,
only within the reasonable
European framework.
Anyone know who that was?
Xxx Billy Braun, the former
Chancellor of Germany
who actually would die a couple of years,
three years after that,
so he was one of the
celebratory crowd at that time.
So that might give you a
little sense of the shock
and the enthusiasm that people experienced
in the latter days of 1989.
This had been a period
in which the Soviet Union
was clearly losing its
grip on Eastern Europe.
It wasn't just Germany.
Right across Eastern
Europe, all through 1989,
there had been these massive
resistance movements developing
and the Soviet Union was losing,
it was clearly not in
a position to intervene
in these countries.
And they were shedding
totalitarian control
for the first time in decades.
Of course, the great exception
which we will be talking
about next week was in China
where demonstrations in Tiananmen Square
that June had come out,
meant a very different result
but in most of the world, after 1989,
it seemed like democracy was on the March.
We saw the democratization of all
of the former Soviet Union bloc
countries in Eastern Europe
even places like South
Africa which had been mired
in a bitter conflict for
decades transitioned in
the early 1990s to a
multi-racial democracy.
The problems in Northern
Ireland finally settled
with the Good Friday Accords in 1997.
Even Israel-Palestine which had been one
of the most intractable
conflicts for decades and decades
seemed to be moving towards a
resolution in the early 1990s.
There were the Oslo Accords, the PLO
and the Israeli government
were negotiating a settlement.
Anyone who was in Israel or the West Bank
at that time anticipated
that there was going
to be a settlement until the assassination
of one of the key
protagonists, Yitzhak Rabin
in November of 1995.
And that would lead to an unraveling
of that potential settlement
but in the early 1990s,
it's really I think difficult to overstate
the enthusiasm for change.
This is the period when Francis Fukuyama
was talking about the end of history
by which he meant that liberal democracy
was sweeping the world.
In fact, at the turn of the 21st century,
we finally went from a world
in which most countries
in the world were not democracies
by most standard measures
to a world in which most
countries were democracies
by most standard measures.
So it's not surprising that
one would have had the kind
of enthusiasm that
Fukuyama had at that time
and that was almost,
what's the word?
Just snowballing across so
much of the developed world.
Enormous confidence in
democratic capitalism
and enormous confidence in the idea
that many people were gonna
be lifted out of poverty
and that the world was heading
for a kind of benign equilibrium,
as an economist would say,
Fukuyama's end of history idea.
now let's fast-forward three decades
and let's stay in Germany and
here's a very different thing
to look at.
(speaking in foreign language)
(audience cheering)
(speaking in foreign language)
So he's a leader of the
Alternative for Deutschland,
far-right anti-immigrant,
anti-system political party
and what he is celebrating
is that they have
crossed the 5% threshold.
This is the AFP here on this graph.
Germany has a 5% threshold to get seated
in the parliament so if you
don't get 5%, you get no seats,
they hadn't gotten 5% before
and now they had won 5%
and so they saw themselves
as getting a foothold
in German electoral
politics for the first time.
Germany, in 2017 was
coming out of a situation
in which there had been a grand coalition
between the SPD which is the left
of said Social Democratic Party
and the right of center CDU,
Christian Democratic Party
led by Angela Merkel.
And the SPD were very unhappy,
they had been in this grand
coalition for a long time
and they found that they
were paying a huge price
with their supporters.
They were getting less
and less of the vote
for reasons we'll talk
about later in the course
and they announced that they
were not gonna participate
in a grand coalition again
and they were gonna go
into opposition and rebuild themselves.
Angela Merkel then spent
the next six months,
Alternative for Deutschland were and still
are seen as beyond the pale,
nobody will form a government with them.
So she spent the next six months trying
to put together a coalition
with the Green Environmentalist Party
and the so-called Free Democrats.
The Free Democrats would be
what we would think of as,
in this country, as
Rand Paul libertarians.
They are for small
government, low regulation
across the board.
It's not surprising
that she couldn't do it
because the greens want green regulation.
They want environmental regulation.
That's their raison d'etre
and the Free Democrats
want no regulation or
certainly, less regulation.
So they stumbled along in
and out of negotiations
but they weren't able to form a coalition.
However, over the course
of that six months,
all the opinion polls showed that the AFD,
the Alternative for Deutschland
was actually rising in popularity.
And so the German
president was very against
having another election in
the face of the stalemate
with the Social Democrats refusing
to join in a grand
coalition on the one hand
and Merkel's inability to construct
a different coalition on the other.
They all knew that if they
went for another election,
the AFD would do even better.
So finally, after much hand-wringing,
the SPD was persuaded after extracting
a very big set of concessions,
including six ministries
and the Finance Ministry.
They were persuaded to go
back into a grand coalition
even though a lot of their
membership didn't want it.
So terrified were they of the
prospect of another election
in which the far right
would do even better.
So we thought German politics
was kind of settling down
at this point but the following year,
this is what you see happening.
- [Presnter] German
Chancellor, Angela Merkel,
who's led Germany for 13
years has offered to step down
as her party's leader
and said she won't run
for office again after
her term ends in 2021.
Her announcement came
a day after her party,
the Christian Democratic Union,
saw a disappointing performance
in a key regional election
in the state of Hesse.
The far-right, Alternative
for Germany party
claimed more than a dozen
seats in Hesse's Parliament
for the first time.
The entire migrant
party now controls seats
in all 16 of Germany's state Parliament's
plus the National Bundestag
and European Parliament.
- So there it is.
They had also done very poorly
in the Bavarian regional elections.
They had hemorrhaged about
10% of their vote to the AFD
in these regional
elections and by the way,
the SPD wasn't very happy either
because they were hemorrhaging
support to the greens.
And this is something
we'll see playing out
in many European countries.
The establishment parties are
shrinking and becoming weaker
and the parties on the fringes are growing
and becoming stronger.
And it was impossible
not to start thinking
about the past and thinking particularly
about the 1920s and 30s.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Presenter] As a result of
the elections of July, 1932,
the Nazis became the
biggest party in Germany
with 37% of the vote.
- So if you wanna go back to the 1930s,
you can see that that video was
about the July 1932 election
and you can see what happened
in the subsequent elections
that it was a very unstable system.
They were having multiple
elections and of course,
18 months later, Hitler came to power.
And if you go to Germany,
you hear very anxious people talking about
is this back to the future?
Is 2017 and 2018 some kind
of replay of the empowerment
of extremist parties and of course,
it wasn't just Germany.
In 2016 we had massive shocks delivered
to establishment parties
with the Brexit result
in the UK and Donald
Trump's populist stampede
to the presidency in the US,
both widely unanticipated outcomes by most
of the establishment parties,
pundits and politicians.
And you could go around the world.
In the Austrian elections of 2016,
people are very relieved
that in the runoff,
the Green candidate actually
defeated the far-right
quite handsomely by 54 to 46%
but if you look at the legislature,
again, you see the
far-right gaining ground,
the establishment parties
coming in fourth and fifth
in the 2017 legislative elections.
These are the parties that would normally
have come in first and second
while the far-right
party increased its vote,
putting them a close third with 51 seats,
while the Greens fell below
the threshold and won nothing
or if you look at Belgium,
you see a center-right party
retains its majority but if
you drill down a little bit,
you can see that there
was an increase of support
for the far-right Flemish Vlaams Belang
which received almost 12%
of the vote gaining seats.
If you look at Italy, you can see
the center-left party ceding
power to the center-right
but many of the votes for
the center-right party
are coming from the league, so-called,
again, a far right-wing populist party
which ends up with 125 seats
and 17% of the popular vote, of 109 seats
and I could put up another
seven or eight or nine slides
of different countries that
basically tell the same stories
in country after country across Europe
both Eastern Europe and Western Europe,
including countries that
we thought of as bastions
of civil social democratic
stability like Sweden.
You see these far-right
parties doing well,
Turkey, Latin America, elsewhere,
where anti-establishment
parties that sometimes
also verge on being anti-system parties
are gaining ground in many legislatures.
So if you think about the contrast
between the videos of
1989 and where the world
has been since 2016, it
couldn't be more dramatic
and in some ways, it's a big downer
but my first thing I wanna say
is don't get too depressed.
It's not all of course, for depression.
The central questions of
this course are three.
How did we get from there to here?
What are the challenges and
prospects going forward?
And most importantly, in
the last part of the course,
how could we get to a better place
in many of the countries
that we're talking about?
We'll spend a lot of time on the US
but not exclusively in the US.
I should say a little bit
about the distinctive approach
that I'm gonna be taking
in these lectures,
not to say it's the best approach;
there are many ways to look
at this kind of material
but it is the approach
that I'm going to be using.
And the first thing I would
say about this approach
is that I'm going to be studying history
with the tools of political science
and political theory on the one hand
but also using history
to keep political science
and political theory honest.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, one thing that is remarkable
about the events of 1989
is that they supply us with
a terrific natural experiment
from the point of view
of social scientists.
If you look at the
literature, for example,
of people who studied
European democracies,
before 1989, they were essentially
cycling endless numbers
of theories through the same old data set
that everybody had had for four decades.
And they didn't have any
a big exogenous change.
1989 is a big shock to
the system and suddenly,
we have, for instance, in Western Europe,
in Eastern Europe, the addition
of a whole lot of new
parliamentary democracies.
That creates possibilities of thinking
about long-established
conventional wisdom,
testing theories against new data
which is the gold standard
for social science
rather than testing theories on data
out of which the theories
have been developed,
which tend to result in
what statisticians call
just-so stories, fitting
the curve to the data.
Suddenly we have all this new data,
coming along in real time.
If you think about and
we're gonna talk some about
some of the standard
theories in political science
like modernization
theory, which is a theory
about how as economies modify,
certain kinds of political
changes become more likely.
It was long held that
modernization produces democracy.
There were many variants
of modernization theory.
And we will talk about some
of the differences among them
but now we have new data and
whether modernizing economies
will produce democracy.
It is long been conventional
wisdom that democratic systems
are incompatible with state-run economies.
If we look at what's happened since 1989,
we've gone to market economies
in some of the post-communist
systems but others
like China and Vietnam have
become state capitalist systems
of a certain kind while retaining
non democratic politics.
So we'll have cause to
think about theories
of that general sort.
There's been a lot of conventional wisdom
about the conditions for stable democracy
that suddenly can be put to the test
on a whole slew of new democracies.
Is it all the economy stupid
or do beliefs of citizens matter?
And what kinds of beliefs matter
and what about the beliefs of elites?
All of these things, we can look at again,
in new contexts.
So we have lots of new
data to think about them,
provided by this dramatic break of 1989.
There's a lot of conventional wisdom
about the relations between
business, government
and labor that has built up
among political economists
and political scientists
over the last several decades
before 1989.
We now have big power shifts
partly because communism
as an economic system has
been taken off the table.
Well if communism, as an economic system,
is taken off the table, how
does that restructure relations
between business government and labor?
It turns out it really has a big impact
on those relationships.
So that's another of the
topics we will be looking at.
How do electoral systems
affect things like inequality,
provision of environmental legislation
and public goods?
A lot of conventional wisdom there
about which types of
democracies are more likely
to do that and which are
less likely to do that
start to look before and after 1989
and we're gonna discover
that some of the conventional
wisdom needs rethinking.
So on the one hand
we're bringing the tools
of political science and the
theories of political science
to bear on the data that's thrown up
by this last 30 years of history.
On the other hand, we're using that data
to keep the political scientists honest,
precisely because we have
this whole smorgasbord
of new results as a social
scientist would put it
but then I also said
I'm gonna use the tools
of political theory.
So political theory, I should
confess, truth in advertising
by my first profession, if
extended is a profession
is I'm a political theorist.
I cut my teeth in the world
of political philosophy.
I'm in normative things
about what should happen,
how the world should be organized,
rather than empirical work
on how it is organized.
We are definitely gonna be thinking
about normative questions
here as well as we go along,
what should happen,
what might have happened
but the confession I need to
make about my home discipline
is that it reminds me of
the story about the fella
who goes up to a farmer in Donegal
and says how do I get to Dublin
and the answer that comes back is well,
I wouldn't start from here, sonny.
That is to say much of
political philosophy
develops theories that take no account
of where we actually
are and how the theories
that people argue about in the journals
and in the literature
actually could be implemented
in the world, if at all.
And this spills over
into normative arguments
made by other scholars.
Thomas Piketty in his book,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
argues for a 4% global wealth tax.
Well, good luck with that.
Who's gonna implement
a 4% global wealth tax.
So when I think about normative questions,
it's gonna be from the perspective
of how might the goals
that we think are desirable
actually be achieved.
I am going to spend, as we go along,
through the different topics
that we're gonna be discussing.
I am gonna be focusing on paths not taken,
things that might have
been done differently
and here the sorts of things
I'm gonna be talking about
are things like NATO
expansion, after the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the NATO alliance,
we'll talk about this next week
which was expanded over
the next several decades
to include most, eventually,
all of the former Soviet bloc countries
and there were overtures,
also to including former
Soviet states like Georgia and
several others.
I'll, talk about this Ukraine,
Georgia and Ukraine were
both talking about,
joining NATO that part of
the reason the Soviet
Union invaded Ukraine.
So we will talk about
whether there was a path
not taken at that time French
president Francois Mitterrand
thought that NATO should be shut down
at the end of the Cold War
it was a defensive alliance
that had lost its purpose.
How realistic was that?
how might the world have been
different had that happened
we're going to be talking about
the Global War on Terror I
should in after 9/11 when,
we invaded first
Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Was there another path
that would have been politically
viable that would have led
the world in a different direction.
We will talk about the response to
the financial crisis
of 2008 in 2009, again
what were their possibilities that,
were, ignored or overlooked
that might have been
both politically feasible
and more polished effective
in the sense of policy
and so that brings me
to underscore the third feature of
the approach that I am
going to take in this
course which is when you look at, people
who talk about public policy,
it tends either to be
policy wonks who just go on
about what would be, the best policy
or political scientists who talk about
why some policies get adopted in some
systems and not in other systems
but there's very little discussion of what
is the effective political way of
achieving a good policy or
the effective political way of blocking
a bad policy and so when I
talk about innovations in
the last part of the
course, it's very much going
to be in a way that marries considerations
of politics to considerations
of good public policy
so, that that is the flavor
of what we're going to be doing here
and as I said it's not the
only way one might study
these materials ,but it's
the way that we're going
to be doing it in this course.
Let me talk a little bit
about the shape of the course.
It falls into five, sections.
The the first one is going to starting
on Monday deal with the
collapse of communism
and its aftermath.
There we going to look
at collapse of communism
in Eastern Europe in Russia,
in China and in Vietnam.
Although I will talk
about some other countries along the way.
We're going to talk about
the rise of a unipolar world,
until 1989, we had a
bipolar world in which,
as I said a lot of actual stability,
that came about as a
byproduct of the Cold War
at least among the the major powers
even if they maintained this stability,
partly by, acting out their conflicts
in proxy wars in, Asia, Africa and
at America but it by and large
the great powers were the
nucleus standoff worked
and we didn't have a major
conflict between them.
Now we have gone to a
unipolar world dominated,
by a single power ,after 1989.
How does that restructure politics and
the possibilities for
politics that will be
also part of our concern.
And then I'm going to
talk about the, politics
of the economics.
What I'm going to call the
rise of neoliberalism at home
and the Washington Consensus abroad
and this is put on this is basically
it comes to, exist because of
the collapse of an
alternative to capitalism,
the disappearance of communism
as a viable, political system
as a viable economic system and so you
have this idea that's
often called neoliberalism
that basically has three elements.
Its trade deregulation,
trade deals getting rid
of restraints on trade, getting
rid of internal regulation
within countries, and
massive privatization
of formerly state assets
that was called, the neoliberal approach
to political public political economy.
And when it's translated into a set
of recommendations or requirements
for countries in the developing world,
it was called the Washington Consensus,
was essentially adopted by the World Bank
by the IMF as a condition for giving loans
to developing countries and it,
was essentially taking
neoliberalism global.
And so the, post communist era is marked
by, this massive confidence in, the
the capacity of unregulated
or mildly regulated
free-market capitalism,
to deliver the best results,
for every country in
the world then we're going to talk about
the new global order, that
is ushered in by this.
We're going to look at
whether democracy really
was on the march the people thought
about a potential we had talked again
the conventional wisdom in
political science was that
the democratization had
preceded in three waves.
The first wave being
the gradual expansion of
the franchise in what we think of today as
the older democracies,
the second wave being decolonization in
Africa and Asia and Latin
America after World War II.
The third wave coming in 1989 to 1991
and people started to
wonder whether there's
a fourth wave now with
democratization of South Africa
with settlements in places
like Northern Ireland,
initially with the Arab
Spring people wondered whether
we were going to start to
see more democracy as part of
this new global order.
Then we're going to look at
the international institutions
that developed in this global order,
we'll talk about things like,
the International Criminal Court
which for the first time would
hold dictators to account
for their activities of repression.
There was the creation and of
something called a doctrine
at the United Nations called
the responsibility to protect.
Responsibility to protect, says that this
was in the wake of, things
like the Rwanda genocide
of 1994 and what happened in
Kosovo, in 1999 eventually
we got responsibility
to protect where the UN
was said all governments are going to
be held accountable for
severe human rights violations
within their own territories
and if they don't respect them,
the UN is going to intervene,
militarily this is you know a
big change we're saying we're not going
to respect the sovereignty of Nations
so the new international
order seems to be,
affecting not only
relations among countries
but relations within them.
The third part of the course I'm calling
the end of the end of
history and this is really,
has its ultimate roots with 9/11
and the emergence of the
global war on terror.
The invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya
and eventually the collapsing Syria
we're going to see that
the idea that history
was heading in some benign direction,
was getting harder and harder
for people to hold on to.
we're going to look at the
resurgence of state capitalism.
we're going to look at
what China was, has been
and is doing in Africa.
We are going to be looking
at Russia's resurgence
as a global power, they had
been back on their heels,
for much of the 1990s and early 2000
but now they became actively
involved, in, the Middle East
and elsewhere, we're going to, look at,
the new role of business in
many political conflicts around
the world sometimes with
benign purposes in mind,
but often not and so we're
going to start to see
a much messier politics.
The fourth part of the course, is about
the new politics of insecurity.
This is really ushered in not so much by
the financial crisis
itself, but by the way
in which governments responded
to the financial crisis
and this will be one of the areas
where we will be looking
at paths not taken but,
we will see that there
was, growing insecurity
in the workforces of many
of the advanced democracies
that had been building up for decades,
and the financial crisis,
threw into sharp relief
the fact that most governments
were not doing much
about it if anything at all
and in fact that they ended
up bailing out the elites,
while doing nothing much,
for the people who have been
most harmed in the crisis
and so we will look at the response to,
the financial crisis
in a number of countries
particularly in the US
and then we will all in the
last part of the course,
what is to be done that
great Leninists slogan,
we will be looking at, two things really.
First how the, voter sentiment in
these countries was,
so poorly misdiagnosed
by so many, political elites
and people in control of
political parties, misdiagnosed
to the point where not only
did they fail to respond,
to the growing economic insecurity,
that was experienced by many,
many millions of workers
within their own countries.
They were actually
implementing political reforms
that were likely to make things worse.
And so the last part of the
course will be looking at
those two interacting issues.
What sorts of economic
policies were pursued
or failed to be pursued.
What kinds of policies
might have been pursued
and how did the reform
of political systems over
the last 15 or 20 years,
make the problem worse
and that will lead me,
to make some arguments, about
how we should, think about,
politics going forward.
So, that is what we're going, to be doing.
It's a big menu, we have, you know
we have 26 now soon to be 25 lectures in
which to explore it.
I'm going to, before breaking today,
I'm going to talk about
a few logistical matters.
One is that I have been
asked to announce but
you can see for yourself,
that the Office of Public Affairs is,
taking pictures and
these lectures are going
to be videotaped.
And this will include, we
will have microphones so we
can have questions from
the floor and interaction
but you should know that,
this is all being tape recorded and
so anything you say can be taken down
and used in evidence against you.
So, a couple of other logistical things.
One is I want to introduce
Christina Seyfreid.
Christina, she's the head teaching fellow
for the course so for
she will be overseeing
the grading of students
who are taking the course,
for, credit and she will
also be working with me,
in, running office hours for
people from the community,
which we're both going to be doing.
I'll say a little bit more about
that in a minute but, you will see more
of Christina as we go along.
Office hours I'm gonna be having
office hours in Rosenkranz room 201
from 10:00 to 12:00 on
Wednesdays and Fridays.
The presumption there is that
from 10:00 to 12:00, Yale
students have priority.
These are walk-in office
hours not by appointment
and on 10:00 to 12:00
on Fridays, people from
the community have priority but who knows
if anyone will show up but
that's the way it'll work
201 Rosenkranz Hall
which is right opposite,
the new colleges up the street.
Christina is going to have office hours
for people from the
community on Thursdays,
from 5:00 to 7:00 at a place
yet to be announced and one
thing we're going to do,
the office hours are not just
going to vanish into the ether
we're going to, Christina and I are going
to film five sessions over the course of
the semester, where she and
I will discuss what's come up
in the office hours and we will post that,
on the course website.
I do this with my Coursera course
and it proves to be quite helpful.
So, we will get questions
that have come up in the office hours
both in our office hours
and in office hours,
between the students and
the Teaching Fellows,
that they will be participating
as well and we will publish
those videos of the office hours
on the course website.
Access to reading.
Anyone who has a Yale
ID can get almost all of
the readings on Canvas,
there's a few, I think three of
the book, we're using too much
for copyright reasons
to put them on Canvas
but they're all in the library
for anyone who doesn't want to buy any.
The, people from the community
we have, made available
in the New Haven Public Library
if you don't have access
to Canvas us a couple
of sets, of the books
that we're being using in the course
or you can get them that way.
Those who are taking, the
students who are taking the course
for credit the official exam is
the last afternoon of
the last day of exams,
which I'm sure some of you have
already bought plane tickets
that are, inconsistent with that.
So actually we're going to
have to alternate exams.
One on December 11th and this is primarily
to accommodate SOM students because,
of the timing of the SOM
elective, exam period
and that exam will, if we can arrange it
be held at SOM, and then there'll be,
but others can take it
then as well if they want.
And then there'll be an another
alternate exam on Friday
the 13th so there'll be different times
at which people can take the exam.
Policy here will be no laptops,
no screens, no iPhones.
I came to this policy
a couple of years ago.
It definitely works better.
It's just too tempting to be
doing that Amazon shopping
for your grandmother's birthday present
that you forgot about
and it's very distracting
not only for the people
around you but it's
also distracting for me, to teach.
We will post the slides on Canvas and on
the course web page off the lectures
so people will have access, to the slides.
What you'll find is if
you go and you look at
the slides on Canvas,
they'll look like they'd
been turned into a PDF
and the video will not play.
If you want to play the
video, you have to download
the slides and then it will
read, it will regurgitate
as playable videos,
so it is possible to play the video,
yes so no laptops, no screens, no phones
and everything, everything I
put up here will be available
to you, so you don't have
to take copious notes
of what appears on slides.
Comments, questions.
Yes, sir, you're gonna have to yell.
We will have microphones
here starting next time.
(student speaking faintly)
You can't.
So that's why we put a
set of the reasonings
in a New Haven library
and the reason for it,
it's not just Yale being mean.
It turns out there're two
sets of copyright rules
so if you are photocopying
chapters from a book,
you are allowed to take
up to 10% of the book,
otherwise you have to buy the book
if you're using it but
universities, for their students,
have a more permissive rule.
So we can take more than 10% from a book.
I've forgotten what the exact number is
but it's much more than 10%.
We can take more than 10% from a book
and put it up on Canvas
if it's only available
to Yale students but if
we made them available
to the general public,
Yale would be violating copyright laws.
So that's why we have bought
two complete sets of the books
and put them in a New
Haven Public Library,
from which we have been
xeroxing most of this stuff.
So you should be able
to get the vast majority
of the readings if you wanna go down there
and get them.
Other questions, comments, observations?
If there's a question in your mind,
it's probably in the
mind of 30 other people
so they'll be grateful if you ask it.
Yeah, you just have to yell.
(student speaking faintly)
Are we gonna look at the
European Union as well as what?
(student speaking faintly)
We're certainly gonna look at the growth
of the European Union and the expansion
of the European Union since, in fact,
we're gonna talk about it next class.
We're gonna look at the
expansion of the European Union
since the Cold War.
I'll talk very briefly about the early,
this course is really post 1989.
We've just hired David
Engerman and Arne Westad,
who are both cold war historians
who are gonna be teaching
courses on the Cold War.
So if you really wanna deal
with the post-war Europe
from into war Europe II to
the end of the Cold War,
these are the guys who
are gonna be teaching
that stuff going forward in Yale College.
So I'm very consciously not doing that.
So I will talk about the way
in which the European Union
was formed which has had a lot to do
with its current troubles but mostly,
I'm gonna focus on since 1989.
Yeah, pardon?
(student speaking faintly)
There are no sections in this course.
This is why we have an
hour and a quarter lecture
rather than a 50-minute lecture.
Yeah.
(student speaking faintly)
The topics for the papers
will be posted two weeks
before the papers are
due and we will give,
I should say a couple
of things about that.
This is not a research course
so you can write a first-rate
paper based on reading
the material on this syllabus.
You are not expected to
go beyond the syllabus.
And we will post, two weeks
before the papers are due,
a list of topics of and it will be,
there will be very significant
amount of choice on it
so we'll probably give you
four or five possible topics
to write about.
Yes, sir.
What is the expectation
for graduate students?
The same course requirements,
two papers and a final exam.
Yeah.
Yes, sir.
Pardon.
- [Student] Is there a
limit for (mumbles) students
to join the class?
- No, there's no limit.
This is an uncapped course.
I'm hoping we can stay in
this room, it looks like it.
Numbers tend to go down rather than up
during shopping period.
It's not a capped course.
Yeah.
(student speaking faintly)
People have taken courses
with me before know
that I have a pretty
interactive lecturing style.
So yes, there will be microphones
and there will be questions.
I'm not planning to talk
for an hour and a quarter
every Tuesday and Thursday.
So there will be significant
amount of interaction.
Yes sir.
(student speaking faintly)
Yeah, we currently, I believe, have six
in addition to Christina's
Teaching Fellows,
all of whom will be holding office hours.
They'll be available and
you will be able to go
and talk to them about
what's come up in the class,
about your papers and so on.
And the conversations you have
with those teaching fellows,
we will also address then in
the videotaped office hours
that we post.
Okay.
So any other questions,
comments, reactions?
So on Tuesday, we're gonna talk about
the collapse of the Soviet
Union from Soviet Communism
to Russian gangster capitalism.
I will see you then.
(music)
