Foreign policy concerns often focus on issues of political stability or national security, and “women’s issues” and other “soft” issues traditionally get little attention. So what’s the rationale for this attention?

In general, we need to have an attitude of working together with other countries rather than trying to impose a U.S. perspective. However, we can still advocate for gender equity goals and report on steps toward or away from meeting agreements.

Societies and cultures change over time. In agriculture for example, an area may adopt new crops, new seeds and new technologies, and move from feudalism to small independent farmer arrangements, but want to hold on to traditional exclusion of women from owning land. Is this culture or discrimination?

Many countries have participated in the four United Nations world conferences on women and have agreed to support the Millennium Development Goals, which give attention to some basic improvements for women and girls. These agreements can be used to initiate discussion about breaking down gender barriers and sharing opportunities.

Can you cite some examples of how focusing programs on women can make a difference?

The state of Kerala in India has lowered its fertility rate by changing values associated with women’s opportunities for education and employment. By having fewer children, women can put more resources into educating them and also have more time for activities outside the home.

The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the Self-Employed Women’s Association in India offer microcredit programs aimed largely at women, who use these small loans to start businesses that can improve family nutrition and pay the school costs for their children. In some cases they make enough to get out of poverty, but even if not, the women and their families are often better off. There can be problems with microcredit, but there are many success stories.

Societies often resist changes in women’s roles for reasons of religion or tradition. Should we respect those concerns?

In general, we need to have an attitude of working together with other countries rather than trying to impose a U.S. perspective. However, we can still advocate for gender equity goals and report on steps toward or away from meeting agreements.

Societies and cultures change over time. In agriculture for example, an area may adopt new crops, new seeds and new technologies, and move from feudalism to small independent farmer arrangements, but want to hold on to traditional exclusion of women from owning land. Is this culture or discrimination?

Many countries have participated in the four United Nations world conferences on women and have agreed to support the Millennium Development Goals, which give attention to some basic improvements for women and girls. These agreements can be used to initiate discussion about breaking down gender barriers and sharing opportunities.

We hear about the extreme cases of violence or discrimination against women: mass rape in Congo, violence against girls’ schools and their students in Afghanistan, human sex trafficking, and female infanticide in India and China. Beyond denouncing these on moral grounds, what arguments or actions might bring about an end to these practices?

These extreme forms of discrimination do not like transparency. Bringing global attention to these problems through political discussion, conferences, publications, and the media can make a difference. Even in the U.S., we haven’t eliminated violent crime, sexual abuse, and trafficking. As part of a global effort, we won’t eliminate these problems quickly, but ignoring them is an invitation to expansion. Improving the lives of some women and girls right now is possible. With consistent effort, we can accomplish more. Having gender equity as a key piece of U.S. foreign policy can be a step toward those goals.

Anke Pinkert is Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Cinema Studies. She is also affiliated with the Program in Comparative and World Literature, the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center, and the European Union Center at the University of Illinois. She received her M.A. in German Studies and History from the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, in 1989, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with a dissertation on "Literary Intellectuals, Resistance, and the East German State" in 2000. She has published on postwar and post-1989 film, East German literature, and post-unification identity debates. Her book Film and Memory in East Germany appeared in 2008 with Indiana University Press. Here, she talks about the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling and the changes the united Germany has seen since.

What is Berlin and Germany as a whole doing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?

I just came back from a trip to Berlin, where currently many different kinds of exhibits deal with the remembrance of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Just to give you a sense: In a gallery in Berlin-Mitte, the photographs of the artist Sarah Schönfeld capture public spaces, such as kindergartens, amusement parks, pools, and schools, in East Berlin that were closed down for financial reasons after 1989. Showing how these abandoned sites create traces of the past in the urban landscape of today’s Berlin, Schönfeld creates a melancholic topography of memory that invites reflections on the losses and gains of reunification. Or an exhibit on the Wende at the District Museum of Alt-Mahrzahn at the outskirts of Berlin shows objects that people bought with their first Western currency. Inviting the visitors to share their personal memories, visitors are asked to leave notes at the exhibit about the goods they acquired during their first trip to West Berlin. Or in an exhibit entitled “Art and Revolt: a Transitional Society,” the Academy of the Arts currently shows images of everyday life in the GDR from 1980-1990, encouraging the visitors to contemplate the fact that the Wall did not fall over night but rather that this process was prepared by a slow erosion of conformity in the former East Germany.

In addition to the GDR museums in Berlin, Dresden, and Eisenhüttenstadt, exhibits commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall are planned in various Bundesländer (German states). The Cultural History Museum in Rostock, for example, is planning an exhibit with the title “We are the people”, which deals with the events and demonstrations leading up to the collapse of the GDR. Most of the exhibits commemorating the fall of the Wall are organized in the Eastern states and they inevitably focus on an “Eastern” perspective of the events. What needs to be acknowledged more in the public culture of Germany is the fact that the Wende (the change from socialism to capitalism) in 1989 affected (or in case should have affected) not only the East Germans but also the West Germans.

The highlights of the many events in Berlin that commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, will be a big ceremony on the November 9 at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, which will be accompanied by many smaller parties all over the city. This ceremony will remember the people who died trying to escape the GDR and it will be a celebration of, as the Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit put it, “one of the biggest moments in German history.” Nov. 9th, also marks the 71st anniversary of the Reichskristallnacht, when in Nazi Germany Jewish synagogues, apartments, shops, and cemeteries were destroyed. The Jewish community in Berlin will commemorate this event the same night as the Wall celebrations, reminding us of the complexities of 20th Century German history, a history filled with horrific conformity but also with moments of transformative self-determination.

The cultures of the two sides of the Iron Curtain were very different. How has Germany worked to assimilate the West and East Germany over the last 20 years? What if any cultural/socioeconomic differences remain?

This is a very complex question and the answer will very much depend on the person to whom you talk. I do not want to reproduce stereotypes. Calling for a more differentiating discussion, a well-known journalist recently coined the phrase “the East German does not exist,” and the same can be said about the West German. But I think it is safe to say, if you ask people in the West, many would agree that a lot of government and tax money went into the rebuilding of the East and that the East Germans have not been as “grateful” as they should have been. New statistics show that almost 50 percent of former East Germans agree that the GDR had more positive than negative aspects and that only 25 percent of the former East Germans truly feel like citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG).

If you talk to people in the East, many would also agree that a lot of money went into the rebuilding of the East German infrastructure. But among the East Germans, a sense of a West German “take over” prevails. A recent statistic shows that more than 50 percent of East Germans feel that the West German system was imposed on them. Given the demonstrations in 1989 where the calls for reunification emerged soon after the fall of the Wall, this is of course a revisionist memory. But what these statistics also reflect is people’s disappointment that structures in all areas of society in the former East Germany – education, politics, culture, media, economy, health care system etc.—were replaced by structures from West Germany.

The government missed the historical opportunity to find a third way or at least to reevaluate which structures in the West needed to be changed. The sudden introduction of a free market economy resulted in a high unemployment rate in the Eastern states (in some states up to 20 percent), and in a dominance of former West Germans in higher educational, managerial, administrative, and political positions. This has lead to some resentment among the East Germans. On the other hand, a recent polemical article by a well-known West German writer suggests that the West Germans feel that their democratic culture achieved through the struggle of the student movement in the 1960s has been spoiled by the obedience and conformity of the East Germans.

You can see that there is still a lot of polarization in the public culture of Germany, a lot of gaps still need to be filled. This is less an issue in Berlin, but the further one moves into the other states, a sense of dissatisfaction (East) or disinterest (West) prevails. There are many individual success stories of people from the West who started a new life in the East and vice versa. However, those stories get often drowned out in the public discourse.

East Germany under Communism developed far more slowly than capitalist West Germany. How has Germany gone about rebuilding and updating the infrastructure in the East? How different does the East look than the West, 20 years later?

When I go back to Berlin I am surprised how little difference there is between the neighborhoods in the East and in the West. I grew up in East Berlin right at the Berlin Wall at the checkpoint “Sonnenallee,” which gave the famous movie its name. As a child, when I left my apartment building to go to school, I would walk along the Berlin Wall and along the watchtowers. Today there is a beautiful green zone in that area where the Wall used to be. People walk their dogs, bike, and roller-skate in this park. The trees are so big that it is hard to imagine only 20 years have passed since the fall of the Wall. Of course, there are neighborhoods that consisted solely of the prototypical socialist housing in the East, but even there the architecture has changed. Tall buildings have been lowered to only three and four stories and trees have been planted to create a more inviting sense of community.

When I take the train to travel in the East, I am always amazed how prosperous the cities are and how nicely the former industrial areas with high pollution have been cleaned up. With the help of money from UNESCO, the former coal mines have been flooded and transformed into beautiful recreational areas with lakes and beaches. Of course, you can still find houses that are decaying and that have not been renovated or old industrial plants that are no longer used. But in many cities, such as Leipzig and Berlin, old factory buildings have been transformed into artist studios, theatres, and performance spaces. There you find this interesting convergence of the old and the new.  A lot of tax and government money went into the rebuilding of the infrastructure in the East. Especially when we keep in mind how outdated the infrastructure is in certain parts of the United States, it is really impressive how quickly this external transformation has taken place. As I mentioned earlier, the internal changes, the changes of the relationship between East and West Germans, are much slower.

You study German cinema and literature. How would you compare the focus and theme of these mediums from German artists now with that during the Cold war?

After the end of World War II, movies continued to be produced and shown in the different occupation zones of Germany. Most of the early postwar films, the so-called rubble films, focused on the devastation of the German cities by the bombing raids (often without specifically referring to the Allies), on the return of German men from war, and the “victimization” of the German people by the Nazis. The filmmakers often used conventions of melodrama and family narratives to create relatable characters and accessible stories. In addition, the early postwar films produced by DEFA, the East German film company, privileged conversion narratives that showed how people seduced by Nazi ideology changed into new antifascist citizens. But overall, watching these films now more than 60 years after the end of World War II, we can notice surprising similarities between the early postwar films produced in the East and the West – most importantly the exclusion of the Holocaust from any of the war narratives.

In the 1950s and 60s, DEFA also produced formally innovative, modernist films with socialist protagonists at the center. The films in the West, in contrast, were decidedly more conventional, many of them following a melodramatic formula and revolving around restorative notions of Heimat and belonging. This changed with the emergence of the New German cinema in the early 1960s, which aimed at a more experimental formal language and an engagement with social problems and the repression of the Nazi past. The life in the East rarely entered the stories told in the West German cinema; whereas the West served as a negative background against which the merits of socialism were portrayed in the East German films.

East German filmmakers lost their footing after 1989. Only relatively few East German directors continued to produce work that became widely acknowledged. The funding system had changed and without a more comprehensive state-run support system, many found themselves in a competitive setting where they could not succeed. This had little to do with the quality of the work by East German directors, but rather with a general dismissal of anyone and anything associated with the East German film company after 1989. Some younger directors were still able to produce successful work; many of them resorted to a more artistic cinematic language to tell their stories of characters that were displaced, lost, and even suicidal after the fall of the Wall. One director, Andreas Dresen, has become commercially successful with his realistic and socially critical stories about everyday life in postunification East Germany.

Interestingly, a number of West German directors have created films that deal with the divided Germany and with East Germany post-1989. Von Trotta, Klier, Roehler, Levi, and more recently Becker (Good by Lenin) and von Donnersmarck (Lives of Others) are all filmmakers from the West. With the exception of Klier’s Ostkreuz all of their films have been commercially successful in Germany and most of them have been internationally released. Lives of Others even received an Oscar for best Foreign Language Film in 2007. Of course, people who grew up in West Germany should be able to produce their stories about the East. It concerns me, however, that those commercially successful films have created a public memory that often relies on stereotypical notions of what life in communist East Germany was like. When we see films, such as Good by Lenin and The Lives of Others, we need to remember that they do not recreate reality as it was but that they present particular, fictionalized, or distilled versions of life under communism.

There is much more to find out about that time. Almost 40 percent of East Germans would give socialism another chance, suggesting that a free market economy, commercialism, and social inequality might not be the ultimate answers to a call for historical progress.

Dr. Matthew Rosenstein is Associate Director of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS) at the University of Illinois, a position he has held since 2001. He also served as Acting Director of ACDIS from June 2007 to February 2008. Rosenstein’s current research interests include regional security of South Asia, and politics, political systems, and militancy in the region, especially in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He has authored articles and op-eds and given interviews to local and international media on these topics. He has also edited several special journal issues and reports on South Asian security. Recent or forthcoming edited publications cover subjects such as the dispute over Kashmir; NATO’s mission in Afghanistan; and nuclear weapons in South Asia. From 2001-2005, Rosenstein managed institutional grants to ACDIS from the Ford Foundation and National Security Education Program, which involved extensive collaboration with scholars from the region. He holds Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Illinois, and a B.A. from Duke University. Here, he discusses the conflict between the Pakistani Army and Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley.

Since the Taliban was driven from leadership in Afghanistan, it has largely been seen by Americans as irrelevant to the war effort in the region. What has been the root cause of the recent Taliban resurgence?

The Taliban resurgence can be attributed to several factors. After the U.S. unseated the Taliban regime in Kabul following 9/11, the porous border and mountainous terrain allowed some Taliban to travel from Afghanistan to Pakistan unimpeded. Today, the conglomeration of local and foreign militants, radical clerics, and tribal members in Pakistan being referred to as the Taliban are well-armed, well-trained, and well-financed. The United Nations (UN) estimates the Taliban’s profits at $400 million per year from opium trade. Monetary support from foreign sympathizers has also undoubtedly played a role in their gathering strength.

The Taliban have several charismatic leaders, such as Sufi Mohammad and Baitullah Mehsud, who have been able to consolidate their power in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan through intimidation of locals but also savvy recruitment to their cause, in particular leveraging resentment of the United States and the weak and ineffective—if not corrupt—regimes of Pervez Musharraf and later Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan and Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. One such leader in Swat Valley, Maulana Fazlullah, who earned the nickname “Radio Mullah” from the Pakistani press by broadcasting his sermons to millions through an illegal FM channel, exemplifies the creative ways that pro-Taliban forces have been able to spread their influence. Additionally, U.S. preoccupation until recently with Iraq—where, typically, on the order of four to five times more U.S. troops have been deployed when compared with Afghanistan—cannot be ignored as a factor.

In short, the Taliban have been able to build up their numbers and resources in historically ungovernable outlying regions of Pakistan during a period of transition and weak governance in the country’s administrative center, while an insufficient commitment from either Pakistan or the United States did little to counter the growing problem.

The United States, along with NATO, has played a central role in the War in Afghanistan. However, the U.S. has denied any attacks have occurred across the border in Pakistan. What has been the official position of the U.S. to the fighting in Pakistan, and why have some suggested that the U.S. may be playing a larger military role than it has indicated?

The United States does not want to admit to carrying out military operations on the sovereign territory of another country, much less a strategically important ally. It also must be careful not to undermine the fledgling Pakistani civilian democratic government. However, no one is really buying the notion that the U.S. has not been active in carrying out attacks. Reports of unmanned aerial drone strikes by the CIA have been relatively frequent and highly publicized in the Pakistani press for several years now, and developed into a particular source of tension between Islamabad and Washington. There have also reportedly been ground incursions by US special forces, along with stories broken in U.S. newspapers of U.S. presidential approval for covert operations to counter the growing threat to stability not only in Afghanistan but also Pakistan from Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives.

The Pakistani civilian and military leadership have repeatedly demanded a stop to the drone attacks and incursions by the U.S. In turn, the U.S. diplomatic arm has been pressuring Pakistan to take on greater responsibility for the war effort within its own borders.

The Taliban insurgency has reached to within 60 miles of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. How legitimate is the threat created by these forces? Is there a real danger of the Taliban taking control of Pakistani nuclear weapons?

It is perhaps overly alarmist to paint the Taliban insurgency alone as a direct threat to the continued existence of the Pakistani government, but there is no doubt it already has and can continue to do much damage. Prior to the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan, suicide bombings were virtually unknown in Pakistan; now they occur in major seats of economic and political power such as Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi on a regular basis at great cost in terms of loss of life, infrastructural damage, and depletion of confidence in Pakistani government and security forces to combat the phenomenon.

As for scenarios whereby the Taliban gets a hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or at least small quantities of highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium to cause harm, it is difficult to assess just how great the threat really is. The Pakistani political and military leadership assure the international community that steps they have taken to safeguard nuclear materials—dispersing component parts of nuclear weapons, refining command and control structures, acquiring additional training from the U.S. for personnel in its Strategic Plans Division responsible for nuclear weapons security—are enough. But the revelations in 2004 of extensive black market smuggling by a senior nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, is one of many reasons to worry about “loose nukes.” Whether the Taliban or al-Qaeda has insiders within the military, intelligence agencies, or nuclear weapons infrastructure, as some fear, cannot easily be determined.

Whatever the case, such questions are very much on the minds of people in both Washington and Islamabad, and recent assessments by analysts and journalists that Pakistan is ramping up its nuclear weapons production even today certainly does not allay concerns.

The government of Pakistan just launched a massive offensive in Swat Valley in the hopes of squashing the insurgency. Why has Pakistan been incapable of an effective counterinsurgency thus far? Do you see the current offensive working?

A major reason behind Pakistan’s previous counterinsurgency failures has been the weakness of the successive governments. Also, the Pakistani military has maintained high troop deployments along the Line of Control, the country’s de facto border with rival India, to the detriment of the counterinsurgency effort. Beyond these factors, Pakistan has faced the usual set of challenges that confront many counterinsurgency operations, such as terrain that reduces technological advantages of one side, the ability of enemy combatants to blend into civilian populations, and so forth. Additionally, the Pakistani Army has suffered from low morale from being asked to train their guns on fellow Muslims and fellow Pakistanis. Moreover, until very recently, public opinion in Pakistan was not behind the war, largely perceiving it as a U.S.-imposed conflict despite efforts by President Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to assert that it is “our [Pakistan’s] war.”

Mixed signals from Islamabad, such as multiple peace deals with Swat militants, emboldened rather than placated the insurgents. The current climate suggests that this offensive has as good a chance of success as at any time since the conflict began. There are signs that public opinion has turned, with polls now indicating that nearly 70 percent of Pakistanis consider the Taliban presence in the country problematic. A widely circulated video of Taliban beating a young women, and fatigue of civil society with the suicide attacks, have contributed to the shift. On the other hand, if the offensive stalls and the violence is prolonged, Pakistani civil society could grow impatient. The estimated millions of refugees fleeing the fighting could cast the government in a very negative light, especially if blame for the internal displacement gets placed at the feet of the U.S. or Pakistani governments rather than the Taliban.

The success of the current offensive, in other words, is far from assured.

Donald J. Wuebbles is the Harry E. Preble Endowed Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences as well as a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois. He was head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences from 1994 until 2006. As a lead author on the first and second international assessments of climate change sponsored by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Professor Wuebbles co-authored development of the Global Warming Potentials concept being used in policy considerations on greenhouse gases and their potential effects on climate; this concept is included in the Kyoto Protocol and most carbon trading applications. He, along with many others, shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Here, he discusses climate change and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recent report confirming that greenhouse gases endanger human health.

The EPA unveiled recently its finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. How did they come to this conclusion? How do we know that a buildup of these gases, such as carbon dioxide, is due to human activity?

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm (parts per million; this means molecules of carbon dioxide per every million molecules of air) to over 385 ppm today. This increase is due almost entirely to the effects of human activities, particularly because of our use of fossil fuels (oil, coal, natural gas) and secondarily because of land use change (e.g., deforestation). The reader may wonder why are we worried about such small amounts of carbon dioxide – it is because of the importance of carbon dioxide as a heat-trapping or “greenhouse” gas in the atmosphere. Without greenhouse gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and other gases in the atmosphere, our planet would be too cold to maintain life as we know it. The presence of greenhouse gases is therefore essential to mankind. The problem is we are increasing this heating effect by adding more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In fact, the trapped air in bubbles found in ice core samples from Greenland and Antarctica indicate that carbon dioxide concentrations have not been above 280 ppm for 800,000 years, until they started increasing about 250 years ago. Complex models of the Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere and oceans indicate that the only way to explain the large increase in the amount of carbon dioxide is because of human activities, especially fossil fuel burning. Measurements of the isotopes of carbon found in carbon dioxide add further evidence that the explanation for the large change is due to our use of fossil fuels. Therefore, it is not surprising that the EPA would come to the conclusion that human-related emissions of carbon dioxide should be considered a pollutant.

The Kyoto Protocol, signed by many industrialized nations in 1992 but not the United States, was aimed at reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. Do you believe the findings by the EPA will prompt the Obama Administration to act on this treaty?  Won’t the Clean Air Act require regulation of emissions now that these gases are considered pollutants?

Even before the EPA ruling, there has been a lot of discussion going on within Congress, as well as within the Obama administration, about policies to protect the Earth’s climate from damaging levels of changes. After all, every major national academy of sciences in the world has endorsed the findings of the international science community in its assessments of the state of understanding of the Earth’s climate being done by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change that the climate is changing and it is changing because of human activities. A number of studies by economists have also indicated that the costs of inaction on climate change concerns could far outweigh the costs of action. The emissions we are making now will have their largest impact on climate in 30 years or so, after the oceans respond to the increased warming influence. Therefore, to avoid the worst of the potential damage to our planet, we need to start acting now to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases affecting our climate system. Although there are some uncertainties remaining in just how large the damage will be, the risks are too large for us to not act.

Most scientists suggest that not only is climate change occurring, but its effects have already begun to take hold. What impacts of climate change have already been observed, and what could we expect in the future under the status quo?

The changes in climate are being seen in many ways throughout the world. For example, sea levels are rising throughout the world due to the warming oceans and melting ice, the vast majority of the glaciers in the world are melting, permafrost at high latitudes is melting, Greenland ice is decreasing, and the ice cover in the Arctic is getting thinner and is greatly reduced in the summer months (2008 was the first year in human history that both the northeast and the northwest passages were open). In the Midwest, compared to the climate of the 1960s and before, the growing season is getting longer, winters are warmer, lakes are ice free for longer periods, and the frequency of heavy rainfall is increasing. One of the top meteorologists at The Weather Channel commented to me a few weeks ago that he really began to believe in the concerns about global warming when he studied how weather patterns had changed over the last few decades.

Earth Day, observed April 22, is a day designed to try and mobilize people to be more conscientious about the environment. What can people do on a daily basis to address climatic change? How important is the role of business and industry?

There is much to be done. Although the leadership of nations, business, and industry will be essential, there is a role for all of us to play. One of the most important roles is to encourage your political representatives to act on climate change, to create policies that will protect our children and grandchildren from seeing the worst potential impacts of human-driven changes in the climate system. We can also do our part by conserving energy whenever possible. For example, if every U.S. home just replaced one regular 60 Watt incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent, it would save enough energy to light more than 2.5 million homes, while being equivalent to taking more than a million cars off the road in terms of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions saved. Meanwhile, the consumer is also saving money otherwise spent on power.

Hadi Esfahani is professor of economics at Illinois and the new director of the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Illinois. His areas of expertise include theoretical and empirical issues in the political economy of development: the role of country institutions in the formation and reform of fiscal, trade, and regulatory policies. Here he discusses the global economic crisis and its worldwide impact.

Many Americans were incensed at the $700 billion bailout plan passed by the U.S. and the help given to the “Big 3” automakers.  But what would have happened to world markets if companies like AIG or the auto industry weren’t “bailed out” by Congress? What is at the root of the current crisis?

The bailout was necessary. Without continued functioning of major banks and financial institutions such as AIG, many other firms might have collapsed and many people would have lost access to credit and insurance. Most financial assets would have also been hit harder, inducing consumers and investors to curtail their expenditures further. This would have deepened the recession significantly because, with the decline in demand, many more firms would have been forced to layoff their workers or to shut down altogether.

The immediate blame for this situation largely goes to the government and to the Federal Reserve under former Chairman Alan Greenspan, for poor handling of policy and regulations. They missed signs of major weaknesses in the system. They ignored the regulatory changes that were needed in response to the developments in the financial markets. Some other players in the process such as the credit rating agencies and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also share the blame because they failed to recognize the problems that were emerging under their watch.

The widespread failure of the policymakers to take precautionary actions and prevent the disaster suggests that the roots of the problem must go deeper. I think one fundamental factor is the simplistic ideology that government regulation is inherently bad and markets must always be free. Of course, there is a great deal of merit in the idea that free markets are the best means of encouraging innovation and bringing about prosperity. However, unfettered markets do not always work well and innovations that they induce can sometimes be socially destructive. So, they need regulation. This idea is well understood in the case of new medical procedures and drugs, which have to go through lots of testing and follow regulatory procedures before they are allowed to enter the markets. Even then, their use remains highly regulated. For example, most drugs can be used only under supervision of physicians, who themselves must be certified. However, this idea has not been accepted in the case of new financial products that can be harmful to the economic system, but are nevertheless employed by market participants who benefit from them. Subprime lending and mortgage derivatives, for example, were viewed as innovations that could benefit many lender and households. The idea was that if there was any problem with those instruments, it would be the concern of the lender and the borrower. So, if they find it in their interest to use the instrument, it must be beneficial to them. In other words, many policymakers had come to believe conveniently that there was no case for regulatory intervention and leaving the market to itself was the best thing to do. I say conveniently because there many theoretical and empirical reasons that cast doubt on such a belief. But, they were ignored and the people presenting them were dismissed largely because the dominant simplistic ideology dictated otherwise.

Another fundamental factor behind the current systemic crisis is a major dilemma in America's economic and political system. This system has many points of strength and has managed to self-correct and grow over the past two centuries. However, this same strength enables most people to take it for granted and focus on their own lives. They forget that the system cannot be maintained and enhanced without active participation of informed citizens who hold the public officials responsible. Widespread complacency gives an opportunity to those in a position of power in government and business to pursue their own agendas, sometimes recklessly, until the system plunges into a major crisis.

I am confident that we will recover from the current crisis, though we are paying a high price for the past mistakes. To minimize the chances of another major crisis, we need to better educate ourselves about the intricacies of our complex economic and political system, to enhance the culture of citizen responsibility, to participate in public life more actively.

There is a stimulus package that Congress recently passed just short of $800 billion. Is this an effective measure to bring the economy back toward growth? If not, what would you recommend as a course of action?

We do need a major stimulus package, and it must be put into effect quickly. However, the details of the package also matter. We need to spend on projects that raise the aggregate demand for goods and services and, at the same time, raise our economy's productivity in the future. But, it is not easy to identify such projects and to make sure that in the haste to spend, we do not end up wasting a lot of resources. These are contingencies for which the government should have prepared itself, but nothing of this sort was done essentially because of the complacency and ideological factors that I mentioned before. The same factors also seem to prevent the stimulus package from focusing more on projects that are likely to be worthwhile, such as spending on public schools and helping the states to meet their basic expenditure needs and to stop laying off workers who are needed for maintaining public services. Without such expenditures, the public sector will be exacerbating the rising unemployment problem and fuel the crisis rather than alleviating it. Efforts to repair and improve the crumbling parts of the economy's infrastructure can also be very useful.

Tax rebates are also seen as quick and good solutions. However, we had a major package of that type last year and its impact was short lived. Another dose of tax rebates is unlikely to address our current economic problems because most people have lost large chunks of their savings and are uncertain about the futures. So, rather than spending more, they are likely to save most of the rebate as a means of replenishing their savings and protecting themselves against possible future income declines.

It seems as though the markets in the United States are breaking records on a weekly basis. This collapse has not only been felt on Wall Street, but around the world. How much investment do foreign entities have in the U.S. markets, and how has this collapse affected the economies of foreign companies and their governments?

This is the most recent data that we have on debt is for 2007. In the middle of that year, the total value of debt owed by the U.S. government and the private sector to foreign entities was about $12.3 trillion, which amounted to almost 89 percent of U.S. GDP in that year. At the time, about $2.3 trillion of this amount was invested in US treasury securities, which has largely held its value. The remaining $10 trillion was in the form of private sector financial assets, which is likely to have lost about 30 percent of its value. So, the rest of the world has probably lost $3 trillion dollars of its investments in the U.S. as a result of the financial crisis. Perhaps more importantly, the global economic slow down has reduced the demand for exports in almost all countries and has led to major loss of jobs and income around the globe. As a result, the impact on other countries has been quite significant, especially in East Asia that has been the largest exporter and biggest creditor to the U.S. For example, while in the fourth quarter of 2008, real GDP fell by an annualized rate of 3.8 percent in the U.S., it fell by 21 percent in South Korea and 17 percent in Singapore. Japan's exports have dropped by 35 percent in the 12 months to December. For Taiwan, the corresponding drop has been 42 percent! These declines are causing major unemployment problems in those economies. China has been the largest lenders and exporters to the U.S. and seems to suffering from shock badly.

It is well known that the U.S. has a massive trade deficit with a number of countries, perhaps most notably China. What measures should President Barack Obama take to reduce this deficit? How does this deficit impact our economy?

For a number of reasons, this is by no means a good time to focus on reducing our trade deficits with other countries. First of all, the deficit is likely to decline by itself as our economy shrinks. Also, other countries that used to lend to us will start coming up with strategies to reduce their trade surplus so that they can absorb more of their production in their domestic markets. Second, we need to spend a lot more to keep the economy moving. For this purpose, the U.S. government needs to be able to borrow freely in the short run. Reducing the trade deficit essentially means curtailing our borrowing from other countries, which can be counterproductive. Third, if we try to cut our trade deficit, our trading partners may also try to curb their imports from us, which could hurt the U.S. economy. Fourth, in the globalized world in which we live, our well-being is ultimately intertwined with the fate of the rest of the world. So, to move towards economic recovery, we need to pull the rest of the world with us by continuing our imports from them. Finally, the rest of the world still trusts the U.S. more than any other economy and is willing to lend to it. There is no reason for us to refuse that offer and make ourselves and many other people in other countries worse off. Of course, in the longer run as recovery takes place, we need to save more and reduce our dependence on foreign credit. We also need to help the economic conditions in the rest of the world to improve, so that investment opportunities in those countries expand and serve as productive conduits outside the U.S. for the savings generated around the world.

A large portion of the U.S. national debt is held by foreign countries. Do you foresee the international community resisting continued investment in U.S. markets? What effect could this have on the U.S. economy?

I do not foresee any major pull back of foreign capital from the U.S. markets in the next year or so. It so happens that our financial crisis has created more serious problems in many other countries than we are facing here. As a result, U.S. markets remain relatively better bets. In the longer term, many of our current creditors are likely to create more demand in their domestic markets or elsewhere and reduce their surpluses with us. If this proceeds in an orderly fashion, it can actually be helpful in terms of job creation in the U.S. because those economies will be importing more of our products. However, our consumption per person may stagnate for a while because, in contrast with the past when we could borrow from the rest of the world and consume beyond our means, we will have to work and give up a large part of products so that it can be exported.

Stephen Nussbaum joined the University of Ilinois in 2008 as director of Student International Academic Affairs and the Study Abroad Office. Previously, he served as Associate Dean of the Center for International Education at Waseda University. At Illinois, he hopes to contribute to a significant expansion in both the number of students participating in study abroad and the quality of their educational experiences. Here, he discusses the 2008 Open Doors from the Institute for International Education.

Illinois ranked seventh in the nation in students studying abroad, with 2,052 in 2007-08, up nearly 200 from the previous year.  What are the University’s ultimate goals for studying abroad? How is Illinois working to meet those goals?

You ask a good question.  Our ultimate goals, of course, will continue to evolve as we move into the future.  But no one questions the importance of training students both to understand the world and to interact with its peoples.  Everyone recognizes such skills will only become more important with each passing year.  Our immediate goals are to increase both the number of our students studying abroad and the quality of their engagements abroad.  This is a big task and many of its key challenges, perhaps paradoxically, are found here on campus.   We need to increase the involvement of our faculty and departments with education abroad and we need to create more options for students to study specialized fields.  We also need to increase the language competence of our students and see to it that all students who study another language have the option to spend an extended period living among the speakers of that language.  This is the only way for our students to become truly fluent in a second language and culture.   We need to increase our educational linkages with universities and to expand study abroad to include collaborative virtual projects and labs linking our students with their peers around the world.  We also need to enhance the involvement of graduate and professional schools in this area.  These are exciting times to work in this field.  The world’s major universities and the students they produce function on a global stage.  The more we recognize this the more important it becomes to re-think the University so that it is not tied to a single location.

What are some trends you are seeing as far as study abroad destinations? Where are the most popular locations? How do you see the current economic downturn affecting students’ choices for studying abroad?

The trends are moving in good directions.  First, there is a steady growth in the number of students going abroad.  Currently, about 28 percent of our students, across the University, study abroad.  This was an unthinkable figure only a few years ago, especially for a very large public university.  I expect this number to increase despite the economic downturn.  Indeed, one of the lessons of the current recession is that we are all in this together, and the economic well-being of the U.S. is directly linked to that of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and much of today’s world.  These linkages mean we need to send more of our students abroad to learn about and work with different people and cultures. 

Destinations are shifting away from English-speaking countries toward East Asia, and to a certain extent Latin America and new destinations in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa.  This is a good thing, but we also need to build the infrastructure on campus to support these students.  Our faculties are very much involved in doing research in local communities around the world.   If research funds decrease in the immediate future we need to figure out ways to support their research interests with educational projects encouraging them to lead student groups or facilitate their study at research sites abroad already familiar to them. 

In February of 2008, Illinois students voted overwhelmingly to impose a $5 per semester student fee to fund study abroad scholarships. How is that money being used? What do you believe the vote said about the wishes of Illinois’ students and their families?

There is no question our students and the people of Illinois want us to provide the best possible education to our students.  And they recognize this must include opportunities for students to learn abroad.  It is very impressive that our students voted to impose a fee on themselves to encourage this.  The fee will be used to provide scholarships to hundreds of students each year.  These will be divided to support needy students, study in non-traditional destinations, under-represented groups, and finally to support merit scholars.  The students came up with these categories.  Coming here I was quite surprised to discover this new fee.  It is a wonderful example of how sophisticated our students are. 

As in 2006-07, the University of Illinois ranked in the top ten nationally in students studying abroad, international students (4th), and Title VI National Area Studies Centers (2nd, with 8), according to the Open Doors Report. The University also won the 2008 Paul Simon Award for Internationalization.  How does this national recognition help to place more Illinois students in study abroad programs around the world?

I suspect there is only an indirect link.  We are very good, but few of our students or faculty are aware of these national rankings or awards.  This is another example of the hard work facing us as we develop the on-campus infrastructure to support our students abroad.  There is no doubt that the universities of the world are prepared to work with us and to respond to our needs.  We need to continually assess those needs and seek partners abroad to help us respond to them.  We also need to spend more time assessing the needs of our partner institutions around the world and develop ways on campus to respond to them.  The fact that the University of Illinois is well known and highly regarded means we have a huge advantage over other institutions in creating new collaborations to serve our students.

Paul F. Diehl is the Henning Larsen Professor of political science at Illinois. His areas of expertise include quantitative analyses of international conflict, UN peacekeeping operations, geopolitics, and international law. Professor Diehl is the director of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Teaching Academy. He is also director of the Correlates of War Project, the largest data collection project on international conflict in the world. Here, he discusses the future of U.S. foreign policy under a new president.

Clearly, the next president, whether it is Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain, will have a number of different foreign policy issues to address. But the first topic almost certainly would be troop involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. How do you foresee each of the candidates handling this issue?

Over time, the positions of the two candidates on Iraq have become more convergent as the situation on the ground has become more convergent.  Senator Obama no longer speaks about beginning troop withdrawals on the first day of his presidency and Senator McCain is more circumspect about keeping troops in place for an unlimited period of time.  The candidates' actual policies will differ more in terms of the pace of withdrawal and are likely to be governed more by changes in Iraq (e.g., increased violence, better functioning national army) than their previous campaign rhetoric. The range of choice could also be narrowed by an agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments on a framework for withdrawal, something that almost came to fruition this past summer.

Afghanistan may become the "new Iraq" as the violence increases and government structures break down.  Senator Obama has indicated that he favors increasing American troop presence by 10,000, transferring troops from the Iraqi theater to Afghanistan.  Senator McCain has indicated he favors the same strategy that was successful in Iraq. This presumably means a troop surge, although he has not specified the number of troops this might involve or how long they might be deployed.

The "War on Terror" has led many to look at Pakistan as a likely haven for many groups wishing to harm the U.S. How likely is a prolonged military operation in Pakistan, and how prominent has each candidate made this issue?

A great deal of criticism has been directed against Senator Obama for his statements about using military force within Pakistani borders without the permission of the host government.  Yet his professed policy lists a number of narrow conditions for such actions, often dealing the politically popular goal of killing Osama bin Laden.  Senator McCain would not necessarily pursue a different policy, but has indicated that publicly stating one's intentions is a diplomatic blunder.  Indeed, President Bush has already authorized covert and overt military actions across the border into Afghanistan, but none of these are extensive or prolonged and this is unlikely to change with a new president.

Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan are obvious situations to which the new President will have to look for solutions. What are some other topics that are sure to be atop his agenda, and why?

There are likely to be several continuing issues on the foreign policy agenda of the new president, largely dictated by external events.  Broadly, the United States needs to construct a strategy on how to interact with Russia, whether as a partner or an enemy; this may vary across the wide variety of issues (e.g., trade, security, human rights) that will arise.  Addressing nuclear proliferation challenges from North Korea and Iran will also merit attention.  Past agreements have largely failed to address those threats, and the new president will need to decide what mixture of multilateral diplomacy, unilateral initiatives, and military coercion will be necessary.  Finally, domestic economic pressures stemming from a recession may lead the new president to take a more protectionist stance on trade broadly, and NAFTA or other hemispheric initiatives in particular.

In contrast, to the major issues, and number of other situations could perhaps draw less attention, such as African conflicts or the U.S. relationship with socialist Latin American regimes. What do you think it will take for Obama or McCain to seek to increase political engagement in these areas? What are some other issues that may be given lower precedence?

Presidents are limited in how many priorities can be tackled at once, and domestic economic woes from the financial crisis are likely to dominate executive and Congressional attention for at least 2009.  Assuming that events in Africa or Latin America do not possess significant threats to U.S. interests, it is unlikely that will be placed high on the new president's agenda.  Furthermore, a traditional foreign policy focus--the Arab-Israeli conflict--is also unlikely to prompt new American peace initiatives, given prospective changes in the Israeli government and the continuing divide between Palestinian factions.

Richard Tempest is the director of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, where he was acting head in 2006-07 and 2000-02. His research interests lie in the area of Russian culture, history, and politics and their intersection with disciplines such as the history of religion, cultural theory, and the semiotics of the body. He also writes on Bulgarian history and culture. Here he discusses the recent conflict in Georgia and its causes and effects.

On August 7, the Georgian military attacked separatists in the Georgian-region South Ossetia. Consequently, Russian military forces entered Georgia in support of the separatist regions. What was the root cause of the uprising? Why did the Russian military become involved?

Under the Soviet Union, Ossetia was divided into two administrative units, North Ossetia, which was part of Russia, and South Ossetia, which was part of Georgia. As the Soviet Union began to implode in the early 1990s, South Ossetia became the scene of armed conflict between Georgian forces and South Ossetian separatists who wished to unite with their counterparts in North Ossetia. The conflict ended in 1992; a ceasefire was signed that provided for the presence in South Ossetia territory of Russian peacekeepers. Russia granted tens of thousands of South Ossetians Russian passports, even though legally the territory they inhabit was (and still is) a part of Georgia. Sporadic violations of the ceasefire by both sides occurred over subsequent years until on the night of August 8, 2008 Georgia tried to occupy South Ossetia by force. By so doing Georgian President Saakashvili played into Russia's hands, since the Russian leadership has long been anxious to assert itself in what is known as the "near abroad," that is, the territories of the former Soviet Union bordering on the Russian Federation. A staunch ally of the United States and an applicant to join NATO, Georgia is regarded by Russian policy makers as a stalking horse for the West in an area they consider part of their country's historical sphere of influence. Russian military intervention in this new conflict was meant to show that after the diplomatic and military defeats of the 1990s, Russia is back. Another factor in the military-diplomatic-economic equation is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which transports Azeri oil to the West and bypasses Russia by running through Georgian territory, thereby constituting an important alternative route for West-bound energy supplies.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was urged by U.S. President George W. Bush during a meeting to cease fire and recognize the territorial integrity of Georgia. What does this meeting and the situation as a whole say about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's power in the Russian government? What impact could this have on the political climate in Russia?

The Georgia-Russia conflict offers conclusive proof that Dmitry Medvedev is not an independent political actor. Indeed, he may safely be described as an extension of Vladimir Putin, his predecessor as president and now Russia's prime minister, even though under the constitution the head of government (Putin) serves at the pleasure of the head of state (Medvedev). The recent events in the Caucasus may well exacerbate nationalistic and even xenophobic sentiments among some Russians (yet, it is ironic that in Moscow and other cities Ossetians have been the victims of racist attacks), while encouraging Russian policy makers to take a tougher line with Ukraine and Moldova, countries with sizeable Russian-speaking minorities. In Moldova the Transdniester region, like South Ossetia a separatist enclave within the territory of this former Soviet republic, has enjoyed Russian protection ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the case of Ukraine, Russia would dearly love to recover the Crimea, a subtropical peninsula where the Russian Black Sea fleet is based.

U.S. Presidential candidate John McCain has suggested that Russia be expelled from the G8 group of leading economic powers. How would you characterize the U.S.-Russian relationship in the wake of the Georgian war?

John McCain has consistently taken a tough line on Russia; he is also personally close to President Saakashvili. However, should McCain win the presidency, it is far from certain that Russia would be expelled from the G8. Such an action by the major Western powers and Japan would be a humiliation for Russia and would, if anything, exacerbate tensions. It would not moderate Russian behavior in the "near abroad" or elsewhere; quite the contrary. In spite of the recent events in the Caucasus, the United States has economic and political interests in common with Russia. Russian foreign policy today is not driven by a totalitarian ideology but by a mixture of military and economic considerations, feelings of national prestige, as well as a lingering sense of resentment against the West and the United States in particular. All in all, a rather nineteenth-century mix of factors.

If the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia are granted independence from Georgia, does this set a dangerous precedent for other regions in the former Soviet Union? Are suggestions that many leaders of former Soviet republics are Russian puppets merited?

The Russians would argue-have argued-that the precedent was set by the proclamation of Kosovo's independence, which was recognized by the United States and many of its allies. But certainly, a Russian recognition of an independent South Ossetia and Abkhazia-or their incorporation into the Russian Federation-would amount to an abrogation of the post-Soviet territorial settlement and could have highly destabilizing consequences for the region. As for the idea that many of the leaders of the former Soviet republics are merely Russian stooges, I cannot think of a single one who could be so described. Some of them are democratic and some are authoritarian; some are honest and some are corrupt; but none is a puppet of Russia-or of the United States, for that matter.