DAAD Events

CGES is one of ten Centers for German and European Studies in North America that was founded through a generous grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). This funding from the German government makes the following events possible.

 Abe Newman’s Fall 2023 workshop “Europe in a Geo-economic Age”

For Europe, economic openness long served as its primary path to wealth and power. Increasingly, however, interdependence has become a source of vulnerability. Shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, exposed world-wide economic networks for information, money, and production as more brittle and centralized than many observers had expected. But this is far from simply an economic story as the US and China have begun to manipulate these vulnerabilities, inflicting costs on their adversaries as a tool of foreign policy. The Russia invasion of Ukraine and its gas war has only made this more obvious. The chokepoints of the global economy have become the battlefield upon which interstate tensions playout. Unfortunately, Europe increasingly finds itself stuck in the middle.

This workshop will explore three fundamental themes. First, how do European policy makers assess the threat posed by the use of economic coercion by the United States and China respectively? How are policy and industry actors reorienting their positions to manage the new vulnerabilities? Second, what are the constraints that shape Europe’s use of such tools and what might be done to overcome those constraints? Third, what is the relative potential of new policy tools being developed in Europe to either block external pressure or project European foreign policy globally? Here, could a new appreciation for geo-economics in Europe be the basis of global climate action or other international public goods?

Date and participants to be announced.

Past DAAD Event Series:

 Thomas Zimmer’s lecture Spring 2023 series on “A Never-Ending Crisis?”

Prior DAAD Conferences