Professional Affiliation

Professor of International Studies, University of Washington

Expert Bio

I was born in London, England, in 1949. My mother is Austrian, my father Spanish. When I was 10 years old, we moved to southern California, where I continued my education in Catholic schools. I did my undergraduate education at Stanford University, majoring in Philosophy, and then served in the U.S. Air Force (stationed at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany). While in the Air Force, I earned a Master's degree in International Relations by taking evening classes. Upon my release from the Air Force in 1975, I entered graduate school, receiving my Ph.D. in Political Science in 1981 from UCLA (main field, Comparative Politics; secondary fields, Political Theory and International Relations). In the eighteen years since I received my Ph.D. I have focused, in my research, on three partially overlapping areas:

• general political trends in Eastern Europe, especially regarding the movement toward liberal democracy;
• Yugoslav affairs, especially regarding the mobilization of nationalism for political purposes; and
• Church-state relations in the Russian and East-Central European area.

Of the seven books I have written and published to date, two have dealt with general political trends, two with Yugoslav affairs, and two with Church-state relations in the given area. I am especially interested in the sources, effects, and power of values, hence in the nature of the value system that underpins liberal democracy. Let me give one example. In Whose Democracy? I endeavor to show how the liberal project sanctions and entails respect for both individual rights and the rights of the community, but is undermined by appeals to what I call "collective rights" -- i.e., the alleged rights of linguistic groups, ethnic groups, and religious groups to set the cultural agenda of their societies in ways that penalize minorities and that also entail claims to "rights" above and beyond what is entailed in individual and community-based rights. In philosophical terms, I consider myself a Kantian -- though, as with most Kantians, I make some revisions to Kant's thought (accepting, for example, the Lockean premise that people have a right, if not a duty, to revolt against tyranny). My thought falls, thus, squarely within the classical liberal tradition when it comes to the major questions of rights, equality, political legitimacy, and so forth. In reading the works of John Stuart Mill, I have yet to find myself in disagreement with even a single point of his. At the University of Washington, the classes I have taught most regularly have included lecture classes on Eastern Europe, the Catholic Church in world politics, and -- in earlier years -- the history of communism; undergraduate seminars on utopias and value systems (involving readings from Plato to Kant to Stirner to Skinner, among others), and gender relations and gender politics; and graduate seminars in East European affairs. In spring 2000, I taught a new class "The History of Classical Liberal Thought," focusing on the ideas of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Paine, Montesqueiu, and J.S. Mill.

Expertise

East European Studies, especially: Church-State Relations, Political Philosophy

Wilson Center Project

"The Three Yugoslavias: The Dual Challenge of State- Building and Legitimation Among the Yugoslavs, 1918-2000"

Project Summary

The national question has bedeviled the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and socialist Yugoslavia alike; it has also played a role in the political life of most of the Yugoslav successor states since 1990 (all except Slovenia). But it is another matter as to why Yugoslav politicians have failed, for so long, to build stable, valued institutions capable of resolving national and other issues. I propose to investigate this failure of state-building in light of an original theory of system legitimacy. The project may shed light on the nature of system legitimation broadly, as well as on the consequences (and symptoms) of the failure of system legitimation.

Major Publications

• Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the War for Kosovo, 3rd ed. (Westview Press, 1999)
  
  
• Whose Democracy? Nationalism, Religion, and the Doctrine of Collective Rights in Post-1989 Eastern Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997)
  
  
• Social Currents in Eastern Europe: The Sources and Consequences of the Great Transformation, 2nd ed. (Duke University Press, 1995)