October 15 – 17, 2009, Philadelphia

An international conference at the University of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with the German Historical Institute,Washington, DC, and the Heidelberg Center for American Studies.

Two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War it is timely and necessary to assess the historical impact of these momentous developments on the West. Victory can be as unsettling in its own way as defeat, and recent events have shown that the West’s “victory” in the Cold War has raised important questions about the nature and future of the West as a political, cultural, and economic space in a world where older divisions have passed away and new fault lines have begun to emerge.

This conference aims to consider those questions and to contribute to the historicizing of the European and German re-unification process by mapping intellectual responses to the events of the past three decades, asking how the end of the Cold War changed European and North American as well as non-Western perceptions of the West.

Thursday, 15 October, 6 p.m.: Keynote Address

Adam Michnik (Editor in Chief, Gazeta Wyborcza)
The Decline of the West Seen from Poland

Friday, 16 October: Historical and Cultural Perspectives

Panel I: The West as Idea
Chair: Wilfried Mausbach (Heidelberg Center for American Studies)

Riccardo Bavaj (University of St. Andrews, Scotland)
A Cultural Crisis of the West? Liberal intellectuals and the challenges to “Western Civilization” in the 1970s

Ariane Leendertz (University of Munich)
American Images of Europe since the 1970s

Commentator: Thomas W. Maulucci (American International College)

Panel II: Concepts of International Order
Chair: Ellen Kennedy (University of Pennsylvania)

Sandeep Gopalan (University of Reading School of Law)
The Two “Wests”: International Law in the U.S. and Europe

Mary Elise Sarotte (University of Southern California)
1989 & the Architecture of Order: The Competition to lead the Post-Cold War World

Commentator: William Glenn Gray (Purdue University)

Panel III: Human Rights in Theory and Practice Since the 1970s
Chair: Ronald J. Granieri (University of Pennsylvania)

Elizabeth Borgwardt (Washington University)
Politics, Culture, and the Limits of Law in Generating Human Rights Norms

Ben Nathans (University of Pennsylvania)
Soviet Rights-Talk

Commentator: Samuel Moyn (Columbia University)

Afternoon Roundtable: Studying the West – Paradigms and Approaches
Chair: Eric Jarosinski (University of Pennsylvania)

Philipp Gassert (University of Augsburg)
John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University)
Lily Gardner Feldman (American Institute for Contemporary German Studies)

Saturday, 17 October:

Panel IV: The West as Experience—High Culture and Popular Culture
Chair: Martin Klimke (German Historical Institute, Washington, DC)

Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie Mellon University)
The Cultural Paradox of Atlanticism

Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (University of Heidelberg)
(Re)Making the East and West in Film

Commentator: Frank Trommler (University of Pennsylvania)

Panel V: The Widening Atlantic?

Chair: Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania)

John C. Torpey (CUNY Graduate Center)
The Return of God and the Decline of “the West”

Uta A. Balbier (German Historical Institute, Washington, DC)
Crusading against secularization - Billy Graham in Germany

Commentator: Thomas Banchoff (Georgetown University)

Public Lecture: 2 – 3:45 p.m., McNeil Center

Volker Berghahn, Columbia University
The Fallacies of Triumphalism: America in the Post-1989 World

Commentaries by Ronald J. Granieri (University of Pennsylvania) and Henry Teune (University of Pennsylvania)

Concluding Discussion: Where is the West?
Chair: Philipp Gassert (University of Augsburg)

Bryan van Sweringen (US Army Europe, The Pentagon, Washington, DC)
Martin Thunert (Heidelberg Center for American Studies)

-------------------------
Registration: There is no registration fee for the conference. For more information, please contact one of the following:

Full conference program at: tinyurl.com/declineofthewest