Episode 06: Competing Visions for a New Era of Globalization
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Michael Hüther
German Economic Institute
Prof. Dr. Michael Huether has served as Director and Member of the Executive Committee of the German Economic Institute since 2004. He has previously worked in a number of important positions in research, teaching, and banking, including at Stanford University, the German Council of Economic Advisers, and DekaBank. Since 2001 he has held the Honorary Professorship for Economics at the European Business School. He is also a member of the EU Commission‘s Refit Platform, which advises the Commission on the efficient, effective and practical implementation of EU legislation. He has a Ph.D. in Economics and History from the Justus Liebig University in Giessen. He was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany by the President of the Republic.
Peter S. Rashish
Vice President; Director, Geoeconomics Program
Peter S. Rashish, who counts over 30 years of experience counseling corporations, think tanks, foundations, and international organizations on transatlantic trade and economic strategy, is Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at AICGS. He also writes The Wider Atlantic blog.
Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the Chamber’s advocacy ahead of the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Previously, Mr. Rashish was a Senior Advisor for Europe at McLarty Associates, Executive Vice President of the European Institute, and a staff member and consultant at the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the Atlantic Council, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund.
Mr. Rashish has testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and has advised three U.S. presidential campaigns. He has been a featured speaker at the Munich Security Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jean Monnet Institute in Paris and a Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. His commentaries have been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, and he has appeared on PBS, CNBC, CNN, and NPR.
He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. He speaks French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
The U.S. economic relationship with Europe is the most intense and largest economic relationship on the planet. Bigger than U.S.-China trade, or any other for that matter.
Earlier this week, French president Emmanuel Macron published his recommendations for the future of Europe. It is a vision for re-founding European solidarity in the face of a more difficult and dangerous world. The impetus is that 2019 will be a year of major changes in Europe: a new European Parliament a new President of the European Council, a new European Commission, and a new leader of the European Central Bank.
The European Union is notoriously complex—how it operates, what authorities are exerted in Brussels by the European Commission versus what are the responsibilities of member states—and that complexity is an important part of the U.S. difficulty engaging with the European Union. But there’s no way around it—it’s a market of over 500 million people, an economy about as big as that of the United States, and one of the major players on the international economic scene.
There’s a growing discussion in Europe, often overlooked in the U.S. Some of the issues are the same on both sides of the Atlantic, including what are the challenges from China’s state-capitalist model for the global economy, especially when it comes to technology and the industries of the future. There is also a debate happening about whether the European Union should shift more toward an industrial policy that promotes European champions on a global stage, and about whether more European integration is a good thing, and if so, whether that should be on the economy and competition, or in social and labor market policy.
In this episode of The Zeitgeist, Prof. Dr. Michael Hüther, Director of the German Economic Institute, joined AGI President Jeff Rathke and Senior Fellow Peter Rashish to talk about what Hüther calls the end of the second era of globalization and the challenges of shaping the third era of globalization, creating a European and an international framework that is politically sustainable and economically effective.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Michael Hüther, Director, German Economic Institute
Peter Rashish, Senior Fellow and Director of the Geoeconomics Program, AGI
Prof. Dr. Michael Hüther also joined AGI for a breakfast discussion on “Strategies for the European Union in the Third Age of Globalization,” part of the Geoeconomics Speaker Series supported by Allianz.
The Geoeconomics Speaker Series is supported by
