On Sunday, December 13, 2020, 1:30-3:00 p.m. Eastern Time (US), our final Mackinder Forum Seminar of the year took place. Professor Kent Calder addressed the following topic: "The Logic of Eurasian Integration."
TOPIC FOR CONSIDERATION: Geography arguably dictates many basic parameters of political-economic competition. It conveys certain latent, potential advantages in the Eurasian context to a centrally located power promoting overland connectivity. It also enhances the likelihood that continental interdependence will move forward when the centrally located nation is growing and becoming politically influential. How strong today are these forces for integration and where might they lead the Eurasian continent?
READING: Kent E. Calder, Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019), chapter 4.
BIOGRAPHY: Kent Calder serves as the Director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies. He previously served as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) from 2018 to 2020 and as Director of Asia Programs from 2016 to 2018. Before arriving at Johns Hopkins SAIS in 2003, Calder served as Special Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Professor at Princeton University, Lecturer on Government at Harvard, and as the first Executive Director of Harvard University’s Program on US-Japan Relations. Calder received his PhD from Harvard University in 1979, where he worked under the direction of Edwin O. Reischauer. A specialist in East Asian political economy, he has spent eleven years living and researching in Japan and four years elsewhere in East Asia. In 2014, he was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. Calder’s most recent works include Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration (Stanford, 2019); Circles of Compensation: Economic Growth and the Globalization of Japan (Stanford, 2017); Singapore: Smart City, Smart State (Brookings, 2017); Asia in Washington (Brookings, 2014); and The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (Yale, 2012).