Otto Wolff-Director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations
Eberhard Sandschneider was born in 1955 and studied English, classical philology and political science at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. In 1986, he received his doctorate with a thesis on "Military and Politics in the People's Republic of China, 1969-1985" and also devoted his habilitation thesis on "Stability and Transformation of Political Systems" to an international perspective on political events. From 1995 to 1998, he taught as Professor of International Relations at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Since 1998, he has held the Chair of Chinese Politics and International Relations at the Free University of Berlin, where he also served as Dean of the Department of Politics and Social Sciences for three years. In 2003, in addition to his professorship, he took on the position of Otto Wolff Director of the Research Institute of the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.
Thursday, 05. December 2013, 18:15 – 20:00 h
At the University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich, KOH-B-10
Geopolitical upheavals are part of the normality of international politics. While many discussions focus on the role of rising powers, it is all too easy to overlook the much greater importance of the behaviour of declining states. While Europe's relative geopolitical decline seems beyond question, the question arises as to how it can succeed in maintaining peace, security and prosperity without falling back into the mistakes of the past, which have repeatedly led to devastating catastrophes precisely because of the propensity of declining states to engage in conflict. Successfully managing its own decline is Europe's central task in the 21st century.