7th Annual Borton Mosely Distinguished Lecture on Eurasia: A Reassessment of Sino-Russian Relations: How National Identities Trump National Interests

The Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute hosts the 7th Annual Borton Mosely Distinguished Lecture on Eurasia

Speaker: Gilbert Rozman, Musgrave Professor of Sociology, Princeton University

Moderator: Charles Armstrong, Director, Center for Korean Research, Columbia University

Please join us for food and beverages at the reception following the event.

FREE and open to the public
To reserve seats, click here. 

Abstract:

For fifty years since writing a junior independent paper on Sino-Soviet relations, Rozman has been following mutual images in Moscow and Beijing and their wildly fluctuating relations. This talk will provide an updated assessment, focusing on the most recent developments.

Combining comparisons of Chinese and Russian national identities and analysis of Sino-Russian relations, the talk will assess factors that have driven these two countries closer together over the past decade. Using a six-dimensional framework for the study of national identities and the role of national identity gaps in bilateral relations, Rozman will discuss the presence of a communist great power national identity syndrome and its strengthening under Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Attention will likewise be paid to divisive forces, especially linked to relations with other countries in Asia. Coverage will touch on new momentum in Russo-Japanese relations, developments related to North and South Korea, and divergence over Central Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. National interests associated with views of these areas will be evaluated in relation to the power of national identity, as seen particularly in attitudes toward the United States. The talk will conclude with suggestions on how evolving Sino-Russian relations are impacting reorganization in Eurasia and the prospects for regionalism. 

Gilbert Rozman Bio:

Gilbert Rozman taught at Princeton University from 1970 to 2013. He first went to Princeton for a junior year in the Critical Languages Program before returning to Carleton College for an independent study major in Chinese and Russian studies. As a Princeton graduate student, he prepared a field on Chinese, Russian, and Japanese societies. In the 1970s his writings compared premodern urban development first in China and Japan and then with a focus on Russia, and modernization first in Japan and Russia and then with a focus on China. Following a 1977-78 stay in the Soviet Union to assess Soviet studies of China, he turned his attention to the intersection of international relations and sociology. Since 1979 he has been a professor and was named the Musgrave Professor of Sociology in 1992

Rozman’s books and articles have appeared in series. In the 1980s he wrote on Soviet debates about China, Chinese debates about the Soviet Union, and finally the Japanese debate on the Gorbachev era. In the 1990s his main emphasis was on the search for regionalism, culminating in Northeast Asia’s Stunted Regionalism, a book on flawed thinking and bilateral distrust on how to achieve this goal. After starting Korean studies, Rozman edited a number of books that put Korea at the center of Northeast Asian transformation. 

Charles Armstrong Bio

Hugh Borton, 1903-1995, and Philip Mosely, l905-l972, were remarkable individuals, who compiled outstanding records of scholarship, teaching, and public service. Borton began his lifelong involvement with Japan in the late l920s,studying at Tokyo Imperial University in the 1930s and joining the Columbia faculty in 1937. From l930-l932,Philip Mosely spent two grueling years in Leningrad researching his Harvard dissertation. He joined the Columbia faculty in l940.

During WWII both served in the State Department. Philip Mosely specialized on planning for post-war Europe, also serving as an advisor at major Allied war- and postwar conferences. Borton engaged in post-war planning for Japan, playing a significant role in the preservation of the Japanese Emperor, then widely regarded as a war criminal. Borton argued that deposing him would have made governing an occupied Japan an impossible challenge.

Borton returned to Columbia in 1948 as Associate Director of the newly established East Asian Institute (now the Weatherhead East Asian Institute), serving as Director from l954-57. Under his leadership, the Institute became a major center for research and teaching. Nationally he helped found what later became the Association for Asian Studies; he was its President in 1957-58. He then became President of Haverford College, returning in 1967 to the East Asian Institute as a Senior Research Associate.

Mosely was a co-founder in 1946 of Columbia's Russian Institute (now the Harriman Institute), vigorously promoting Soviet studies and serving as Director from l951-l955. Mosely was a marvelous teacher and mentor. He contributed greatly to the national advancement of Slavic studies in the US. From l955-53 he served as Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, but returned to Columbia in l963, as Director of the European Institute, and as Adlai Stevenson Professor of International Relations.

Both Borton and Mosely stood up in defense of academic freedom during the McCarthy years. By all accounts, both were wonderful human beings who greatly influenced and affected those around them. This lecture series is a fitting tribute to them.