Featured speakers include Bob Maguire, director of the Haiti program at Trinity Washington University in D.C.; Nikolas Kozloff, author of Hugo Chavez, Oil, Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S.; and François Pierre-Louis, an associate professor at CUNY who specializes in Caribbean and Haitian politics. Lenelle Moise, a Haitian-American poet and performance artist, will recite a few of her poems to open the program.

Tickets are $40 in advance and $60 at the door.

Inspired by a trip to the Middle East in 1865, Swiss chocolatier Philippe Suchard added minarets to his home in Neuchatel.

Switzerland’s voters recently passed a ban on the construction of minarets. On the political blog 538, founder Nate Silver and Geneva-based correspondent Renard Sexton look into how religious identity, language spoken, and the foreign population affected how each canton, or Swiss province, voted on the initiative.

Silver kicks off the discussion, finding that the more religious the canton, the more likely it was to vote for the ban. In his follow-up, Sexton examines the role of xenophobia in the decision. He points out that since many multinational corporations and organizations are based in Switzerland, about 22 percent of Switzerland’s population are foreigners. As he says, this means two things:

First, the cultural clash in many Swiss cantons between traditional agriculturally-driven, conservative lifestyle and the “international” culture of more urban areas, who are dominated by the UN, banks and globalized companies, has become very pronounced.

And second, and perhaps more importantly, foreigners can’t vote.

Through their analyses, Silver and Sexton reveal some interesting insights about Swiss culture, especially in the age of globalization. As Sexton wrote, “the politics of culture in a country that is multi-cultural/lingual, yet insular…and isolated are very complicated politics indeed.”

Photo by Tambako the Jaguar. CC 2.0.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

With the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the founding of the People’s Republic of China approaching in October and November, Jeffrey Wasserstrom examines how communism’s biggest defeat helped strengthen China’s Communist Party in an article for Foreign Policy.

Toward the end of the piece, Wasserstrom looks at two key lessons China learned from the end of communism in Eastern Europe:

1. Patriotism is a winning strategy, but it only works for one side.

By capitalizing on national pride, Eastern Europeans were able to unify citizens within each country against Communism, positioning it as a regime imposed on the country from outside forces. Taking control of this powerful tool, the Chinese Communist Party “placed renewed emphasis on patriotic education, stressing the party’s pre-1949 role in chasing out foreign invaders,” Wasserstrom writes.

2. Class divides give rise to dissent, so give people opportunities to bridge those divides.

East Berliners had to merely look over the wall to see how capitalism afforded their West Berlin counterparts a higher standard of living. Within Eastern European countries, Wasserstrom writes, “The only meaningful social divide was between a small privileged coterie of corrupt officials and the rest. And the rest was pretty much everyone.”

China avoided similar problems by encouraging a consumer revolution over the past two decades. As more working Chinese entered the middle class, there was less of a divide between the average Chinese worker and not only the party faithful but also middle-class workers in capitalist Taiwan.

Read the full article here.

Photo by unknown author, released by permission of the Senate of Berlin. CC 3.0.