Asia and the Mediterranean World

Bio
Philippe Le Corre is a Senior Fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute (Center for China Analysis) and a Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at ESSEC Business School in Paris, and Associate Fellow with FRS. He specializes in Europe-China relations, Chinese investments in Europe and Chinese influence in Southern Europe. Philippe previously worked at two of Washington’s foreign policy think-tanks: The Brookings Institution and The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was also Special Adviser to the French Defense Minister and a Senior analyst with the MOD Policy Planning Directorate. Philippe is the author or co-author of six books, including China’s Offensive in Europe: Brookings Institution Press, 2016. He testified several times before the US Congress, the French Senate and the French National Assembly. He is the author of various monographs and book chapters published by Carnegie and Brookings, and contributed to several edited volumes including The China Questions 2 (ed: M. A. Carrai, J. Rudolph, M. Szonyi): Harvard Press, 2022; and Europe in an Era of growing Sino-American Competition (ed: S. Biba, Reinhard Wolf): Routledge, 2021

Bio
Davide Lombardo is Lecturer in History, Metropolitan Studies and Liberal Studies at NYU Florence and also teaches Political Science at Kent State University Florence. He holds a doctorate in History and Civilization from the European University Institute (Fiesole, Italy) as well as a French (Grenoble II) and Italian (Pisa) degrees in Modern History. His research focuses on European History from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In 2009, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, and Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Huntington Library. In 2020 and 2021 he was Visiting Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow of Liberal Studies at NYU Shanghai. His latest work is an edited volume – with Marcella Simoni, Languages of Racism and Discrimination in Twentieth-Century Italy, Palgrave 2022

Abstract
2022 marked the 60th anniversary of the “accidental death” of Enrico Mattei, the manager that, with his unconventional industrial strategy, lead Italian state-owned energy company ENI to become a relevant global actor and something more than a competitor for the energy cartel that had dominated the  international scene since the 1920s.  A most welcome partner by Mediterranean and Asian countries, such as Egypt, Persia, Tunisia found in ENI not only better deals but a partnership for the industrial development of their country. At home, arguably, more than anyone else, Mattei fostered and created the conditions for the 1950s Italian economic boom. This paper explores the various dimensions of the history of Italian “Petrolio” [oil] and gas between growing energy needs, competition for natural resources and international tension. In her inaugural speech in fall 2022,  the new Italian cabinet’s Prime Minister evoked the need for a “Mattei’s plan”:  this was more than paying lip service in the wake of the anniversary of Mattei’s, rather it marked the attempt to appropriate and repropose a set of national aspirations – in part remote from the political roots of Meloni – for a renewed strategic agenda as geopolitics is shifting away from globalization and into a renewed phase of not-so-cold-war.

Bio
Stephen G. Gross is jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU. After working as an economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington DC, he completed his PhD at UC Berkeley where he subsequently lectured with the International and Area Studies Program. In his research and teaching Dr. Gross is interested in 20th century Germany, European unification, European and international political economy, energy policy, and international relations. His forthcoming book—Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford)—explores the political economy of energy crises and transition in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. His first book, Export Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015. He has also published on a variety of economic themes in German and European history in Central European History, Contemporary European History, German Politics and Society, and Eastern European Politics and Society, as well as in various book chapters.

Abstract
This paper traces the deepening of natural gas infrastructural ties between the European Union (EU), Russia, and the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions from the 1990s to the 2010s. It asks how the EU’s conception of energy security changed from the collapse of Communism through Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and how energy security contradicted or complemented other European energy goals such as liberalization and environmental protection. It begins with the European Energy Charter of 1991, which aimed to integrate the post-communist states of Eastern Europe and Russia into a new legal framework that would expand investment into transnational infrastructure and facilitate the flow of hydrocarbons into the EU. It illustrates how, in the rush to tap major natural gas fields outside of Europe, questions of energy security lost priority for policymakers in Brussels, as their belief that depoliticized, competitive, liberal, and short-term energy markets could solve nearly any challenge gained momentum. This paper then shows how gas infrastructure became re-politicized during an era of pipeline competition in the early 2000s, as new rival pipeline projects proliferated—including Nord Stream, Southstream, Nabucco, and the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline—pitting different constellations of countries and corporations against one another. After 2010 questions of energy security resurfaced in dramatic fashion, culminating in Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. But this created intense divisions within the EU and generated intractable political problems by creating an apparent trilemma that pitted the priority of security against the goals growth and environmental protection.

Bio
Maria Adele Carrai is an Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai. Her research explores the history of international law in East Asia and investigates how China’s rise as a global power shapes norms and redefines the international distribution of power. She co-leads the Research Initiative ‘Mapping Global China,’ and is the author of Sovereignty in China. A Geneology of a Concept since 1840 (CUP 2019) and co-editor of The China Questions 2 – Critical Insights into US-China Relations (HUP 2022). Before joining NYU Shanghai, she was a recipient of a three-year Marie-Curie fellowship at KU Leuven. She was also a Fellow at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program, Max Weber Program of the European University Institute of Florence, and New York University Law School.

Abstract
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was launched in 2013 by Xi Jinping. Europe and its vast market were the end point of the maritime silk road and economic belt. What was the connectivity strategy beyond the BRI, and what role the Mediterranean played in it? What is the status of the BRI in the Mediterranean? The paper looks at China’s connectivity strategy in the Mediterranean. It focuses on the key policy documents and the actual economic statecraft that China is promoting in the Mediterranean region.

Bio
Yifei Li is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai and Global Network Assistant Professor at NYU. His research concerns both the macro-level implications of Chinese environmental governance for state-society relations, marginalized populations, and global ecological sustainability, and the micro-level bureaucratic processes of China’s state interventions in the environmental realm. He has received research support from the United States National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, and the China Times Cultural Foundation, among other extramural sources. He is the lead author (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. His recent work appears in Current Sociology, Sociology of Development, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Environmental Sociology, Journal of Environmental Management, Journal of Food Law & Policy, and other scholarly outlets. His research has been featured on NPR, in The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other media. He received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Bachelor’s from Fudan University.

Abstract
Much of the critical literature in development studies examines “hard” developmental undertakings such as infrastructure, mining, industrial restructuring, and energy. Less critical attention has been paid to “soft” projects such as mass tourism, scientific collaboration, and cultural exchange. This article seeks to issue a corrective by examining the influx of Chinese state capital into such “soft” initiatives in Eurasia and beyond. Despite the common narrative of these projects being “neutral” and “win-win,” BRI-funded tourism and archeology exhibit the tendency to impose a China-centric, tianxia-like framework on Eurasian history and culture. These projects have engaged in not only discursive recalibration of historiography and archeology but also the spatial and material transformation of landscapes in accordance with BRI-imposed imaginaries. While COVID-19 has placed a hold on most of such initiatives, the pandemic has also left many of China’s BRI partner countries even more dependent on BRI-enabled growth and development. The softer face of the Belt and Road can turn out to be as consequential as its harder side.