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Carole Fink
Carole Fink is Humanities Distinguished Professor of History and an associate of the Mershon Center. She is author or editor of 12 books and more than 50 articles, chapters and monographs on European international history and historiography.
Fink's most recent book, edited with Bernd Schaeffer, is Ostpolitik, 1969-1974: European and Global Responses (Cambridge University Press, 2009). The product of a 2006 conference at the Mershon Center, the book examines the worldwide effects of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's policy of Ostpolitik, or normalizing relations with East Germany, the Soviet Union, and other Eastern European states. Brandt's goal was to end confrontation across the Iron Curtain and resolve Europe’s Cold War division.
Fink is currently working on a two areas of research. The first, "West Germany and Israel, 1966-74: The Transformation of the ‘Special Relationship,'" flows from her work on Ostpolitik, focusing on its impact on Israel. After World War II, Israel enjoyed a special relationship with West Germany based on the dark legacy of the Third Reich, a shared dependency on the United States, and a shared hostility from the Soviet Union.
Under Ostpolitik, however, Brandt sought a policy of "evenhandedness" in the Middle East by declaring neutrality during the 1967 and 1973 wars, supporting Palestinian rights, and calling on Israel to withdraw from the conquered territories. In implementing this new policy, Fink says, West Germany was not rejecting Israel but pursuing its national interest in an undisrupted oil supply, which required a stable Middle East. Brandt was also responding to the historic and economic ties between Germany and the Arab world as well as internal pressure demanding sympathy for the Palestinians.
Second, Fink is beginning a new area of research on international involvement in refugee questions. In June she gave an invited paper on "Revisiting the Refugee Problem on the Eve of World War II" at the 2009 Galilee Colloquia in Israel on Immigration, Asylum-Seeking and Citizenship: Entitlements, Individual Rights and Collective Identities.
Fink's research examines the 1951 Convention on Refugees, tracing its roots to the Jewish refugee crisis just before World War II. Although the new United Nations regime made progress by defining who is a refugee, establishing the right to legal aid, and setting forth the principle of burden sharing, Fink argues that other problems have not been solved. The U.N. High Commissioner's work remains humanitarian, failing to address the political causes of refugee crises, and refugees still have no right to asylum.
Fink's scholarship has been widely recognized. She is two-time winner of the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize for The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy, 1921-1922 (North Carolina, 1984) and Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge, 2004), which also won the Akira Ariye Prize for Best Book in International History. Her book Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989), the first biography of France's eminent historian and resistance leader, has been translated into six languages.
Fink is also faculty sponsor of the Mershon Network of International Historians, an online association for scholars of modern European international relations. Located at www.mnih.org, the web site is visited annually by more than 50,000 people in dozens of countries.
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Carole
Fink
Humanities Distinguished Professor of History
The Ohio State University
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