SERFATY AWARDED FRENCH LEGION OF HONOR
November 25, 2008
WASHINGTON, November 25, 2008 – The Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) is pleased to announce that Simon Serfaty has been made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor), one of France's highest decorations. Named as a recipient during the summer by decree of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Serfaty will be awarded the honor at a ceremony hosted by French Ambassador Pierre Vimont on December 1.
Simon Serfaty is the first holder of the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy at CSIS. He was the director of the CSIS Europe Program for more than 10 years and remains a senior adviser to the program. Dr. Serfaty is also a senior professor of U.S. foreign policy with the Graduate Programs in International Studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia where he is also designated Eminent Scholar.
Recognized for his many and longstanding contributions to the strengthening of bilateral relations between the United States and France within a strong transatlantic partnership, Serfaty joins a select group of American citizens, including CSIS President and CEO John Hamre, chosen to receive this honor since its inception in 1802.
"The French Legion of Honor is a tribute to just how important Simon Serfaty's work has been," said John Hamre. "We are honored to have someone such as Simon here at CSIS — his contributions to strengthening transatlantic ties have been invaluable."
"I am profoundly touched," said Serfaty, "and the fact that this honor would come at a time when our relations with France have gained new levels of intimacy within a renewed Euro-Atlantic partnership makes it especially satisfying and rewarding."
Serfaty’s work at CSIS has been a force for building a wide and effective consensus within and between the United States and Europe that voices the centrality of the transatlantic relationship to achieving common and complementary interests. In May 2003, he released a "Joint Declaration on Renewing the Transatlantic Partnership" that was endorsed by a bipartisan group of eighteen former high-level U.S. officials and which elicited a supporting reply from a comparable group of seventeen Europeans led by former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. In April 2005, Serfaty organized and led a "Think Tank Summit" that included senior representatives from around forty U.S. and European think tanks, producing a report on "The U.S., the EU and NATO after the Cold War and Beyond Iraq" endorsed by forty-three leading scholars from over three dozen institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 2006-2007, Serfaty directed a CSIS project involving over one hundred scholars from seventy-six U.S. and European institutions that examined the various aspects of EU-U.S., EU-NATO and EU-U.S.-NATO relations. He currently leads a two-year "Global Dialogue between the EU and the U.S." that looks at an ever closer Euro-Atlantic community of the thirty-two states that belong to either the EU or NATO (or both).
Dr. Serfaty is the author of many books, including most recently Architects of Delusion: Europe, America, and the Iraq War (2008) and The Vital Partnership: Power and Order (2005), among many others.
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The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) is a bipartisan, non-profit organization founded in 1962 and headquartered in Washington, D.C. It seeks to advance global security and prosperity by providing strategic insights and policy solutions to decision makers.