2024-25

Drawing on his new book The Shortest History of Migration, Ian Goldin shows how, from the ancient peopling of the planet to the present, migrants have been at the heart of advances in society. Identifying both the economic contributions as well as the social costs of migration, he addresses the antipathy shown by some towards foreigners and help develop an understanding of just how vital migration will be in the future.

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Ian Goldin (@ian_goldin) is the Oxford University Professor of Globalisation and Development and founding Director of the Oxford Martin School, the world’s leading centre for interdisciplinary research into critical global challenges. He served as Advisor to President Nelson Mandela, has been knighted by the French Government and is the author of three BBC series. His previous book, Age of the City, was selected by the Financial Times as one of its best books of 2023.

Kristin Surak is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at LSE and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires (Harvard University Press 2023). Her research on elite mobility, international migration, nationalism, and politics has been translated into a half-dozen languages. 

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

The LSE School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.

The shortest history of migration

The guest speaker of the Maurice Fraser Annual Lecture 2024 is Timothy Garton Ash. Under the title of Europe at the Beginning of a New Era he will be discussing his latest book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe. 

In it, Timothy Garton Ash argued that there was a distinct ‘post-Wall’ era of European history which began on 9 November 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ended on 24 February 2022, with Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. If that is true, what are the defining characteristics of the new era? And what the key challenges that follow for Europe in this period? For a conventional historian 'It's too soon to say’, but for a ‘historian of the present’, and even more for European policy makers, some tentative answers must be attempted.

Europe at the beginning of a new era - Maurice Fraser Annual Lecture 2024

Central banks are in the course of reining in inflation, after the surge due to COVID-19 and then the worst energy crisis since the 1970s. This unprecedented series of events obviously raised questions, debates and some criticism; so does a more volatile future, taking a forward-looking approach.

François Villeroy de Galhau, Governor of the Banque de France and member of the European Central Bank’s Governing Council, will give a keynote speech (followed by a Q&A), around three questions for monetary policy.

In his talk, he will offer his view on how central banks stand ready to greater volatility and supply shocks, discuss the implications for the inflation objective and explore how central banks can help with regard to structural policies.

Meet our speaker and chair 

François Villeroy de Galhau is Governor of the Bank of France.

Iain Begg is a Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE European Institute.

With welcome remarks by Professor Larry Kramer, President and Vice Chancellor, LSE

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

Hashtag for this event: #LSEFrance

Monetary policy in perspective: three questions for a more volatile future

In the most recent European Parliament election, forces to the very right have received nearly 30% of the vote. That vote share has been increasing dramatically ever since the financial crisis and reflects a profoundly changing party political system on the national level. 

Following Hannah Arendt we will not try to judge, but to better understand the economic and social background for the rise of more extreme thought not just in Europe, but also in the United States. How to interact: confront, cooperate or integrate?

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Klaus Welle is Visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE European Institute. He was previously Secretary General of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2022. His previous roles in Brussels include serving as chief of staff to the President of the European Parliament, as Director General for EU Internal Policies in the Parliament's administration, and as Secretary General successively of the European People's Party (EPP) transnational political party and of the EPP political group in the European Parliament.

Jonathan Hopkin is Professor of Comparative Politics at the LSE European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

What is right-wing populism? Understanding the experience in Europe and America

Only 7 of the 27 European Union (EU) countries are not members of the union’s common currency area – the euro area - and most of them are in Central-Eastern Europe (CEE): Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Except for Bulgaria, they are all far from meeting the membership convergence criteria, which is mainly a reflection of their governments’ lukewarm – or sometimes even hostile - attitude towards euro adoption in the past two decades. In contrast, other CEE states opted for an “as-early-as-possible” adoption of the common currency (Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, and the three Baltic states).

The time has come to revisit the pros and cons of euro adoption in the CEE region. What is the record of existing EMU-CEE countries under euro area membership? How this compares to their own expectations and to experiences of countries outside the EMU, particularly with regards to the post-pandemic inflation experience? Have plans in non-EMU countries are changing in light of these experiences as well as new challenges such as security issues in the wake of Russia’s war against Ukraine?

This panel of high-level policy makers and academics will look at this question from various complementing angles and will discuss prospects for euro adoption in non-eurozone countries. 

Meet our speakers and chair 

Reiner Martin is Executive Director of the National Bank of Slovakia. 

Piroska Nagy Mohacsi is a visiting professor of the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa.

Atanas Pekanov is a monetary economist WIFO Wien and former Deputy Prime Minister of Bulgaria (via Zoom). 

Agnieszka Smoleńska is a senior policy fellow at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise (CETEx) and assistant professor at the Florence School of Banking and Finance.  

Angelo Martelli is Assistant Professor at the LSE European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

The Centre for Economic Transition Expertise (@CETEx_LSE) is a specialised research and policy centre to support the ambitious reforms required to deliver sustainable, inclusive and resilient economies and financial systems across Europe.

The LSE SU European Society is an LSE student society for all students interested in Europe - whether European national or EU enthusiast. They specialise in hosting senior speakers leading thought, research and policy on European issues on issues covering politics, economics, international relations and much more.

Central and eastern Europe's prospects for euro adoption

Join us for this event with Elke Evrard, a postdoctoral researcher at the Human Rights Centre of the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University.

In recent decades, reparations have emerged as key mechanisms for addressing systemic state-sponsored human rights violations, aiming not only to acknowledge and compensate victims but also to transform the structural causes of these harms. However, the realization of reparation programs also hinges on support by majority non-victimized groups, a dynamic largely overlooked in existing literature. Understanding how survivors’ demands for comprehensive repair (fail to) resonate is crucial, as public perception and support contribute to shaping both the socio-political viability of reparation initiatives and their broader goals of fostering recognition, civic trust, and social solidarity.

This presentation reflects on a survey experiment in Guatemala to explore how contentious processes of discursive memory production – characterized by competing representations of the temporality of harm and prospects for peace – impact the emergence of political solidarity with Indigenous survivors of the internal armed conflict and support for their reparations demands. While the study finds that perceptions of survivors' ongoing suffering and the potential of reparations to contribute to peace are important predictors of solidarity and support, these perceptions proved largely unmoving to the contrasting textual primes presented in the experiment.

In-depth analysis of open-ended responses shows that individuals, in engaging with prevalent memory discourse(s), have developed stable yet diverse interpretations of the necessity and nature of repair and its connection to social change. Three interpretative frames – focusing on 'rights and justice,' 'healing and reconciliation,' and 'economic progress and development' – are variably mobilized in expressions of support, ambivalence, or opposition to reparations. Additional research is essential to better understand how socio-legal contexts and cognitive processes interact to shape public attitudes and behaviors in relation to reparation debates worldwide, including, for example, in European countries grappling with the legacies of slavery and colonial pasts.

Meet our speaker and chair

Elke Evrard is a postdoctoral researcher at the Human Rights Centre of the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University. As a member of the ERC-funded Justice Visions research project, her work focuses on victim participation, public outreach, reparations, and memory-making in transitional justice contexts, including post-conflict settings and countries addressing widespread historical harm. She has a particular interest in interdisciplinary and mixed method approaches. She is also a co-lecturer of the course "Transitional Justice and Human Rights" and serves as the managing editor for the Journal of Human Rights Practice with Oxford University Press.

Elke holds a PhD in Law, as well as Master’s degrees in European Studies and in International Politics. Her doctoral dissertation examined the nexus of expressive justice theories with discourses and practices of participation, solidarity and citizenship, through empirical studies focused on Liberia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. She has published and forthcoming articles in leading journals, such as the International Journal of Transitional Justice, Social Justice Research, the Journal of Peace Research, and the International Journal of Human Rights. Additionally, she is currently co-editing an authoritative handbook on victim engagement in transitional justice, which is based on an international conference she co-organized.

Denisa Kostovicova is Professor in Global Politics and Director of LSEE Research on South Eastern Europe at the LSE European Institute.


Understanding solidary support for reparations: Memory production and public meaning-making after mass violence

Join us for the book launch of Sovereign Europe: An Agenda for Europe in a Fragmented Global Economy, with co-authors Paolo Guerrieri and Pier Carlo Padoan. 

This book investigates the evolution of the European and global economy from the 1950s to the present day, focusing on the role of the EU in a new global environment where economy and security intersect.

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Paolo Guerrieri is Visiting Professor at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences-Po (Paris) and the Business School of the University of San Diego. Guerrieri was Senator of the Italian Republic and member of the Economic Budget Committee and the European Policy Committee at the Italian Senate from 2013 to 2018.

Pier Carlo Padoan has been Chairman of UniCredit since April 2021. He was the Italian Minister of Economy and Finance from February 2014 to May 2018 and Member of Parliament from 2018 to 2020.

Tony Barber is European Comment Editor of the Financial Times. He is a former foreign correspondent in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, the former Soviet Union, the US and the former Yugoslavia.

Iain Begg is a Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE European Institute.

Lorenzo Codogno is a Visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE European Institute.

Leila Simona Talani is Professor of International Political Economy and Director of the Centre for Italian Politics in the Department of European and International Studies at King's college London.

Paul de Grauwe is John Paulson Chair in European Political Economy at the LSE European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

Sovereign Europe: an agenda for Europe in a fragmented global economy

The US has 330 million citizens, which is less than 5% of the world’s population. Yet its GDP footprint is around 25% of global GDP. How is that possible? While leading-edge technological innovation and a giant military undoubtedly help, what’s really been the secret sauce for the past 30 plus years is the global role of the dollar. The rest of the world needs a savings asset and the US provides it through massive debt issuance and the global role of the dollar in international trade. This has enabled the US to import vast quantities of  TVs, Cars, Computers, and everything else you can think of, while paying for it all with digital IOU'S that bear 2% called Treasury bills.  

The problem with this model is that if you import everything you stop making your own things and you hollow out your industrial base. Both Biden and Trump saw this. Biden sought green re-industrialization through the IRA. Trump seeks re-industrialization through doubling down on the carbon-economy, which constitutes the growth model of GOP states in the US.  

If a Trump administration doubles down on carbon, the short term boost to growth through lower input prices plus deregulation will be huge. Possibly enough to propel a two-term administration. Climate denial can be profitable. But the rest of the world, China, Europe and East and South Asia, will continue to develop the green technologies needed to survive in the 21st century. The US will fall behind in this critical area as the countries involved in the green transition trade more intensely with each other. The knock-on effect will be that the global role of the dollar shrinks. First, because the issuer doesn’t like the side effects any more. Second, because in a post carbon world, who needs a currency that denominates and is backed by carbon assets that no one else uses any more? In short, the US’s addiction to carbon and the politics that it produces risks burning down the house.

Meet our speaker and chair 

Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics  and the Director of the Rhodes Centre for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a joint appointment in the department of political science. He is the author many award-winning books including, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), Angrynomics (New York: Columbia University Press 2020), Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (Oxford University Press 2022), and forthcoming in 2025, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. He writes about the politics of growth, distribution and decarbonization and why people continue to believe dubious economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.

Benjamin Braun is Assistant Professor in Political Economy, LSE European Institute

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

Burning down the house: carbon politics, American power, and the almighty Dollar

Join us for this public event with Robert Holzmann, Governor of the Austrian National Bank.

Governor Holzmann will discuss selected issues of unconventional monetary policy instruments (UMP): Assuming inflation is tamed, can we go back to conventional monetary policy before 2008, when short-term policy interest rates (and reserve requirements) dominated the monetary policy tool box? Or do we have to apply again UMP – with learnings from recent past and perhaps new unconventional instruments? This talk offers selected considerations about the intentions, effectiveness, and options of UMP in the Euro area and beyond.

Meet our speaker and chair 

Robert Holzmann is the Governor of the Austrian National Bank, and member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (since 2019), and elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (since 2014). He holds honorary positions at the South-Western University in Economics and Finance, Chengdu, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur and University of New South Wales, Sydney. Before his return to academia in 2011, he held various positions at the World Bank including for 12 years Sector Director and acting Senior Vice President. Before joining the World Bank in 1997 he was an academic in Austria and Germany, and senior economist at the IMF and OECD.

Daniela Gabor is Professor of Economics at SOAS. 

Donato Di Carlo is an assistant professor in political economy at the LSE European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

OMFIF (@OMFIF), the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, is an independent forum for central banking, economic policy and public investment.

Unconventional monetary policy – quo vadis?

Join us for this public event with Benjamin Haddad, Minister Delegate for European Affairs attached to the French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs, as he discusses how Europe can position itself in the face of today’s challenges.

“Our Europe is mortal”, French President Emmanuel Macron warned last spring, stressing the difficult and urgent choices that the continent is confronted with. Presenting his Report on the future of European competitiveness, former Italian prime Minister Mario Draghi argued that failing to cope with mounting challenges would entail the ‘slow agony’ of Europe. Following the return to power of President Trump, the transatlantic partnership faces potential disruption. The US has engaged in negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, sidelining Europeans and raising new questions on America’s commitment to European security. The threat of tariffs looms large over the future of the transatlantic economy and top US officials are meddling in Europe’s politics, such as at the recent Munich Security Conference. At the same time, a world of growing competition, rising authoritarianism and declining multilateralism tests Europe’s capacity to stand its ground and advance its interests and values.

Meet our speaker and chair 

Benjamin Haddad is Minister Delegate for Europe, attached to the Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of the French Republic. Graduated from Sciences Po Paris and HEC and a researcher in international relations, he taught international relations at Sciences Po and worked for seven years in think tanks in Washington, D.C., notably as Director of the Atlantic Council's Europe Center from 2019 to 2022. He is the author of “Paradis Perdu: l'Amérique de Trump et la fin des illusions européennes”, (Grasset, 2019), a plea for European sovereignty and strategic autonomy in the face of new geopolitical threats and American withdrawal. Elected Member of Parliament for Paris (14th constituency) in June 2022, he was member of the Foreign Affairs Commission and the European Affairs Commission and also spokesman coordinator for the National Assembly's Renaissance group. On July 7th 2024, after the snap legislative elections, he was re-elected MP for the 14th Paris constituency. On September 21st of the same year, he was appointed Minister Delegate for Europe.

Dr Spyros Economides is Associate Professor in International Relations and European Politics at the LSE European Institute and Deputy Director of the Hellenic Observatory.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

The Department of International Relations (@LSEIRDept) at LSE is now in its 97th year, and is one of the oldest as well as largest IR departments in the world, with a truly international reputation. The Department is ranked 2nd in the UK and 5th in the world in the QS World University Ranking by Subject 2024 tables for Politics and International Studies.

Europe's strategic crossroads

In the early 21st century, democratic societies are at the height of their affluence, scientific brilliance, and institutional sophistication. Yet, their capacity to navigate the future has dramatically eroded since the turn of the century. While it has been the hallmark of democratic politics to sacrifice long-term and global policy commitments to short-term and local concerns, the postwar era witnessed an unprecedented rise in future-oriented institutions meant to lengthen the shadow of the future, both domestically and internationally, from the welfare state to international organisations.

Albena Azmanova and Kalypso Nicolaidis argue that times are changing in contradictory ways. Collective time is shrinking again under the diktat of emergency politics while at the very same time the need to act long term has never been so urgent, so pressing. Thus, democracies now seem to be in the grip of a paradox. On the one hand, they are afflicted by myopic tunnel vision: barely coping with one crisis after another, bereft of the capacity to think beyond their immediate concerns, people are increasingly focused on the here-and-now. On the other hand, the awareness is growing of the need for urgent action that is future-focused and planetary in scope – in order to safeguard nature, harness the digital revolution, fight poverty and disease, and prevent wars whose impact defies local borders. Indeed, democracies’ political ambitions for radical, transformative action are commendably bold.  

Azmanova and Nicolaidis set out to tackle this ‘paradox of democratic time’, as they call it: the fact that democracies are uniquely capable of harnessing collective intelligence in pursuit of grand political ambitions and thus anchor their present into a better future, yet keep chaining their future to an anxious present. The speakers consider three strategies for solving this paradox.

Meet our speakers and chair 

Albena Azmanova is Professor of Political and Social Science at City, University of London and Senior Fellow at OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, Bard College. She is co-director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle and founder and co-editor of the journal Emancipations. Her analyses of contemporary capitalism have received numerous awards, among which the Michael Harrington Award of the American Political Science Association given for work that “demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world”. She has worked as policy advisor for a number of international organisations, most recently, as a member of the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality to the European Parliament and as consultant to the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

Kalypso Nicolaidis is Chair in Global Affairs at the School of Transnational Governance (EUI), where inter alia she convenes the EUI Democracy Forum. She is currently on leave from the University of Oxford and was professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and at Ecole Nationale d’Admistration, Paris. She has worked with numerous EU institutions, including as a member of the European Council’s reflection group on the future of Europe chaired by Felipe González (2008-10), and is a Council member of ECFR. She also served as advisor on European affairs to George Papandreou in the 90s and early 2000s, the Dutch and UK governments, the European Parliament, the European Commission, OECD and UNCTAD.

Abby Innes (@innes_abby) is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at LSE. She has published widely on the political economy of Central Europe and drew on this background for the comparison of Soviet and neoliberal economic regimes in Late Soviet Britain. In more recent years Abby has focused her research and teaching on the political economy of the green transition in Europe.

Regaining our futures: how to build democracies with foresight

In this public event, Jens Weidmann, Head of supervisory board of Commerzbank AG and former President of Deutsche Bundesbank, presents his views on how to preserve Europe’s role in a changing geopolitical and economic world order and how to restore Europe’s competitiveness.

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Jens Weidmann is Supervisory Board Chairman of Commerzbank AG, Professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management for Practice in Central Banking and Former President of the German Central Bank.

Iain Begg is Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE European Institute.

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The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.

OMFIF (@OMFIF), the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, is an independent forum for central banking, economic policy and public investment.

Geography is back: a German view on Europe's perspectives in times of global uncertainty

Europe has witnessed significant political and social turbulence over the past decade. The rise of anti-immigrant, nativist, and populist movements, the erosion of traditional political parties, widening socioeconomic disparities, and increasing polarisation have profoundly unsettled the European order. From the shock of the 2016 Brexit referendum to the seismic impact of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, recent developments have challenged long-held assumptions.

In this lecture, Siniša Malešević critically examines the conventional wisdom that nationalism and war are relics of Europe’s past. Drawing on a longue durée sociological perspective, he will argue that these forces remain deeply embedded in modernity. Rather than anomalies, the resurgence of nationalism and organised violence should be understood as part of broader historical patterns shaping contemporary Europe.

The lecture will be followed by an interactive Q&A session and a networking reception, offering a valuable opportunity for scholars and students to exchange ideas and build connections.

This event is the Annual Lecture of the Annual Review of the JCMS, hosted by the LSE European Institute and UACES.

Meet our speaker and chair 

Siniša Malešević is Full Professor of Comparative Historical Sociology at the University College Dublin. He was appointed UCD Chair of Sociology in September 2011. Previously he held research and teaching appointments at the Institute for International Relations (Zagreb), the Centre for the Study of Nationalism, CEU (Prague) - where he worked with late Ernest Gellner -, and at the University of Galway. He also held visiting professorships and fellowships at NIAS/NIOD Amsterdam, Uppsala University, Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Eric Remacle Chair in Conflict and Peace Studies), the London School of Economics, the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna and the Australian Defence College, Canberra. Professor Malesevic is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (elected in 2010), Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe, elected in 2014) and an Associated Member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (elected in 2012). He is also Senior Fellow and Associated Researcher at CNAM, Paris. Prof Malesevic's main research interests include the study of war and violence, ethnicity, nation-states, and nationalism, empires, ideology, sociological theory and the comparative historical sociology.

Jasna Dragovic-Soso is Visiting Professor at LSEE Research on South East Europe, Hellenic Observatory Centre for Research on Contemporary Greece & Cyprus, LSE. She has written extensively about memory politics, transitional justice, nationalism, state disintegration and international intervention, with a focus on former Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav region. She is currently writing a book about truth commission initiatives and memory politics in the post-conflict Balkans and co-editing the Brill Handbook on Regions of Memory: Southeastern Europe. From 2022 to 2024, she was Director of Centre for the Study of the Balkans at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Maya Tudor is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and Fellow at St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates the origins of effective and democratic states with a regional focus on South Asia. Before embarking on an academic career, Maya worked as a Special Assistant to Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz at the World Bank, at UNICEF, in the United States Senate, and at the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee.

Vesna Popovski is LSE Fellow in Conflict and Post-Conflict Studies. 


Nationalism and War in 21st-Century Europe

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2024-25

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