2024-25

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?

Meet our speaker and chair 

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

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.

Meet our speaker and chair

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

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