Friday, September 15th, 2017 Munk Annual Lecture in European Affairs: Europe between Brexit, Trump and Putin

Description

UPDATED: Registration for this event is now full. If you would like to attend but did not register, there will be a rush line forming outside the theatre prior to the lecture. Seats will be provided if available shortly before the lecture begins.

As a free event, seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. However, advance registration via the link above is still required.

The European Union marked the 60th birthday of its founding Treaty of Rome this year in the middle of an existential crisis. Brexit, Trump and Putin are only three of the challenges it faces. There is also Eurosceptical populism in many member states, Turkey, Ukraine, the refugee crisis and the continued travails of the Eurozone. Can the Franco-German pair of Emmanuel Macron and (if, as expected, she wins the German election on September 24) Angela Merkel lead the EU out of the morass? Timothy Garton Ash, who has been writing about Europe for decades, will argue that to make any informed judgement on that question, one first needs an accurate diagnosis of the root causes of Europe’s crisis.

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of nine books of political writing or ‘history of the present’ which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last thirty years. He is Professor of European Studies in the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and he writes a column on international affairs in the Guardian which is widely syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

His books are: ‘Und willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein ...’ Die DDR heute (1981), a book published in West Germany about what was then still East Germany; The Polish Revolution: Solidarity (1983), which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (1989), for which he was awarded the Prix Européen de l’Essai; We the People: The Revolution of ’89 witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (1990; US Edition: The Magic Lantern), which was translated into fifteen languages; In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (1993), named Political Book of the Year in Germany; The File: A Personal History (1997), which has so far appeared in sixteen languages; History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s (2000); Free World (2004); and Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name (2009). He is currently writing a book about free speech in the age of the internet and mass migration, and leads a major Oxford university research project built around the 13-language website freespeechdebate.com.

After reading Modern History at Oxford, his research into the German resistance to Hitler took him to Berlin, where he lived, in both the western and eastern halves of the divided city, for several years. From there, he started to travel widely behind the iron curtain. Throughout the nineteen eighties, he reported and analysed the emancipation of Central Europe from communism in contributions to the New York Review of Books, the Independent, the Times and the Spectator. He was Foreign Editor of the Spectator, editorial writer on Central European affairs for the London Times, and a columnist on foreign affairs in the Independent.

In 1986–87 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Since 1990, he has been a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, where he directed the European Studies Centre from 2001 to 2006 and is now Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow. Since 2010, he has directed the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom, based at St Antony’s. He became a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in 2000. A frequent lecturer, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts and a Corresponding Fellow of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from St Andrew’s University, Sheffield Hallam University and the Catholic University of Leuven.

He continues to travel extensively, and remains a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and other journals. His weekly column in the Guardian is syndicated in leading newspapers across Europe, Asia and the Americas. He also contributes to the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

Honours he has received for his writing include the David Watt Memorial Prize, Commentator of the Year in the ‘What the Papers Say’ annual awards for 1989, the Premio Napoli, the Imre Nagy Memorial Plaque, the Hoffmann von Fallersleben Prize for political writing, the Order of Merit from Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic, and the British CMG. In 2005, he featured in a list of 100 top global public intellectuals chosen by the journals Prospect and Foreign Policy, and in Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2006, he was awarded the George Orwell Prize for political writing.