How long have you been at LSE and how did you come to join the European Institute?
I joined the EI in 1997 as a Lecturer. I was finishing my doctorate as a Visiting Fellow at MIT and the job advert came up. I had been an undergraduate at LSE (Government) and my PhD was from the LSE – Brendan O’Leary was my wonderful supervisor – so I was incredibly excited by the possibility that I might get to be here as an academic.
I had spent most of my doctorate either in Prague or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and so after almost three years abroad, it also looked like a way to come home, even though I had loved my time both in the Czech Republic and the US.
How has the European Institute changed during your time here?
Enormously! I can’t remember quite whether Jennifer Jackson Preece arrived first, or I did, but either way we were the first women academics in the EI, so the fact that the EI is now so much larger, but close to parity between men and women, is an indication of how much LSE as a whole has changed since the late 1990s. There was only one female professor in Government when I was an undergraduate – the wonderful Professor Janet Coleman - so I was taught by one woman in the space of three years!
As a department we have gone from being a small, slightly chaotic and entrepreneurial outfit to a full-fledged department with a superb PSS staff who run the place like clockwork, and a legitimate claim to be a centre of truly interdisciplinary research and teaching. In my time here the EI has grown larger, more coherent and more public-facing, but in all that time I have also felt the EI to be an exceptionally friendly and collegiate place, and I think that last characteristic is the trait that has kept me here so long and so happily.
What has been the most memorable moment during your time at the EI?
When the new member states of Central Europe joined the EU 2004 we threw a party to celebrate at the EI. I found the event incredibly moving for reasons I will try to explain…
As an undergraduate I had studied the Soviet communist system in 1989: an interesting year to take this course! I had grown up in the Cold War and I wanted to find out for myself what communism was about, so I had spent a year out before university travelling in communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, and then China (having worked as a waitress in the UK and a cleaner in Oslo!). By 1989/1990, in the aftermath of the revolutions, I was the External Affairs Officer in the Student Union, and I was determined that we should set up an exchange between LSE students and students from the newly free CEE, and that because of the extreme exchange rate differences, we should cover the CEE side financially or it would be impossible for people to travel. The School was supportive, and via businesses and the School itself we raised the money and the exchange went ahead, and in the process I found what turned into a lifelong friendship with two Czechs, David and Misha. Both had been involved in the revolutions and their lives had changed completely: they went from being thrown out of university for dissident activities to now, suddenly, being able to go back, and to graduate into the kinds of jobs that would’ve been impossible under the old system: David became a lawyer specialising in European law and Misha an artist and curator who has spent her life bringing European artists to Prague and Czech artists to the rest of Europe and beyond. I had gone on to do my doctorate in CEE political economy and to teach it, but when we got to the party in 2004 I wrote to David and Misha, and some other old friends in the region, in Poland, Hungary and Romania – all my age – in their early 20s in the 1990s, and I asked them if they could write something about what membership meant to them.
I had planned to read out these wonderful letters at the party, and I started fluently enough, but by the time I got to David and Misha’s I just couldn’t speak, I was so emotional. David had said essentially this: ‘the thing I love about EU membership is that young Czechs will travel on holiday around Europe, and they won’t think twice about it, whereas when I was 18 I had no freedom of movement beyond the more conservative regimes of the Soviet bloc. I was trapped and they are free, and they don’t need even know how extraordinary that is. I love the normality of it.’ I got about as far as ‘the thing I love…’
By 2004 David and Misha had stayed with me in the UK and I had stayed with them in Prague many times, and although we don’t get t see each other nearly enough, they are two of my closest, dearest friends. The party made me realise all over again how much they had endured, how privileged I had been to grow up in a country where I could say what I thought without fear, and to have choices when I voted, and how they had nearly lost everything for trying to do those same, simple things. Without the revolution they would have been punished for their dissident activities and their lives would have been powerfully diminished, and all because of the courage they showed as teenagers.
It’s the small details that tell you the most. When he was 16 David’s mother had given him a copy of the poem ‘If’, by Kipling. It was illegal and he had had to keep it hidden in a book. It brought home to me at a visceral level that the European Single Market is the least important thing about the European Union. The flipside to this was 2016 and the Brexit referendum, and the sense that the British had signed away, and I had just lost, so many of the freedoms that we had celebrated in 2004. I was as unhappy about that in 2016 as I was delighted in 2004. Maybe one day David and Misha will throw a party and write to me to ask me how I feel about my country joining the European Union. I will also talk about the normality of freedom, but from our perspective, how easy it was to take it for granted, and how alarmingly easy it is to lose it.
What course or subject area have you enjoyed teaching the most?
I’ve enjoyed teaching multiple subjects for different reasons at different times. Since joining the European Institute I have taught, at one point or another… The Political Economy of Post-Communist Transition; Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity in Central and Eastern Europe; Varieties of Capitalism; Democracy, Ideology and the State; The Political Economy of Emerging Markets and most recently, The Political Economy of the Neoliberal State. It would be impossible to choose which one has been more enjoyable, but it has felt like a particular privilege to be able to talk through the changing political economy of Central Europe over twenty-five years, as it emerges from the communist era, and to hear first-hand how new generations of Central Europeans have experienced these changes, and what they have to say about the literature, so much of which, for so many years, carried a distinct legacy of Cold War projections, West to Centre/East….
It’s also fair to say that the last course, on the Political Economy of the Neoliberal State, is peculiarly important to me. It is the culmination of two decades of my apparent obsession with Soviet communism and neoliberalism, and I wrote the course when I got to the last leg of a book that compares these two materialist utopias and the failing statecraft that they produce. That book is just about finished (hooray!) and I feel a particular gratitude to the students who have debated the questions of Soviet and neoliberal statecraft with me over the last two years because, as you can imagine, when you have been thinking about something alone (the book started with a two year research sabbatical with funding from the British Academy), there’s a real joy, and not a little trepidation, when you finally bring your analysis back into the seminar room for a serious test, and EI students are a pretty serious test.
What makes the EI a special place?
The fact that in thirty years it has managed to be a place that is predominantly kind, enthusiastic and careful of the welfare of its staff and students. These days it feels like an all too rare blessing to be able to feel proud of the place you work, and grateful for its culture. Over the years it has given me a lot of faith in people.
What excites you about the future of the EI?
That it is still full of people who are full of curiosity, who feel a vocational need to make education a living process of discovery, the external pressures to see education in more narrowly instrumental terms notwithstanding. The LSE motto is ‘to know the causes of things’, but the School, and the EI, is blessed by the presence of students who are determined not just to figure that out, but to take that knowledge into the world to try to make it a fairer, better place. When I think of where EI students of the last thirty years are now, and the work they are doing, it makes me hopeful, despite the very difficult times we live in.
What’s your favourite place on LSE campus?
Hard to say: possibly the Old Theatre. I was an undergraduate at LSE in the late 1980s so between then and now I have seen a really huge number of fantastic lectures in that space. I also think the Centre Building is a pretty funky piece of architecture: it’s actually an exciting space, as well as delightfully new and functional.
What is your favourite place to visit in Europe and why?
Petrin Hill: up near the castle there is a park, effectively an orchard, and to sit under the blossom and to look out at Prague was mind-blowing for me at 18 and it still is.
Practically anywhere in Tuscany is a balm for the soul. I was lucky enough to live in Florence for a year with a fellowship to the EUI. I was so spellbound by everything for the first month I found it almost impossible to concentrate... I was pretty proud of my second-hand Alfa Romeo, and hey, with the Florentine plates it allowed me to learn all the local hand gestures really fast..