Home alone II: Europe without America
Join us for the Department of International History's Annual Lecture!
We have entered a new era in international relations, which announced itself, first, through Russia’s increasing hostility towards the West from 2007 culminating in the all-out attack on Ukraine in 2022.
During the Cold War, US administrations felt directly threatened by the USSR, and committed to the defence of Europe through NATO as their first line of defence. After the end of the Cold War, however, US administrations became increasingly preoccupied with the rise of China while seeing Russia as less of a direct threat. This general trend was long predictable and became clearly observable in recent years, and particularly pronounced during the first and now the second Trump presidencies.
Is there a geostrategic “normality” to which the US is returning, and what consequences does this have for Europe?
Meet our speaker:
Beatrice Heuser is a graduate of the universities of London (BA from Bedford College; MA from LSE) and Oxford (St Antony’s College; St John’s College, graduated with DPhil). She holds a higher doctorate (Habilitation) from the University of Marburg. She is currently a professor in the Department Of Politics, University Of Glasgow.
War is at the centre of her research interests, with a particular focus on why people go to war and how they wage war, what means they choose (or reject) and what strategies, and how they justify them. She is especially known for her contribution to Strategic Studies. The “why” covers the multiple factors leading to war, including structural factors like the patterns of relations between groups of people (from terrorist bands to ethnic groups and nations and civilisations) and their representatives (governments, states, alliances, international organisations), what is traditionally called “international relations”. She is particularly interested in cultural factors, which include particular narratives of the past and how these are drawn upon to argue for particular policies and strategies for the present and future. Her expertise lies mainly in Europe and the “West”, especially Britain, France, Germany, and the USA, but also touches on Russia.
Meet our chair:
Kristina Spohr is a specialist in the International History of Germany since 1945 and interested in questions of World Order, Diplomacy & Strategy and the practice of Applied History. She is now writing a global history on the Arctic.
Spohr is author of a dozen books or edited volumes. In 2019/21 her monograph Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World the World After 1989 (WilliamCollins, 2019 and Yale UP, 2020 ) was published together with the German edition Wendezeit: Die Neuordnung der Welt nach 1989 (Deutsche Verlags Anstalt, 2019) and the Spanish Edition Después del Muro: La reconstrucción del mundo tras 1989 (Taurus, 2021).
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