Lecture by Professor Jan ZIELONKA: "The End of the European Dream: from Athens to Kiev"

On Tuesday 24 February 2015, Professor Jan ZIELONKA gave a lecture at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe. The event was organized by the EP Geremek Chair of European Civilization as part of the European Civilization Chair Lecture Series. The title of the lecture was "The End of the European Dream: from Athens to Kiev".

European integration has been an enormous success since its inceptions in the Treaty of Rome in 1957. For the successive five decades member states of the European Union (EU) enjoyed an unprecedented peace and prosperity. But now this legacy is being questioned and the EU has fallen out of grace with the public. At the recent elections to the European Parliament parties determined to curb EU powers came clearly on top in numerous member states. The Greek electorate refused the bailout program orchestrated by the EU. The EU is hardly a visible actor in the ongoing war in Ukraine. What went wrong and why? This lecture tried to offer some answers to this uncomfortable question.

About the speaker:

Professor Jan ZIELONKA has since 2004 been Professor of European Politics at the University of Oxford and Ralf Dahrendorf Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He studied Law at the University of Wrocław and Political Science at the University of Warsaw where he received his doctorate in 1981. In 1982 he took up a position at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, before moving in 1984 to the University of Leiden. He became Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence in 1996. 

Jan ZIELONKA has published extensively in the fields of international relations, comparative politics and the history of political ideas. His current work is an analysis of the EU’s efforts to project power and spread its values in its external relations. He also tries to compare four contemporary ‘empires’: the USA, China, Europe and Russia. His latest book - Is the EU Doomed? - was published by Polity Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts, in 2014. His previous books include Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union (Oxford: OUP, 2006), Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London: Routledge, 2002), Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe (2 vols, Oxford: OUP, 2001), Explaining Euro-Paralysis: Why Europe is Unable to Act in International Politics (London: Macmillan, 1998), and Political Ideas in Contemporary Poland (Aldershot: Avebury 1989).