Germany’s new government: A fragile coalition in a challenging landscape

On 10 June, the ESC hosted a timely seminar with Andreas Busch, who offered a comprehensive analysis of Germany’s new federal government and the broader political shifts shaping the country. Professor Busch—currently an academic visitor at the Centre and Professor of Comparative Politics and Political Economy at the University of Göttingen—drew on his long-standing expertise to assess the government’s early direction and the challenges ahead. The seminar was chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of the Centre, with Timothy Garton Ash serving as discussant.

Following the February 2025 general election, Germany’s political landscape has been dramatically reshaped. While the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) made modest gains, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) surged to over 20% of the vote—an unprecedented rise. The Social Democrats (SPD) suffered their worst result in over a century, the Liberals (FDP) fell below the parliamentary threshold, and the Greens underperformed. Die Linke made a surprise comeback, while Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party narrowly missed entry into parliament. The result was a fragile CDU–SPD coalition led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Professor Busch characterised the coalition as functionally pragmatic but internally fragile. Merz has repositioned the CDU in a more conservative direction, particularly on migration, while also abandoning earlier commitments to strict fiscal rules. The SPD, meanwhile, is undergoing internal consolidation under co-leader Lars Klingbeil, who now also serves as finance minister. Both parties face tensions around strategic direction and long-term viability.

Two pressing domestic challenges featured in Busch’s analysis: migration and economic stagnation. Migration continues to dominate public concern, with a majority of Germans favouring tighter restrictions. However, mainstream parties remain largely clustered on the permissive side of the policy spectrum, leaving political space that the AfD has effectively claimed. At the same time, local authorities report growing strain, as they are increasingly burdened with refugee accommodation and integration responsibilities. The disconnect between political rhetoric and practical implementation has become increasingly apparent.

Understanding climate-related disruption of global financial governance

On June 4, 2025, the European Studies Centre welcomed Professor Jeff D. Colgan of Brown University for a seminar entitled “Climate Politics and Global Financial Governance.” As a Richard Holbrooke Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs—and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre—Colgan spoke to a full house of faculty, graduate students, and practitioners. The event was chaired by Dr Othon Anastasakis, Director of the European Studies Centre.

Colgan opened by reminding his audience that Europe exists not in isolation but at the intersection of three vast global systems: the environmental web that sustains all life, the industrial networks that generate the greenhouse emissions driving climate change, and the financial architectures that allocate the capital for both economic growth and decarbonization. Europe, he argued, views these systems through a unique lens. Its robust embrace of ESG and green finance stands in stark contrast to the more cautious attitude of other regions.

Building on this foundation, Colgan described the shocks reverberating through climate politics today. He observed that the Trump administration’s return has once again disrupted U.S. climate diplomacy and science funding, emboldening right-wing parties abroad. Meanwhile, rising interest rates are making capital-intensive clean-energy technologies more expensive relative to traditional fossil-fuel assets. Across Washington and Westminster, a new strain of “climate realism” has taken hold—one that doubts the feasibility of Paris targets and advocates a more pragmatic, if pessimistic, approach. Colgan cautioned that such realism risks abandoning decades of hard-won progress.

Bridging the gap between research and policy in international affairs: A practitioner's perspective

On 29 May 2025, the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, welcomed Giulio Venneri, Deputy Director in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, for a seminar chaired by Eli Gateva, Departmental Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University. Venneri—who began his career in the Italian Foreign Ministry before joining successive EU institutions—has combined frontline policy work on Albania and North Macedonia with teaching posts in Rome, Trento and London. His new book, Learning Policy Advice, distils nearly two decades of experience into a practical guide for anyone seeking to navigate the leap from academic research to policy-making.

Venneri opened by recalling his own “cold shower” moment on joining Italy’s Foreign Service. Fresh from completing a PhD on Bosnia and sovereignty, he confidently drafted his first briefing on Canada’s embrace of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine—only to be told by his head of office that, however sophisticated his analysis, it was far too dense for a busy minister. Forced back to the drawing board, Venneri learned that policy writing must be both vertically accessible—so that your political masters can grasp key arguments at a glance—and horizontally calibrated, empowering them to advocate effectively in bilateral or multilateral settings. This anecdote underpins his conviction that academic rigour, rather than being jettisoned, must be re-engineered into concise, audience-tailored advice.

Learning Policy Advice is structured around three pillars. First, Venneri “front-loads” the trauma of that cold shower, inviting readers to test themselves with realistic simulations—drafting talking points or speeches under tight deadlines, armed only with minimal background material. Only after this exercise does he introduce the building blocks of policy writing: defining the scope of “policy advice” (distinct from advocacy or academic argument), mastering template-based briefings, crafting speeches, and preparing press statements. Each chapter concludes with further simulations, and Routledge has generously provided free online exercises to sharpen practical skills.

Spanish transition to democracy revisited

On 27 May 2025, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, hosted a seminar chaired by Ainhoa Campos Posada, Ramón Areces Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s. The event brought together Alba Nueda Lozano of the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha; Sophie Baby, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary History at Université Bourgogne Europe; and Magda Fytili, Ramón y Cajal Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Each speaker challenged conventional wisdom about Spain’s passage from dictatorship to democracy, illuminating overlooked dimensions of violence, gender, and regional disparity.

Sophie Baby began by dismantling the myth of a peaceful transition. She reminded attendees that between 1975 and 1982—often held up as Spain’s “exit from violence”—there were at least 714 deaths and over 3,200 recorded violent actions. Far from a simple departure from authoritarianism, Baby showed how Spain inherited and perpetuated interlocking cycles of violence: revolutionary groups such as FRAP and GRAPO clashed with far-right militants like Guerrilleros de Cristo Rey, while the state itself was responsible for nearly 180 deaths through police operations and extrajudicial “dirty war” tactics. The Basque conflict, she argued, cast the longest shadow: ETA’s campaign left over 800 dead, provoking counter-terrorism measures (Triple A, BVE, GAL) that blurred the line between law enforcement and political repression. Baby concluded that this sanguinary backdrop calls for a re-evaluation of human-rights legacies: unlike Latin America, Spain’s victim-rights movement emerged unevenly, propelled more by the long-running Basque struggle than by civil-war memory.

Searching for the magic of conversations in these feral times

On May 20 2025, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Oxford University, hosted a seminar chaired by Professor Timothy Garton Ash, Professor of European Studies and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, with Professor Paul Betts of Modern European History at St Antony’s joining as a discussant. The keynote was delivered by Dr Hakan Altınay, Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford, Professor of the Practice at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts University, and founding Director of the European School of Politics in Istanbul. Together, they explored how today’s political malaise demands a rediscovery of camaraderie, trust, and the art of conversation as foundations for healthy democracy.

Dr Altınay began by invoking the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as an “experiment” in reconnection—one whose promise has since been undermined by our underestimation of three vital ingredients. First, he argued, we have neglected camaraderie: the shared sense of belonging that flourished in thriving democracies. He noted that, in the United States, the proportion of congressional districts represented by the same party rose from 26 percent in 1979 to over 60 percent today, a measure of partisan Balkanisation fuelled in part by social media and manipulative design. In the United Kingdom, local communities have similarly fragmented into “anywhere people” whose weak ties to neighbours foster exaggerated perceptions of ideological opponents. Drawing on experiments at the University of Chicago, he suggested that many of our political dislikes stem not from deep conviction but from too little genuine interaction with those who differ from us.

Rethinking Socialist Space in the Twentieth Century

On May 14 2025, European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, hosted a seminar to rethink socialist space in the twentieth century. The event was chaired by Dan Healey, Professor of Russian and Soviet History at St Antony’s, and brought together Dr Jennifer Altehenger, Associate Professor of Chinese History and Jessica Rawson Fellow in Modern Asian History at Merton College, Oxford; Professor Paul Betts, Professor of Modern European History at St Antony’s College, Oxford; Dr Marcus Colla, Mark Kaplanoff Research Fellow in History at Pembroke College, Cambridge; Dr Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations, University of Vienna; and Dr Bethan Winter, Lecturer in History at the University of Oxford. Each panelist explored how socialist states—across China, Eastern Europe and Vietnam—produced distinctive spatial logics that shaped everyday life and collective memory.

Paul Betts opened by recalling that this volume emerged from an online conference during the 2021 lockdown, a collaboration principally between himself and Marcus Colla. He reflected on how the impossibility of travel prompted historians to rethink “socialist space” not as a fixed rubric but as a series of contested practices and imaginaries.

Building on Betts’s introduction, Marcus Colla examined the impact of transnational history on the study of twentieth-century socialism. He argued that after 1945, scholars stabilised categories—socialism versus capitalism—that now appear insufficiently nuanced. Colla asked: how did socialist authorities govern space as an instrument of power? He showed that Soviet planners sought to shape spatial imagination through schools, factories and collective farms, embedding ideological content in the built environment. Colla’s chapter interrogates whether “socialist space” remains a meaningful category, emphasising its ties to physical and emotional experiences of loss. He further traced how COVID-19’s brutal lockdowns provided historians with fresh insights into the material and affective dimensions of confined spaces.

The Long Disenchantment: Reassessing UK–EU Relations from Accession to Brexit

On May 6, 2025, the European Studies Centre at the University of Oxford hosted a seminar inviting Ilaria Poggiolini, Professor of European Studies and specialist in post-war peace-making, to introduce her new book The Long Disenchantment. Timothy Garton Ash, Emeritus Fellow, joined as discussant, and Catherine Briddick, Andrew W. Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law, chaired the event.

Poggiolini opened by challenging the familiar trope of Britain as a perpetually awkward outsider in Europe, drawing on Chapter 1—“Uninvolvement”—to show that London’s post-war reluctance was neither accidental nor purely inertial but rooted in a conscious strategy of balancing global commitments. She traced this stance to Churchill’s 1948 vision of “three interlinked circles”—the Commonwealth, the English-speaking world, and a potential integrated Europe—within which Britain remained the indispensable intersection . Building on Ernest Bevin’s 1950 reinterpretation of that model under the Atlantic Community, Poggiolini argued that Britain’s early support for the Marshall Plan sought to stabilise the continent under Anglo-American leadership as much as to foster European unity .

Contrary to narratives of “missed opportunities,” she demonstrated that Britain consciously opted for an intergovernmental approach—exemplified by its preference for the OEEC’s unanimous-vote structure—over Jean Monnet’s supranational design. This choice preserved sovereignty but also meant declining Schuman’s 1950 European Coal and Steel Community plan, as ministers feared domestic unrest and erosion of control over vital industries. Far from passive disengagement, this policy of “uninvolvement” only shifted when the collapse of the European Defence Community and the rise of EFTA made continued detachment unsustainable.