Can cultural life thrive under Authoritarianism? Evidence from Greece, 1970–1973

On 7 May 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar on the relationship between authoritarian rule and cultural creativity. Chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of SEESOX, who also served as discussant, the seminar featured Stathis Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, presenting his recent Greek-language book Big Bang 1970–1973. Best known for his work on civil war and political violence, Kalyvas turned to the cultural life of the Greek military dictatorship to ask a broader question: is the absence of freedom necessarily suppressive of culture?

Kalyvas began by observing that the answer is far from obvious. One intuition holds that repression stifles cultural life; another that hardship drives people to seek refuge in culture. The empirical record is mixed, with much richer cultural life in Brazil than in Pinochet's Chile, in Czechoslovakia than in East Germany, and in Iran than in North Korea. Greece under the Colonels (1967–1974)—the last successful military coup in Europe, launched by colonels against their own generals and ultimately undone by the Cyprus crisis and the Turkish invasion of 1974—is conventionally remembered as a "cultural desert". According to the standard narrative, the regime interrupted the cultural renaissance of the early 1960s, driving creativity underground into indirect forms of resistance, symbolised by two émigré figures, the composer Mikis Theodorakis and the actress Melina Mercouri. Kalyvas organised his talk around four questions: whether there was high-quality cultural production under the dictatorship; if so, what explains it; why this has been forgotten; and why it matters.

Escaping from inequality: Is Europe trapped by history?

On 5 May 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar on the long-run history and future prospects of economic inequality in Europe. Chaired by Timothy Garton Ash, the seminar featured Walter Scheidel of Stanford University, best known for The Great Leveler, on the historical forces that reduce inequality, and Escape from Rome, on how Europe’s fragmentation shaped its distinctive path to modernity. Garton Ash challenged Scheidel to combine the arguments of both books into a single account of whether Europe can escape inequality while remaining, in effect, trapped by its own history. Scheidel responded with a deliberately high-level overview, noting that precise measures of historical inequality remain elusive.

He began with the long arc of European inequality, which peaked just before the First World War after roughly four centuries of rising inequality following the Black Death. Within that period, he argued, the Thirty Years’ War was the only major interruption, illustrating his central thesis that only massive, usually violent shocks have historically produced significant levelling: mass-mobilisation warfare, communist revolution, state collapse and catastrophic pandemics. The great compression between 1914 and 1945, followed by further, gentler equalisation into the 1970s, was a semi-global phenomenon. East of the Iron Curtain it was driven by communism; in Western market economies by falling returns on capital, progressive taxation, unionisation and the post-war welfare state. Since the 1980s, however, deregulation, financialisation, automation and, above all, globalisation—which added roughly a billion low-income workers to the world economy—have reversed the trend, steadily increasing the share of income flowing to capital rather than labour.

Polish-Ukrainian relations in the past and present

On 10 March 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted this year's Leszek Kołakowski Lecture, bringing together Yaroslav Hrytsak of the Ukrainian Catholic University and Anna Wylegała of the Polish Academy of Sciences to reflect on the past, present and future of Polish-Ukrainian relations. Set against the backdrop of Russia's continuing war against Ukraine, the seminar asked what had made post-1989 reconciliation possible, why relations have become more strained in recent years, and what their future might mean for Europe as a whole.

Hrytsak began by arguing that Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation represents one of the most significant achievements of post-communist Europe. In his view, its historical importance can be compared with Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War: just as the latter helped lay the foundations for a peaceful and integrated Western Europe, the former created the possibility of extending that European space further east. Poland, he suggested, has played a crucial role in enabling Ukrainians to imagine their country beyond the shadow of Russian history and as part of a broader European political tradition.

This led Hrytsak to one of his central arguments: the most important distinction between Ukraine and Russia lies not in language or religion but in political culture. Ukraine's historical experience, he argued, produced a different relationship between society and the state, helping to explain why Ukrainian political development has followed a markedly different trajectory from Russian authoritarianism. Polish-Ukrainian dialogue therefore matters not simply as a bilateral relationship between neighbouring states but as part of the wider question of Ukraine's place within Europe.

Mistakes were made? The EU's relations with Russia and Turkey in the 1990s

On 3 March 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a Dahrendorf Seminar on the European Union's relations with Russia and Turkey during the 1990s. Chaired by Dimitar Bechev of St Antony's College, Oxford, the seminar featured Ayşe Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with commentary from Roy Allison, Professor of Russian and Eurasian International Relations at St Antony's College. Framed around Zarakol's chapter in Rethinking the 1990s: Liberal World Order-Building in the Aftermath of the Cold War, the discussion asked what went wrong in the West's engagement with two semi-peripheral states that sought recognition within the post-Cold War liberal order but were never fully incorporated into it.

Zarakol began by arguing that the tensions shaping Russia's and Turkey's relationships with the West cannot be understood solely through the events of the 1990s. Both countries carried much longer histories of perceived exclusion, stretching back to the nineteenth century, when they were repeatedly treated as partial or aspiring members of a European-centred international order. The significance of the post-Cold War decade, she suggested, lay in its revival of these older status anxieties within a new institutional framework. Russia emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union seeking recognition within the new European security order, while Turkey had already spent decades pursuing closer integration with European institutions. Despite these different starting points, both ultimately occupied what Zarakol described as an uncomfortable halfway position: neither fully inside nor clearly outside the emerging liberal order.

Morale on the ‘home fronts’, 1914-1945: Its transnational construction and destruction

On 26 February 2026, the European Studies Centre and the Centre for Global and Imperial History welcomed Sheldon Garon, Nissan Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University, to deliver the annual lecture in European History. In a lecture entitled "Morale on the Home Front (1914–1945): Its Transnational Construction and Destruction", Garon examined how the elusive concept of "civilian morale" became one of the twentieth century's most consequential—and destructive—strategic ideas. Difficult to define yet repeatedly invoked with confidence, morale became a language through which states justified attacks on cities, food supplies and, ultimately, civilian endurance itself.

The lecture formed part of Garon's broader ERC project, The Global War on Civilians, which explores how it became accepted that victory could be pursued not only through defeating armies and navies but also by directly targeting civilian populations. Rather than treating this development as a series of separate national experiences, Garon argued for a transnational history of learning and adaptation, in which governments observed one another's practices, borrowed strategic ideas across borders and gradually constructed new kinds of "home fronts" designed both to sustain their own populations and to undermine the morale of their enemies.

Garon organised his argument around three interconnected dimensions of modern warfare: aerial bombardment, blockade and morale itself. He traced the origins of the concept to the First World War, when governments increasingly sought to monitor, measure and influence the "general mood" of civilian populations living under wartime strain. Food blockades, particularly those directed against Germany, rested on the expectation that deprivation would eventually provoke unrest, social disintegration and political collapse. At the same time, governments in Germany, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain began producing remarkably systematic reports that claimed to assess civilian morale with striking confidence. As Garon observed, these documents often resembled weather forecasts, describing morale as though it could visibly strengthen, weaken or "crack" under pressure.

Governing a multi-ethnic state: Minority rights in the early twentieth-century Baltics

On 17 February 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar on minority rights and the governance of ethnic diversity in the early twentieth-century Baltics. Chaired by Katherine Lebow, Associate Professor of Modern History at Christ Church, Oxford, the seminar featured Timo Aava, Estonia-Oxford Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, with comments from Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History at Balliol College, Oxford. The discussion examined how the collapse of the Russian and Habsburg Empires and the emergence of new nation-states generated fresh approaches to governing ethnically diverse societies, focusing particularly on Estonia's interwar experiment with non-territorial minority autonomy.

Aava began by placing the Estonian experience within a wider intellectual and political context shaped by late imperial debates on constitutional reform. He argued that non-territorial autonomy was not a marginal or utopian proposal but a serious attempt to address the challenge of governing multi-ethnic societies without forcing national communities into rigid territorial units. Drawing on the work of Karl Renner and other Austro-Marxist thinkers, Aava showed how these theorists sought to separate nationhood from territory by conceiving national communities as self-governing personal associations rather than geographically defined entities. At the same time, he emphasised that Estonia did not simply import an Austrian model. Instead, these ideas were adapted through local legal traditions, debates within the Russian Empire and existing practices of communal self-government.

Greece's comeback: Restoring economic credibility after crisis

On 18 February 2026, the ESC hosted a seminar on Greece's return to international economic credibility after more than a decade of crisis. Chaired by Vasiliki Poula, DPhil candidate in International Development at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the seminar featured Alex Patelis, former Chief Economic Adviser to the Greek Prime Minister, in conversation with the economists Vicky Pryce and Peter Sanfey. Framed around Patelis's recent book on Greece's economic recovery, the discussion explored how the country moved from an era associated with bailouts, capital controls and existential doubts about euro membership to renewed market access, the restoration of investment-grade status and growing international confidence.

Patelis began by arguing that Greece's recovery rested not on a single reform or favourable external circumstance but on the design and consistent implementation of a coherent strategy. He recalled the scepticism that greeted the incoming government in 2019, both domestically and internationally. There were doubts that Greek politics could operate transparently, doubts that a centre-right administration would implement politically difficult reforms, and doubts that Greece could successfully manage its own economic programme without external supervision. Against this backdrop, Patelis presented the government's approach as a three-part strategy centred on repairing the banking system, implementing structural reforms and reshaping fiscal policy to support economic growth while maintaining budgetary discipline.