Britain, Détente, and the Helsinki CSCE: 'Fathers of the Final Act'

On 7 May 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a seminar entitled "Britain, Détente, and the Helsinki CSCE: 'Fathers of the Final Act'". Chaired by Anne Deighton (Wolfson College, Oxford), the seminar featured Kai Hebel (Leiden University), who presented research from his forthcoming book on Britain's role in the negotiations leading to the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Responding to the presentation were Paul Betts and Timothy Garton Ash, both of St Antony's College, Oxford. Drawing on extensive multinational archival research and interviews with former negotiators, Hebel argued that Britain's contribution to one of the Cold War's defining diplomatic achievements has been substantially underestimated.

Hebel began by situating the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) within the wider historiography of the Cold War. The Helsinki Final Act, signed on 1 August 1975 after almost three years of negotiations involving thirty-five states, is now widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important diplomatic agreements. Yet historians continue to disagree about why it mattered. One school of thought sees Helsinki primarily as a catalyst for the peaceful end of the Cold War, arguing that its human rights provisions encouraged the growth of dissident movements across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. A second interpretation emphasises its more immediate effects, seeing Helsinki as a mechanism for managing rather than transforming conflict by institutionalising dialogue across the Cold War divide, reducing tensions, and creating new forms of cooperation between states. While recognising the importance of both interpretations, Hebel posed a different question: where was Britain in this story?

The question arises because Britain is largely absent from the existing literature. Standard accounts emphasise the Soviet Union, the United States, France and both German states, while Britain's role is frequently overlooked. Hebel suggested that this omission reflects broader assumptions about Britain's international position during the 1970s. The decade is conventionally portrayed as one of economic decline, political crisis and diminishing diplomatic influence. At the very moment when détente appeared to be reshaping East-West relations, Britain seemed marginalised. Relations with Moscow had deteriorated sharply following the expulsion of 105 alleged Soviet intelligence officers from London in 1971, leaving Britain isolated just as its allies were expanding diplomatic engagement with the Soviet Union.

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.

Beyond the Rock and the reef: Britain's Overseas Territories in transition

On 19 November 2025, the ESC, in collaboration with the Oxford University Spanish Society, hosted a seminar entitled "Beyond the Rock and the Reef: Britain's Overseas Territories in Transition." Chaired by Sandra León, Ramón Areces Visiting Fellow at the European Studies Centre, the seminar featured Peter Clegg, Professor of Politics and International Relations and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of the West of England, with David Garciandia Igal (Oriel College, Oxford) serving as discussant. Drawing on his extensive research on the Caribbean and Britain's Overseas Territories, Clegg explored the constitutional, legal and geopolitical challenges facing Britain's remaining territories as they navigate the legacies of empire alongside new pressures arising from Brexit, international law, environmental change and shifting global politics.

Clegg began by observing that Britain's fourteen Overseas Territories occupy a distinctive position within the international system. They are neither colonies in the traditional sense nor fully independent states. Most possess elected governments, substantial domestic autonomy and self-governing institutions, yet the United Kingdom retains ultimate responsibility for defence, foreign affairs and important aspects of constitutional governance. This hybrid constitutional status, he argued, places the territories in an increasingly complex position as they confront evolving international legal norms, changing relationships with Westminster and growing external scrutiny over governance and financial regulation.Although Britain's Overseas Territories receive relatively little attention in domestic political debate, Clegg emphasised that they remain strategically significant. Together they provide military facilities, major financial centres, extensive maritime zones and over ninety per cent of the UK's biodiversity. Yet they vary enormously in their constitutional arrangements, economic structures and local identities. Some are prosperous financial hubs, others depend heavily on fisheries or tourism, while a handful continue to receive substantial financial support from the United Kingdom. Understanding the Overseas Territories therefore requires moving beyond treating them as a single constitutional category and recognising the distinct political, economic and historical circumstances of each.

Law unbound? Asylum and migration law in the UK post-Brexit

On 18 November 2025, the ESC convened a wide-ranging panel on post-Brexit migration and citizenship, bringing together legal scholars and policy experts to assess how the UK's departure from the European Union has reshaped asylum, citizens' rights and labour migration. Chaired by Catherine Briddick (St Antony's College, Oxford), the seminar situated these debates within the longer politics of sovereignty and the public rhetoric that shaped both the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. Briddick argued that sovereigntist narratives have fundamentally altered the policy landscape, introducing three interconnected themes that framed the discussion: the legal architecture governing asylum, the consequences of new citizens' rights arrangements for EU nationals, and the evolving direction of UK migration policy after Brexit.

Catherine Barnard (University of Cambridge) and Fiona Costello (University of Cambridge) opened the panel by examining the position of EU citizens following Brexit. Focusing on the Withdrawal Agreement and the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), they argued that the transition from free movement to a status-based immigration system has produced uneven outcomes for many long-term residents. Particular attention was given to the difficulties experienced by those holding pre-settled status, who continue to encounter obstacles when applying for benefits or seeking to convert their status to full settlement. Barnard and Costello suggested that the EUSS has become a de facto test of long-term residence, with digital application procedures, evidential requirements and administrative complexity contributing to refusals, delayed applications and legal uncertainty. One consequence has been a growing incentive for many EU nationals to seek British citizenship in order to secure rights that had previously been exercised automatically under free movement.

Belonging in exile: How to write an almost global history of the German-Jewish diaspora

On 13 November 2025, the European Studies Centre hosted the Richard von Weizsäcker Lecture, welcoming Miriam Ruerup (Weizsäcker Visiting Fellow, St Antony's College) to discuss the methodological challenges of writing a history of statelessness. Chaired by Paul Betts, Professor of Modern European History at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, the lecture proposed a distinctive way of approaching exile and displacement: treating statelessness not merely as a legal category but as a lived experience that reshaped social ties, cultural memory and claims to belonging across continents. Ruerup explained that her project seeks to combine close archival research with a broad comparative perspective on the migration routes that connected Europe, Asia and other parts of the world after 1933.

Ruerup organised her lecture around successive episodes in the history of statelessness and the changing legal and political regimes that produced it. The first followed the First World War, when new states and redrawn borders left many people without secure citizenship. The second centred on the National Socialist regime, whose unprecedented legislative and administrative measures created a vast category of denaturalised Jews. The third examined the post-war period, when international institutions and emerging human rights frameworks attempted—often imperfectly—to manage refugee movements and restore legal belonging. Drawing these episodes together, Ruerup emphasised continuity rather than rupture: denaturalisation was not a single event but an ongoing process whose consequences extended through the war and into post-war struggles over restitution, citizenship and legal recognition.

From two-party rule to polarisation: Ten years of Spanish politics

On 11 November 2025, the European Studies Centre welcomed Sandra León, Ramón Areces Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, to present her new work on the transformation of Spain's party system since 2015. Chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of the European Studies, the seminar offered a careful, evidence-based account of Spain's transition from a relatively stable two-party equilibrium to a more fragmented and polarised multiparty system. Drawing on longitudinal public opinion data, electoral maps and original experiments, León argued that this transformation is structurally durable and carries important implications for social cooperation, democratic accountability and crisis management.

León began by locating this transformation within a sequence of overlapping crises. The global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath brought deep economic hardship and austerity politics, culminating in the political upheaval of 2015. New parties such as Podemos and Ciudadanos entered the political arena, voter loyalties fragmented, and Spain's long-standing two-party dynamic gave way to a more competitive multiparty landscape. Electoral and parliamentary fragmentation increased sharply after 2015, and by the end of the decade Spain's party system had come to resemble those of many other European democracies rather than the "Spanish exception" of earlier decades. Using electoral data and fragmentation indices, León traced this evolution while showing how institutional politics adapted through more frequent elections, coalition governments and minority administrations.

The legislative politics of climate change mitigation: Evidence from the European Parliament

On 4 November 2025, the European Studies Centre hosted Mihail Chiru, Associate Professor in Comparative Central and Eastern European Politics at the University of Oxford, for a seminar that placed the political economy of climate mitigation at the heart of contemporary parliamentary politics in Europe. Chaired by Othon Anastasakis, Director of the ESC, the seminar opened with a simple but powerful observation: mitigation policies typically impose concentrated, short-term costs while delivering diffuse, long-term benefits. This structural asymmetry, Chiru argued, makes climate policy especially vulnerable to politicisation. Against this backdrop, he asked whether mainstream parties in the European Parliament respond to electoral pressure from populist and radical-right (PRR) parties by moderating their support for ambitious climate legislation.

Chiru's empirical strategy exploits a distinctive institutional feature of the European Union. Because MEPs from across member states vote on the same European Commission proposals, roll-call votes in the Ninth European Parliament provide a rare opportunity to examine how domestic political conditions shape transnational legislative behaviour. Focusing on 94 salient mitigation votes across 19 policy files—including the EU Climate Law, ETS reform and vehicle emission standards—Chiru combines a roll-call dataset of around 42,000 observations with Chapel Hill Expert Survey measures of party positions, time-varying national polling to capture PRR strength, and eight semi-structured interviews with MEPs and parliamentary assistants working on ENVI and climate files.

Analytically, Chiru begins from established expectations about MEP voting: national party positions and European party-group coordination matter, but domestic electoral incentives may reinforce the political costs of decarbonisation. He tests the hypothesis that where PRR parties are stronger, mainstream MEPs will be less likely to support ambitious mitigation measures. To do so, he estimates a Bayesian multilevel binomial logit model that nests MEPs within national parties, electoral districts and European party groups, while allowing the effects of PRR support to vary over time at the district level.