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.