Working Group Europe and North America

About the Working Group Europe and North America Relations

Does the US-European relationship still matter and if so, how and in what ways? Will Washington’s growing preoccupation with Asia lead it to downgrade Europe in its strategic calculus? Will Europe turn inward and further distance itself from the United States? What policy issues offer the greatest promise for restoring the credibility and vigor of the transatlantic partnership? The EU-North America Working Group will explore these and related questions about the future of US-Europe relations and more generally, the future of the West. At a time when new international forces (e.g., the rise of China, terrorism, climate change) and global economic restructuring are leading observers on both sides of the Atlantic to question the relevance of the West, we need to better understand the international and domestic forces that will shape the US-European relationship in the coming decade, and to what effect?

During the Cold War the presence of a common geopolitical foe, the Soviet Union, gave Washington and European capitals strong stakes in cooperation. Popular support for liberal internationalism in the United States and Europe strengthened those security bonds, as did the common values (e.g., democracy, human rights) they shared. It was easy to treat the transatlantic partnership as a political given.

Today, the transatlantic partnership no longer looks so secure. The absence of a Soviet-style threat has made it harder to agree on what security problems are most pressing, let alone how to deal with them. Meanwhile, domestic support for internationalism has weakened considerably in the United States as well as in Europe. Populist movements that take a dim view of globalization have gained political traction on both sides of the Atlantic, especially since the 2008 global economic crash.

The EU-North America Working Group sought to better understand these developments and their implications for the future of Europe and its relations with North America and especially, the United States.

Working Group Members

Peter Trubowitz, Chair
Peter Trubowitz is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Director of the US Centre at the LSE. He is the author of four books and edited volumes on world politics and US foreign policy, including Politics and Strategy: Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton 2011) and Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago 1998), which won the J. David Greenstone Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association (APSA) in 1999 for the best book in international history and politics. He is currently the President of the APSA’s International History and Politics section. Before joining the LSE, he was Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard University, Princeton University, Universidad de Chile, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City, and the Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU), where he was the J. William Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in American Foreign Policy.

Tim Oliver, Member
Tim Oliver is a Dahrendorf Postdoctoral Fellow working with on Europe-North American relations. Tim’s research interests focus on transatlantic relations, European geopolitics, British-European relations, British government and politics, and the UK’s foreign, security and defence policies. He was awarded a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Prior to joining the Dahrendorf Program, Tim has taught at LSE, UCL and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He has worked in the European Parliament and the House of Lords, and he was TAPIR Fellow based in Berlin at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and at the SAIS Center for Transatlantic Relations and the RAND Coporation in Washington DC. He is currently the chief editor for the ‘Asian Perceptions of the EU’ series run by the NFG Research Group at the Freie Universität Berlin and former convener (and founder) of the BISA British Foreign Policy working group.

Cora Lacatus, Research Associate
Cora Lacatus is the Research Associate of the EU-US working group housed at the LSE as part of the Dahrendorf Symposium Program. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department International Relations, a fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council, and the LSE research assistant of the MAXCAP Project Research Consortium. Her social sciences-based research interests focus on global governance, human rights, and European foreign policy. She holds a PhD in Germanic and European Studies from University of California, Los Angeles (2007) and is the author of the book The (In)visibility Complex: Representing Otherness in Contemporary Sweden (Stockholm University 2008). Before joining the LSE to pursue a second PhD, she taught at University of California Los Angeles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and American University in Washington DC. She has also worked for a number of think tanks and organizations based in London and Washington DC.

Brian M. Burgoon, Member
Brian Burgoon is Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy and the Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 and held posts at Brandeis University and Johns Hopkins University SAIS before joining the University of Amsterdam. He is member of the Research Programme on Political Economy and Transnational Governance at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, the Amsterdam Center for Inequality Studies, the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, UvA-VU ACCESS Europe and the Board of Directors at the Dialogue Advisory Group. He has published extensively on the politics of economic globalization, welfare and labor market policies and standards as well as on the influence that economic conditions have on political violence in, among many, journals such as European Journal of Political Economy, Comparative Political Studies, and Journal of European Social Policy.

Rosemary Foot, Member
Professor Rosemary Foot is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. Her research interests cover the international relations of the Asia-Pacific, including US-China relations, human rights, Asian regional institutions, and East Asian regional governance. Author of several books, which include two on US policy during the Korean War published as part of the series “Cornell Studies in Security Affairs”; The Practice of Power (Oxford 1995); Rights Beyond Borders: the global community and the struggle over human rights in China (Oxford 2000); and with Andrew Walter as co-author, China, the United States, and Global Order, (Cambridge 2011). Two recent edited books include China Across the Divide: the domestic and global in politics and society (Oxford 2013), and, with Saadia M Pekkanen and John Ravenhill, The Oxford Handbook of the International Relations of Asia (Oxford2014). Since 1996, she has been an elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Julia Gray, Member
Julia Gray is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in international political economy and international organizations. Her research centers on international economic relations and economic organizations in emerging markets. Specifically, she focuses on international organizations and reputations, and on how and whether states and bureaucracies in international agreements implement their mandates. Her book The Company States Keep: International Economic Organizations and Investor Perceptions in Emerging Markets (Cambridge 2013) was awarded the 2013 Lepgold Book Prize by Georgetown University for the best book published in international relations. In 2013-2014, she was a visiting scholar at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. She is currently working on a second book manuscript on implementation and adaptation in international economic organizations over time.

Lloyd Gruber, Member
Lloyd Gruber is the former Dean of the LSE’s Institute of Public Affairs. An established expert in international and comparative political economy, he is the author of Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton 2000) and various articles and chapters on globalization, international governance, and income inequality. Before joining the LSE in 2006, he was Associate Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, where he taught courses on US foreign economic policy and international political economy. Gruber has held visiting positions at the Brookings Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In addition to his work on globalization and political economy, he is also known for his research on educational reform.

G. John Ikenberry, Member
G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is also Co-Director of Princeton’s Center for International Security Studies and a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Korea. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of six books, including Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American System (Princeton 2011) and After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton 2001), which won the 2002 Schroeder-Jervis Award presented by the American Political Science Association. He is co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security and has served as a member of the Policy Planning Staff in 1991-92, as a member of an advisory group at the State Department in 2003-04, and as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on U.S.-European relations. In 2013-2014 he was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford.

Mereike Kleine, Member
Mareike Kleine is Associate Professor of EU and International Politics at the London School of Economics’ European Institute. Her research interests include international organization, international political economy, informal and formal governance, the interplay of domestic politics and international institutions, negotiation theories and normative questions of global governance. She is the author of Informal Governance in the European Union – How Governments Make International Organizations Work (Cornell 2013) and numerous articles published in journals such as International Theory, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, and the Review of International Organizations. She completed her Ph.D. in political science at Freie Universität Berlin and has held visiting positions at Princeton University, Harvard University, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, and the University of St. Gallen.

Jeffrey W. Legro, Member
Jeffrey W. Legro is Taylor Professor of Politics and Vice Provost for Global Affairs at the University of Virginia (UVA). He is the author of four books, including Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Cornell 2005) and In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11 (Cornell 2011), with Melvyn Leffler. He is co-founder of the Governing America in a Global Era Program at UVA’s Miller Center. He chaired the American Political Science Association (APSA) Task Force on U.S. Standing in the World and is past president of the APSA’s International History and Politics section. He has published extensively on US foreign policy, international cooperation and conflict, China’s future in world politics, international norms and law, military doctrine and strategy, and the sources of foreign policy and national identity. He previously taught at the University of Minnesota and China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. In 2011 he was Fulbright-Nehru Senior Researcher at the Institute for Defense and Strategic Analyses in New Delhi.

James Ashley Morrison, Member
James Ashley Morrison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He specialises in international political economy and studies the role of ideas and intellectuals in foreign economic policy. He is interested in the ways in which these ideas–and the intellectuals who proffer them–interact with institutions and interests to shape policy. His research utilises both the methods of contemporary social science and historical analysis and has been published, among others, in International Organizations and Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Prior to the position at the LSE, he was an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College (2008-2013) and a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2012-2013). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an MA in History from Stanford University and is also an alumnus of the University of Chicago and a member of Trinity College at Cambridge University.

John M. Owen, Member
John M. Owen is Ambassador Henry J. and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, at the University of Virginia. He is author of Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West’s Past (Princeton, 2015), The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010 (Princeton, 2010), and of Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Cornell, 1997), and co-editor of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (Columbia, 2011). He has published extensively in academic journals and the media. He holds a PhD from Harvard. From 2011 through 2014 he was Editor-in-Chief of Security Studies. During 2015-16 he is a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin and the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), supported by a Humboldt Research Award.

William C. Wohlforth, Member
William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth. He is the author or editor of eight books and some 60 articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the Cold War and its end to unipolarity and contemporary U.S. grand strategy. His most recent books are Status and World Order (Cambridge 2014), edited with T.V. Paul and Deborah Larson, and America Abroad The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century (forthcoming on Oxford), with Stephen Brooks. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and has served as a consultant for the National Intelligence Council and the National Bureau of Asian Research. He has held fellowships at the Institute of Strategic Studies at Yale, the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, and the Hoover Institution.

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