About
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I am the Emeritus Professor of European Politics at the University of Bath (UK), where I served as Professor of French Civilisation from 1985 to 2004. I also hold an ad personam Jean Monnet Professorship of European Political Union awarded in 1992 by the European Commission. From 2002 to 2018, I served as Visiting Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University. From 2018 to 2022, I moved to Harvard University’s Kennedy School as Visiting Professor of Public Policy and then Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
In spring 2022, I formally retired after fifty-five years of university teaching. I continue to be active in research, writing and lecturing.
Between 1966 and 1985, I held appointments at the Collège de Genève, the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Aston University.
I have also held Visiting Professorships at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po-Paris); the Free University of Berlin; Luiss Guido-Carli University (Rome); the University of Washington-Seattle; New York University; Columbia University; the New School for Social Research (New York); the University of Chapel Hill-North Carolina; the University of New South Wales (Canberra). I have been affiliated with the Harvard Center for European Studies since 1981.
I originally trained as a historian and my early publications (1970 to 1985) were on late nineteenth-century French social history. My doctoral dissertation, Ed́ouard Vaillant and the French socialist movement: the tactics of total action (2 volumes, 780 pages) prepared at the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at the University of Reading (1973), was published as Edouard Vaillant et la Création de l'Unité socialiste en France (Paris, Syros, 1982). It showed that, together with Jean Jaurès, Vaillant forged the intellectual and political compromise that synthesized the many different strands of the French left emerging out of the revolutionary tradition of the nineteenth century (Jacobinism, Republicanism, Proudhonism, Blanquism, Syndicalism and, eventually, Marxism). This synthesis led to the creation of the only unified socialist party in French history, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO). The book was widely hailed as the definitive work on Vaillant as the father of the united left in France. My research also focused on the difficulties facing the nascent socialist movements in Europe in countering the appeal of nationalism as the continent drifted towards World War One. In 1976, in collaboration with Georges Haupt, I published my first book, a critical edition of the many hundreds of letters Vaillant wrote as co-chair of the Second International, most of them dealing with the left’s efforts to prevent war La Correspondance entre Edouard Vaillant et le Bureau Socialiste International, (Milan, Feltrinelli).
In the late-1970s, in part because of my involvement in anti-Vietnam War activism in Paris, I began to switch my research focus to international relations in general and, more specifically, French and European security and defence policy. In 1984, I published two books that highlighted French distinctiveness in the field of nuclear weapons. NATO’s 1979 decision to deploy a new generation of nuclear weapons in Europe (generally referred to as the “Euromissiles crisis”) gave rise, across the continent, to mass movements opposed to nuclear weapons. My research explained the reasons behind France’s seeming outlier position which featured broad political and popular support for the French nuclear strike force (force de frappe). The first book, an edited volume bringing together the work of the main scholars in both France and the UK, was entitled Defence and Dissent in Contemporary France (Croom Helm). In 2022, this book was republished under the Routledge Library collection. My second book in 1984, France: The Politics of Peace (Merlin) analysed the very special political-cultural distinctiveness of the French peace movements that agitated against the international nuclear arms race while refusing to condemn French nuclear weapons. The prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists concluded, in its review of The Politics of Peace, that “Howorth’s careful analysis of the French movement provides a model of how peace movements can and should be written about”. I continued, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, to publish many scholarly articles and book chapters on France’s defence policy under François Mitterrand. For this work, I was recognised by the French Prime Minister, Edouard Balladur, with the award of the highest French academic honour: Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Key publications are listed under both Journal Articles and Book Chapters in the Bar Menu above.
I began my university career in 1969 when I was appointed to a lectureship at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. In 1976, dissatisfied with the relative chaos of the French university system in the wake of the post-May 1968 reforms, I moved to Aston University as a lecturer and then senior lecturer in French Studies. I was instrumental in creating the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, which was launched at a conference I convened at Aston in 1980. I then organised, again at Aston, the first annual conference of this body, an edited edition of whose proceedings I published, in collaboration with Philip Cerny, as Elites in France, Origins, Reproduction and Power (Frances Pinter). Leading scholars from around the world addressed key questions. Who are the elites? Where do they come from? How do they reproduce themselves? What kinds of power do they wield? How important are they to an understanding of how French society works? And how can they most effectively be studied?
After being appointed in 1985 to the Chair of French Civilisation at the University of Bath, where I also assumed the Headship of the Department of European Studies, I sought to promote the interdisciplinary study of France by collaborating with George Ross, of Brandeis and Harvard Universities, on the publication of a series of volumes under the title Contemporary France: A Review of Interdiscipliary Studies (France Pinter, 1987, 1988, 1989) in which guest essays by historians, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists and cultural specialists attempted to break down disciplinary stovepipes and interact with one another. In similar vein, as the European Union struggled to assert its “unity in diversity” as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, I published, in 1992, in collaboration with Mairi Maclean, Europeans on Europe: Transnational Visions of a New Continent (Macmillan). This book, with a Preface from Edgard Pisani, the only French statesman to have been a minister under both De Gaulle and François Mitterrand, examines at both the national and European level the three key areas of business and economics, foreign and defence policy, and politics and political culture, both country by country and in comparative mode. It was nominated for the European Information Agency’s “Best Books of 1992”.
My own specialist research, beginning in the the 1990s, focused on Europe’s attempts, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, to assert its own relative autonomy from the US in the field of security and defence policy. Emerging from a conference I organised with Anand Menon at Oxford, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, we published, in 1997, The European Union and National Defence Policy (Routledge). The book, bringing together the leading scholars on European defence issues, analysed the extent to which, and the way in which, the main countries (France, Germany, the UK, Italy, and the Netherlands) framed their own defence policy in European terms. It was the first study of the role of European integration in shaping national defence thinking – including in the highly controversial area of nuclear weapons. I followed this up with a monograph in 2000, European Integration and Defence: The Ultimate Challenge (WEU-ISS), which was simultaneously published in French as L'Intégration Européenne et la Défense: l'Ultime Défi. This was the first scholarly study of the EU’s emerging Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), a topic which has subsequently become a massive scholarly sub-field in its own right. In May 2000, I organised, with John Keeler of the University of Washington, Seattle, a major conference exploring the transatlantic tensions that were arising out of the EU’s attempts to assert its growing autonomy. In 2003, this produced a new edited volume, Defending Europe: The EU, NATO and the Quest for European Autonomy (Palgrave-Macmillan) which brought together the leading scholars on both sides of the Atlantic to address the topic that has proven, over the decades, to be the most persistent but also the most controversial behind the EU’s attempts to assert itself as an international actor.
My main book-length contribution to scholarship on European security and defence policy has come in the two books I published in 2007 and 2014. Security and Defence Policy in the European Union (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007) offers a full assessment of the historical, political, and systemic reasons behind the rise of CSDP. It argues that the key issues involved - the challenges of defining a more balanced partnership between the two sides of the Atlantic and of transforming the EU from a civilian power into a new type of more muscular crisis management actor - are the most significant since the creation of NATO and the EU at the end of World War 2. At the time I was working on that book, the EU seemed to be forging ahead successfully with the launch of numerous overseas crisis management missions, both military and civilian, and the book reflects the upbeat and confident atmosphere which prevailed in Brussels as the US struggled to cope with its misguided wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, by the early 2010s, the CSDP project seemed to have run out of steam. No new missions were launched between 2008 and 2012 and during the “Arab Spring” of 2011 – precisely the type of crisis which CSDP was purportedly designed to confront – the EU seemed to have gone absent without leave while the US emerged once again as the indispensable global actor. Many declared CSDP to be moribund. In an attempt to explain the complex reality of the situation, I wrote a fully revised edition of the earlier book, Security and Defence Policy in the European Union, 2nd edition (Palgrave-Macmillan 2014). Based on hundreds of interviews with key actors over more than a decade, and on a burgeoning scholarly literature, the new volume assessed the mixed results of developments since the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 and offered a much more circumspect analysis of the reality of the EU as a military actor. It featured a new chapter on the ways in which IR theorists handle the tricky task of understanding a non-state actor claiming to be a military power. It concluded with a stark assessment of the main challenges facing CSDP in the third decade of the 21st century, especially its schizophrenic relationship with NATO.
In all, I have published fifteen academic books, two hundred academic journal articles and over one hundred chapters in edited academic books. I have delivered five hundred and fifty conference papers in thirty-four countries on five continents. Select items from these lists have been included in the various sections of the Bar Menu above.
I have also been deeply involved in the policy world and have worked closely with numerous think-tanks across Europe. Over the past forty years, I have sat, for different periods, on the Scientific Advisory Boards of numerous policy research institutes: the Centre for Defence Studies, Ministry of Defence/Kings College, London; the Centre for Studies in Security and Diplomacy, University of Birmingham; the Centre National Jean Jaurès (France); the European Defence Agency (Brussels): the European Institute of Public Administration, Maastricht, (Netherlands); the European Peace and Security Programme (Brussels); the European Policy Centre (Brussels); Fair Observer; the Institute of Contemporary European Studies, European Business School, London; the Institut de Recherche Stratégique de l'Ecole Militaire (French Ministry of Defence); and the League of European Defence Experts and Researchers (Brussels).
I have also been appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at the the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies, Paris; the Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI), Paris; and the Martens Centre for European Studies (Brussels). In 1981, I was elected as a Fellow of the Institut Français d'Histoire Sociale (Paris); and in 1985, as a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (UK).
In addition to my purely academic work, I have published extremely widely in more policy-oriented outlets. The complete list of these publications can be found in my CV. A selected list has been included under Policy Inputs on the Menu Bar above. I have consulted with governments across Europe, the European Union and in the US.
On the course development front, in addition to teaching a wide range of courses at the institutions where I have held positions, I have also been responsible for the creation and launch of several trail-blazing degree programmes. At Bath University, I devised the new degree programme in International Management and Modern Languages which has emerged as the flagship undergraduate programme in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies. I also created, in 1996, the first international Masters degree programme in Europe, Euromasters under which leading universities in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Czech Republic collaborate to deliver an integrated programme in European Studies, whose graduates occupy prestigious positions in European institutions, business, media, politics and academia. I was also responsible for extending this degree programme across the Atlantic, with the launch, in 1997, of the Transatlantic Masters Programme involving collaboration between Bath, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Duke University and the University of Washington. That degree programme has now expanded considerably, and Chapel Hill has taken over its central administration.
Finally, I have supervised and/or examined more than sixty doctoral dissertations, and several hundred Masters dissertations. The list of doctoral students is available under the long cv.
Although I was born and formally educated in the United Kingdom, my main scholarly focus has been on the European Union and France. I have lived for decades in Paris, which I have seen since the late 1960s as my home. My wife, Vivien Schmidt, and I own an apartment in the 5th arrondissement. In 2019, I was honoured to be awarded French citizenship under the special regime of “étranger ayant contribué au rayonnement de la France”[1]. Since retirement, I have spent most of my time at our Mediterranean villa in Mortola Inferiore, Italy – just two kilometres from the French border town of Menton.
For further elaboration on these basic details, please visit my Wikipedia page at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolyon_Howorth
Scholarship
My scholarly output has covered the following fields and sub-fields:
French social history during the Belle Epoque
Edouard Vaillant and the unification of the French socialist party
Vaillant and the Second International’s efforts to prevent World War One
French politics under the Fifth Republic
Developments within the French communist party (1970s)
Unity and disunity of the left in France
French defence policy
The evolution of the defence policy of the socialist and communist parties
French nuclear policy
Defence and security policy under President François Mitterrand
European Union security and defence policy
The historical emergence of the EU’s common security and defence policy (CSDP)
The European Union and grand strategy
Decision-making in CSDP
Civilian and military capacity for crisis-management
Europe as a “normative power”
CSDP and the Arab Spring
Relations between the EU, CSDP, the US and NATO
The EU’s quest for strategic autonomy
Franco-British defence relations
[1] “foreigner who has contributed to the international significance of France”