On Wednesday 24 March, Prof. Stella Ghervas (Newcastle) presents her book Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard UP, 2021) at the History of Political Ideas Seminar.
Discussant: Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL)

Please register here.

Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.

Stella Ghervas is Professor of Russian History at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her book Réinventer la tradition: Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance won the Guizot Prize from the Académie Française.