Author Archive

Brendan Simms

Brendan Simms lectures for MPhil in International Relations on the History of European Geopolitics and leads seminar groups on the same subject. He also lectures to the Faculty of History on geopolitics and the primacy of foreign policy. He supervises MPhil and PhD theses for both POLIS and the Faculty of History, which deal primarily with German and British history in its international context, and the history of humanitarian intervention.

In his stimulating recent post ‘France and the New Balance of power’, Oxford’s Geoffrey Gertz argues that the near-certain election of Francois Hollande will change the balance between ‘North’ and ‘South’ in Europe. Having for so long reckoned herself part of the German, Dutch, Scandinavian and Eastern European ‘North’, he suggests, France will now join Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and possibly Bulgaria and Hungary in the ‘South’. He may well be right: Hollande’s recent demands that the stability pact be renegotiated, that Germany would have to push for growth as well as balanced budgets and the whole tenor of his campaign is evidence enough. I wonder, though, whether a Hollande victory might not also have profound consequences for relations between …