Anthony Pagden - The Pursuit of Europe: A History

Conversations : Globalization and Law

Anthony Pagden is the Distinguished Professor of Political Science and History at UCLA, and has in the past been affiliated with Oxford, Cambridge, the EUI (Florence), and Johns Hopkins University.

Easily one of the most important intellectual historians alive, Anthony Pagden has written extensively on European, and in particular Spanish history, with a special focus on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In this episode, Anthony joins us to discuss his latest book, The Pursuit of Europe: A History (OUP 2022), which traces the history of the idea of European Unification, starting from the end of the Napoleonic Wars right through to Brexit. The book details the various attempts to deal with the question of how to create a united Europe after centuries of internecine conflict, while at the same time preserving the political, legal, and cultural integrity of the individual nations, many of which had had extensive imperial holdings until the end of the WWII. The resulting entity, Anthony argues in the book, is to be regarded neither as a ‘super-state’ nor an empire, but a new post-national order united in a political life based, not upon the old shibboleths of nationalism and patriotism, but upon a body of common values and aspirations.