Professor of politics
Andrew Maitland Moravcsik (born 1957) is professor of politics and international affairs, director of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and founding director of both the European Union Program and the International Relations Faculty Colloquium at Princeton University.
Moravcsik is known for his academic research and policy writing on European integration, international organizations, human rights, qualitative/historical methods, and American and European foreign policy, for developing the theory of liberal intergovernmentalism to explain European Union (EU) politics, and for his work on liberal theories of international relations. He is also active in teaching and developing qualitative methods, including the development of "active citation": a standard designed to render qualitative social science research transparent.
Moravcsik is also a former policy-maker who currently serves as book review editor (Europe) of "Foreign Affairs" magazine. He was previously nonresident senior fellow of The Brookings Institution, contributing editor of "Newsweek" magazine and held other journalistic positions.
Academic career.
Academic positions.
In 1992, Moravcsik began teaching at Harvard University's Department of Government. During his 12-year tenure in the department, Moravcsik became a full professor and founded Harvard's European Union program. He left the school in 2004 to assume a post at Princeton University, where he again founded an EU program. As of 2019, he directs the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University, a research institute that focuses on questions of globalization, sovereignty and self-determination, with special attention to Europe, the European Union, and Eurasia. He has also been affiliated as a researcher and/or professor the University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as various French, British, German, Italian and Chinese research institutes.
He holds a lifetime appointment as distinguished affiliated professor at the Technische Universität München (TUM), in Munich, Germany, where he is affiliated with its Hochschule für Politik and he teaches annually as Non-Resident Professor at the Florence School for Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Firenze, Italy.
In the academic year Fall 2023, he was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, where he served as Richard Holbrooke Fellow. During Spring 2024, he was Visiting Faculty at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. During the 2019–2020 academic year, he was Distinguished Senior Faculty Fellow at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania. During the 2015–2016 academic year, he was Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, DC. During the academic year 2011–2012, he was visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. During the academic year 2007–2008 he was affiliated with the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.
Academic publications.
With over 47,000 academic citations, a recent study found that Moravcsik is the most cited US-based political scientist of his cohort. These writings include a book, entitled "The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht", three edited volumes, and over 150 academic book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. The book, which the "American Historical Review" called "the most important work in the field" of modern European studies, attempts to explain why the member states of the European Union agreed to cede sovereignty to a supranational entity.
Moravcsik's "liberal intergovernmentalist" theory of European integration is widely regarded as a plausible account of the emergence and evolution of the European Union. It stresses the issue-specific functional national interests of member states and goes on to analyze the interstate bargains they strike among themselves and the rational incentive to construct institutions to render enforcement and elaboration of those bargains credible. Quantitative studies of research citations in EU studies conclude that liberal intergovernmentalism currently serves as the "baseline" academic theory of European integration, that is, it is the theory that most often confirmed and taken as a baseline for further extensions or for identification of anomalies. A recent restatement of liberal intergovernmentalism, published in 2018, elaborates a future research agenda.
Regarding international relations theory more generally, Moravcsik adheres to "liberal" theory in the sense that he seeks to explain state behavior with reference to variation in the underlying social purposes (substantive "preferences" or "fundamental national interests," material or ideational) that states derive from their embeddedness in an interdependent domestic and transnational civil society. In contrast to realist, institutionalist, and various types of "constructivist" or "non-rational" theory, liberal theory privileges and directly theorizes social interdependence and globalization as the dominant force in world politics, past and present. Liberal theory, Moravcsik maintains, is not empirically sufficient to explain all of international relations, but it is analytically more fundamental than other types of international relations theory.
Moravcsik advocates greater transparency and replicability of textual, qualitative and historical research in international relations, political science, and the social sciences more generally. To this end, he has proposed the use of "active citation" the use of precise footnotes hyperlinked to source material contained in an appendix or on a permanent qualitative data repository. He has worked with other scholars to extend this approach through the "Annotation for Transparent Inquiry" (ATI) initiative. Moravcsik's book "The Choice for Europe" was criticized for imprecise and misleading use of historical sources.
Policy career and public commentary.
Policy positions.
Prior to the start of his academic career, Moravcsik served in policy positions for governments on three continents. He was international trade negotiator at the US Department of Commerce, special assistant to South Korean Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hahn-Been, and press assistant at the Commission of the European Communities, as well as an editor of a Washington-based foreign policy journal. He has subsequently served as a member and in leadership positions on policy commissions organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, the Commission of the European Communities, Princeton University and other organizations.
Public commentary.
Since 2002, he has written over 150 pieces of public commentary on global affairs. These include dozens of articles and commentaries, including cover stories in "Newsweek", "Foreign Affairs" and "Prospect". He has also written for the Financial Times, "The New York Times", and many other publications. He has lectured about the European Union at The Pentagon, was a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation", and has been quoted in multiple news sources, including
"Deutsche Welle",
"International Herald Tribune",
and "USA Today". Since 2009, he has served as book review editor (Europe) for "Foreign Affairs" magazine. He continues to engage in regular policy analysis and advising, currently focusing on EU–US burden-sharing, the democratic deficit in Europe, transatlantic relations, the future of the European Union, and Asian regionalism. He is known for his argument that Europe is the world's "second superpower" and for a soberly optimistic assessments of the European Union. He has also written and spoken for "The Atlantic" and other media outlets on the desirability of men serving as the "lead parent" for children and playing an equal or more active role in caring work.
Writing on music.
Moravcsik began writing on classical music in 1977 for "The Stanford Daily". Since 2000, he has written over 80 articles on classical music, especially opera. Non-scholarly articles, mostly reviews, have appeared in the "Financial Times", "The New York Times", "Newsweek", "Opera", "Opera News", "Opera Today", and other publications. He also conducts scholarly research on the sociology of music, in particular concerning the current state of Verdi and Wagner singing, and the underrepresentation of women among instrumental soloists in the classical music world.
Education.
Moravcsik received a BA in history from Stanford University in 1980 and, after a period working in the US and Asia, spent the next year and a half as a Fulbright fellow at the universities of Bielefeld, Hamburg, and Marburg in West Germany. In 1982 he enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, from which he received a Master of Arts degree in international relations in 1984. In 1992 he obtained an MA and PhD in political science from Harvard University.
Personal life and family background.
Moravcsik spent most of his youth in Eugene, Oregon, where he graduated from Winston Churchill High School in 1975.
His father, Michael Moravcsik (1928–1989), was a Hungarian immigrant to the United States globally active as a professor of theoretical particle physics, an expert on science development, and a pioneer in the field of citation studies. His paternal grandfather, Gyula Moravcsik, was a professor of Byzantine history and Greek philology in Budapest. His great-grandfather, Sándor Fleissig, was a Hungarian banker and public official who served as president of the Budapest Commodity and Stock Exchange. His great-grandmother, born Malvina Drucker, perished on the way to (or immediately on arrival at) Auschwitz in 1944.
Moravcsik's mother, Francesca de Gogorza, comes from a New England family of Basque, Hispanic, Dutch, German, Scottish, English and Native American ancestry. She worked for decades as a landscape architect and urban planner, and now lives in South Burlington, Vermont. Francesca is the daughter of Ernesto Maitland de Gogorza (1896–1941), a graphic artist and painter who taught art at Smith College, and a descendant of the British-Quebecois-American painter Henry Daniel Thielcke.
Moravcsik is married to the legal academic, political scientist, public intellectual, university administrator, government official, and think-tank director Prof. Anne-Marie Slaughter, with whom he has two sons.
References.
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