Kathleen R. McNamara is Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and for 2026-27, a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study. Her work focuses on how markets, power, and culture interact in the global political economy; industrial policy and geopolitics; and the European Union. She is the author of The Politics of Everyday Europe and The Currency of Ideas, and numerous articles. Dr McNamara has taught at Princeton University, Sciences Po, and has been a Simone Veil Fellow at the European University Institute, a Fulbright Fellow, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. At Georgetown, she has served as a Vice Dean, Director of the Mortara Center for International Studies, and Co-director of the Global Political Economy Project.
Abstract of talk: The global political order is in a moment of historical change after decades of relative geopolitical stability. I argue that a combination of the second Trump Administration’s pivot away from the transatlantic alliance alongside an aggressively revisionist Russia may produce a new path for the European Union. My argument rests on an application of the history of political development and state formation to the EU case. Three reinforcing logics around markets, identity, and security have the potential to accelerate the movement of political authority to the EU level while reshaping Europe as a polity. I illustrate this potential with a discussion of the newly emerging European military industrial complex. But I caution that there are major tensions in attempting to respond to geopolitical threat without the robust processes and norms needed to ensure democratic rule over Europe’s security turn.
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