Dead or dormant? Germany after Ostpolitik

This talk poses the question as to whether the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in lasting damage to Germany's erstwhile social democratic Eastern policy. After reviewing the geopolitical foundations of Ostpolitik and the stages of its decline in the 2010s and 20s, I shed light on the continued ways in which German politics and society today sits on the fault line between Atlanticism, Ostpolitik, and Geopolitik.

Speaker: 

Ian Klinke  is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a fellow of St John's College. He studies the history of geopolitics from the late nineteenth century to the present and is the author of Life, Earth, Colony: Friedrich Ratzel's Necropolitical Geography (University of Michigan Press, 2023), Cryptic Concrete: A Subterranean Journey into Cold War Germany  (Wiley, 2018), and the co-author (with Patricia Daley) of Human Geography: A Very Short Introduction  (Oxford University Press, 2025). In 2023, he was awarded a British Academy mid-career fellowship. In 2023/4, he was a visiting researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen. His new book project, Geopolitics: What the right gets wrong  is under contract with Verso.

Partnerships: IIR, Institute of International Studies (Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung