OLD Advisory Board

György Schöpflin was born in Budapest in 1939 and lived in the UK from 1950 to 2004. He graduated M.A., LL.B. from the University of Glasgow (1962) and pursued postgraduate studies at the College of Europe in Bruges (1962-1963). He worked at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1963-1967) and the BBC (1967-1976) before taking up university lecturing, at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London (1976-2004), including latterly as Jean Monnet Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism. Until 2011 he was taught in Forli, University Bologna, Faculty of Political Sciences. Professor Schöpflin’s principal area of research is the relationship between ethnicity, nationhood and political power, with particular reference to post-communism. He is the author of Politics in Eastern Europe 1945-1992 (Blackwell, 1993) and Nations, Identity, Power(Hurst, 2000), and co-editor of and contributor to Myths and Nationhood (Hurst, 1997, with Geoffrey Hosking) and State Building in the Balkans: Dilemmas on the Eve of the 21st Century (Longo, 1998, with Stefano Bianchini) and The Dilemmas of Identity, among many other publications. His latest book, Politics Illusions, Fallacies was published in 2012 by the University of Tallin, the Hungarian translation Politika, illúziók téveszmék was published in 2015 by Századvég. Professor Schöpflin was elected a Member of the European Parliament for Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union, a member of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats)  in 2004, re-elected in 2009 and in 2014. He served as the EPP group coordinator on the Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO), he was a full member of EP’s Development Committee (DEVE) and served as a substitute member on the Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET) and its Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE). He died after a serious illness at the end of November 2021.