Is the European Union in decline? Recent history, from the debt and migration crises to Brexit, has led many observers to argue that the EU’s best days are behind it. But in Embattled Europe, renowned historian Konrad Jarausch counters the prevailing narrative of European obsolescence with a rousing yet realistic defense of the continent. He makes a powerful case that Europe—with its peaceful foreign policy, social solidarity, and environmental protection—offers the best progressive alternative to the military adventurism and rampant inequality of rightwing populism. 

Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Senior Fellow of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam/Germany. Among the more than 50 books which he has written or edited on German and European History are Reluctant Accomplice: A Wehrmacht Soldier’s Letters from the Eastern Front (Princeton 2011), Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2015), and Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2018).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.