This online lecture will provide a fresh and provocative interpretation of the history of European integration. It discusses how the European Union and its predecessors could become so important over time, and how it has impacted on ordinary people's lives. Did it really create peace after the Second World War, as is often argued? How about its contribution to creating prosperity? The presentation looks back at the myths and realities of integration and challenges conventional wisdoms of Europhiles and Euro-sceptics alike.

Kiran Klaus Patel holds the chair of European history at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich. Before joining LMU, he held chairs at Maastricht University and the European University Institute in Florence, and an assistant professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin. He has been (inter alia) a visiting fellow/professor at Harvard University, LSE, Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Oxford. His latest publications include: Project Europe: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

Through a series of public lectures, the Pierre du Bois Chair addresses Europe’s role in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world, for example through colonialism and migration, as well as the question of how that global role conversely impacted European history itself.