György Schöpflin

Member of the European Parliament

György Schöpflin has been a member of the European Parliament for Hungary since 2004. He represents the Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Union, a member of the group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats.

He serves as a full member on the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and its Subcommittee on Human Rights, and as a substitute member on the Constitutional Affairs Committee.

In 2006, Professor Schöpflin was also a member of the Parliament’s Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners. Professor Schöpflin is also a member of the Parliament’s Delegation to the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee.

Born in Budapest, Professor Schöpflin lived in the UK from 1950 to 2004. He graduated with an M.A., LL.B. from the University of Glasgow (1962) and pursued postgraduate studies at the College of Europe in Bruges (1962-1963).

György Schöpflin went on to work 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). During that time, he was also the Jean Monnet Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism.

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) as well as of many other works, including numerous articles on ethnicity and nationhood.

György Schöpflin is 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).

Professor György Schöpflin’s latest book, The Dilemmas of Identity, is forthcoming in English, and has already appeared in Hungarian as Az identitàsok dilemmàja (Attraktor, 2004).

In the European Parliament, Professor Schöpflin has been particularly active in pursuing issues of ethnic rights, the future of the Constitutional Treaty — and the implications of Turkey’s projected membership in the EU.