Biography

Professor 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. He is currently teaching 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), among many other publications. His latest book, The Dilemmas of Identity, is forthcoming in English and has already appeared in Hungarian as Az identitások dilemmája (Attraktor, 2004).

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) and European Democrats, in 2004. He serves as a full member on the Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET) and its Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE), and as a substitute member on the Constitutional Affairs Committee (AFCO).

In the EP he is coordinator of the Agora (Civil Parliament) on the behalf of the EPP-ED and also one of the founding members of the United Europe, United History informal working group.