Andrew Moravcsik


Andrew Maitland Moravcsik is a Professor of Politics and director of the European Union Program at Princeton University. He is known for his research on European integration, international organizations, human rights, qualitative/historical methods, and American and European foreign policy, for developing the theory of liberal intergovernmentalism, and for his work on liberal theories of international relations. He is also active in teaching and developing qualitative methods, including the development of "active citation": a standard designed to render qualitative social science research transparent.
Moravcsik is also a former policy-maker who currently serves as Nonresident Senior Fellow of The Brookings Institution, and book review editor of Foreign Affairs magazine. He was previously contributing editor of Newsweek magazine and held other journalistic positions. He writes popular and scholarly work on classical music, especially opera.

Academic career

Academic positions

In 1992 Moravcsik began teaching at Harvard University's Department of Government. During his 12-year tenure in the department, Moravcsik became a Full Professor and founded Harvard's European Union program. He left the school in 2004 to assume a post at Princeton University, where he again founded an EU program. He has also been affiliated with the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University, as well as various French, British, German and Chinese research institutes.
In 2011, Moravcsik was awarded the Stanley Kelley Teaching Prize by the Princeton University. He teaches the introductory undergraduate course in international relations, as well as masters and doctoral seminars. In addition to being the Founding Director of the European Union Program, he is the Founding Chair of the International Relations Colloquium and serves on the executive committee of various centers and programs at Princeton.
Moravcsik's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, Columbia University, Harvard University, German Marshall Fund, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Centre d'Etudes et Relations Internationales, and many other organizations. During the academic year 2011–2012, he was visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ.

Academic publications

Moravcsik has published one book, titled , three edited volumes, and over 125 scholarly book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. The book, which the American Historical Review called "the most important work in the field" of modern European studies, attempts to explain why the member states of the European Union agreed to cede sovereignty to a supranational entity.
According to Google Scholar, The Choice for Europe has been cited at least 6550 times as of November 2019. In addition, at least six articles authored by Moravcsik have been cited more than 1000 times as of the same date, and twenty-four have been cited more than 250 times. These include:
Moravcsik's "liberal intergovernmentalist" theory of European integration is regarded as a plausible account of the emergence and evolution of the European Union. It stresses the issue-specific functional national interests of member states and goes on to analyze the interstate bargains they strike among themselves and the rational incentive to construct institutions to render enforcement and elaboration of those bargains credible.
Regarding international relations theory more generally, Moravcsik is a "liberal", in that he seeks to explain state behavior with reference to variation in the underlying purposes that states derive from their embeddedness in domestic and transnational civil society. Liberal theory, in contrast to realist, institutionalist, and "constructivist" theory, privileges and directly theorizes social interdependence and globalization as the dominant force in world politics, past and present. Liberal theory, Moravcsik maintains, is not empirically sufficient to explain all of international relations, but it is analytically more fundamental than other types of international relations theory.
Moravcsik advocates greater transparency and replicability of textual, qualitative and historical research in international relations, political science, and the social sciences more generally. To this end, he has proposed the use of "active citation" the use of precise footnotes hyperlinked to source material contained in an appendix or on a permanent qualitative data repository. He is currently working with other scholars to realize this proposal. However, Moravcsik himself has been criticized for imprecise and misleading use of historical sources in The Choice for Europe.

Policy career

Policy roles

Prior to the start of his academic career, Moravcsik served in policy positions for governments on three continents. He was international trade negotiator at the US Department of Commerce, special assistant to South Korean Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hahn-Been, and press assistant at the Commission of the European Communities, as well as an editor of a Washington-based foreign policy journal. He has subsequently served as a member and in leadership positions on policy commissions organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, the Commission of the European Communities, Princeton University and other organizations.

Policy publications

Since 2002, he has written over one hundred pieces of public commentary. These include dozens of articles and commentaries including cover stories in Newsweek, Foreign Affairs and Prospect. He has also written for the Financial Times, New York Times, and many other publications. He has lectured about the European Union at The Pentagon, was a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and has been quoted in multiple news sources, including
Deutsche Welle,
International Herald Tribune,
and USA Today. He is book review editor for Foreign Affairs magazine. He continues to engage in regular policy analysis and advising, currently focusing on EU–US burden-sharing, the democratic deficit in Europe, transatlantic relations, the future of the European Union, and Asian regionalism. During the academic year 2007–2008 he was a fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

Musicological career

Moravcsik began publishing music criticism while an undergraduate at Stanford University. Over the past decade, he has published over 30 reviews and articles on opera in the Financial Times, New York Times, Opera, Opera News, Newsweek, Opera Today, and elsewhere. He also conducts scholarly research on opera performance and history, which has appeared in Opera Quarterly, Wagner Quarterly, Opera and elsewhere. He has written on the staging of Wagner operas and is currently directing a scholarly research project at Princeton University seeking to measure and explain the possible recent decline in quality of spinto and dramatic opera singing, particularly in heavier Verdi and Wagner roles.

Education

Moravcsik received a BA in history from Stanford University in 1980 and, after a period working in the US and Asia, spent the next year and a half as a Fulbright Fellow at the Universities of Bielefeld, Hamburg, and Marburg in West Germany. In 1982 he enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC, from which he received a Master of Arts degree in international relations in 1984. In 1992 he obtained a PhD in political science from Harvard University.

Personal life

Moravcsik is married to the political scientist, international lawyer, university administrator, policy-maker and think-tank director Anne-Marie Slaughter, with whom he has two sons. As a young child, Moravcsik lived in New York, California, Pakistan, Italy, Japan, Scotland and Massachusetts. From age 10 to 18, he lived in Eugene, Oregon. His father, Michael Moravcsik, was a Hungarian immigrant to the United States who was active as a theoretical particle physicist, an expert on science development and a pioneer in the field of citation studies; Michael Moravcsik was the son of Gyula Moravcsik, a professor of Byzantine history, the grandson of Sandor Fleissig, a noted banker and government official, the brother of Julius Moravcsik, a philosopher at Stanford University, and the brother of Edith Moravcsik, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin. Andrew Moravcsik's mother, Francesca de Gogorza, comes from a New England family of Basque, Dutch, German, Scottish and English ancestry. She worked as a landscape architect and urban planner, and now lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where she is active in retirement as a nationally ranked senior track and field athlete.