With Britain's Integrated Review having recently passed its twelve-month anniversary, the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s College London plans to host three events examining its successes, failures, and implications.

This panel discussion with Q and A seeks to contextualise the ongoing recalibration of Britain’s relationship to Europe through the lens of Germany's recent announcements regarding increased defence spending. It would seek to address, among other questions:

As legislation passes from the Bundestag to the Bundesrat for final approval, will a substantial change in military capacities over time really be delivered, given past inefficiencies, legal constraints, and bureaucracy? Will this change in spending be backed-up by a broader shift in mindset and structures, for example less restrictive rules of engagement, or greater public support for riskier deployments? If it lives up to its commitments, Germany will have the largest military budget in Europe: what is the political significance of this for European partners, and should Britain see competition or opportunities for co-operation in Germany's changing defence posture?

Speaker Biographies

Prof. Christoph Meyer is a Professor of European and International Politics at King’s College London and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He chairs the Research Group on European Foreign Policy. He has written widely on issues at the intersection of European foreign and security policy, political communication and European studies in leading academic journals, news media, think-tanks and as commissioned research for the European Parliament. He has authored The Quest for a European Strategic Culture (Palgrave, 2006) and co-authored Warning about War: Conflict, Persuasion and Foreign Policy (CUP, 2020), which won two best book awards of the International Studies Association in 2021. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book titled Estimative Intelligence in European Foreign Policymaking: Learning Lessons from an Era of Surprise (EUP, 2022).

Gesine Weber is a PhD candidate at the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. Her research interests include the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), EU-UK security cooperation after Brexit, and the E3 (France, UK, Germany) and their respective security policy. As a Research Analyst at the Paris Office of the German Marshall Fund of the US, Gesine covers European security and defence, as well as Europe’s role in geopolitics. She holds an MA in European Affairs with distinction from SciencesPo Paris, an MA in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin, and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Freiburg and Institut d’Etudes Politiques Aix-en-Provence.

Dr. Aylin Matlé is a research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) on the Security and Defense Program, and was previously deputy head of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung’s Israel office in Jerusalem. Dr. Matlé studied for a BA in Public Management and Governance at Zeppelin University (ZU) in Friedrichshafen, with an emphasis on political science; and an MA War Studies at King’s College London. She earned her PhD from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, where she was a research associate for the chair of International Relations and European politics. Her dissertation researched the impact of US engagement with NATO, and the defence policies of European allies during Barack Obama’s presidency.

Dr. Helene von Bismarck studied History and Politics at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, and Humboldt-University in Berlin. She worked as a lecturer of Western European history at Humboldt-University, before winning a full scholarship to complete a PhD in modern history. She published Conceptions of Informal Empire. British Policy in the Persian Gulf, 1961-68 in 2013, while her second project will explore the relationship between Margaret Thatcher and Jacques Delors. She has been published in numerous journals and periodicals, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2018, and has spoken to audiences across the world, including the Cabinet Office in London, and Deutsche-Britische Gesellschaft in Berlin. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for British Politics and Government at King‘s College, as well as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.