Andrew Moravcsik

Andrew Maitland Moravcsik (born 1957) is professor of politics and international affairs, director of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, and founding director of both the European Union Program and the International Relations Faculty Colloquium at Princeton University.

Moravcsik is known for his academic research and policy writing on European integration, international organizations, human rights, qualitative/historical methods, and American and European foreign policy, for developing the theory of liberal intergovernmentalism to explain European Union (EU) politics, 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 book review editor (Europe) of Foreign Affairs magazine.

He was previously nonresident senior fellow of The Brookings Institution, contributing editor of Newsweek magazine and held other journalistic 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.

Since 2002, he has written over 150 pieces of public commentary on global affairs.

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,

He left the school in 2004 to assume a post at Princeton University, where he again founded an EU program.

During the academic year 2007–2008 he was affiliated with the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.

With over 47,000 academic citations, a recent study found that Moravcsik is the most cited US-based political scientist of his cohort.

These writings include a book, entitled The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht, three edited volumes, and over 150 academic 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.

Moravcsik's "liberal intergovernmentalist" theory of European integration is widely 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.

Quantitative studies of research citations in EU studies conclude that liberal intergovernmentalism currently serves as the "baseline" academic theory of European integration, that is, it is the theory that most often confirmed and taken as a baseline for further extensions or for identification of anomalies.

During the academic year 2011–2012, he was visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

During the 2015-2016 academic year, he was Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, DC.

A recent restatement of liberal intergovernmentalism, published in 2018, elaborates a future research agenda.

Regarding international relations theory more generally, Moravcsik adheres to "liberal" theory in the sense that he seeks to explain state behavior with reference to variation in the underlying social purposes (substantive "preferences" or "fundamental national interests," material or ideational) that states derive from their embeddedness in an interdependent domestic and transnational civil society.

In contrast to realist, institutionalist, and various types of "constructivist" or "non-rational" theory, liberal 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 has worked with other scholars to extend this approach through the "Annotation for Transparent Inquiry" (ATI) initiative.

Moravcsik's book The Choice for Europe was criticized for imprecise and misleading use of historical sources.

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.

As of 2019, he directs the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination at Princeton University, a research institute that focuses on questions of globalization, sovereignty and self-determination, with special attention to Europe, the European Union, and Eurasia.

He has also been affiliated as a researcher and/or professor the University of Chicago, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as various French, British, German, Italian and Chinese research institutes.

He holds a lifetime appointment as distinguished affiliated professor at the Technische Universität München (TUM), in Munich, Germany, where he is affiliated with its Hochschule für Politik and he teaches annually as Non-Resident Professor at the Florence School for Transnational Governance at the European University Institute in Firenze, Italy.

In the academic year Fall 2023, he was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, where he served as Richard Holbrooke Fellow.

During Spring 2024, he was Visiting Faculty at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

During the 2019-2020 academic year, he was Distinguished Senior Faculty Fellow at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania.