Brendan Simms: A strong, united Europe is in Britain’s interest

Since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, European history has been dominated by two themes: the centrality of Germany and the primacy of foreign policy. This is the argument of Brendan Simms’ new book, Europe: the struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present. Simms is a professor of the History of International Relations at Cambridge University and his decidedly European focus has allowed him to craft a detailed yet expansive account in the style of Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. One afternoon we sat down at Penguin’s offices on the Strand to discuss these issues, as well as their relevance to the current European Union debate.

‘Grand strategy’ is a term associated with your work—it features in Three Victories and a Defeat, for instance. And Europe returns to this theme constantly.  How did you become interested in this concept?

I started out as a historian of Germany and my first book was on Prussia facing the Napoleonic challenge in the late 18th and early 19th century.