Featured Scholar: Iren Marinova

Please introduce yourself.

My name is Iren Marinova. I’m a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow this year with the Kissinger Center. I’m also a Non-Resident Global Fellow with the Wilson Center’s Global Europe Program.

Could you walk us through how you came to this role from the very beginning?

I was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. I came to the United States to do my undergraduate degree, and I’ve done all my higher education here. I first got my BA in political science at the University of Louisiana in Monroe where I was also a student athlete and played indoor and beach volleyball.

Continuing the tradition of Kissinger Center Postdoctoral Fellows with Louisiana ties! (Former AJI Post-Doc Andrew Erhardt is a proud New Orleanian).

Lovely! It was in Louisiana where my passion for political science and international relations grew. That is also where I first developed an interest in environmental politics, especially climate change politics in addition to my primary focus on the European Union, foreign policy, and transatlantic relations.

Was this based on proximity to Louisiana’s fossil fuel industry?

Not directly. But I had a professor, who is still a mentor for me, who really captured my attention with his focus on global environmental politics. When I was looking for MA programs and eventually my PhD, he pointed me towards Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins. Unique among other more standard political science or international relations programs, CSU’s doctoral program in political science has a mandatory subfield in environmental policies and politics in addition to the traditional political science concentrations. So, at CSU I studied political science with a focus on the security and foreign policy of the European Union, but with this added component of environmental politics and, for me, climate politics and foreign policy.

How did your intellectual journey develop between embarking on your PhD and now?

2022 was a pivotal year, of course, with the Ukraine War setting off big changes for the world (especially Europe) and for my own scholarly development. Up to that point I had done a lot of environmental politics-focused research, in addition to foreign policy and security. I wanted to bridge both research directions, and the EU has been a unifying element.

Could you expand on that?

In 2022 and after that I began asking this combined set of questions: how and why has the EU pursued leadership on climate issues? And why has the EU failed to achieve leadership or even significant autonomy in other domains, particularly security issues? This was the driving research puzzle for my dissertation, and I focused exclusively on the climate foreign policy domain there. I looked at what were some of the main drivers for the pursuit of such leadership ambitions, especially after the US announced its withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.

So my next research step is to dive into the other part of the puzzle: why didn’t the EU develop a more autonomous agenda in the realm of security and defense, particularly at the end of the Cold War. This is what I am focusing on at SAIS

Relevant to those twin questions: just a few weeks ago, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt came to speak at SAIS about emerging technology’s impact, and he made the somewhat provocative claim that the EU as a bloc has “decided not to grow.” Do you agree?

I do think he has a point. The EU definitely has been stagnating the last 10 years. It starts with the sovereign debt crisis in the 2000 and 2010s. And you can’t point exclusively to Germany, but with Germany being the economic engine of the EU, the German preference for austerity presents itself as a problem. Beyond that, there’s of course bureaucracy, how slow everything happens, in a world where AI is growing so much and so quicky. It’s important to talk about these issues, especially when we try to make predictions about where the EU is going.

How would you hope to address some of these questions through your year at SAIS?

In my time as a DAAD Fellow at the Kissinger Center, I’m very excited to be working with Prof. Marina Henke (Visiting Professor from the Hertie Centre for International Security in Berlin) on the security and defense side. I want to draw important historical connections between the transatlantic relationship and the prospects for strategic autonomy of the EU. My goal after the fellowship and within the next five years is to turn my dissertation into a book that has a combined focus on both the climate foreign policy aspect, but also the security and defense aspect for the EU.

What’s the core of your book-in-progress?

I’m taking a look back at the transatlantic relationship between the United States and the European project from basically after 1945 to the present day. And the big puzzle that I'm trying to address is: why is the EU in the place it is now with its security and defense? Why does it find itself in such an inadequate position to address traditional security threats like the war in Ukraine? And I want to look at what happened right after the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and suddenly that big enemy in Europe was gone. Why didn’t the EU, kind of pull away from the US and try to build its own identity and security and defense, build up its own capacity? Why did it instead, to quote the historian Geir Lundestad who I’m reading right now, extend the invite of America’s “empire by invitation” once again as it did in the late 1940s-early 1950s?

And I am focusing specifically on what role the relationship that Western Europe established with the US since 1945 played for the way in which the European project developed. I want to understand how, if at all, did the transatlantic relationship constrain and enable the European project to develop the way it did. As I mentioned, I will also be bringing in my dissertation’s focus on climate and how and why the EU very actively pursued a leadership agenda in that domain since the 1990s, which of course appears to be in contrast to its decisions on security and defense.

It seems like one major factor has to be that EU publics wanted a peace dividend…

Exactly. And the EU being able to build these welfare states, this social policy, and since the 1990s the focus on climate, all this was happening vis-à-vis more or less outsourcing its defense to the United States and NATO.

Do you see the second Trump administration as changing any of this dynamic of dependency?

Honestly, not really. That dependency has lasted basically the length of the European project, some 75 years. I don't think Trump 2.0 is going to trigger any transformational change in that direction, because the EU doesn’t have the muscle memory to replace the US defense role entirely. The EU is trying different avenues now, of course, which is commendable and a very interesting and important dynamic to follow over the next 5 years. For example, the new European Commission established the role of a Commissioner for Defence and Space who is taking on a very ambitious agenda.

Oh wow. Is this concern about the Russian anti-satellite weapon, the “orbiting nuke” that has been reported on this past year?

Partially. There is a focus on the building of an EU space strategy for security and defense to include the protection of European space assets, systems, and interests. But it goes back to the competitiveness dimension, with a main goal for the Commissioner being to promote the development of an innovative European space industry, EU space law, and, in the future, the drafting of a space data economy strategy.

To end on a lighter note…What have been some highlights of time in DC so far?

It’s been great! Something that I’m very passionate about is policy relevance in my work, in addition to the strictly academic part of my career. Being in Washington has really been a highlight of my career to this point—being here at this important moment in global history. And obviously the Kissinger Center has very strong policy ties. It’s been wonderful to get to meet a lot of different people within both the academic and the policy worlds, and really have very interesting and stimulating conversations with them on these topics. So yeah, being in DC has been fantastic—every time I step out of the door, I meet somebody very interesting that I get to talk to. But mostly that has meant getting to know my amazing colleagues – the scholars and fellows at the Kissinger Center.

Fantastic! Best of luck with the remainder of the fellowship.

Thanks, and Happy New Year!