Uwe Kitzinger, CBE/Commander of the Order of the British Empire,
A refugee from Nazi Germany, Uwe Kitzinger was educated at Balliol and New College Oxford, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union. In 1950, he graduated with a 1st class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1951.
He was appointed the first British economist of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in 1951. In 1956 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Nuffield College, where he became a prominent advocate of British adhesion to the European Community.
He took various sabbaticals during his time at Nuffield: first in 1964/5 to the University of the West Indies as Visiting Professor of International Relations and consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation to advise on training diplomats and economists for the newly independent countries of the Caribbean.
In 1969/70 he was invited to Harvard as Visiting Professor of Government taking over the seminar on European Politics from Henry Kissinger who had been called to the White House; then in 1970-73 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris.
When Britain joined the European Union in 1973, he was appointed Political Adviser to the first British Vice-President of the Commission, Sir Christopher Soames, who carried the chief responsibility for the Community’s external relations. In 1976 he was appointed as the Dean of the Management School INSEAD in Fontainebleau. Then in 1983, he negotiated the foundation of Templeton College, Oxford, of which he became the first President.
Uwe was active in various other spheres: in 1967-70 he founded and chaired the Committee on Atlantic Studies; from 1982 to 1987 he was founding Chairman of the Major Projects Association of leading international finance and engineering companies engaged on macro-projects like the Channel tunnel; he served on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) 1973-84, the National Council of the European Movement 1974-76 and the Council of Oxfam 1983-91. Kitzinger was also a member of the British University Committee of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe in Lausanne.
He founded the Journal of Common Market Studies in 1962 and wrote many books, including German Electoral Politics 1960, The Challenge of the Common Market 1963 and Diplomacy and Persuasion 1973 and in 1998 co-edited Macro-Engineering and the Earth.
Uwe is a very close friend and adviser. I met him in 1993 when he was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard a position he held until 2003. He was an enthusiastic supporter the Institute’s academic initiatives, and served on the Institute’s External Advisory Board until I retired in 2016.
With his wife Sheila he founded “Lentils for Dubrovnik” in 1991, a charity to deliver essential supplies to refugees in Croatia. In 1998 he was elected President of the Federation Britannique des Alliances Françaises and now serves as Patron of Asylum Welcome and Chairman of GARIWO, a campaign for civil courage in the Balkans.
He introduced me to his remarkable courageous friends, the Yugoslavian human rights activist, Svetlana Broz, https://www.humanityinaction.org/person/svetlana-broz/ and General Jovan Divyak, https://en.gariwo.net/righteous/the-righteous-biographies/former-yugoslavia/exemplary-figures-reported-by-gariwo/jovan-divjak-7505.html allowing us to send many of our students into Bosnia on distinctive research projects.
Uwe participated in may IGL forums, notably in a powerful Brexit panel during the last symposium of my directorship in 2016, “The Future of Europe.”
He is a fantastic raconteur, and I always envied my students who I selected to crew for him on his wooden ketch, The Anne of Cleaves, sailing the Adriatic coastline and cruising the Mediterranean
He often hosts me in London, and at his home in Standlake Manor, Oxfordshire.