Brendan Peter Simms (born 1967,

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 ...

) is a Professor of the

history of international relations Diplomatic history deals with the history of international relations between states. Diplomatic history can be different from international relations in that the former can concern itself with the foreign policy of one state while the latter deals ...

in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

Early life

Brendan Simms is the son of Anngret and David Simms, a professor of mathematics. Historian says Varadkar has breached letter and spirit of the Belfast Agreement
irishtimes.com, 19 July 2019 He is also a grand-nephew of

Brian Goold-Verschoyle Brian Goold-Verschoyle (5 June 1912 – 5 January 1942) was an Irish member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD as a courier between its moles and their handlers in London. After being sent as a radio tech ...

, a member of the

Communist Party of Ireland The Communist Party of Ireland (CPI; ga, Páirtí Cumannach na hÉireann) is an all-Ireland Marxist–Leninist communist party, founded in 1933 and re-founded in 1970. It rarely contests elections and has never had electoral success. The pa ...

, who became a Soviet spy and died in a Soviet gulag in 1942. Simms was brought up in the

Roman Catholic Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD * Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a let ...

faith. He studied at

Trinity College Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

, where he was elected a

Scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...

in 1986, before completing his doctoral dissertation, ''Anglo-Prussian relations, 1804–1806: The Napoleonic Threat'', at

Peterhouse, Cambridge Peterhouse is the oldest constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England, founded in 1284 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely. Today, Peterhouse has 254 undergraduates, 116 full-time graduate students and 54 fellows. It is quite ...

, under the supervision of

Tim Blanning Timothy Charles William Blanning (born 21 April 1942) is an English historian who served as Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge from 1992 to 2009. Career Timothy Charles William Blanning attended the King's Sch ...

in 1993.

Career

Simms became a Fellow of Peterhouse and now also serves as Professor of the History of European International Relations at the

, where he lectures and leads seminars, specializing in international history since 1945. In addition to his academic work, Simms also serves as the president of the

Henry Jackson Society The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) is a trans-Atlantic foreign policy and national security think tank, based in the United Kingdom. While describing itself as non-partisan, its outlook has been described variously as neoliberal and as neoconser ...

, which advocates the view that supporting and promoting

liberal democracy Liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under an indirect democratic form of government. It is characterized by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into ...

and

liberal interventionism Liberal internationalism is a foreign policy doctrine that argues two main points: first, that international organizations should achieve multilateral agreements between states that uphold rules-based norms and promote liberal democracy, and, se ...

should be an integral part of Western foreign policy, and as President of the Project for Democratic Union, a Munich-based student-organised think tank. He has advocated that the

Eurozone The euro area, commonly called eurozone (EZ), is a currency union of 19 member states of the European Union (EU) that have adopted the euro (€) as their primary currency and sole legal tender, and have thus fully implemented EMU pol ...

should create a

United States of Europe The United States of Europe (USE), the European State, the European Federation and Federal Europe, is the hypothetical scenario of the European integration leading to formation of a sovereign superstate (similar to the United States of Ameri ...

, and also that this should continue the traditions of the

Holy Roman Empire The Holy Roman Empire was a political entity in Western, Central, and Southern Europe that developed during the Early Middle Ages and continued until its dissolution in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. From the accession of Otto I in 962 unt ...

, appointing an elected Emperor.Brendan Simms
Charles III — why not make him King-Emperor of Europe?
engelsbergideas.com, 3 October 2022, accessed 5 October 2022

''Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy''

Norman Stone praised ''Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy'' as "lively and erudite".Reviewed: Europe – the Struggle for Supremacy by Brendan Simms, Norman Stone, New Statesman 25 April 2013
/ref> He also praised the book for the focus on Germany and Simms's knowledge of it though he qualifies it by saying Simms is stronger on the 18th century than the 20th century due to the volume of material to be covered in the latter. Richard J. Evans was critical of the book, saying that Simms had overly favoured observations by A. J. P. Taylor of a Hobbsean view of European history, focusing on periods of strife while neglecting periods of cooperation between European states. Evans described the book as a "one-sided picture", adding that even Simms has to acknowledge that there were periods of cooperation.

Noel Malcolm Sir Noel Robert Malcolm, (born 26 December 1956) is an English political journalist, historian and academic. A King's Scholar at Eton College, Malcolm read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and received his doctorate in history from Trinity Col ...

praised Simms as "a historian of unusual range and ability", saying that "knowing what he wants to say is one of Simms’s strengths".Europe by Brendan Simms: review, Noel Malcolm, The Telegraph, 15 April 2013
/ref> On the whole Malcolm praised the book, though regarding Simms' emphasis on the primacy of foreign policy in European affairs, Malcolm did wonder if there may be counterexamples, such as those where the foreign/domestic distinction is less clear.

''Hitler: Only the World Was Enough''

British historian Richard J. Evans was also critical of ''Hitler: Only the World Was Enough'', arguing that Simms's claim of Hitler embracing socialism does not stand up to examination. Simms cited violence of Nazi stormtroopers against conservatives, but Evans noted that socialists and communists were the overwhelming majority of the 200,000 Germans thrown into concentration camps during Hitler's first year in power. Simms claimed that Hitler's rhetoric was more anti-capitalist than anti-communist, but Evans shows that the anti-communist rhetoric dominated the political portion of Hitler's autobiographical manifesto ''

Mein Kampf (; ''My Struggle'' or ''My Battle'') is a 1925 autobiographical manifesto by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler. The work describes the process by which Hitler became antisemitic and outlines his political ideology and future plans for Ge ...

''. Simms claims that Hitler had managed "to nationalise German industrialists by making them instruments of his political will" which Evans disputes – the reason Thyssen and

Krupp The Krupp family (see pronunciation), a prominent 400-year-old German dynasty from Essen, is notable for its production of steel, artillery, ammunition and other armaments. The family business, known as Friedrich Krupp AG (Friedrich Krupp ...

supported him was that Hitler's rearmament policies were profitable for them. Simms claimed that the ''

Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation fro ...

'' was caused by "Roosevelt’s hostility to Hitler and his defence of the Jews", that

Operation Barbarossa Operation Barbarossa (german: link=no, Unternehmen Barbarossa; ) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. The operation, code-named afte ...

"was to be a campaign of conquest and annihilation, for reasons more to do with Anglo-America than the Soviet Union itself" and that

The Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europ ...

was "primarily driven … by his fear of Britain and the United States". Evans comments "All this is nonsense, and indeed, Simms is forced to contradict himself by the sheer weight of the evidence against his thesis." As an example of where Simms is forced to contradict himself Evans points to Operation Barbarossa, which Simms concedes to have been "part of a much broader ideological war against Bolshevism". Evans also points out that Hitler's genocidal anti-Semitism was based on a paranoid view that Jews were inherently disposed to subversion and conspiracy. Evans summarizes the book with "In the end, Simms hasn’t written a biography in any meaningful sense of the word; he has written a tract that instrumentalises the past for present-day political purposes. As such, his book can be safely ignored by serious students of the Nazi era".

Works

*''The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850'' (Palgrave MacMillan, 1998) *''Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia'' (Penguin, 2001) *''Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783'' (Penguin, 2007) *''Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present'' (Allen Lane, 2013) * ''The Longest Afternoon, The Four Hundred Men who Decided the Battle of Waterloo'' (Allen Lane, 2014) * ''Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation'' (Penguin, 2017) * ''Donald Trump: The Making of a Worldview'' (I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2017) * ''Hitler: A Global Biography'' (Basic Books, 2019)

References

External links

BiographyBrady Lecture, London 2018
{{DEFAULTSORT:Simms, Brendan Living people Alumni of Peterhouse, Cambridge Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Historical Society 20th-century Irish historians 21st-century Irish historians Irish writers Historians of the Napoleonic Wars Members of the University of Cambridge faculty of history Scholars of Trinity College Dublin Place of birth missing (living people) 1967 births