The Making of a European Union Military

Radosław (Radek) Sikorski is a distinguished statesman with the Brzezinski Institute on Geostrategy at CSIS. He is also currently a senior fellow at the Center of European Studies at Harvard University. He was formerly Poland’s minister of defense (2005–2007), foreign minister (2007–2014), and speaker of parliament (2014–2015). Born and raised in Bydgoszcz, Poland, Mr. Sikorski led a student strike committee there in 1981 as part of the Solidarity movement. He graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. and an M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics. He then served as a war reporter in Afghanistan and Angola. In 1988, he was awarded the World Press Photo for spot news. Mr. Sikorski returned to his home country in 1989. From 2001 to 2005, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. As minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Sikorski was the Polish signatory of the Treaty of Lisbon, in 2007. Together with Carl Bildt, he launched the EU Eastern Partnership. He proposed and helped to set up the European Endowment for Democracy. He negotiated and signed the Poland-Russia regional visa-free regime, Poland-U.S. missile defense agreement, and—together with foreign ministers of Germany and France—the accord between the pro-EU opposition and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013. In 2012, Foreign Policy named him one of its 100 global thinkers for “telling the truth even when it’s not diplomatic.”

For more information on this event, contact Elizabeth Doughtie at [email protected].