Biographies always seem difficult to summarize in countries whose modernization began somewhere in the past and still feels half-finished and uncertain. Or, it might be better to say that they seem trapped in a nineteenth-century format, as do the countries themselves. Someone is never just a ‘scientist’ or just a ‘politician’ in places where everything still needs to be invented, but a historian, poet and statesman at the same time, or a physician, composer and freedom fighter. Ghiţă Ionescu, the Romanian who took British nationality, could not escape such a background: he was a civic journalist, a political thinker, a playwright, a lawyer, an academic and a diplomat. How can one make the career of such a man intelligible, someone who started as a Marxist but ended up a Conservative, while for most of his life he was a constant supporter of constitutional monarchy? Fortunately, we find a few threads drawing all the parts together into one whole. But this is no ordinary academic biography, not even for the twentieth century.

Ghiţă (Gheorghe) Ionescu (1913–96) was born on 11 March 1913 in Bucharest, Romania, the son of Alexandru Ionescu and Hélène Sipsom. His was an affluent bourgeois family: on his father's side the money came from oil and property development in Ploiesti, Romania's oil-rich city, although Alexandru himself was a lawyer; Hélène was descended from Greek traders from Romania's thriving port cities on the Danube. Ionescu was born in and lived most of his time in Romania at the Athenée Palace Hotel in Bucharest, where his family had interests and his father acted as manager. The place was described by many journalists and writers – from C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times to Olivia Manning – being called the ‘most notorious caravanserai in all Europe’, a nest of spies of all nationalities, adventurers, concession hunters and financial schemers who mixed with the local dandies and expats. The hotel was the essence of Bucharest as the last European city and the first Oriental one, a pure border town between worlds.

After taking a degree in law at the University of Bucharest, like many bright young men, Ghiţă Ionescu became a follower of anti-fascist diplomat Nicolae Titulescu, Romanian minister of foreign affairs and president of the League of Nations in Geneva (1930, 1931). It was Titulescu's vision and dedication to a peaceful post-war Europe that first planted the seed in Ionescu's mind for the ideal of European unification. Titulescu was a visible European leader and agenda-setter through his position at the League of Nations, where he was Romania's permanent representative, and he was identified as being aligned mostly with French and British positions. He was a staunch promoter of the Aristide Briand Plan for the Organization of a System of European Federal Union, to entail the economic integration of the great industrial areas of Europe and the provision of political security for Eastern Europe against Soviet threats. As Ionescu stated in 1993, Titulescu's 1934 vision of building the universal from the regional and the regional from the national was later to become the cornerstone of thinking on EU unification, and it was Ghiţă Ionescu who founded and chaired the first permanent committee on European unification within the International Political Science Association. At the time, however, as a consequence of the fascist takeover in Germany and then the rise in influence of both Germany and Italy in Central Europe, such ideas were deemed subversive. Titulescu was dismissed from the Romanian government in 1936, a measure of appeasement that was not to help Romania, which became a victim of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact, although it made a devastating impression on young people like Ghiţă Ionescu. To them, Titulescu's dismissal signalled the demise of Western democracies and a decline, maybe irreversible, of Franco-British influence in Eastern Europe. Titulescu, who went into exile in France – where he died prematurely, warning of the catastrophe about to engulf Europe – never held left-wing views, although he mediated a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. However, the young Ionescu was very much a man of the left: in 1935, when he was barely 25, he was involved as a lawyer in defending dissenting Romanian Communists, when the Communist movement was deemed illegal and its members were routinely imprisoned.

While Communism itself was forbidden, the left-wing press was tolerated, and Ionescu was an active columnist. His stance might seem to have been a typical middle-class affectation, but in Romania it was not so. Most of his generation were right-wingers: Iron Guardists, Christian Orthodox fundamentalists, anti-Western and anti-Semitic. In an article written at the time, he deplored the inadequacy of Romanian intellectuals, deprecating their poor bond with wider society, their entrapment between the Western capitals, whose fashions they copied, and their own deeply rural country, whose underdeveloped ways they idealized, confusing them with eternal ‘national’ features (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1934). Ionescu's entourage consisted of the most left-leaning of the Liberals, Romania's main pro-market party: the Social Democrats and the intellectual Communists. He did not have to go all the way to Spain to lose his illusions of the Soviet Union as promoter of the leftist ideals, as George Orwell did. An attempt to join the Republican Army in 1938 ended in Paris after some earnest discussions with French socialist intellectuals who argued that a time was coming when everyday resistance rather than romantic revolution would be needed.

He therefore opted for administration: joining the government, first in the Ministry of the Economy, then the Diplomatic Service, serving as an economic attaché in Sofia, and later in Ankara. He applauded Romania's switching camps after the coup d’état led by King Michael in August 1944 and he served in the Romanian Commission of Armistice with the Allied forces from 1944 to 1945. There he had an early opportunity to see that the Soviet Union treated Romania as a country it had conquered, not one that had liberated itself, and that the Soviets had no intention of leaving it after the war. After coming into conflict with the Soviets, Ionescu managed to escape to Ankara on a train one night and, following the forced abdication of King Michael in 1947, he emigrated to the West.

While teaching Romanian to the British War Office as part of a programme at the School of Slavonic Studies in London he met the two most important women in his life: Valence Ramsay de Bois Maclaren, whom he married in 1950 (the war had already left him twice a widower, he having lost first a Romanian, then a Bulgarian wife), and Isabel de Madariaga, who became his intellectual companion and co-author. But the Cold War was not yet over for Ghiţă Ionescu. First he crossed the Atlantic Ocean to become, from 1955 to 1958, the general secretary of the Romanian National Committee in New York, which was a sort of government-in-exile. There he had a fresh opportunity to witness the incapacity of the West to save Eastern Europe from its new occupation by Soviet Russia and he saw the end of the illusion that free elections could be reinstituted in countries occupied by the Soviet Union.

He quickly recognized the ineffectiveness of such national organizations, deprived of means or even influence, and moved on to serve as director of the Romanian section of Radio Free Europe in Munich from 1958 to 1963. He was unhappy there too, although he did his best to make the programmes more analytical and objective. But Ionescu was no propagandist, and his dealings with his superiors in Washington did not go smoothly. He was also more of a leader than a manager, highly demanding and a perfectionist, and he found his staff wanting on many counts. Nevertheless, he was an indefatigable seeker after talent, distributing as many congratulatory telegrams as harsh reprimands. We still have his political commentaries from the 1950s, broadcast by the BBC and Radio Free Europe, printed confidentially for the party leaders by the Romanian news agency, with harsh, sometimes amusing, handwritten notes in the hand of Gheorghiu Dej, the general secretary himself (retrieved after 1989 from the archives of the Communist Party). Ionescu was frequently denounced in the Communist propaganda press, but his left-wing past made it difficult to throw the usual accusations of ‘fascist’ in his direction. For want of anything better they nicknamed him the ‘dandy theorist’.

Ionescu left Radio Free Europe in 1963 at the age of 50 to become a Nuffield Fellow at the London School of Economics until 1968, when he became a reader, then Professor of Government, departmental chair and Professor Emeritus at Manchester University. He died in London on 28 June 1996, by then a reputed academic and a pioneer of EU integration studies. During his time at the London School of Economics he founded Government and Opposition with a group of academic colleagues, a firmly interdisciplinary as well as cosmopolitan journal, which he directed until his death with the help of devoted staff – of whom Rosalind Jones deserves a special mention. In that interval, he used the journal and an associated series of lectures to showcase talented people and original and visionary work. He had always been and remained an intellectual, promoting intellectual work and not narrow specialization. His reviews down the years after International Political Science Association meetings dealing with the state of political science constitute a genuine history of the continuing development of comparative politics and EU studies.

Ghiţă Ionescu's own academic work can be divided into two great phases. He began as a student of Communism and the Cold War and gravitated to comparative politics through his comparative studies on the impact of Soviet rule in East European countries. Three books at least are worth mentioning here: Communism in Rumania (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1965a), commissioned by Chatham House; The Break-up of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1965b); and The Politics of the East European Communist States (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1967). He distanced himself both from the scholars who overlooked the despotic character of the Soviet regime on the pretext of neutrality, and from Cold War propagandists whom he had met and worked with during his time at Radio Free Europe. He argued impeccably that Communism in Eastern Europe was a form of occupation, that the Soviet Union could be considered an empire in the classical sense, as it possessed a central monopoly of power, a system of coercion and espoused a doctrine inspiring its own expansion. He described the synthesis of state and party as the ‘state apparatus’, but he foresaw from those very early stages that such an organization could not last, that complex global economic realities would force subject countries to defy the Soviet Union more and more in order to pursue their own interests. He was no Cold War romantic.

He had long argued – and the disclosure of the Tehran documents confirmed his insight – that the Western Allies had never ‘traded’ Eastern Europe at Yalta, and the origin of the Cold War dated back earlier than that. The fate of the Eastern side of the continent was sealed when the decision was taken at Tehran by the Allies that the Soviet Union would fight the Germans alone in the East and no Western military operations would be undertaken in the Balkans. Once Stalin had the military monopoly in the region, it became unrealistic to presume that another war could be carried out for the freedom of the Czechs, Romanians, Poles and the others. But the Communist regime, despite its efforts to gain some legitimacy – which Ionescu analysed judiciously – would never be able to endure without Soviet military power. Perhaps Ionescu's most remarkable forecast (apart from predicting that Ceausescu would follow Romanian Stalinist Gheorghiu Dej, a prophecy of which Ghiţă was very proud) was when he wrote that the Berlin Wall was held up only by the Red Army and that the people themselves would bring it down with their bare hands the second that the army was gone. After 1990, when counterfactual exercises were organized to explain why the Soviet Union collapsed, a revisiting of Ionescu would have shown how absurd the question was. How had a regime with such little legitimacy and which had to spend so much on surveillance and repression managed to endure for so long? From the first signs of the breakup identified by Ionescu in 1965 another quarter of a century had passed before the Soviet Union finally imploded. He rightly foresaw the two forces that would bring Communism down: the impossibility of sustaining economic success in an interdependent global economy, and local nationalism.

The route to his later work, which was far more theoretical and universal, came via the book on opposition he jointly authored with Isabel de Madariaga (Opposition: Past and Present of a Political Institution, Reference Ionescu and de Madariaga1968), which carried out a comparative overview and stressed the fact that the absence of opposition was the defining feature of what was then called the ‘Second World’. Ionescu admired Raymond Aron for his fight against the blindness of Western intellectuals to the crimes of Communism and praised his book Démocratie et totalitarisme of Reference Aron1965, which offered a clear distinction between constitutional and non-constitutional regimes, stressing the treatment of opposition as the key issue.

Ionescu's life journey to European integration and his insight into the unification of Europe was sparked by the failed interwar attempts of Briand, Stresemann and Titulescu. But it was also an intellectual journey. Marx had seemed to him, when he was in his early twenties, a better option than the classic anti-social German philosophy then fashionable in Bucharest. To understand that, one has to realize the extent to which all Anglo-Saxon political thought was absent from Eastern Europe, which had always lived on a mixture of French and German authors. Later in life, Ionescu would enthusiastically adopt British authors; Bagehot, with his argument of constitutional monarchy, became a particular favourite. But his continental background led him to travel in the opposite direction too, for key French authors, from the classics of Montesquieu or Alexis de Tocqueville to Raymond Aron, were undervalued in Britain. It was Henri de Saint-Simon in particular, whose political thought Ionescu helped translate, edit and introduce (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1976), which influenced Ionescu decisively. In Saint-Simon's criticism of the French Revolution and his theory of industrial society and design of European unification Ionescu found what he considered was the true social theorist. He considered it a supreme irony that Saint-Simon rather than Marx was ranked with the Utopians. Marx and Engels, Ionescu wrote, have superficially and perhaps purposely neglected the fact that the state could not disappear in Communist society. Ionescu saw as supremely pathetic the note that Lenin made in his blue notebook in 1917 when working on his The State and the Revolution – that Marx did not mention if and where the state would go after the Revolution, instead mentioning in passing a future ‘state organization of society’. It turned out that the ideal Communist society could have been achieved only by means of state dictatorship. On the contrary, Saint-Simon predicted that the advance of science and technology would reduce the role of nation state, which would gradually have to give up its sovereignty in favour of international cooperation, which would in turn lead to a form of global governance organized by the principle of susidiarity. Who was then more Utopian? Ionescu asked.

The ‘interdependence’ predicted by Saint-Simon was Ionescu's main credo. He had few grounds to doubt it, after his chief hopes that the Western world would be made stronger by European unification and the Soviet Union would lose its empire had both come to fruition. Ionescu's road to mild conservatism was mostly grounded in his anti-Communism. He had been an anti-fascist who had seen the best Romanian Communist and social democrat intellectuals who had successfully survived fascism being killed by the Communist Party. He had gradually become a monarchist – even after his patron, Titulescu, had been fired by King Charles II, a controversial monarch and finally a dictator – because he later came to admire and be loyal to his son, Romania's King Michael, who at 25 led the coup against the Germans in 1945, only to be sent into exile by the Soviets in 1947. Ionescu frequently called King Michael in his writings a wise and just statesman. The rest of his move to monarchism was brought about by his admiration for the British monarchy and Queen Elizabeth II in particular, as well as his assessment (in which he was joined by many political scientists) that it was King Juan Carlos II who kept Spain's democratic transition on its path. His endorsement of constitutional monarchy and his respect for a sublimated Christianism applied to social life (again he contrasted here his Saint-Simon to the militant atheism of Marx), which also grew over the years (his wife, Valence, was a devout Catholic), came together in the broader conservative belief that social progress is achieved by evolution, not by Revolution, and that the driving force of social change could not be interest alone. Here again he had come in time to loathe materialism in any form and to refuse to accept the idea of a world that could be explained by utilitarianism alone. He urged for the ‘disideologization’ of political judgement in what really captures the quintessence of his political thought, his book Politics and the Pursuit of Happiness (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1984). The fact that few citations of this book exist is easily explained by the whole wave of arguments Ionescu builds not only against Marxism, but also against utilitarianism and classic liberalism, using unorthodox authors (Pascal and Unamuno are not customarily studied in government classes in the Anglo-Saxon world), and also because many quotations in French are not translated (one of which, a poem by Saint-Just mocking interest, is used as a central concept in explaining human behaviour). Ionescu believed that the West would defeat fascism and Communism not only on materialistic grounds, as it was better equipped to ensure the maximization of social welfare, but also on ethical grounds. Man's eternal struggle against his tragic destiny, as Unamuno called it, should not be reduced to a pursuit of worldly happiness.

Ionescu was also an astute observer of public policy who believed that an interdependent world needed increasingly technical public policy solutions; he was concerned with the capacity of leaders to deal with the new complexity (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1991) and believed in technocracy. The last piece of wisdom of his that I would stress here was his belief that managing complex knowledge-based industrial societies requires important intellectual sophistication. The democratic deficit, he wrote, has been a fact of life for at least half a century, caused by the specialization of knowledge and the increase in the power of the expert on one hand, and on the other by the transnationalization of what had previously been national matters, and the consequent impossibility of governments to act alone even after the ‘fullest consultation of their peoples’ (Ionescu Reference Ionescu1989). He tried to argue for that ‘tragic dependence’ on others in the case of Britain, in whose integration into the European Union Ionescu was a staunch believer. He would have been deeply hurt to hear recent discussions of Britain's exit and in the euro crisis would certainly have blamed the leaders’ lack of foresight. But, most important, he would have advised us not to give in to populism. Together with Ernest Gellner (1969) he had edited a book on populism that built on the American Edward Shils's definition of populism as politics unmediated by elites and representatives. While Ionescu was devoted to freedom, he equally abhorred rule by the people in the populist sense. Indeed, he found it impossible in the present globalized information age and would have judged harshly any compromises on that count.

The personality of Ghiţă Ionescu had little correspondence with this intellectual portrait of an anti-hedonistic elitist. Despite being perfectly adjusted to his new country and very devoted to it, he was anything but an understated character. He was a jovial, exuberant, intense man who engaged others both intellectually and affectively. He cultivated friendship and as an editor he reached out to persuade people to develop what he thought – and frequently on good grounds – to be path-breaking in their work. He was always the active centre of a network, from the group of scholars who joined him when creating this journal (Leonard Schapiro, Bernard Crick, Julius Gould, Isabel de Madariaga, then Ernest Gellner, Edward Shils, Robert Dahl, Daniel Bell, David Apter, Bertrand de Jouvenel) to the Research Committee on European Unification of the International Political Science Association (Emile Noel, Karlheinz Neunreither, Giuseppe Ciavarini Azzi, John Pinder, Klaus von Beyme). The only time he returned to Bucharest in the half-century after he sneaked out to Ankara under the cover of darkness at the end of the war he came back with a veritable entourage consisting of this whole International Political Science Association committee, among them some top EU civil servants. It was obvious that great bonds of friendship and loyalty existed in the group, going far beyond any mere commitment to EU studies. Apart from this horizontal relationship, Ionescu was the professor and adviser to the whole European first generation of EU studies, as well as of most British post-communist studies scholars who were not on the payroll of the KGB.

The time has finally come to explain why, of all his more highly reputed followers and friends, it is I who write these lines on Ghiţă Ionescu. My claim is a simple one: I am probably the person whom this almost overgenerous and indefatigable meddler in other people lives managed to change most (though this was his main hobby). Events unfolded over his last years, when he called me in the office of BBC London to invite me down to his Athenaeum Club and to make his extraordinary suggestion that I should abandon journalism and study political science. He offered to become my mentor and to guide me through it all. At first I resisted going to Harvard, as I was not only happy with my life as it was but I was young and in love. When he discovered who the man was – it turned out that he and my lover's father had been friends at the left-wing press before the war – Ghiţă Ionescu decided on the spot that we should marry, with himself as our best man, on condition that I leave the month after for Harvard to study political science. By the time of the wedding he was too sick to fly, so it was held in the Greek Orthodox church on Canterbury Road in Oxford, with a handful of Cold War friends from the BBC World Service and various Oxford dons, former chums of my husband and who had carried letters behind the Iron Curtain to help the resistance there. I did not see Ghiţă again before he died, though we spoke every week by telephone, as he called very early to criticize my op-eds and to enquire about my progress with my studies. But the plans that he laid out for me I have mostly followed ever since, and the modest Romanian political science we have managed to build since 1993 acknowledges him as its indisputable founding father.

Except where otherwise mentioned, the main material I used to trace Ghiţă Ionescu's intellectual history was the unpublished speech he made when the doctorate Honoris Causa was conferred on him at Bucharest University in 1993. The reference to Spain and the homage to Nicolae Titulescu also came from his handwritten attempts at memoirs, which he never finished. His personal archive was donated by Isabel de Madariaga to the Romanian Institute of Recent History, where I consulted it.