From 1996 to 2003, he served as General Editor of a series of monographs on Contemporary French Politics and Society, Berghahn Books (Oxford and New York).

Howorth showed that, together with Jean Jaurès, Vaillant forged the intellectual and political compromise that synthesized the many different strands of the French left emerging out of the revolutionary tradition of the nineteenth century (Jacobinism, republicanism, Proudhonism, Blanquism, syndicalism and, eventually, Marxism).

This synthesis led to the creation of the only unified socialist party in French history, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO).

That this unity did not survive the trauma of World War One was the subject of Howorth’s second major research project, which first drew him to international relations.

The overwhelming majority of this correspondence dealt with the looming threat of world war and with the prospects for a trans-national effort, led by the Second International, to avert the imminent catastrophe by organizing a general strike of all workers in all potentially belligerent countries.

Focusing in particular on French President François Mitterrand’s fourteen years in office (1981–1995), Howorth devoted around forty scientific papers to the analysis of the gradual embrace of fundamental Gaullist precepts by the man who had launched his presidential ambitions in 1965 by ridiculing France’s nuclear pretensions and by denouncing de Gaulle as the architect of a permanent coup d’état.

This work, which combined research into French military strategy, institutional dynamics, defence economics and above all political culture, explained the progressive transformation of François Mitterrand into the ultimate protector and defender of France’s Gaullist legacy.

It was for this sustained analysis that Howorth was honored, in 1994, by French prime minister Edouard Balladur with the award of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.

[10] The third strand of Howorth’s research began in the late-1980s as the imminent end of the Cold War induced an embryonic move, on the part of Europe’s nation states, to coordinate their foreign and defence policies.

Realist theory has informed his many publications on the absence of European strategic thinking, as well as those focusing on the EU’s attempts to generate civilian and military capacity for crisis management missions.

His substantial analyses of relations between CSDP, the US and NATO have been informed by a mix of realism and institutionalism; while his critical work on the EU as a “normative power” has been based both on constructivist and on realist theories.

[12] By 2013, he had become convinced that this development was not happening in large part because of CSDP’s limited ambition, but also because as long as the Americans seemed prepared to bail the Europeans out whenever a serious crisis emerged on the EU’s door-step (Bosnia, Kosovo, Arab Spring and Libya, Russian annexation of Crimea, and meddling in Ukraine, the rise of ISIS) many EU member states were happy to “free-ride” on American security guarantees.

Howorth’s alternative proposal, notably sponsored by the European People’s Party (the grouping of all of the EU’s conservative parties) was for CSDP to merge with NATO and, with the active assistance of the Americans, to undergo an “apprenticeship in leadership” that would allow for a rebalancing of responsibilities within the Alliance, facilitating European maturity, gradual assumption of leadership and a US re-focusing on the areas of the world considered to be the most crucial for Washington.