Uwe Kitzinger, a refugee from Germany, arrived in Britain in July 1939 and became a British citizen by his father’s naturalisation in 1948. He was educated at Watford Grammar School 1940-46 and at Balliol and New College Oxford, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1950 and graduated with a 1st class honours degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1951.
In 1951 Kitzinger was appointed the first British economist of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where he became Secretary of the Economic Committee. In 1956 he was elected a Fellow and in 1962 Investment Bursar of Nuffield College, Oxford, posts he held until 1976. 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 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 as Visiting Professor at the University of Paris.
During these years Kitzinger became a very public champion of British accession to the European Community and when Britain did join in January 1973 he was appointed political Counsellor to the first British Vice-President of the European Commission, Sir Christopher Soames, who carried the chief responsibility for the Community’s external relations.
In 1976 he was appointed Dean of the Management School INSEAD in Fontainebleau, and in 1983 became founding President of Templeton College Oxford, He returned to Harvard as Visiting Scholar from 1993 to 2003.
Uwe Kitzinger 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 (now 80) 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. He was on the advisory boards of various academic centres and a trustee of the European Foundation for Management Development, Brussels. Kitzinger was also a member of the British University Committee of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe in Lausanne and the Tufts Institute for Global Leadership. 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 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.
Sheila and Uwe Kitzinger have five daughters and live in Standlake Manor, Oxfordshire, since 1966.