From 2013 to 2015 Speck was a Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels and a foreign policy columnist for Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He has been an Associate at FRIDE, Madrid; the editor of the Global Europe Morning Brief, a subscriber-only newsletter on EU foreign policy; and worked for RFE/RL in Prague and Brussels. From 2000 to 2005 he was a senior editor at Frankfurter Rundschau, a German newspaper. Speck has co-edited three books (in German): On the Revolution of 1848/89 (1998), American Empire (2003), and New Anti-Semitism (2004). He holds a PhD in modern history from the University of Frankfurt and was a member of the Graduate College for the history of law at Frankfurt University from 1992-95.