Russian Stalinist who invented Europe

politico.eu/article/russian-stalinist-behind-the-treaty-of-rome

March 22, 2017

Alexandre Kojève in Japan in 1959 | National Library of France

By Jacopo Barigazzi
March 22, 2017 4:20 am

Alexandre Kojève was a Russian aristocrat, a philosophy professor, a high-ranking French

civil servant, possibly a spy — and one of the more unlikely early architects of the European
Union.

He inspired a generation of intellectuals and, from his perch as an influential civil servant in
the French ministry of economy, mentored some of the political figures who would later lead
France and Europe.

While the idea of a union has many fathers, Kojève was instrumental in its realization by
helping to broker the Treaty of Rome, the document that established the European Economic
Community and articulated the principle of an “ever closer union.”

But don’t expect any of the EU27 leaders to namecheck Kojève when they celebrate the
treaty’s 60th anniversary on Saturday in the Italian capital.
His life was relatively short and marked by argument. After his death in Brussels at the age of
66, he was posthumously accused of spying for Moscow — an allegation disputed by his
closest friends.

But what he lacked in longevity, he made up for in controversy. He once described himself as
“Stalin’s conscience” and clearly enjoyed the part of agent provocateur, even as he built the
foundation for the post-war political order in Europe.

A man of many parts

Born Aleksandr Kozhevnikov in 1902 into a wealthy Moscow family, (his uncle was the
painter Wassily Kandinsky,) he left Russia in 1920 after the revolution. After studying
philosophy in Germany, he moved to France, changing his name to the more French-
sounding Kojève, and from 1933 to 1939 taught at the prestigious École pratique des Hautes
Études in Paris.

His seminars on the German philosopher Hegel became legendary. His students included the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the political scientist Raymond Aron as well as the writer
Raymond Queneau. The economist Robert Marjolin, one of the two French commissioners in
the first European Commission, was also in his circle. His friendship with the political
philosopher Leo Strauss took the form of a life-long public debate.

“When Kojève arrived, he triggered panic in the other delegations” — Bernard Clappier, high-
ranking French official 

During the 1930s, Kojève was a self-avowed Stalinist. “He had no illusions about the
barbarism of Stalin’s rule,” wrote Robert Howse in an essay published on the Hoover
Institution website. “Rather, Kojève appears to have believed that forced ‘modernization’ was
the only, or the fastest, means of bringing Russia to the point where it might be capable of a
peaceful transformation into a regime of rights. Stalin was merely a vehicle of post-history.”

Francis Fukuyama adapted and popularized Kojève’s “End of History” thesis — which differs
from Fukuyama’s later book in that the term denotes the end of the ideological struggle
heralded by the French Revolution and Napoleon, not the triumph of Western liberal
democracy.

Kojève’s book on Hegel — which the American philosopher Allan Bloom described as “one of
the few important philosophical books of the 20th century” — is still considered essential
reading and his intellectual contributions to the shaping of the Continent’s post-war political
identity have been widely recognized.
 Former French Prime Minister Raymond Barre said Kojeve’s
ideas paved the way for the Common Market | Joel
Robine/AFP via Getty Images

“He’s one of the few European figures who was central both at a diplomatic and a cultural
level,” said his biographer, the Italian philosopher and journalist Marco Filoni, who collected
many of the articles written by friends of the Russian diplomat in a book called “Kojève mon
ami.”

From 1945 until his death in Brussels in 1968, Kojève held a wide-ranging but undefined
position in the trade department of the French economy ministry.

“He was in the French administration but he had no specific role,” said Raymond Phan Van
Phi, a former top official in the Commission who worked with Kojève in the 1960s and said
the Russian owed part of his power to the fact that “he had a great intellectual influence on
the architects of the French economy who were also French chief negotiators.”
The former French Prime Minister Raymond Barre, who worked as Kojève’s intern, once
described him as “an exceptional negotiator,” and the “éminence grise of French trade
policy,” saying the Russian had “provided great services during the negotiations for the Rome
Treaty.”

A diplomatic terror

Kojève first joined the economy ministry as a translator (his languages included Sanskrit,
Russian, French and German) before climbing the ranks, earning a reputation as a fearsome
negotiator.

“When Kojève arrived, he triggered panic in the other delegations,” Bernard Clappier, a high-
ranking French official and former chief of staff for Robert Schuman, a former French prime
minister and a key founder of the union, would write. “He was really exceptionally clever.”

The Russian formed an influential trio with Clappier, who was also in the economy ministry,
and Olivier Wormser from the foreign ministry (and later governor of the Bank of France).
Wormser later said that the trio helped define French post-war politics.

In the aftermath of the war, protectionism ruled but Kojève put his expertise to use in
reducing tariffs and other trade barriers. Kojève’s idea to open the market of the six founding
members — Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries — was to do it “through
common lists of products that countries would have traded freely because the aim was to
achieve this liberalization all at the same time,” wrote Barre.

That thinking helped pave the way for the Rome Treaty and the “method allowed us to
implement the Common Market in 1968, one year earlier than what envisaged in the treaty,”
wrote Barre.

“He used to have fun showing the Americans all their lack of consistency” — Olivier Wormser,
former Bank of France governor

Kojève was known as a provocateur who enjoyed sowing chaos at the negotiating table before
providing a solution that everybody could agree and that was the one he wanted, Barre wrote.

In the early 1960s, when the European Economic Community, or ECC, faced problems in
negotiations with the Americans on customs, Kojève was called in to win the day, the
Canadian diplomat Rodney Grey recalled in another article, arguing that the Russian
successfully managed to shift the negotiations onto his terms. U.S. officials, however, weren’t
pleased with his tactics and gave him the nickname “the snake in the grass,” Grey wrote.

“He used to have fun showing the Americans all their lack of consistency,” recalled Wormser.
Kojève was eventually awarded a Legion of Honour, the country’s top recognition, for
services to the state. But his allegiance to France would be questioned after his death.

Spying allegations

In an explosive piece in 1999, the French daily Le Monde published an article suggesting that
the discovery of a Russian intelligence document showed that the Russian thinker had been
an agent for Soviet intelligence.

While the evidence appeared flimsy, “Britain’s right-wing Daily Telegraph proclaimed with
melodramatic alliteration that ‘this miraculous mandarin turns out to have been a
malevolent mole,'” wrote Matthew Price in Lingua Franca, in a piece headlined: ‘The Spy
Who Loved Hegel.”

For Grey, the Canadian diplomat, the revelations were hardly surprising, given Kojève’s
provocative pronouncements. He was seen as anti-American and anti-British, and many
considered his spirited advancement of the European project as a way to offset American
power. Still, Grey cautioned that, without solid evidence, it was hard to know if the Russian
had actually been a spy for the Kremlin.

Raymond Aron wrote that Kojève was actually misunderstood — his exclamations was rather a
continuous attempt to épater le bourgeois, to provoke and to rattle.

His friends certainly did not believe it. “I have never believed this accusation,” said Phi, the
former Commission official.

Wormser was equally skeptical. “I have never trusted for one second that he was a
Communist,” the former governor of the Bank of France wrote. “He always looked to me like
a reactionary.”

Raymond Aron wrote that Kojève was actually misunderstood — his exclamations was rather
a continuous attempt to épater le bourgeois, to provoke and to rattle, and that he ultimately
“served the French homeland freely, with a stainless loyalty.”

As for why the philosophy professor decided to become a bureaucrat, Aron wrote that Kojève
himself had given him an answer: “’I wanted to know how history is made.’”

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