Russian Stalinist who invented Europe

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.

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.

“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.

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.

Click Here: gws giants guernsey 2019

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.

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.’”