Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Kojeve’s Latin Empire and the EU

Robert Howse reflects on Alexandre Kojeve (and his paper "Outline of a Doctrine for French Policy," written in 1945, and published in English for the first time)

and Kojeve’s attempt to to establish a "Latin Empire":

"In 1945, Kojève understood that any attempt to rebuild France’s greatness as a nation-state would be delusional, given the hard realities of Anglo-American military supremacy as well as the Soviet fact. The latter decisively pushes Germany itself into the Anglo-American empire as a protection against the risk of absorption by the Soviets. Kojève seeks to convince de Gaulle that this is no reflection on France, since demographic and technological realities are such that no single nation-state in the contemporary world could ensure an adequate base in military power, that is without allying or affiliating itself with other states and peoples. Believing otherwise, according to Kojève, was Hitler’s downfall.


But, Kojève proposes, France can find political purpose and direction in an Anglo-American dominated postwar world by bringing into being and assuming leadership of a Latin Empire.

This empire would be a political and economic union of the Latin Catholic states of Europe, backed by an army — albeit one unable to stand up to Anglo-American military might (and probably not to Soviet strength either) if push came to shove, but formidable enough to establish a sphere of political independence from either the Anglo-American or the Soviet Empire in time of peace." Complex, long, but interesting, and not without policy implication for the EU,
and of our relations toward France and the EU.   

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