Opinion | Meet Europe’s New Machiavelli - The New York Times

Opinion|Meet Europe’s New Machiavelli

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/09/opinion/europe-defense-van-middelaar.html<br>Share full article

11

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google

About a mile from the NATO headquarters in Brussels lies the cemetery of Evere. There, next to a British monument commemorating the Battle of Waterloo, visitors may stumble upon the grave of Aleksandr Kozhevnikov, known more widely by his Francophone alias Alexandre Kojève.<br>Originally of Russian descent, Kojève is one of the 20th century’s titanic thinkers. In the 1930s, his lectures on Hegel influenced an entire generation of Parisian intellectuals; in the 1990s, decades after his death, his ideas provided the guiding motif for Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the end of history. His significance spanned wider still. Kojève spent his final years as a bureaucrat in Brussels — a “civil servant of humanity,” in one colleague’s words — negotiating trade deals as a French envoy to Europe.<br>In 2018, a conference for the 60th anniversary of Kojève’s death was held at the European Parliament. One of its main speakers was a Dutch scholar named Luuk van Middelaar. The act of affiliation wasn’t accidental: Mr. van Middelaar has followed a strikingly similar professional trajectory, trading philosophy for policymaking. After his studies, he gained fame as a historian of European integration, earning a post as speechwriter for the first president of the European Council.<br>Today, Mr. van Middelaar heads the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, known by the apt acronym BIG. There, he hopes to help Europeans gain a renewed taste for power, instilling a realist sensibility in the continent’s rudderless elites. If he was previously regarded as the secretary of Europe, he now appears as a kind of European Elbridge Colby, a master strategist readying the continent for the era of great power competition. His theorizing, both in its emphases and ellipses, reveals how Europe sees itself — and where it may be headed.

Mr. van Middelaar’s association with Kojève goes far back. In the 1990s, he wrote an influential doctoral thesis, later published as “Politicide,” that accused Kojève of the intellectual murder of politics in postwar French thought. Thanks to him, an entire generation of Frenchmen came to believe that history had an intrinsic direction and purpose. Such a view not only fostered a nasty admiration for totalitarian regimes that invoked a mandate from history, not least Stalin’s Soviet Union. It also, Mr. van Middelaar claimed, contained no clues for actual, day-to-day political action.

The critique clearly had a contemporary slant. Against the triumphalist sensibility of the 1990s, Mr. van Middelaar cautioned Europeans against all-encompassing theories that declared history and politics over. Instead of Hegel, he urged them to look to another philosopher — the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli, who insisted that politics took place on a terrain of radical contingency and that history was a random play of fortune rather than a patterned process. The post-Cold War world would not last, Mr. van Middelaar warned: Europeans were not on a vacation from power forever. One day they would experience their “Machiavellian moment.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.<br>Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.<br>Already a subscriber? Log in.<br>Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT