The Art of Diplomacy: Alexandre Kojève’s Guide for the Perplexed

Philosophy rarely ventures beyond the confines of academia, but Alexandre Kojève—philosopher, bureaucrat, and self-described Hegelian—was no ordinary thinker. Best known for his 1930s Parisian lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Kojève later traded the intellectual salons of Saint-Germain-des-Prés for the corridors of international trade diplomacy. It was in this arena, far removed from the Republic of Letters, that Kojève applied his ideas to the business of tariffs, treaties, and trade rounds, leaving an indelible imprint on the global economic order. The world he navigated—marked by the fragmentation of international markets, a resurgent protectionism, rival commercial blocs, and growing tensions between the North and South—bears a striking resemblance to ours.

Kojève’s journey from philosophy to diplomacy was not a case of accidental wandering but the outgrowth of his Hegelian convictions. He held that critique without action is frivolous, dismissing the “fundamentally nihilist elements, known as ‘intellectuals,’ for whom non-conformity is in itself an absolute value”—those who, like Albert Camus, reveled in moral dissent yet sidestepped the arduous institutional work needed for durable change.1 A critique, Kojève said, that wants to be taken seriously cannot operate at a distance from the state. Any intellectual activity related to politics that does not imaginatively inhabit the position of the state forfeits the right to serious consideration. To think politically is to adopt the point of view of the government, even if only to criticize it or to propose alternatives. Academic debate disconnected from governmental circles, Kojève held, amounts to self-indulgent futility. At the stroke of a pen, political thought that foregoes an active advisory role was relegated to the sidelines.

In 1945, Kojève joined the Direction des Relations Économiques Extérieures, a small but powerful unit affiliated with the Ministry of Finance and with links to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that enjoyed remarkable autonomy within the French state under the Fourth and Fifth Republics. From this perch, he orchestrated trade policy decisions that reverberated across Europe and beyond. Kojève had come a long way from the stale atmosphere of lecture halls, never regretting his farewell to academia. The Parisian intelligentsia was bewildered, even scandalized, by Kojève’s trajectory. Once celebrated for his penetrating take on Hegel, whom he read “like others read Tintin,” as the journalist Gilles Lapouge quipped, Kojève now took greater pride in the tariff system he fought for “like a devil in holy water,” the baffled reporter also noted. “I love this job,” Kojève exaltedly proclaimed in the last interview he gave before his death in 1968: “For intellectuals, there is success. You write a book, it’s successful and that’s it. Here it’s different. There are accomplishments.”2 His diplomatic activity represented a synthesis of theory and practice—ideas in action.

Kojève approached his role in French economic policy with the same idiosyncratic panache that characterized his interpretation of the Phenomenology of Spirit. His memoranda, far from adhering to the dry conventions of bureaucratic writing, were provocative and unmistakably his own, often brimming with paradoxical proposals. It did not escape the attention of other delegates that Kojève had a prior life as a philosopher. They acknowledged his conceptual acumen, without necessarily going along with his preferred authors. A Danish delegate put it wryly in a letter from 1959: “I’ve read your book about Hegel” but “contrary to you, I detest Hegel.”3 Others, like E. D. J. Kruijtbosch of the Dutch OECD delegation, found Kojève’s style both confounding and invigorating. “You can be difficult,” Kruijtbosch conceded, “because your intelligence surpasses all of ours.” He admitted to feeling “a little like your student,” having learned from Kojève the courage to think on his feet.4 Such intellectual independence was not to everyone’s taste. The Canadian diplomat Jake Warren painted a more ambivalent portrait of Kojève, whom he saw as “a great nihilist, and a shadowy figure” with a disturbing ability to make “black seem white and white seem black.”5 British officials suspected that Kojève’s influence extended directly to the highest echelons of French power, describing him as “the man whom de Gaulle refused to receive but to whose opinion he deferred.”6 His French colleagues recognized him as the preeminent expert on the intricacies of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a multilateral agreement that aimed to reduce trade barriers and tariffs, signed in 1947 by twenty-three countries. As Olivier Wormser, a close collaborator, recalled, Kojève knew the text and the spirit of the trade agreement better than anyone else in France, if not Europe.7

1. The Snake in the Grass: Kojève at the GATT Kennedy Round (1964–67)

The diplomatic intrigues surrounding the tariff reductions during the Kennedy Round, which marked the first time the European Economic Community (EEC) negotiated as a unified bloc in global trade talks, offer a vivid tableau of transatlantic trade politics in the Cold War era. By the early 1960s, the United States faced an economic dilemma. A persistent balance-of-payments deficit—exacerbated by global military commitments—worried the White House. President John F. Kennedy championed trade liberalization as the solution, securing unprecedented authority through the 1962 Trade Expansion Act. This set the stage for the Kennedy Round, where the US aimed to slash tariffs by 50 percent, broadening access to international markets, particularly in the fledgling EEC—later to become the European Union.

President John F. Kennedy delivers remarks at the signing of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. Photo: Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

The centerpiece of Kojève’s strategy was écrêtement—a proposal to “lop off the peaks” of exorbitantly high tariffs while making more modest cuts to lower ones. This method directly countered the American linear approach, which aimed to halve all tariffs indiscriminately, thereby entrenching, as Kojève averred, a system working to America’s advantage. For example, if US duties on a given item stood at 40 percent and those of the EEC at 10, cutting all by half would maintain a formidable US trade barrier, preserving significant hurdles for European exporters while offering American producers an easy path into European markets. Kojève made the case that cutting America’s highest tariffs disproportionately would not only level the playing field between the US and Europe, but would also yield far greater gains for global trade as a whole than an across-the-board reduction.

While Kojève is often cast as the intellectual puppeteer of the plan, his role was less that of mastermind than of opportunistic dramatist, weaponizing a concept whose origins lay not in Paris, but in the meticulous work of German delegates in the preparatory committees of the EEC going back to the late 1950s.8 At a critical juncture, Kojève planted an article in the New York Herald Tribune, framing écrêtement as the French response to American proposals.9 At the time, the idea had no official backing, but the article forced it onto the agenda. “Is this French policy?” Rodney Grey, an incredulous Canadian delegate, asked Kojève after reading the paper in May 1963. “No,” he replied, “but it will be.”10 This theatrical move exemplified Kojève’s knack for shifting the terrain of debate at opportune moments. Washington refused to budge on écrêtement, with the head of the US delegation insisting that it “wasn’t a starter for us.”11 Though the demand was quietly dropped, Kojève’s ruse had been directed elsewhere. From that point onward, it became untenable for the US representatives to deny the glaring asymmetry between American tariffs on certain industrial goods and the comparatively modest levies of the Common Market. Kojève’s tactics propelled these disparities to the forefront of the Kennedy Round negotiations.

The Americans had misread the situation and viewed écrêtement not as a pan-European initiative but as another French ploy to sabotage multilateral progress. They counted on Germany to fracture the unity of the European Economic Community, and the Franco-German tandem did nearly come apart over Bonn’s perception of French intransigence. Economics Minister Ludwig Erhard was so incensed that he reportedly threatened to pull the Federal Republic out of the Common Market altogether.12 As divisions deepened, Kojève resorted to techniques the historian Francine McKenzie has called “underhanded politics.”13 He began spreading rumors that Wyndham White, the guiding force of GATT, was exhausted and preparing to retire, signaling the potential collapse of the organization. British officials were alarmed that Kojève’s gossip, whispered behind closed doors, soon entered wider circulation, seriously agitating Wyndham White himself. Before things could spiral out of control, a compromise was brokered. The Kennedy Round concluded with industrial tariffs reduced by an average of 35 percent, the largest multilateral trade liberalization since GATT’s inception.

This episode encapsulates Kojève’s dual role as both a unifier and a disruptor—a diplomat capable of rallying rival European powers while playing a high-stakes game of manipulation that tested the patience of allies and adversaries alike. US delegates nicknamed Kojève “the serpent in the grass,” a testament to his methods and unnerving effectiveness. Chairman of the American delegation W. Michael Blumenthal’s frustration at the French negotiators was tempered by his respect for their cunning.14 Given the “constant clamor for inside information” at international summits, he wrote in his autobiography, “rumors invariably circulate, and ‘leaking’ deliberate half-truths to undermine or weaken the other side and buttress one’s own position is not uncommon.” Throughout the many ups and downs of the Kennedy Round, this “extension of the negotiations into the media was always part of the process.”15

Kojève’s interventions exposed the limits of American leverage, signaling a new era in which Europe could negotiate on equal terms. Yet the process also underscored a new culture of standoffishness among major trading powers, with Europe asserting itself as a full partner rather than subordinate ally.16 In the end, the five other EEC member states, far from being naive acolytes of French obstruction, were simply pursuing their collective economic interests.17 Kojève emerged as the unlikely impresario of this drama, with his fingerprints all over it. Isaiah Frank, an American economist and trade diplomat, wrote to Kojève in 1964 that his “role at Geneva” and “influence on policy thinking in the field of trade and development are widely recognized.”18

When it served his purpose, Kojève could be more Catholic than the Pope. In 1961, he waxed lyrically about the accomplishments of cross-border commerce to a GATT audience. He likened the long history of tariffs to a “Hundred Years’ War,” a conflict sparked by Britain’s industrial revolution, which provoked envy and retaliation from its European neighbors.19 This struggle traversed the Atlantic, culminating in William McKinley’s infamous Tariff Act of 1890 raising US import duties to nearly 50 percent, ending only with the founding of GATT in 1948. (Incidentally, McKinley is lionized by US president-elect Trump, who claimed in September 2024 that his precursor’s trade policy had made the US “the wealthiest it ever was.”20) On occasion, Kojève posed as militantly laissez-faire, browbeating the US delegation and challenging them to tear down all remaining tariff walls. Of course, he knew that there was no conceivable scenario in which Washington would renounce tariff protection altogether. After all, many a senator and congressman had employers breathing down their necks.

The protectionist instincts of the United States in the early 1960s revealed the deep tension between liberal rhetoric abroad and domestic political realities. The US textile industry, supported by labor unions, argued vehemently that imports were driving them into bankruptcy and costing American jobs. These claims put immense pressure on the Kennedy administration to impose strict quotas on imported apparel and other cloth goods. The reasoning sometimes bordered on the absurd. Industry lobbyists framed the survival of Stateside textile manufacturing as essential to national security, even suggesting that the inability to clothe American soldiers could limit their firepower.21 Despite skepticism, this contention was formally endorsed by the Director of Defense Mobilization, adding a veneer of legitimacy.22

2. Let a Hundred Institutions Bloom: Kojève at UNCTAD

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in the 1960s was a watershed moment in the history of global trade, embodying a pivot from the liberal orthodoxy of GATT to a more inclusive platform for developing countries. The failure of the Havana Charter in the early 1950s to establish an International Trade Organization (ITO) set the stage for this shift. The ITO had promised a more balanced approach to trade, prioritizing development and employment alongside liberalization. Kojève, who had been present at Havana in 1948 on his first international assignment, supported the charter and was deeply disillusioned by the rise of GATT. He saw it as a narrow, Anglo-American instrument—an outpost of US hegemony that failed to address international imbalances or incorporate the principles of full employment. To Kojève, French membership in GATT seemed less a question of economics than of national dignity. In his view, the system’s liberal logic forced France into an ignoble position, perpetually pleading for special treatment before an arbiter that would inevitably reject its demands.

Dreams of a truly global trade order had all but faded into diplomatic obscurity when the Soviet Union demanded the ratification of the Havana Charter in 1955, calling for a new international trade conference the following year. These appeals were met with polite indifference in the West, either dismissed as Cold War posturing or simply ignored. By the early 1960s, however, the tide was turning. The Cairo Declaration of June 1962, issued by thirty-six developing nations, pressed once more for an international conference that would prioritize their interests. State delegates gathered in the Egyptian capital delivered a blistering indictment of the EEC’s neocolonialism in its dealings with Africa.

Despite earlier intimations of the gathering storm, the Cairo Declaration hit Paris like a thunderbolt, rattling the French government that had urged its African allies in the Association of African States and Madagascar—essentially a loose grouping of former French colonies—not to attend the Cairo meeting.23 The initiative gained traction in the United Nations, where the General Assembly approved the establishment of a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) that same December. France rejected the resolution, and French unease was mirrored in most Western European nations and in Washington. A 1963 memorandum to President Kennedy warned of the challenge posed to GATT by a UN-centric trade organization heavily skewed toward developing nations and potentially sympathetic to the Soviet Bloc.

By 1963, France’s response to UNCTAD was still defensive but more deliberate. Kojève, though initially unconvinced, perceived the strategic potential of UNCTAD. Sometimes the way to defuse a potentially dangerous development is to get ahead of it. In this case, it meant setting the tone of the proceedings and actively molding the new organization rather than keeping it at arm’s length. Kojève’s far-reaching proposals for reshaping the international economic order inevitably attracted the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA Bulletin from 1963 shows Kojève’s ideas—and his influence in French policy—coming under scrutiny. That May, intelligence sources picked up chatter from US officials in Geneva suggesting that Kojève was promoting the dissolution of GATT as part of a broader shake-up of the international trade machinery. According to this scheme the “work of the GATT with respect to the less-developed countries should be transferred to the UN” and “its activities on trade among the advanced countries should be shifted to the OECD.”24

First session of the Conference (UNCTAD I), Geneva, Switzerland, 1964. United Nations archives. License: CC BY-SA 2.0.

Kojève was one of a handful of people who left their mark on UNCTAD, as its first historian Branislav Gosovic noted on the occasion of the organization’s fiftieth anniversary.25 It was Kojève who impressed upon UNCTAD delegates that improving the lot of poorer nations was above all a matter of creating the right economic conditions. Kojève, in other words, was a full adherent of the creed of modernization. Like the American economic historian and policy advisor Walt Rostow, with whom Raymond Aron had put him in touch in October 1961, Kojève believed that development meant above all self-sustaining economic growth.26 Rostow, meanwhile, was the architect of the “Development Decade” that President Kennedy had announced to the UN General Assembly in 1961.27

As representatives of 120 countries were gearing up for the first UNCTAD summit held in Geneva, Le Monde brought to light a quasi-official document making the rounds in diplomatic circles.28 Authored in large part by Kojève, this memorandum was meant as a neutral “base for discussion” rather than an overtly French initiative.29 It was an unapologetically dirigiste rallying cry for state intervention to shape the global trade order. For Kojève, free trade was a byword for an economic Darwinism that systematically siphoned wealth from poor countries to the industrialized world.30 The language of nondiscrimination in commercial relations concealed deep asymmetries of power. As an Indian GATT delegate once said, “Equal treatment is only fair between equals.”31 When French Finance Minister (and soon to be president) Valéry Giscard d’Estaing took the stage in Geneva in March 1964, he sounded remarkably like Kojève, whose memorandum he referred to explicitly.

By hinting at systemic reforms, Giscard positioned France as a maverick among Western nations. Mere mention of the need for an “organization of markets” in his speech caused a meltdown in liberal quarters.32 As other developed states in the capitalist core tried to hold the line on free trade, France’s overtures to the Global South painted their adherence to liberal principles increasingly as callous indifference to global inequality. The British delegation, unimpressed by France’s aide-mémoire at the UNCTAD conference, made their disdain abundantly clear. In a note circulated by the British embassy in Paris, they dismissed the French proposals as “superficially attractive” but utterly lacking in realism.33

It fell to George Ball, the Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs from 1961 to 1966, to make the opening remarks at UNCTAD on behalf of the United States. Ball had long harbored suspicions about “a forum in which some well-intentioned people—encouraged by others less benign—can do considerable mischief.” He did not think much of the new discipline of development economics, especially in its American campus version where one professor apparently called himself “the Pan American Chair of Development Economics,” which Ball mocked as “a first-class seat on Pan American Airways to any destination in the world.”34 The advice Ball gave developing nations was to do their homework and create a capital-friendly environment for foreign investors. He scoffed at the French finance minister, thinking it odd to hear such Third World pieties “from a country that still revered the spirit of Colbert.”35 Even years later, he resented that Giscard’s speech had met with applause. The neoliberal economist Gottfried Haberler was even harsher than Ball, likening Giscard’s proposals to Soviet planning. Staunch ordoliberals in the German press were horrified. As the West was besieged by the global South, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, the French could once again not be relied upon to stand up for the cause of economic freedom. The paper’s correspondent Wolfram van den Wyenbergh envisaged a future for UNCTAD as “the great Wailing Wall” of poor countries seeking nothing more than “to break into the bank vaults” of the Global North.36

3. Kojève and Prebisch

One person who welcomed Kojève’s ideas was UNCTAD Secretary-General Raúl Prebisch. The Argentinian economist was confident that UNCTAD would allow developing countries to speak with a more forceful institutional voice. And was not the consolidation of the Group of 77 during the Geneva conference a sure sign that history was about to prove Prebisch right? When accused of bias, Prebisch delivered a pointed riposte: neutrality with respect to development, he said, was as absurd as the World Health Organization remaining “neutral toward malaria.”37 In the pages of Fortune, the American establishment struck back with a barbed if grudgingly admiring profile of Prebisch as “doctrinaire” and “perhaps the most influential—but not necessarily the soundest—political economist in the hemisphere,” a mercurial figure with a “mind as agile as it is capricious.”38 His politics, they sniffed, were transparently baked into his economics.

But while Prebisch earned little affection in the US, he found allies elsewhere, not least among the French. Pierre Mendès-France championed his work at the United Nations, praising his incisive analyses of Latin America’s economic struggles and shielding Prebisch from US hostility. Philippe de Seynes, as head of the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, became a steadfast supporter. With Kojève, too, Prebisch struck up a congenial rapport, and Prebisch’s own report submitted ahead of the 1964 UNCTAD conference cited the French aide-mémoire multiple times.39 Prebisch, indifferent to accusations of partiality, praised the French contribution, declaring in an interview that he had read the document “with great interest” and found it commendable for “opening new pathways”—precisely the kind of bold thinking he deemed essential for the success of the conference.40 Kojève, it seemed, had found in Prebisch a kindred spirit, a fellow “interventionist” unafraid to challenge the laissez-faire orthodoxy.

Kojève, for his part, had absorbed Prebisch’s reflections on the declining terms of trade for developing nations as early as 1957.41 Both argued that this phenomenon—where the value of raw materials and agricultural products exported by the Global South consistently failed to keep pace with the value of industrial goods imported from the North—was not a matter of inadequate effort but a systemic imbalance. Prebisch’s analysis underscored that industrial prices declined less during economic downturns because unionized workers in the industrialized world could resist wage cuts and preserve productivity gains. The benefits of technological progress were therefore distributed unevenly and heavily skewed in favor of the industrialized “center” at the expense of the agricultural and raw-material-exporting “periphery.”42 The steady erosion of developing nations’ relative position in the global trading system followed from this, their share in world exports declining from nearly one-third in 1950 to only slightly more than one-fifth in 1962. The remedy lay in reversing these exploitative trade dynamics. Kojève, following Prebisch, contended that restructuring the terms of trade in favor of developing nations would enable them to accumulate the capital necessary for their industrialization. In 1963, he commended Prebisch’s doctrine to his superiors as “a natural extension of France’s approach” to international commerce.43

Both Kojève and Prebisch threw their weight behind regional economic integration as a buffer against the vagaries of the global market. Regional markets could offer economies of scale, foster industrial growth, and reduce dependency on the industrialized North while lowering tariff barriers among its members. For Kojève, Europe provided a potent example: a model of preferential trade agreements and financial coordination that spurred intra-regional commerce while saving precious dollar reserves. What Europe should export was neither democracy nor Enlightenment values, but intelligent protectionism. Between 1963 and 1969, regional economic groupings proliferated, many of them notional or short lived: the Arab Common Market, the Central African Customs and Economic Union, the Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, and the Caribbean Free Trade Agreement, to name but a few. By 1969 seventeen preferential trade zones had emerged, encompassing over eighty nations. Prebisch’s vision of a Common Market in Latin America met fierce resistance; Washington denounced it as protectionist fortress, the GATT balked at its discriminatory undertones, and even within Argentina, hostility to the Prebisch leadership doomed the initiative.

By the late 1960s, some African leaders concluded that it was pointless to draw parallels between postwar Europe’s recovery and their own development struggles, among them Robert Gardiner, Ghanaian Secretary-General of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Speaking from his office in Addis Ababa’s Africa Hall to Der Spiegel, Gardiner was adamant that neither the Marshall Plan nor the EEC could ever serve as template for the Global South.44 Europe’s postwar challenge, he noted, was reconstruction. By contrast, developing nations faced the monumental task of building from scratch, grappling with infrastructural, social, and political difficulties that far surpassed those experienced in Europe. Kojève had to admit that no institution comparable to the OEEC—the body entrusted with disbursing Marshall Plan aid across Western Europe—existed in the Third World, both in terms of US support and in financial firepower.

4. The System of Preferences

Preferential tariff arrangements were another area of cooperation between Kojève and Prebisch. History furnished a clear precedent: tariffs, often maligned in free-trade rhetoric, had played a critical role in the industrialization of today’s richest nations. They served not only as fiscal tools but also as protective bulwarks for infant industries and stimulants for economic growth. To deny developing countries the same latitude, Prebisch and Kojève maintained, was to impose a double standard that ignored the practicalities of nation-building. What worked for Pittsburgh and the Ruhr could work just as well for Kinshasa and Dhaka—if only the rules allowed and industrial nations opened their markets to Third World exports without expecting the vulnerable economies of developing countries to do the same in return.

By late 1962, Kojève left no doubt that giving manufactured goods produced by developing nations preferential access to the markets of the Global North was overdue. Such ideas were hardly new. In the late 1940s, Article XV of the proposed ITO charter had tentatively made room for preferential trade arrangements in the service of economic development. Yet this clause was abandoned with the ITO itself, and efforts to integrate such provisions into GATT made little progress.

Kojève instead hitched his wagon to the plan named after the Belgian Minister of Foreign Trade Maurice Brasseur, who had first publicly presented it in May 1963. The plea for preferential tariffs to aid developing nations had to emanate from a nation with unassailable liberal credentials, and traditionally free-trading Belgium fit Kojève’s bill. The Brasseur Plan, measured in outlook, also insisted that preferences be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, and bilaterally. In addition, a quota system would register the needs of domestic industries in the North. If imports exceeded a given ceiling, they would be subject to quantitative restrictions.

The United States, dogmatic in its commitment to nondiscrimination under the Most Favored Nation clause, dismissed preferences as “frivolous hobby horses” and a “particularly fractious beast”—sentiments that extended to the Brasseur Plan, which proposed phased and selective preferences.45 American officials feared such initiatives would open the floodgates to closed markets and perpetual protectionism, rather than the competitive liberalization they espoused. In the developing world too, the Brasseur Plan, however laudable its aim, fell short of expectations. Its cautious, case-by-case implementation hardly qualified as transformative.

Prebisch soon realized that without Kojève preferential tariffs would remain a pipe dream, and in 1966 solicited his help to break the deadlock at the UNCTAD negotiations. Prebisch extolled Kojève’s ability to “separate true from false problems,” seeing him as a crucial ally in advancing the case for preferences.46 Yet they did not see eye to eye when it came to the scope of the preference system they envisaged: Prebisch held that it should be generalized to all developing nations, whereas Kojève and Brasseur had maintained that it ought to be more piecemeal.

The French and Belgians, deeply invested in maintaining their foothold in their former overseas territories, endorsed selective preferences. In the Yaoundé Convention of 1963, the EEC offered African states special trade privileges based on historical ties to their former colonizers. For France, this arrangement preserved strategic control over African markets while projecting an image as a benefactor of the developing world. Critics saw this as thinly veiled neocolonialism, a means of locking former colonies into “vertical” economic relationships that fostered dependency rather than self-sufficiency. Prebisch never lost an opportunity to excoriate these arrangements as a “relic of the past” and castigated their role in perpetuating the political and economic domination of the South by the North.47 Such large blocs led by individual hegemonic states often assume a paternalistic authority over entire continents, evidenced by French influence in Africa, and distort and undermine the original aims of regional integration.

Prebisch’s alternative was the idea of a Generalized System of Preferences (GSP)—a framework that would extend tariff reductions or exemptions to all developing countries. Kojève eventually came around to this scheme and dragged a reluctant France along. Under Kojève’s intellectual stewardship, the government in Paris began toning down its opposition to global preferences in 1965. By December 1966, the EEC Commission, in a decisive break from its earlier position, acquiesced into extending equal preferential treatment to all developing countries. The only element missing was the US.

The American opposition to a GSP for industrial goods from developing countries began to crumble under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Latin American countries grew restive over the spread of preference arrangements in other parts of the world and their clamoring for better access to US markets put Washington in a tight spot. At the Meeting of American Chiefs of State at Punta del Este in April 1967, President Johnson relented, solemnly declaring that “we are ready to explore with other industrialized countries—and with our own people—the possibility of temporary preferential tariff advantages for all developing countries in the markets of all the industrialized countries.”48 As America dropped its obstructionist stance, hesitant industrial powers fell in line “as if by magic,” Kojève commented sardonically. He was mightily pleased with himself as he watched the preferential tariffs make their way through the committees. When GSP won majority support, at least in principle, at the Second United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in New Delhi in 1968, Kojève was present to witness what he felt was the high point of his career: a rare and tangible achievement in the fraught arena of North-South economic relations.

There is no reason to sanctify Kojève as a white knight of the Global South, however. He knew when French interests were at stake and did everything in his power to safeguard them. What turned the Generalized System of Preferences into a toothless tiger was a simple fact. With only a handful of exceptions, the volume of most developing nations’ exports to Western markets was negligible. In the early 1960s, more than eighty developing nations did not exceed $5 million in exports to industrialized countries. By 1962, India and Hong Kong each achieved export figures of approximately $400 million.49 Hong Kong’s economic prowess in particular proved a constant bugbear for Kojève. The British crown colony epitomized the perils of what came to be called “social dumping”—a race-to-the-bottom dynamic where the low wages of export-oriented industries in developing countries undercut the labor standards of wealthier nations.50

Kojève campaigned relentlessly against the danger posed to French companies by export-oriented emerging economies. In a 1963 note, he suggested incentivizing industries in the Third World that committed to selling at least 80 percent of their production within their wider region, while restricting imports from industries focused on exporting to developed economies. This, he declared, would stave off the creation of “new Hong Kongs”—export hubs whose competitive advantage overwhelmed manufacturers in France.51 Kojève, ever the adept rhetorician, even cloaked French resistance to cheap imports from developing countries in a peculiar brand of Marxist moralism. The “surplus value” of such exports would accrue to Western consumers when it should remain in the periphery.52 Kojève even managed to persuade André Philip, the well-meaning but gullible head of the French GATT delegation, that rejecting textile imports from Asia was a moral imperative. To do otherwise, Kojève warned, would amount to complicity in the exploitation of Asian workers. The moral high ground thus aligned neatly with the economic interests of French industry—a smoke screen perhaps, but one expertly maintained.

5. The Civil Servant of Humanity?

Recent disclosures have suggested that Kojève, in addition to being a Hegelian philosopher and a high-ranking French civil servant, was also a spy in the services of the KGB. Further details of his activities will have to await declassification of the relevant files in Moscow. Still, the KGB usually knew a thing or two about their moles. The Russian material released so far pictures Kojève as one of the architects of French “policy toward the Third World.”53 Does this make him a Soviet asset?

Colleagues of his begged to differ, describing a dyed-in-the-wool Gaullist who went to great lengths—even subterfuge—to advance France’s interests and influence over its former colonies. French finance ministers kept Kojève on a long leash, without burdening him with overly detailed instructions. This flexibility allowed him to outwit other delegations who lacked such room for maneuver in response to spontaneous objections. According to Canadian diplomat Rodney Grey, Kojève’s comments were all the more daunting for constantly oscillating between personal opinion and official pronouncement.54 Was he speaking for himself or for France? The one could seamlessly transition into the other, only adding to Kojève’s unpredictability.

Perhaps Kojève was a specimen of the new breed of intellectual advisors that the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger dissected in his 1987 essay Ach Europa. The “Ratgeber” appeared a curious cross between technocrat and traditional intellectual. What sets them apart is their relationship to power: neither revering nor resenting it, they navigate power effortlessly. While they have a talent for cooperation distinguishing them from the traditional “free-floating intellectual” whose independence comes at the cost of collaboration, such advisors are unafraid to bite the hand that feeds them.55

In an article from March 1965, a Financial Times correspondent conveyed his perplexity at the behavior of a French delegate. Over the course of a regional UN meeting on trade liberalization, Kojève took aim not only at the two superpowers, but also at France, in whose name he acted. Non-Western nations, he asserted, would be best advised “to study what the Russians, Americans, and West Europeans do, and not what they say.”56 Sometimes Kojève conducted himself—borrowing a phrase from John Toye and Richard Toye—like a “defiant bureaucrat,”57 who acted as a “transmission belt for geopolitical demands from countries with a weaker voice at the international level.”58 Francois Châtelet, who corresponded with Kojève on Hegelian matters, only half-jokingly referred to him as “a civil servant of humanity.”59 The expression—“Funktionär der Menschheit” in the original German—had been coined by Edmund Husserl in his The Crisis of the European Sciences in 1936.60 Fittingly, the civil servants Husserl had in mind were all philosophers.