Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy: (August 27, 1945)

Editor's note: In the aftermath of World War II, the philosopher Alexandre Kojeve presented the French government his Outline of a Doctrine of French Policy, a document that remains today of scholarly, historical, philosophical, and--perhaps most startlingly--contemporary interest. This unabridged translation marks its first appearance in English. It was translated from the French by Erik de Vries, who recently completed his doctoral dissertation, A Kojevean Citizenship Model for the European Union, at Carleton University and now works as a policy analyst for the Canadian government. An interpretive essay by Robert Howse begins on page 41. TWO DANGERS THREATEN France in the postwar world. The first is more or less immediate; the other is much more distant but also incomparably graver. The immediate danger is the German danger, which is not military, but economic and thus political. It is that Germany's economic potential (even cut off from its eastern provinces) is such that the inevitable incorporation of this country--whose restoration to democratic and peaceful will be attempted--into the European system will inevitably lead to France's reduction to the rank of a secondary power within continental Europe, unless it reacts in a manner as energetic as it is reasoned. The more distant danger is, it is true, less certain. But on the other hand, it could be described as mortal, in the strict sense of the word. It is the danger that France is running of being involved in a Third World War and serving anew as an aerial or other kind of battlefield in it. But it is very clear that in this eventuality, and independently of the outcome of the conflict, France will never again be able to repair the damages which it will necessarily suffer: above all on the demographic plane, but also on the economic one and that of civilization itself. French policy, foreign as well as domestic, thus finds itself faced with two tasks of vital importance, which practically determine all the others: --on the one hand, real neutrality must be ensured as much as possible during a possible war between Russians and Anglo-Saxons; --on the other hand, during peacetime it is important to keep the country, in contrast to Germany, at the first economic and political rank in non-Soviet continental Europe. It is to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions under which this double goal has a serious chance of being achieved that the following pages were written. I. The Historical Situation 1. THERE IS NO doubt that we are currently witnessing a decisive turning point in history, comparable to the one that took place at the end of the Middle Ages. The beginning of the modern age is characterized by the unstoppable process of the progressive elimination of political formations dividing the national units to the benefit of kingdoms, which is to say of nation-States. At present, it is these nation-States which, irresistably, are gradually giving way to political formations which transgress national borders and which could be designated with the term Empires. Nation-States, still powerful in the nineteenth century, are ceasing to be political realities, States in the strong sense of the term, just as the medieval baronies, cities, and archdioceses ceased to be States. The modern State, the current political reality, requires a larger foundation than that represented by Nations in the strict sense. To be politically viable, the modern State must rest on a vast 'imperial' union of affiliated (1) Nations. The modern State is only truly a State if it is an Empire. The historical process which formerly replaced feudal entities with national States, and which is currently breaking down Nations to the benefit of Empires, can and must be explained by economic causes, which manifest themselves politically in and through the requirements of military technology. …

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