Meet Europe’s New Machiavelli

“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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.”

 

After his star debut, Mr. van Middelaar joined the European Commission as a counselor and spent the high years of the euro crisis in the cockpit of the European Union. He wrote about the history of the union and its leadership, urging greater confidence and celerity. Yet it took events in Ukraine in 2022 to shake Europeans out of their lingering somnolence and President Trump’s threats to dissolve the Atlantic alliance to fully awaken them from their daydream. “It is only in Europe,” Mr. van Middelaar wrote last year, “that recent turbulence and disruptive events came as a true shock.”

 

His advice was stern. Instead of a rigid politics of rules, the European Union’s trademark, Europeans need a politics of events. In this way of thinking, history’s unpredictability is the new normal rather than a confusing exception. In a world frayed by chaos and crisis, the call is not for lawyerly wrangling but for swift decision making.

 

Nowhere is this need for urgency clearer than in defense. In the past two years, BIG’s output has featured a familiar list of proposals in the name of security autonomy: common debt issuance, a digital euro, a European economic security council.

 

Amid this menu of options, one less orthodox proposal stands out: a revamped European Defense Agency. Founded in 2004, the agency has re-emerged as a hub for joint projects aimed at increasing military collaboration. BIG would like to see it graduate to a more ambitious role, coordinating Europe’s rearmament. For this, Mr. van Middelaar finds inspiration in the so-called Eurogroup, in which eurozone ministers choose a first among equals to guide their discussion of budgets.

 

The reimagined body would serve a notable purpose: to prepare Europe for decoupling from the United States’ military-industrial complex.

 

The proposal comes with foreseeable problems of accountability and legitimacy, to be sure. Beyond policy prescriptions, the think tank is often more concerned with matters of interpretation — what it calls intellectual rearmament. A recurring task of BIG has been to shift the debate on European defense from quantity to quality. Instead of obsessing over numbers, the institute goes long on purpose: The question of how and why Europe should remilitarize, and what role the continent should devise for itself in the 21st-century world, runs through its publications.

 

Yet BIG provides no clear answers to these questions. Nor does Mr. van Middelaar himself. For all his urging of continental integration, he tells us little about how he envisages Europe’s future. There are other gaps, too. He has said very little of crimes in the Middle East; on the world-historic challenge of decarbonization, the silence is near absolute.

 

The lacunae are not wholly surprising.

 

In Mr. van Middelaar’s Machiavellian worldview, every crisis arrives as a bolt from the blue, both unannounced and unsettling.

 

A sharp flaw in his thinking comes into view here. He insists that the return of history in the 2010s and ’20s requires a “politics of events.” Yet a reactive approach of mole-whacking crises, manifest most clearly in Europe’s breakneck remilitarization, does not make for a coherent geopolitical strategy. To craft one, Europe needs a road map, or at least a faint idea of its destination in the new world. This in turn requires some theory of European history, a sense that — as Hegel and Kojève insisted — past, present and future may be linked up to form a whole.

 

A propositional argument about Europe’s future would also make it easier to build a popular constituency for the rearmament Mr. van Middelaar and BIG insist on.

 

European electorates have expressed their wish for more autonomy, yet it is unclear whether they have signed up for an arms race.

 

Here, Kojève had the merit of honesty: He believed European integration was to remain an elite-driven rather than a popular project. In this respect, perhaps, Mr. van Middelaar has never gone beyond his dissertation topic.

 

Anton Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer. He is a lecturer in politics at Oxford University and the author of “Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences.”” [1]

 

1, Meet Europe’s New Machiavelli: Guest Essay. Jäger, Anton.  New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Jun 9, 2026.