Abstract

This essay analyses some crucial aspects of the debate on Europe's fate developing after the Second World War, when many intellectuals confronted the supposed consequences of the new global politics which was rapidly leading to Europe's marginalization: the prospect of a "World State", which was very unlikely to be dominated by Europe, emerging from the fragmentation of political space through the process of decolonization and the homogeneization of world politics through the rise of two "power blocs". The essay focuses on the cross-cutting intellectual exchanges which involved Carl Schmitt and two major French contributors to this "post-European debate": Alexander Kojève, who was the most sophisticated advocate of a "World State" in the 1950s and the 1960s, and Raymond Aron, the leading proponent of a liberal, "realist" theory of international relations. The author relates the rival pictures of the future global order which they were painting to their respective notions of the "political".