Philippe de Seyne’s international world-making: globalism, the management of interdependence and the disciplining of the planetary

A Working Paper written by Sabine Selchow | 2026

Histories of the post-war United Nations tend to present Philippe de Seynes as a senior international civil servant. In this paper I approach him as an international thinker and examine his public interventions as a form of international worldmaking. Drawing on six interventions published between 1967 and 1979, I ask how de Seynes conceptualised a changing international world from within the UN Secretariat. I identify three connected features of his thinking. First, de Seynes constructs the global as a political field in which transboundary consequences become matters of international judgement, coordination and rule making. Within this wider problem of interdependence, his concept of ‘globalism’ gives a planetary dimension to this field through ecological limits, technological power and the finiteness of the planet. Second, he translates planetary concerns into governable problems through conceptualisation, assessment, priorities and political choice; I describe this process as the disciplining of the planetary. Third, he situates the governance of interdependence within questions of development, inequality, power and sovereignty. Taken together, these moves show the distinct ways in which de Seynes made an interconnected and materially finite world governable, while treating its political and developmental differences as part of the problem of global governance.

Selchow, Sabine Ulrike, Philippe de Seyne’s international world-making: globalism, the management of interdependence and the disciplining of the planetary, EUI, HEC, Working Paper, 2026/07, ECOINT - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/96476