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Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europa
as the Elusive "Object of Longing"
Daniel C. Villanueva
University of Nevada - Las Vegas
The Austro-Hungarian intellectual Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) saw the end
of World War I as the ideal time to finally create the centuries-old "object of
longing," i.e., a peaceful, united Europe (Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan
Europe 8). In doing so, he inspired a large additional body of literature and a
movement for a unified Europe which exists, albeit in a much-reduced role, down to the
present day. I locate his magnum opus, Pan-Europa1
in the continuum of German-language treatments of Europe as a political
project.2 This interwar text is
especially interesting for scholars as it represents a rare bourgeois dissent
against nationalistic pretensions prevalent in many other Weimar-era political
treatises on the cultural position of Germany and Europe in the wider world.
Pan-Europa contains much of interest beyond
utopian policy prescriptions for interwar European statesmen, illuminating
discussions on the pace, scope, and goals of European integration into the
present day.
In postwar Western Europe and the United States this text has occasionally been of
interest to political scientists and European intellectual historians while
remaining virtually unknown in literary histories. Where it is mentioned, Pan-Europa
has most often been viewed as a failed modernist
blueprint for defending democratic, capitalist, political institutions and
geopolitical imperatives binding both "halves" of Europe.3 Today,
it is in Central European countries,
especially Poland, Slovakia, and the Baltics, where much current research is
being done into the Pan-European movement begun by this slim volume.4 Also,
since Count Coudenhove-Kalergi was
half-Japanese, born of an Austro-Hungarian nobleman-diplomat and a Japanese
mother, one also finds many monographs on his life in Japanese, as well as
translations of early philosophical works of his.
A wider interdisciplinary re-evaluation of Pan-Europa brings to light many aspects
useful in understanding
both the evolution of the European idea in German letters and current debates
concerning united Europe. Chief among these is a tension between rational
models of "treaties and rights" and early Romantic notions of an
organically united Germany at intellectual war with Enlightenment (i.e.,
French) political and cultural traditions. Two quite innovative and
controversial aspects for his day, namely forceful calls for continental
disarmament and rapprochement between France and Germany as essential
preconditions for peace, recall essays of prior centuries. A controversial
topic in our own day is also mentioned in his text: the tradition of finding a
place for religion as a supporting pillar of a future European identity. These
and other features of Pan-Europe contribute to a richer illustration of its
continuity with other German works arguing for peaceful European cooperation, of which
Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) might be considered the first, best
example.5 After a brief history of the man and the
movement, we shall see how Pan-Europa integrates important antecedent concepts
and provided his contemporaries a basis upon which to theorize more productively a unified
Europe.6
It is first important to note how widely known this text was between 1923 and
1938, when it went through seven
editions and was translated into every major world language, extending
awareness of the work beyond Europe to readers of Japanese, Chinese, and
Arabic. Other integral parts of this literary-political project included: a
monthly magazine (PANEUROPA) to
which contemporary politicians, intellectuals, and private citizens of many
European nations contributed; Pan-European committees throughout Europe; and congresses held
every few years in different European capitals beginning in 1924. Its
secretariat was originally based in Vienna's Hofburg Palace and its symbol,
then as today, is "a red cross upon a golden sun ... the cross of Christ
upon the sun of Apollo ... this symbol on a light blue background." In
choosing these symbols, Coudenhove-Kalergi symbolically united Christian
principles with Greek humanism and arrayed them on a symbolic "blue sky,
representing untarnished peace" (Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa 1922
bis 1966 58; translation mine).
This treatise had prominent supporters throughout interwar Europe, both because of
the practical steps toward peace outlined there and the tireless efforts of its
author in publicizing the book and the movement. Coudenhove-Kalergi's political
allies included Prime Minister Eduard Herriot (France) and Foreign Minister
Gustav Stresemann (Germany). Others included Reichstag President Paul Löbe, and
the Austrian leaders Ignaz Seipel and Karl Renner, the latter the first
President of postwar Austria.7 Engelbert
Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg, Austria's last two pre-Anschluß Chancellors,
also had important leadership roles. In
the literary sphere, Coudenhove-Kalergi's most famous interwar fellow-travelers
included Heinrich Mann, Heinrich's brother Thomas (originally opposed to his
plans but later a supporter), and Kurt Hiller. Others such as Paul Valery,
Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, and Arthur
Schnitzler regularly corresponded with him as well. Even Einstein and Freud
exchanged letters with him on an ongoing basis until the Nazi regime forced
many into exile.8
Another measure of the influence of the interwar Pan-European movement is that it
created strong political and cultural opposition in Germany, the country
Coudenhove-Kalergi considered his second home and first political success.9
Conservative opponents took him seriously
enough to write many essays opposed to the Pan-European ideal in both
literature and politics. A typical polemic from a German university professor
in 1930 critized Coudenhove-Kalergi's efforts as follows:
This thing called "Pan-Europe" was not invented after the Great War, and
certainly not by the horrible Austrian who preaches it. Rather, it always shows
its face when France is very near to its highest political goal: Rule over
Europe. (Gei§ler 34)
As authors of the period were aware, the term "French" was always pejorative
code for German conservatives, denoting a noxious Other on so many levels: political,
social, religious, and cultural.10 Thus the
raising of a French specter behind Coudenhove's efforts for disarmament, peace,
and European unification was to argue simultaneously for the German Sonderweg.
It was, of course, precisely this Sonderweg that Coudenhove-Kalergi opposed all
his life with his theories and political praxis.
After Hitler's forces occupied Austria, Coudenhove-Kalergi moved to Switzerland, then
Paris, where his influence among the political and literary elites rapidly
waned in the face of the understandably more pressing cultural and political
challenges posed by the Nazis. In 1942 he immigrated to New York and there
founded the "Research Seminar for a Federative Postwar Europe" at New
York University. The seminar was assisted in its work by the American Committee
for a Free and United Europe led by Senator William Fulbright. In 1946,
Coudenhove-Kalergi returned to Switzerland to found the Pan-European Union and
again lobby intensively for a political, economic, and cultural union among the
nations of Europe, then limited to the "free nations" of Western Europe.
At first, it seemed he would regain his old influence. When Winston Churchill
famously called for a "United States of Europe" in a speech in Zürich
in 1946, he explicitly referenced Coudenhove-Kalergi as one of only two people
whose work inspired that goal.11 Shortly
before this, however, Churchill had given his famous "Iron Curtain"
speech, and it is those thoughts, not the Pan-Europe of Coudenhove-Kalergi,
which remained more influential through the Cold War years. As technocrats,
politicians, and lawyers rather than intellectuals assumed the vanguard of the
movement, Coudenhove-Kalergi became increasingly marginalized and devoted his
remaining years to nourishing pro-European networks among the politically powerful
in Western Europe and writing his autobiography. He died in Schruns, Austria in
1972.12
His magnum opus Pan-Europe begins, as
many of the other classic German essays on Europe do, with an introductory
chapter in which Coudenhove-Kalergi highlights previous failed attempts at
European unification stretching back into Charlemagne's day. Pan-Europe
then makes a rhetorically effective case for an
economically, culturally, and politically united European community of nations
by presenting readers with a stark choice: one can either uphold an
Enlightenment belief in the power of unlimited progress through reason, or
choose the fatal alternative of national decay and disintegration through
cultural disunity, leading ultimately to a war of annihilation. Once, "world
policy was more or less identical to European policy" (Coudenhove-Kalergi,
Pan Europe 3).13 Yet now, recovering from World War I, these
formerly great European nations are "burdened with debt, disrupted,
restless and enfeebled, gravely reduced in [their] populative and industrial
strength, floundering in economic and monetary chaos" (8). Just as Julius
Fröbel had written in his influential pro-European essay The Present
European State System (1864),
Coudenhove-Kalergi imagines a Russo-Turkish military threat and a U.S. economic
and cultural threat. Since "Europe as a political concept does not
exist" (16),14 are these individual European nations "bound, in
order to preserve their existence, to organize into a federal union?"
(xiv). His answer is of course affirmative, inspired by the Pan-American
movement earlier in the century: "Self-help through the consolidation of
Europe into an ad hoc politico-economic federation" (xv). Significantly,
the federation should not simply be defensive or military-economic in nature,
but proudly and proactively cultural and political.
Pan-Europe thus swiftly moves beyond
contemporary geopolitical concerns to posit the existence of long-buried common
European cultural roots in need of renewed cultivation. Benedict Anderson has
persuasively described a dynamic whereby peoples construct imagined unified
communities in response to catastrophic societal upheavals. Reading Pan-Europe,
one easily concludes that the fratricidal
tendencies unleashed by World War I motivated Coudenhove-Kalergi to postulate a
new identity around which peaceful forces might coalesce as Anderson outlines.
He imagined a culturally united Europe as a response, with no need for standing
armies or internal, nation-state based enemies. As such, his plans at once
reflect and transcend the purely defensive ideas found in earlier German plans
for European unification such as Fröbel's above, which attempted to convince
nations to unite based on geopolitical threats while retaining strong
militaries. A comprehensive European disarmament plan is part of Pan-Europe,
and perhaps its most revolutionary idea for
politicians in the 1920s:
[E]ither the universal militia system could be introduced or universal compulsory
service could be completely abolished. The moral and economic progress achieved
thereby would be inestimable. (69)
His calls for disarmament also reflect the productive appeals to reason inherent in
Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795) and Arnold Ruge's
speech in the Frankfurt Parliament (1848) on the necessity of disarmament for
any lasting peace. A future united Europe, writes Coudenhove-Kalergi, like the
Pan-American Union, should not be "directed against any other
state-system, but solely against war, and toward furthering the cultural
progress of all" (11).
Pan-Europe contains several other innovative
re-imagining of solutions to cultural-historical rivalries, many of which would
find their way into Christian Democratic and Social Democratic policies
throughout Western Europe in the postwar years. These both dialectically
resolve old tensions and introduce new opposing ideas into the European
cultural mix. Consider Coudenhove-Kalergi's treatment of Soviet Russia. On the
one hand, he writes dismissively that "Russia, in consequence of its
breach with the democratic system, has placed itself outside Europe" (36).
Certainly, the exclusion of Russia from geographical definitions of
"Europe" has a long tradition in German letters, going as far back as
the works of the Catholic Greater German, Joseph Görres. Indeed, the idea that
Russia should not be considered culturally European precedes even these
geopolitical analyses, and remained a popular theme in Coudenhove-Kalergi's
day.15
Pan-Europe's strident anti-Communist tone is not unique to
1920s European essays. Championing
a union of European states as the answer to this "Bolshevist danger,"
as opposed to seeing the "Russian problem" strictly through a
nationalist-militarist lens, allowed seeds of a dialectical movement to
germinate. These seeds would bear fruit after World War II. Coudenhove-Kalergi
writes:
The unanimous aim of all Europeans, regardless of party or nation, should be the
prevention of a Russian invasion.... The only wise thing for Europe to do is
pursue ... a Pan-European defensive pact against the Russian menace. (60-61)
The similarities between
these ideas and the policies of postwar West German leaders, especially those
of Kurt Schumacher and Konrad Adenauer, are obvious. Yet their solution was to
(re-)arm Europe through NATO and retreat into a defensive Western European
economic alliance in the European Community. Coudenhove-Kalergi, from the 1920s
through the 1950s, argued instead for continued dialogue and detente with the
Eastern Bloc -- a sort of pre-Brandt, realist Ostpolitik in which disarmament
was not to be a taboo topic,
and in which "Western Europe" could not be identical with
"Europe."16 Here, an imagined
common European culture mitigates against military solutions to differences of
opinion over specific governmental forms and regimes: "An indifferent
neighborliness is no longer possible. Europe can become only either the stage
of perpetual war or perpetual peace" (116).
As can be traced from the above, the necessity for Germany and France to become
partners instead of rivals is also a central plank of his European project. It
deserves special mention because this position, despite being a commonplace in
the postwar era, was not shared by most of the audience Pan-Europe first
addressed.17
Reading today that "as Germans and Frenchmen, the same people are
opponents who should be allies" (127), or that "The destinies of
Germany and France are inseparably bound together" (137), one must recall
how out of place such sentiments were among the vast majority of Weimar
Germany's intellectuals. The Enlightenment aspects of Coudenhove-Kalergi's
project are clear: "A solidarity of reason must arise ... even where no room
yet exists for a solidarity of love" (138). In visualizing ever-closer
union among European nations, initiated by and modeled on Franco-German
reconciliation, he anticipates the organic, functionalist nature of the EU.
Equally fascinating, he eerily prefigures the actual rational, realist basis of
moves toward European integration in the immediate postwar era.
No less central to the Pan-European project were the protection and
self-determination of Eastern European peoples so recently liberated from
Austro-Hungarian and Russian cultural and political hegemony. In
Coudenhove-Kalergi's analysis,
This [national]18 revolution in Eastern Europe
marks a decisive stage on the road to Pan-Europe. For thanks to it, Europe
received a coherent structure [eine einheitliche Physiognomie] on the
basis of nationhood and of democracy.... Thereby the foundation has been laid for a
Pan-European union of free nations. (120)
This passage well illustrates Pan-Europe's unique,
organic, dialectic movement regarding European and national policies: co-opting
the nationalist and conservative-bourgeois geopolitical thinking of the Weimar years,
Coudenhove-Kalergi pays rhetorical homage to national movements of liberation
throughout Central Europe. At the same time, however, he slyly reminds the
reader that a loosely-organized "Europe of Fatherlands" is not a
completely developed Europe. The organic body imagery present in the German
original signals its intellectual affinities with earlier treatises on Europe
from the German Romantics such as Novalis and Gentz, who both called for all
European peoples and nations to unite under one "head," whether
religious (Novalis) or secular (Gentz). This passage also helps explain Pan-Europe's
attractiveness to Christian Democratic politicians
in the post-World War II years and Central European politicians in the
post-Wall era. The Communist division of Europe was envisioned as an unnatural,
inorganic amputation of nations and peoples from each other, and the imperative
underlying the formation of a European Community was to restore the lost limbs
with the torso, whether after World War I, World War II, or the Cold War.
Pan-Europe's specific plans for European integration,
especially as regards its treaty-based, intergovernmentalist beginnings,
uncannily anticipate many central aspects of how the postwar Western European
community developed. This lends an additional dimension of curiosity to the
work. Hearkening back to Kant, Novalis, Ruge, and others, Coudenhove-Kalergi's
first step towards creation of a European union of states is the convening of a
conference of leaders to create a unification treaty among their nations. This
would be followed by: treaties of binding arbitration between states; a
European disarmament conference; elimination of internal borders; creation of a
European customs union and common currency; an inter-European exchange of
teachers, students, and children; and much more.19 Crowning these endeavors
would be creation
of a "Constitution of the United States of Europe, after the pattern of
the United States of America" (169-175). Implied in this is a quite
energetic, "inorganic" receptivity to a loss of national sovereignty
rarely seen in other texts of this nature in Weimar Germany.
What is especially interesting here for both political scientists and cultural
historians is that culturally conservative, organic state language is sprinkled
throughout the document at the same time that democratic, supranational
solutions are being proposed to remedy Europe's ills. There is talk of needing
to find "a compromise between freedom and order," of trying to meet
the "synthetic needs"
of Europe's citizens, and fighting against a disunited "chaos of peoples
and nations." Coudenhove-Kalergi rails against the "inorganic,
mechanical" unifying process of the League of Nations, though not the
worthy peaceful ideas underlying it (89). And, as with many other conservative-organic
thinkers, he echoes Novalis in imagining the long-past days of the Holy Roman
Empire as representing the high point of European culture.
During the Middle Ages, when European culture, despite the differences of language,
was uniformly Christian, the occident felt its national unity far more strongly
than it does today; for at the time of the Crusades Europe had one Faith, one
God, one Pope, one chivalric ideal, one learned language. (156-157)
Of course, the cosmopolitan
European nobleman sees there is no desirability in re-creating a specifically
Catholic order of things. Still, Coudenhove-Kalergi sees the need for some
transcendent unifying concept so that "a German inhabitant, say, of
Czech-Slovakia ... must endeavor to be a good Czecho-Slovak citizen, and an
honest German" (168). The transcendental, dialectically productive idea is
that of "Europe," which should lose the quotation marks surrounding
it as one imagines it as having existed in the past. His question, following
World Wars I and II is, "Why should enriching [regional and national]
patriotisms with a third, a European one, be considered impossible?"
(Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa 1922 bis 1966 15; translation mine).
Religion is the best transcendental concept necessary to cement the unification of
Europe, since "Europe is bound together by the Christian religion,
European science, art and culture, which rest on a Christian-Hellenic
basis" (Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan Europe 162). This dialectical movement,
the Aufhebung of national and regional cultural-linguistic
particularities by drawing upon a higher imagined cultural memory, seems at
first glance hopelessly antiquated. Indeed, such a notion was also certainly
not a potent draw for nationalist intellectuals inclined to organic thinking
during Weimar Germany and interwar Austria.20
Yet calling to mind the current discussions over an explicit reference to
Christianity in the preamble to the new EU constitution, Coudenhove-Kalergi's
raising of this issue seems less a Novalian anachronism than at first glance.
Certain modernist elements in Coudenhove-Kalergi's plan also echo those of the French
liberal nationalist Ernest Renan. In his famous essay "What is a
Nation?" (1882), he postulates that a supranational European confederation
might someday take the place of sovereign national governments, themselves
transitory in nature. Pan-Europe's
call for a final, federated, yet culturally, politically, and economically
united Europe echoes this. Also, we read in Renan that neither common racial
and linguistic characteristics nor geographical boundaries are necessary and
sufficient conditions for nation-building. Like Renan, and Julius Fröbel before
him, Coudenhove-Kalergi uses the example of Switzerland to show how, rather
than being exclusive communities, the best European nations are in fact
inclusive "symbioses,
communities of interaction, between great men and their peoples" (155). Like Herder,
Coudenhove-Kalergi can
state, "Every [individual] nation is a sanctuary -- as the hearth and home
of culture, as the point of crystallization for morality and progress"
(161). Yet at the same time, with Novalis, he can claim that "[t]he
cultural unity of the Occident gives us the right to speak of a European
nation" (163). Here lies the innovation of Pan-Europe as regards
the dialectic interaction between the
national and European levels: each nation should be free to develop its
particular national characteristics on its own. Yet where a collection of
nations' historical-cultural ties differentiate them from other "world
cultures," they should be encouraged to unite to preserve and protect
unique symbioses. Each tension thus calls forth and mutually reinforces the
other on a third, unifying level.
For all its unique and progressive elements relative to other Weimar treatises on
Germany's role in Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi's work does carry significant
ideological baggage. These illustrate several disturbing affinities with
conservative intellectual traditions of the time. Certainly, Pan-Europa
occupies a place on the spectrum unambiguously out of
the nationalist or anti-Semitic orbit. Yet its triumphalist tone with regard to
"European culture"21 and its
often reflexive recourse to geopolitical concerns do not allow it to achieve
the legacy of literary treatments of European culture found in other authors of
the period. One searches in vain for Eurochauvinist themes in Stefan Zweig's
collected essays and memoirs, or Thomas Mann's post-1921 essays and speeches,
for example. Mann's insightful postwar formulation that what is needed is
"not a German Europe, but a European Germany" significantly echoes
many aspects of Coudenhove-Kalergi's own interwar ideology (Mann, Ansprache 194).
Yet in contrast to these authors, Coudenhove-Kalergi states that only European
culture can be "essentially activist and rationalist ... while the other
cultures are fast decaying, European culture marches triumphantly on.... It
would appear that a century hence, European culture will have absorbed all
other cultures" (29-30). It is a contradictory and ultimately
unsophisticated argument, though presented with considerable rhetorical
flourish. As such, it allows him to claim, for example, that American culture,
"optimistic, aspiring, energetic and progressive" (30), is actually
part of overall European culture, but only because it has indeed proven itself
to be a rival to Europe and needs to be co-opted. Geopolitical realities also
often inform his cultural argument, fatally affecting the rigor of his
analysis. This is especially true during World War II, where he is seen often
to speak of "an 'Atlantic Union' of Western Civilization ... the most
powerful association on earth" (Coudenhove-Kalergi, The Future of
Europe and America).
Another aspect marking Pan-Europa as a product well in line with literature
of the organic, bourgeois-conservative, Germanic tradition is that, as we have seen
above, it defines "European" as being explicitly Christian and resolutely
anti-Communist.22 At the very least, European culture is said to be proudly
"distinct from the Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, and Confucian cultures of Asia"
(29).23 There are unpleasant echoes of Samuel
Huntington's "clash of cultures" theory here which cannot be ignored,
and upon which a secular European Union as has existed since 1959 cannot be
successfully built in the long term. And, as we have seen above,
Coudenhove-Kalergi is not shy in employing this imagined Christian community to
bolster his claims that all non-Orthodox European nations should be unified.
This, together with his Eurocentric predilections with regard to the development of
world cultures, makes his repeated religious-political references to a "European
cultural mission" (48) predictable if not defensible.
For a variety of reasons and with widely differing motives, a considerable number
of German intellectuals have long held a united Europe as that "object of
longing" referred to in Coudenhove-Kalergi's text, as Lützeler's
anthologies well illustrate. Yet as in previous centuries, Pan-Europa
eventually became only one of many competing roadmaps
to peace on the European continent in the 20th century. In the postwar years,
appeals to shared cultural ties lost pride of place to geopolitical and
economic definitions of Europe based on Cold War influences. Yet several
prescient diagnoses of European malaise, political impotence, and struggles
against national cultural superiority in the early 1900s remain valid today.
His work not only anticipates the contemporary debates over whether Turkey and
Russia belong in a united Europe and whether explicit references to religion
should be included in the new EU constitution, but also laments the lack of a
unified European cultural space and a functioning European government. At the
same time, one can appreciate the exemplary interwar effort to imagine a more
inclusive definition of what "Europe" should encompass and the high
degree to which Coudenhove-Kalergi demands these nations should be integrated.
For the historian, Pan-Europa demonstrates how far European nations have
moved towards equality and respect
for different cultures within Europe, however defined. It likewise outlines the
artificial limits and continued dangers of an exclusive focus on the imagined
benefits of these (Western) European traditions, cultures, and histories. These
dialectical oppositions serve to illuminate how long this "object of
longing" has remained elusive, and how this elusiveness has inspired many
German intellectuals such as Count Coudenhove-Kalergi to keep trying to attain
it.
Notes
1 First published in English as Pan-Europe in 1926.
2 This term is borrowed from Paul Michael Lützeler, whose anthologies
of European literary essays are the few sources where one can find Pan-Europe
mentioned within a literary-historical framework. See especially his Europa: Analysen
und Visionen der Romantiker for a more complete definition of the term.
3 Even very sympathetic recent works on Coudenhove-Kalergi and the
Pan-Europe movement come to similar conclusions regarding
Coudenhove's practical effects in the postwar period, no matter how glowingly
they describe the Count as interwar visionary. See Conze, Dészy, and
Ziegerhofer-Prettenthaler.
4 It is perhaps no coincidence that these historians, many of whose nations
joined the European Union in 2004, would investigate an all-too-rare German work which
traced and celebrated their common European cultural heritage.
5 Certainly, the arguments
contained in Perpetual Peace were
eventually meant to apply universally: i.e., they were not limited strictly to
European nations and peoples. Still, it is commonly understood that Europe
would be the region of the world in which they would first be expected to come
close to productive realization.
6 Here, one could cite other
"classic" works in addition to Perpetual Peace. These include
Christianity; or Europe (1798) by Novalis, Europe and America (1820) by
Conrad von Schmidt-Phiseldek, The Present European State System
(1864) by Julius Fröbel, and Thomas Mann's Achtung Europe (1938), among others.
7 A comprehensive list of prominent
Europeans who supported the movement inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi in the
interwar years cannot be presented in the space provided here. Nonetheless,
persons who deserve mention include the German banker Max Warburg, the Czech
politicians Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Benes, Leo Amery and Winston Churchill
from the UK, President Woodrow Wilson, Russian President Alexander Kerensky,
and Aristide Briand, Alexis Léger and Yvon Delbos from France (see Coudenhove-Kalergi,
Pan-Europa 1922 bis 1966 59-66).
8 See Dézsy for a more exhaustive
list of correspondents, as well as the story of how the chests containing
significant numbers of his stored letters disappeared without a trace on the
ocean passage to America after the Count's exile from Europe.
9 Although Coudenhove-Kalergi was a
proud Austrian, he found little initial success in his home country. It was in
Germany (with the Social Democratic Party) and France that his ideas first took
political root and it was their authors who were first inspired to promote his
plans in their prose. A typical German conservative trope was therefore to
brand him "Austrian" first, and then "French" if that
failed: an ironic move, to be sure, as many of these conservatives were
themselves proponents of a united Germany-Austria.
10 The most articulate and thorough
expression of this Franco-German antagonism in the Weimar era can doubtless be
found in Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918). Mann would
refute many of these elitist-nationalist views in Von deutscher Republik (1926),
later fully supporting the Pan-European movement, as his brother Heinrich had from its
inception. Yet such "conversions" were rare in the 1920s.
11 Winston Churchill, "The
Tragedy of Europe: Speech to the Academic Youth." September 19, 1946.
12 National bureaus of the Pan-European Union
still exist in Europe, serving mainly as social networks for nobility and
upwardly mobile persons. With the technocratic aspects of integration having
established ideological hegemony, the Pan-European Union today sees its role as
to stress the importance of attending to cultural aspects of European
integration. Its current Honorary Chairman is Otto von Habsburg, the grandson
of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor. See
http://www.paneuropa.org.
13 Quotes from Pan-Europe in this article are taken from the
first English edition (1926).
14 This indictment of all major European intellectuals, as Coudenhove-Kalergi
formulates it, is all the more negative from a European cultural perspective as it has been
six years since the armistice (see Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa 1922 bis 1966 42).
15 Even non-nationalist authors such
as Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann preferred Goethe to Dostoevsky when
searching for literary representatives of the "European spirit."
16 For example, one can contrast
Coudenhove-Kalergi's generally hopeful view of disarmament in arguing for
trust-building steps with the Soviets on the one hand with Konrad Adenauer's
dismissive response to the Stalin Note in 1952 on the other.
17 See, for example, the aforementioned Reflections of a Non-Political Man
for intellectual positions Coudenhove-Kalergi was combating here.
18 In the 1926 English translation, this sentence reads "The natural
revolution...." Yet in the original German, this sentence begins with
"Die nationale Revolution...." This deviation from the source text fails to
capture the highly organic imagery of the passage. Coudenhove-Kalergi's cunning
rhetoric in this passage is further illustrated by his use of the word Physiognomie,
perhaps misleadingly translated as "structure" in English editions.
19 The affinities between this plan
and such postwar European policies as the Single European Act, the Schengen
Agreement and the introduction of the Euro are obvious. Note here the
intellectual foundations being laid for the ERASMUS and SOKRATES student
exchange programs as well.
20 Representative works of this genre include those of Carl Schmitt
(1888-1985), Othmar Spann (1878-1950), and Jakob Baxa (1895-1979), among others.
21 Note the use of the word "culture" in the singular.
22 This aspect, along with his overt
praise of capitalism, led the prominent Weimar intellectual Kurt Hiller, along
with other leftist-oriented thinkers, to break with Coudenhove (see
Coudenhove-Kalergi, "Kurt Hiller contra Coudenhove. Zwei offene
Briefe").
23 It will be remembered
that the Count was half Japanese. Whether the roots of his division of the
non-European world into distinct, possibly inferior, cultural spheres lie
therefore in his personal history or are born of geopolitical considerations is
a matter for additional research. Many of Coudenhove-Kalergi's literary
contemporaries including Hesse and Mann were fascinated by many aspects of the
Orient, and tracing his intellectual debts to those authors could be an
additional fruitful avenue of inquiry.
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Daniel C. Villanueva is Assistant Professor of German and affiliated faculty member of
the Honors College at the University of Nevada -- Las Vegas. He teaches language courses,
seminars on modern German and Austrian culture, business German, and translation. Research
interests include German and Austrian political culture and language pedagogy.
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