Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi - The Philosophical Founder of The European Union

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In the turbulent period following the First World War the young Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union, offering a vision of peaceful, democratic unity for Europe, with no borders, a common currency, and a single passport. His political congresses in Vienna, Berlin, and Basel attracted thousands from the intelligentsia and the cultural elite, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud, who wanted a United States of Europe brought together by consent. The Count’s commitment to this cooperative ideal infuriated Adolf Hitler, who referred to him as a “cosmopolitan bastard” in Mein Kampf.

Communists and nationalists, xenophobes and populists alike hated the Count and his political mission. When the Nazis annexed Austria, the Count and his wife, the famous actress Ida Roland, narrowly escaped the Gestapo. He fled to the United States, where he helped shape American policy for postwar Europe. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s profile was such that he served as the basis for the fictional resistance hero Victor Laszlo in the film Casablanca.

A brilliant networker, the Count guided many European leaders, notably advising Winston Churchill before his 1946 Zürich speech on Europe. A friend to both Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Charles de Gaulle, Coudenhove-Kalergi was personally invited to the High Mass in Rheims Cathedral in 1961 to celebrate Franco-German reconciliation. A provocative visionary for Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi thought and acted in terms of continents, not countries.

For the Count, the United States of Europe was the answer to the challenges of communist Russia and capitalist America. Indeed, he launched his Pan-European Union thirty years before Jean Monnet set up the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the European Union. Timely and captivating, Martyn Bond’s biography offers an opportunity to explore a remarkable life and revisit the impetus and origins of a unified Europe.

Wikipedia:

Coudenhove-Kalergi is recognized as the founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe. His intellectual influences ranged from Immanuel Kant, Rudolf Kjellén and Oswald Spengler to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In politics, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Fourteen Points made by Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918 and pacifist initiatives of Kurt Hiller. In December 1921, he joined the Masonic lodge “Humanitas” in Vienna. According to Stephen Dorril, in 1922, he co-founded[citation needed] the Pan-European Union (PEU), as “the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia.” In 1923, he published a manifesto entitled Pan-Europa, each copy containing a membership form which invited the reader to become a member of the Pan-Europa movement. He favored social democracy as an improvement on “the feudal aristocracy of the sword” but his ambition was to create a conservative society that superseded democracy with “the social aristocracy of the spirit.” European freemason lodges supported his movement, including the lodge Humanitas. Pan-Europa was translated into the languages of European countries (excluding Italian, which edition was not published at that time), the constructed language Occidental and a multitude of other languages, except for Russian.

His original vision was for a world divided into only five states: a United States of Europe that would link continental countries with French and Italian possessions in Africa; a Pan-American Union encompassing North and South Americas; the British Commonwealth circling the globe; the USSR spanning Eurasia; and a Pan-Asian Union whereby Japan and China would control most of the Pacific. To him, the only hope for a Europe devastated by war was to federate along lines that the Hungarian-born Romanian Aurel Popovici and others had proposed for the dissolved multinational Empire of Austria-Hungary. According to Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europe would encompass and extend a more flexible and more competitive Austria-Hungary, with English serving as the world language, spoken by everyone in addition to their native tongue. He believed that individualism and socialism would learn to cooperate instead of compete, and urged that capitalism and communism cross-fertilise each other just as the Protestant Reformation had spurred the Catholic Church to regenerate itself.

. . .His Pan-Europeanism earned vivid loathing from Adolf Hitler, who excoriated its pacifism and mechanical economism and belittled its founder as “a bastard.” Hitler’s view of Coudenhove-Kalergi was that the “rootless, cosmopolitan, and elitist half-breed” was going to repeat the historical mistakes of Coudenhove ancestors who had served the House of Habsburg. In 1928, Hitler wrote about his political opponent in his Zweites Buch, describing him as “Aller welts bastarden (commonplace bastard) Coudenhove”.

Hitler argued in his 1928 Secret Book that they are unfit for the future defense of Europe against America. As America fills its North American lebensraum, “the natural activist urge that is peculiar to young nations will turn outward.” But then “a pacifist-democratic Pan-European hodgepodge state” would not be able to oppose the United States, as it is “according to the conception of that commonplace bastard, Coudenhove-Kalergi…”

. . .Coudenhove-Kalergi published his work Crusade for Paneurope in 1944. His appeal for the unification of Europe enjoyed some support from Winston Churchill, Allen Dulles, and “Wild Bill” Donovan. After the announcement of the Atlantic Charter on 14 August 1941, he composed a memorandum entitled “Austria’s Independence in the light of the Atlantic Charter” and sent it to Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his position statement, Coudenhove-Kalergi took up the goals of the charter and recommended himself as head of government in exile. Both Churchill and Roosevelt distanced themselves from this document. From 1942 until his return to France in 1945, he taught at the New York University, which appointed him professor of history in 1944. At the same university Professor Ludwig von Mises studied currency problems for Coudenhove-Kalergi’s movement.

. . .In his 1925 book Practical Idealism, Coudenhove-Kalergi theorized that the historical development causing the death of European hereditary social classes would lead to an all-encompassing race of the future made up of “Eurasian-Negroid[s]“, would replace “the diversity of peoples” and “[t]oday’s races and classes” with a “diversity of individuals”.

Video Title: A talk by Martyn Bond and Claudia Hamill about his new biography on Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. Source: Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Date Published: July 29, 2021. Description:

As part of the Churchill History Lecture Series, this online event features Martyn Bond and Claudia Hamill talking with Allen Packwood about this extraordinary man who was a pioneer for European unification and whom Hitler colourfully called a ‘cosmopolitan bastard’