By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Coudenhove-Kalergi And The Pan-Europa Movement
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. He
spoke 18 languages (including Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese).
Initially, Tomáš Masaryk
introduced Coudenhove-Kalergi (RCK)
to Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, who supported
RCK’s argument. More importantly, Beneš gave him a Czechoslovak diplomatic
passport to facilitate his future travel around the continent to propagate his
political program of closer integration.
Like many Wilsonians,
RCK had initially been enthusiastic about the proposal to create the League of
Nations. But, in how it was set up, he could see the problems that prevented it
from working as intended. He claimed it was ‘neither truly global nor
European’. Bolshevik Russia defeated Germany, for instance, and states from
farther afield, such as Argentina and Mexico, were not members. Even the United
States had failed to join because its Senate blocked ratification of its
accession, a dramatic first step along the road of American isolationism.
RCK recounted how, historically,
European powers filled the vacuum left by the collapse of earlier Asian empires.
Pan-Europa in 1923, listing the five Pan
regions of the world: Paneuropa, Panamerika, East-Asia, the Russian Federation, and the
British Federation.
But the First World War had changed all
that. Europe, he argued, was no longer the political, economic, or cultural
power center of a world that, by 1918, had ‘emancipated itself’ from European
control. European states now ran the risk of becoming the object of other
states’ policies rather than independent actors on the world stage, with the
United States chairing deliberations over the fate of Europe at the Paris Peace Conference a powerful
reminder of Europe’s weakness.
As for relations with Russia,
however, Coudenhove-Kalergi envisaged
Pan-Europa as a mutual defense pact against the Soviet Union, the very opposite
of the good ties Pan-Europa would pursue with England. ‘The single greatest
goal of all Europeans, of whatever party or nation,’ he wrote, ‘should be to
prevent a Russian invasion.’ He expanded this, explaining that Russia’s
relation to Europe was like Macedonia’s relation to ancient Greece: both a
source of strength and of danger, able to exploit disunity, to divide and to
conquer. To prevent any further rapprochement between Germany and Russia –
foreshadowed in the Treaty of Rapallo, signed in 1922, the year before he wrote
Pan-Europa – RCK argued that ‘it depends on the powers in the West, above all
on France, whether Germany is saved for Europe – or is pushed away from
Europe.’
At that time, RCK’s vision of Pan-Europa
included twenty-six states and seven small territories: the Saar, Danzig,
Fiume, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, and Andorra. Together, they covered
roughly 5 million square kilometers and contained about 300 million people. If
their dependent colonies were included, the figures rose to 26 million square
kilometers and 431 million people, making Pan-Europa almost as large and as
populous as the British Empire at that time and double the population of
Pan-America, his contemporary inspirational model. This alliance, he declared,
could be independent in raw materials and in food if only European states would
cooperate instead of competing with each other. Pan-Europa, together with its
colonies, would become one of the five great powers of the world.
Europe’s political and cultural elite attended
Pan-Europa’s first Congress in Vienna in 1926.
Just after Mussolini had come to power
in Italy – Hitler attracted the attention of the US embassy in Berlin. The ambassador
sent Truman Smith, the assistant military attaché, to Munich to report on this
man and his new party. ‘Less a political party than a popular movement,’ said
Smith confidentially, ‘the Bavarian counterpart to the Italian fascist.’ He
attended party events and asked for an interview with Hitler himself. Hitler
gave him more than two hours. ‘His ability to influence a popular assembly is
uncanny,’ wrote Smith.
That diplomatic report was not for
public consumption, and at that stage, RCK was unaware of Hitler. Indeed, he
had made even less of a public name for himself than RCK, who already enjoyed a
reputation among a small circle of intellectuals and politicians as an
independent thinker and writer.
Like RCK, Hitler had received his first
political impressions before the war in Austria, watching the struggle between
the political parties. Hitler had large ambitions for his little party, and he
now put into practice the lessons he had learned in Vienna in Munich. RCK might
aim to influence a select group of potentially important people already close
to power, but Hitler planned to lead a mass movement and seize political power
himself.
RCK had clarified his ideas on state and
society, published several articles in small-circulation political magazines,
supported Hiller’s manifesto of the Council of Working Intellectuals in Berlin,
and had put his name about with several editors of political journals looking
for intelligent contributions on contemporary politics. He had also married and
ensured his emotional happiness, with his financial position secured
essentially through his wife’s fees as an actress. He had also tried twice to
persuade a political leader of influence – in Czechoslovakia and in Italy – to
take up his political ideas on Europe. Still, he had failed on both occasions,
as he had when he tried to interest the League of Nations in regional reform.
RCK was also working out his basic political
ideas but from a different angle. He was an intellectual, and the target
audience for RCK’s articles was other politically engaged German-speaking
intellectuals and the political class he and they could influence. RCK also had
a high opinion of the value of propaganda – on one occasion noting that all his
writing was ‘propaganda for the cause’ – but he brought to his cause all the
sophisticated baggage of historical study and cultural tolerance that his
upbringing and academic training had inculcated in him. While RCK appealed to
the intelligent reader’s reason and understanding, Hitler reached for the heart
and guts, stirring the man's basic emotions in the street. The one built from
the top down and the other from the bottom up.
Winston Churchill, quoting RCK, spoke at the
University of Zürich in September 1946.
In the articles that he published in the
early 1920s, RCK posed several pertinent and exciting political questions. Was
Vienna better suited than Geneva to be the seat of the League of Nations? Was
it up to the Czechs or the Germans to improve relations between the two
communities in the new Czechoslovak Republic? Was democracy in any country
worth striving for if it meant those with the deepest pockets could buy public
opinion? However, his voice was just one among many speaking to the
intelligentsia, one vote in an unorganized campaign to inform and persuade
those who held political power in various countries. He was in no position to
make decisions. He had no party or organization with which to put solutions
into effect. He put ideas into circulation, trying to influence political
opinion: the state of mind of the political class across a continent. On the
other hand, Hitler initially attempted to gain political power in just one
city, Munich, as a stepping-stone to a national goal: force in one country, Germany.
RCK had attempted to persuade political
leaders in Prague and Rome and the international secretariat of the League in
Geneva to adopt his ideas, and he had failed on each occasion. Since no
suitable leader would take on the political role he was offering, RCK concluded
that he would have to set up and lead his embryonic Pan-Europa Movement
himself. His wife encouraged him in this. Idel had always seen him as a young
man with a great future. She sensed he could make his mark as a political
leader with her support and encouragement. She knew he needed a higher public
profile than simply as an academic commentator on political affairs within a
small circle to do that with any hope of success. He needed a more critical
status and a full-fledged political program. He needed to establish his
political movement – something between an international party and a Europe-wide
think-tank. And he needed to write a comprehensive manifesto that laid out his
ideas on Europe and clearly. That would be Pan-Europa. Together, she was sure
that they could succeed.
Count Coudenhove-Kalergi
1948 with his first wife, the actrice Ida Roland.
Exile In America
RCK’s wartime exile in America started
with a mystery. The mystery lies in pages missing from his 1940 diary, but a
triumph was with his 1948 meeting with President Truman. Between the two, there
lay eight years of political lobbying and social networking, combined with
academic research, teaching, and writing, all for the cause of rebuilding a
more united Europe after the war was won. It played against a background of
RCK’s concern for his financial position and public image in the new country
that he, Idel, and Erika had made their home in exile. It also
unrolled This activity against the vast canvas of world affairs.
President Roosevelt led the United States from neutrality to engagement in the
war, and President Truman led it to victory.
RCK kept meticulous diaries for
appointments and meetings over the years, noting telephone numbers and
addresses, often entered in pencil in his neat, sloping writing. Sometimes,
they included financial calculations and exchange rates and occasionally
impressive contact lists of the great and the good. In America, his new diaries
were given to him each year as presents by his stepdaughter, Erika,
affectionately inscribed to her father with love and best wishes for success in
his endeavors.
In only one of these many diaries were
any pages removed. Four pages were torn out from RCK’s 1940 diary, running from
Thursday, 1 August, to Sunday, 4 August, the two days before he boarded the
Yankee Clipper with Idel and Erika, the day they took off, and the day they
arrived in the United States. The previous entries on Wednesday, 31 July, note
the telephone number for the Clipper office, a reference to a possible meeting
with the UK ambassador on 4 August (a discussion which never took place), and
the cost of three small purchases. There is also a mention of ‘Pension Belge,’
perhaps the small hotel in Lisbon where the family stayed for the final night
before boarding the Clipper. Those four pages are the only ones missing from
all RCK’s surviving diaries.
What could he have noted there that he
did not want anyone else to see? A brief confession, his political testament,
or personal will? Perhaps notes of a conversation, instructions, or comments on
the past, pointers for the future? Did those four pages have contact details
that RCK later realized were sensitive and, hence, torn out and destroyed? And
when did he remove them? Before or after he arrived in America? Unresolved but
intriguing questions lead to some speculation.
The flight from Lisbon to New York took
just over twenty-four hours, with the Yankee Clipper touching down in the
Azores and Bermuda, giving the three refugees plenty of opportunity to talk to
other passengers and the crew en route. The
United States was then setting up its secret services at the very beginning,
and passengers on flights to and from Lisbon in 1940 would have been of
interest. Service in the Pan-Am crew was later used as cover for Office of Special Services (OSS)
members, directly attached to the president’s office. But what specific
interest might the OSS, or its informal predecessor, have had in contacting RCK
on that flight?
He had already met and corresponded with
several American ambassadors in Europe. Among his friends, he counted William
Bullitt, the volatile American ambassador in Paris. His American contacts –
probably Murray Butler and the Carnegie Endowment – had found the large sums
required for the family’s financial bonds and the Clipper fares, and an
approach on board this flight to discuss what he might do for the United States
in return seems an unnecessarily clumsy move. In any case, the secretary of
state had agreed that visas should be issued to the family, so why should the
OSS pay any further attention, at least until they were safely in America?
William C. Bullitt was appointed by
President Roosevelt in 1933 as the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union. His
initially sympathetic view of the Soviet Union soured on better acquaintance as
a diplomat. His Spring Ball of the Full Moon, attended by four hundred guests
in April 1935, was the most exotic and lavish party ever held at the
ambassadorial residence and is described by Mikhail Bulgakov in his novel The
Master and Margarita. Bullitt became US ambassador in Paris in October 1936 and
was in daily telephone contact with President Roosevelt. Disobeying
instructions, however, he remained in Paris to stay near the action when the Nazis
invaded France, even though the French government fell back to Bordeaux.
The Yankee Clipper landed in the Hudson
at La Guardia on the very day that Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo
across the Atlantic, made a significant speech in Chicago to support American
neutrality in the war in Europe. After they cleared customs and immigration
formalities, the family was driven to the Edgehill Inn in Riverdale, a northern
suburb, where they lodged for a few weeks. It was a pleasant, detached,
colonial-style hotel with extensive grounds, modest rather than grand,
comfortable rather than luxurious.
It would still be some months before the
OSS was officially formed. Still, William
Donovan, its prospective director, was in touch with members of the New
York ‘Century Group’ of leading East Coast grandees who sympathized with
Britain and were consistently anti-Nazi. Some of them and Murray Butler may
have visited RCK to discuss his analysis of the European political situation.
As far as he could, RCK had planned the
family’s emigration carefully, even though, when they left Geneva in June, he
had no idea whether it would be in Britain or America that they would
eventually settle or, indeed, if they would arrive anywhere safe. He had made
financial arrangements with his bank in Zürich and took as much cash in
pesetas, escudos, pounds, and dollars as he safely could. Now, it was a
question of securing a steady income, enough to service a high rent (if indeed
the rent was not paid by one or more of his supporters), maintain his wife and
daughter, and continue his independent life as a political commentator and
writer.
Talk To The Council For Foreign Relations
For RCK’s family, daily life in New York
differed significantly from Vienna. It is hard to imagine that he could support
himself financially in this new situation without help from Masonic sources,
the Carnegie Foundation, individuals from the Century Group, or even directly
from the OSS or the BIS. The family’s apartment was several miles north of
Manhattan, and no Bentley was in the New York garage. Since neither RCK nor
Idel drove, they had to rely on taxis – it is most unlikely they ever used
public transport – for the thirty-minute journey downtown. Their domestic
arrangements had to be cut back from what they had been used to in Vienna, but
Idel had some domestic help in running their new home, though probably not more
than one live-in housekeeper. They could not afford – nor could the apartment
accommodate – the four staff they had employed in Vienna.Council
for Foreign Relations
Otto Tolischus,
a well-known foreign correspondent, who had been expelled from Berlin in March
that year and was now back in America in an editorial position covering
European affairs for the New York Times, reported to readers that RCK had
arrived in town and would soon lecture at the Council for Foreign Relations
(CFR), New York’s most influential think-tank.
RCK spoke after dinner about the nature
of the war in Europe, how the geopolitical scene would look after the defeat of
Germany, and just what options the United States now had. The Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact had given Germany a free hand to invade Western Europe.
Still, RCK homed in on what he saw as the inevitable future conflict that would
break out between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, uneasy bedfellows who would
soon become deadly enemies.4 Stephen Duggan took notes and, according to his
summary, RCK declared: ‘In the present war there are not two fronts but three:
Western Civilization, Nazism and Bolshevism. All three are different, and all
hate one another. One of them will make the new Europe. Irrespective of whoever
wins, Europe will be unified.’ He added that because of its incompatibility
with the two other options, the United States would be forced to ally with
Britain as the representative of Western Civilization: ‘Only if Britain wins
can the United States affect the future of Europe.’
RCK predicted that, after the war,
Britain’s relationship with the continent would also be changed. ‘Aviation has
made isolation impossible for Britain. If she wins the war, she must rule
Europe; if she doesn’t, Germany or Russia will. The conclusion is unavoidable
that Britain must rule Europe, and she can only rule by making a European federation
of free states. No other form is possible. In advising her on federation, no
country is better qualified to render assistance than the United States.’ His
advice to his audience of East Coast Americans interested in international
affairs was clear: ‘You not only should help Britain, you must do so if your
voice is to amount to anything in the world.’
RCK’s lecture was delivered long before
the breakdown of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and more than a year
before America entered the war, but he was convinced that Germany would lose.
‘But who,’ he asked, ‘will win? Russia or Britain?’ He argued that if it were a
long war, it would be Stalin because universal misery and poverty would win
friends for Russia among the working classes. If Britain was going to win, he
argued, she must win quickly, and ‘whether she can win quickly depends largely
on the United States.’ Britain and Germany could bomb each
others’ factories, he argued, but ‘Britain alone can import planes from
the United States.’
The extent of US support for Great
Britain was a politically sensitive issue in 1940. The America First Committee
was set up that autumn nominally to ensure US neutrality. Still, the effect of
keeping the United States out of the war was to lend support to Nazi Germany.5
Public opinion polls suggested that the potential involvement of the United
States in the war against Germany was highly unpopular, with barely 10 percent
in favor. However, RCK argued that the United States had to take sides and
should come down clearly on the side of Great Britain. ‘The United States,’ he
argued, ‘can give material help to Britain and moral help to Europe. The vision
of a United States should be made plain to the people of Europe. The lower
classes place their hopes in Stalin as the only one who can help them. The
United States must give them an alternative.’ His American listeners, he
argued, must become ‘the champion of European liberty just as Russia is the
champion of European equality.’
The Ideological Struggle That Would Follow
RCK outlined the ideological struggle
that would follow the end of the current conflict: ‘Although federation will
mean peace in Europe,’ he said, ‘I envisage very little peace between the
federated bloc and Russia. Between these two, religious wars will be comparable
to those between Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. There will be
alternate periods of war and peace, but generally, it will be a period of war.’
In the longer term, he expected the world to be divided into four significant
groups – the Americas, Europe, Russia, and the Far East. Before the war, he had
foreseen five, but now the British Empire was no longer an independent power
center. Britain’s fate was, in his view, embedded with Europe. Ideologically
and culturally, that was also true for America, even though she was
geographically more distant. Since the Americas ‘have nothing in common with
Russia and the Far East, you can only unite with Europe.’
Questioned at the end of his
presentation about the likely bitterness of other nations towards Germany when
the war was over, he replied that, based on his experience of the 1920s, he
expected any sense of bitterness to disappear quickly. Building the political
and economic federation mattered most, and he listed the essential steps.
The first step is to unify all aviation
under the control of Britain. Then there must be a customs union. Civil rights
must be the same all over Europe. All [European] countries must have parallel
rights in Africa. Last, there must be some political council of the unified
Europe. It will not resemble the old League of Nations – which resembled your
Articles of Confederation – but a new League with strong powers of the type
your second constitution gave the central government.
Launching his vision of Pan-Europa to
the United States foreign-policy establishment was awkward. The United States
was still neutral in the war, and RCK was arguing that the threat to the values
of the West came not only from National Socialism but also from Bolshevism. He
was convinced that Nazism would die with the defeat of Germany. Still,
Bolshevism would spread from Russia across the globe to become a universal
challenge to the civilization that the West had inherited from Greece Rome, and
Christianity. RCK questioned whether Russia, not yet a belligerent, could still
be regarded as a part of Europe. Should it not rather be seen now as a Eurasian
power in its own right?
His audience was fully aware that Hitler
and Stalin were still linked in their non-aggression pact, and one of the
official aims of American foreign policy was to ensure that this did not lead
to any closer alignment of the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany. That meant
weaning Moscow away from its close ties with Berlin – being kind to Russia, not
critical, not opposing or frustrating the Kremlin.
Planning for a post-war Europe united
against Soviet Russia was not on the American agenda. In 1940, several
Americans found it hard to distinguish between the theoretical notion of a
united Europe and the practical reality of Europe already unified by Hitler by
force of arms. A unified Europe, without Hitler, seemed a utopian idea removed
from the realities of practical politics.’ RCK set about disabusing his
audience, firmly anchoring the notion of a united Europe in the context of
post-war reconstruction that would follow an Allied victory in the war and
necessarily in opposition to the Soviet Union.
Many in his mainly East Coast audience
were close to the traditional American isolationist position, preferring
neutrality and letting the Europeans sort themselves out. Others could agree
that the United States should support Great Britain against Nazi Germany. But
very few were prepared to take the next step, to realize that America’s long-term
struggle would be against Bolshevik ideology and a potential Russian adversary.
For many in his audience, to see the future as RCK presented it – a three-way
geopolitical struggle for dominance between the West (the United States and
Europe together), the Soviet Union, and the rising powers.
But one principle they all could share
was that peace needed to be ensured through military might, and the most modern
form of military power was overwhelming air superiority. The United States had
a technological advantage in this area and should exploit it massively, argued
RCK. That would empower the United States to dictate the terms of peace to the
rest of the world, and incidentally, he indicated, would be good for business,
employment, and profits. But RCK’s call for an American rearmament program of
two hundred thousand warplanes per year to impose global hegemony with a
Western air force of a million machines sounded excessive even to the military
hawks. After all, the total material losses of the Luftwaffe and the RAF in the
Battle of Britain, which seemed at the time to be enormous, had been no more
than five thousand planes.
The Democratasion Process To
Be Attempted A New
Much had changed in the European theatre
since his earlier attempts to be heard at the head of the US Administration.
Hitler had unleashed Operation Barbarossa against Russia in June the previous
year, and the United States was now doing all it could to strengthen its Soviet
ally. But, undiplomatically, RCK did not disguise his viscerally anti-Bolshevist
views, outlining his vision of a post-war world of antagonistic blocs – a
transatlantic democratic alliance, Bolshevik Russia, and despotic Asia. This
was the opposite of the Administration’s vision of friendly cooperation within
a global framework of the United Nations. The interview went so badly that
Henry Wallace declined to receive RCK for a second meeting. RCK had now spoilt
relations at the highest level, and the US government was not interested in
listening to his ideas.
Half-Japanese and half-Austrian, RCK,
remarkably, was not interned in the months following America’s entry into the
war. Although he also makes no comment on this in his writings, he must have
had friends, possibly in the OSS, who saw that he was not even called in for questioning
but was regarded as a ‘good’ European in exile. There appears to have been no
official concern about his Asiatic or Austrian roots in America.
RCK had always regarded his Swiss home
as simply a country retreat, a temporary convenience, which had proved helpful
as a haven when he fled from Vienna. He was now a refugee with a French
passport in America. Where was his natural home? There was no government in
exile whose authority he could acknowledge or which he could join. To whom did
he owe allegiance? If asked, he would have answered ‘Europe.’ Still, in the
eyes of the Allied governments, he had no locus other than that of an
independent author from Central Europe, temporarily employed as a lecturer at
New York University. He was a citizen of nowhere.
In the end, his project would not be
completed during his lifetime. The democratic process he proposed was always
disturbed by violence, but it was being attempted anew and, in time, developed
further.
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