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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