Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi

His first book, Pan-Europa, was published in 1923 and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement, which held its first Congress in 1926 in Vienna. In 1927, Aristide Briand was elected honorary president of the Pan-Europa movement. Public figures who attended Pan-Europa congresses included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud.^[3]

Coudenhove-Kalergi was the first recipient of the

Coudenhove-Kalergi was the second son of Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1859–1906), an Austro-Hungarian count and diplomat. His mother was Mitsuko Aoyama (1874–1941). His father, who spoke sixteen languages and embraced travel as the only means of prolonging life yet died in his forties, had prematurely abandoned a career in the Austrian diplomatic service that took him to Athens, Constantinople, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, to devote himself to study and writing.

Coudenhove-Kalergi's parents met when his mother helped the Austro-Hungarian diplomat after he fell off a horse while riding in Japan. In commenting on their union, Whittaker Chambers described the future originator of Pan-Europe as "practically a Pan-European organization himself." He elaborated: "The Coudenhoves were a wealthy Flemish family that fled to Austria during the French Revolution. The Kalergis were a wealthy Greek family from Crete. The line has been further crossed with Poles, Norwegians, Balts, French and Germans".^[6] The Kalergis family roots claim their descent from Byzantine royalty via Venetian aristocracy, connecting with the Phokas imperial dynasty. In 1300, Coudenhove-Kalergi's ancestor Alexios Phokas-Kalergis signed the treaty that made Crete a dominion of Venice.

During his childhood, Coudenhove-Kalergi's mother had read aloud to him Momotarō and other Japanese fairy tales.^[7]

Youth and education

Coudenhove-Kalergi spent his adolescence on

Coudenhove-Kalergi is recognized as the founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe. His intellectual influences ranged from

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.^[18]

Coudenhove-Kalergi attempted to enlist prominent European politicians in his pan-European cause. He offered the presidency of the Austrian branch of the Pan-European Union to

Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as the Anthem of Europe in 1929,^[4] which he later proposed in 1955 as Anthem for the European Union. In 1930, he proposed a Europe Day in May^[4] and in 1932 he proposed to celebrate every 17 May, the anniversary of Aristide Briand's "Memorandum" being published in 1930.^[20]

His Pan-Europeanism earned vivid loathing from

Nazis considered the Pan-European Union to be under the control of

suppressed by Nazis.^[29] Coudenhove-Kalergi had already left the Viennese Masonic Lodge in 1926 to avoid the criticism that occurred at that time of the relationship between the Pan-European movement and Freemasonry.^{[citation needed}

]

After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, Coudenhove-Kalergi fled to Czechoslovakia, and thence to France. As France fell to Germany in 1940, he escaped to the United States by way of Switzerland and Portugal. When he passed a few days after the successful escape to the United States, he listened to the radio announcing the possibility that he had died.^[30] During World War II, he continued his call for the unification of Europe along the Paris-London axis. His wartime politics and adventures served as the real life basis for fictional Resistance hero Victor Laszlo, the Paul Henreid character in Casablanca.^{[citation needed]}

Coudenhove-Kalergi published his work Crusade for Paneurope in 1944. His appeal for the unification of Europe enjoyed some support from

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.^[32]

On 22 July 1943, Nazis deprived him of his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Vienna, with the racist argument, that as a "Jew" he was not considered worthy of an academic degree from a German university ("eines akademischen Grades einer deutschen Hochschule unwürdig") – even though he was not Jewish nor was his family Jewish. His doctorate degree was only regranted on 15 May 1955, six years after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany and thus ten years after the end of Nazism.^[33]

The end of the

In the 1960s, Coudenhove-Kalergi urged Austria to pursue "an active policy of peace", as a "fight against the

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".^[38][verify] This quotation has been misrepresented by conspiracy theorists as Coudenhove-Kalergi specifically intending to mix races.

Coudenhove-Kalergi also believed that a united Europe was desirable for cultural and racial reasons. In his pamphlet Paneuropa Kalergi wrote that "Pan-Europe should be the political expression of the European cultural community", that all the "linguistic nations" of Europe would be gathered into "one single racial nation", just as the Pan-Hellenic movement brought the people of Greece into "one great nation for Hellenics".^[39]

In an interview in the first Pan-European Congress in 1926, he expressed the support of Jews by the pan-European movement and the benefits to Jews with the elimination of racial hatred and economic rivalry brought by the United States of Europe.^[40]

In 1932, Coudenhove-Kalergi composed, and had his publishing house reissue, a preface for a new edition of his father

In Japan, the Pan-European idea also influenced a journalist Yoshinori Maeda, the president of NHK. He became a pioneer of Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union with the image of Pan-Europa that he read in his student days.^[43]

In 1953 Ichirō Hatoyama established Yuai Youth Association (later Yuai Association), the fraternal association as the successor of fraternity that Coudenhove-Kalergi mentioned in The Totalitarian State Against Man. The Japanese word yūai (友愛) has several meanings but especially the word used by Hatoyama means fraternity and in German brüderlichkeit.^[44] It can also be considered equivalent to "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" (Brotherhood), the motto of the French Republic. An educator Kaoru Hatoyama became the second president of the association after her husband Ichirō, the first president, died in 1959.^{[citation needed]}

In 1967 Coudenhove-Kalergi was awarded the Kajima Peace Award, and was invited to Japan by Morinosuke Kajima as the president of Kajima Institute of International Peace, Yoshinori Maeda as the president of NHK, and Kaoru Hatoyama as the president of Yuai Youth Association. Together with his second wife Alexandra in a wheelchair,

Coudenhove-Kalergi visited Japan again at the invitation of the Soka Gakkai in October 1970.[49] During his stay, he and Daisaku Ikeda conducted a formal dialogue over the course of several days, a total of more than 12 hours of which was recorded for posterity.^[50] He also visited the campus of Soka University in Tokyo, which was under construction at that time.^[49]

Two decades later, in 1990, Ikeda proposed that Coudenhove-Kalergi's favorite song, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," be regularly performed at major Soka Gakkai meetings. It was reported in Japan that this was one cause of the split between the Soka Gakkai and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) from Nichiren Shoshu in 1991, as the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood objected to the song's "Christian origins."^{[citation needed]}

Death

According to a masonic report,^{[clarification needed]} Coudenhove-Kalergi died of a stroke.^[51] His secretary, however, indicated that Coudenhove-Kalergi possibly committed suicide. In the memoir his secretary wrote, she said his death had been kept secret so as not to disappoint those who considered him to be the great visionary of European integration.^[52] Coudenhove-Kalergi was the head of the Pan-European Union until his death. Otto von Habsburg succeeded him as president.^{[citation needed]}

Coudenhove-Kalergi is buried at

Coudenhove-Kalergi was married three times: to Ida Roland (1881–1951), to Alexandra Gräfin von Tiele-Winckler (1896–1968), and to Melanie Benatzky-Hoffmann (1909–1983). His known children were Ida's daughter Erika and Alexandra's son Alexander, both of whom were his step-children.^[55]

Publications

• Adel (1922)
• Ethik und Hyperethik (1922); Héros ou Saint (1929), the Cahiers Internationaux series of the publisher Les Editions Rieder, 7, Place Saint-Sulpice, Paris, translated from German into French by Marcel Beaufils
• Pan-Europa (1923), Paneuropa Verlag; Pan-Europe (1926), Knopf, abridged, with an introduction by Nicholas Murray Butler
• Krise der Weltanschauung (1923)
• Pazifismus (1924)
• Deutschlands Europäische Sendung. Ein Gespräch (1924)
• Praktischer Idealismus (1925). English translation.
• Kampf um Paneuropa (3 Volumes, 1925–28)
• Held oder Heiliger (1927)
• Brüning – Hitler: Revision der Bündnispolitik (1931), Paneuropa-Verlag
• Stalin & Co. (1931)
• Gebote des Lebens (1931)
• Los vom Materialismus! (1931)
• La lutte pour l'Europe (1931)
• Revolution durch Technik (1932)
• Gegen die Phrase vom jüdischen Schädling (1933), co-authored with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod
• Europa erwacht! (1934)
• Judenhaß von heute: Graf H. Coudenhofe-Kalergi. Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (1935)
• Europa ohne Elend: Ausgewählte Reden (1936)
• Judenhaß! (1937)
• Totaler Staat – Totaler Mensch (1937), Paneuropa Verlag; Totaler Mensch – Totaler Staat (1939), Herold Verlag; Totaler Mensch – Totaler Staat (1965), Herold Verlag
• The Totalitarian State Against Man, with an introduction by Wickham Steed, translated by Sir Andrew Mc Fadyean (1938), London, Frederick Muller Ltd.
• Europe Must Unite, translated by Sir Andrew Mc Fadyean (1939)
• Die europäische Mission der Frau (1940)
• Crusade for Pan-Europe (1943)
• Kampf um Europa (1949)
• Ida Roland: In Memoriam (1951)
• Die Europäische Nation (1953)
• Der Gentleman (1953)
• An Idea Conquers the World, with a preface by Winston S. Churchill (1953)
• Vom Ewigen Krieg zum Großen Frieden (1956)
• Eine Idee erobert Europa (1958)
• From War to Peace (1959)
• Ein Leben für Europa (1966)
• Für die Revolution der Brüderlichkeit (1968), Zurich, Verlag Die Waage
• Bi no Kuni – Nihon heno Kikyou (美の国 – 日本への帰郷), translated into Japanese by Morinosuke Kajima (1968), Tokyo, Kajima Institute Publishing
• Weltmacht Europa (1971)
• Bunmei – Nishi to Higashi (文明 – 西と東), interview collection with Daisaku Ikeda (1972), Tokyo, publication branch of Sankei Shimbun Co., Ltd.

Awards and honors

• 1950: Charlemagne Prize
• 1954: Officer of the Legion of Honour^[56]
• 1962: Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver with Star of the Republic of Austria
• 1965: Sonning Prize
• 1966: Europäischer Karlspreis der Sudetendeutschen Landsmannschaft
• 1967: Order of the Sacred Treasure, 1st class of Japan
• 1967: Kajima Peace Award^[47]
• 1972: Konrad Adenauer Prize
• 1972: Knight Commander's Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany^[57][58]
• Dr. h. c. of Nihon University^[56]
• Ehrenbürgerwürde der Universität Frankfurt a. M.^[59]
• Nobel Peace Prize nominee in 59 nominations, known by 1971 so far.^[60] 1972 is still concealed.

See also

• Federal Europe
• Ideas of European unity before 1945
• Pan-European nationalism
• Founding fathers of the European Union

References

Notes