‘My father dreamt of a Slavic kingdom under the reign of the Habsburgs. He dreamt of a monarchy of Austrians, Hungarians, and Slavs. […] In his will, I was named heir to his ideas. It was not for nothing that I had been christened Franz Ferdinand’.Footnote 1 These were the words of the protagonist of Joseph Roth’s novel, Capuchin Vault. It continued the story of the Trotta family, familiar to readers from Roth’s bestselling Radetzkymarsch in which the decline of Habsburg glory was explored from the perspective of three generations of a Slovenian family whose ennoblement dated back to one ancestor’s accidental role in saving the life of Franz Josef of Habsburg at the Battle of Solferino. In the sequel, written in the Netherlands during Roth’s exile from Vienna after the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Roth follows the decline of the von Trottas to the next two generations. Witnesses to the end of the Habsburg Empire in the revolution of 1918, Roth’s characters capture the atmosphere of loss that many former Habsburg subjects felt after the disintegration of the empire.
Returning from Siberia after having been taken prisoner on the eastern front, Franz Ferdinand von Trotta finds the Habsburg Empire in ruins. The horses in the Prater are dying of old age, as all the others ‘had been slaughtered, and people made sausages of them’. The back yards of the old army are filled with ‘parts of broken carriages’, which had previously served to transport such eminent personages as the ‘Tchirskys, the Pallavicinis, the Sternbergs, the Esterhazys, the Dietrichsteins, and the Trauttmannsdorffs’.Footnote 2 These old families were now threatened by entrepreneurial new elites from the Prussian North and the Baltic lands, represented by the character of Kurt von Stettenheim, ‘a mix between an international tennis star and a territorially fixed manor house owner, with a slight touch of Ocean Lloyd’.Footnote 3
Roth’s protagonist, Franz Ferdinand, gradually loses all he had: his wife, who runs off with a female artist; his mother, who dies on the day the revolution breaks out in Vienna in 1918; his money, lost to a Brandenburg entrepreneur; and, above all, ‘his’ monarchy. The proclamation of the idea of popular (self-)government, a Volksregierung, sounds to him like words of ‘a beloved woman’ telling him that ‘she did not need me in the least and could just sleep with herself’.Footnote 4 He still has his son, but chooses to send him off to live with a friend in Paris. Even though the line of the von Trottas survives for the time being, their lives appear to be meaningless in the absence of the Habsburgs. Alone, Franz Ferdinand von Trotta has only one consolation: he goes to the Capuchin Vault to pay tribute to the Habsburg emperors. But his mourning is troubled by the fact that his own father had been what he calls a ‘loyal deserter’, a critic of Emperor Franz Josef, the Habsburgs’ last successful emperor before the short final reign of Karl I, from 1916 to 1918. Observing a guard marching up and down in front of the vault, von Trotta, the ‘heir’, asks himself: ‘What is left here to guard? The sarcophagi? The memory? The history?’Footnote 5
These questions were Joseph Roth’s own; he drank himself to death only one year after the publication of this work. Another Habsburg author and a friend of Roth’s from Vienna, Stefan Zweig, followed suit in 1942, committing double suicide with his wife in Brazil, a country he had praised as the land of the future. The city where he died, Petropolis, was the place that, less than one hundred years earlier, had inspired Habsburg Archduke Maximilian to write one of his travel poems lamenting modernity: ‘For where the white man moves, his forest dries up,/ and his woman and child will be engulfed by a chain of sin’.Footnote 6 Like Roth, Zweig had contributed to the charisma of declining monarchs during his exile. One of his bestsellers was the biography of Marie Antoinette; her assassination in the wake of the French Revolution had provided an example of how to end the Old Regime, but also an inspiration to critics of revolutionary radicalism like Edmund Burke.Footnote 7 Like Roth, Zweig saw Prussia, Britain, and Russia as threats to the Habsburg Empire. As two Catholic dynasties, the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, were fighting their last battles against the ‘heretic people’ of an England ‘reaching for empire’, against the ‘Protestant Markgraviate of Brandenburg’ seeking an all-mighty kingdom, and ‘half-pagan Russia, preparing to stretch its sphere of power immeasurably’, they, who used to control most of Europe, grew ‘tired and weary’.Footnote 8 The symbolic victim who, for Zweig, stands in for the sympathetic view of the Old Regime is Marie Antoinette, married off in accordance with a practice that used to work for Europe’s old dynasties. Austria was still marrying, as the old proverb had it, but it was no longer happy. Marie Antoinette, Zweig claimed, was actually a woman of average character. There was neither anything heroic nor contemptible about her; she became heroic by virtue of dying a martyr’s death at the hands of the revolution. In fact, as émigrés like Zweig and Roth saw it, the Habsburg Empire as a whole, after 1918, had suffered the fate of Marie Antoinette. Another contemporary, Robert Musil, painted the empire’s most lasting satirical image as Kakania, an eminently average empire, tucked between Britain’s overseas dominions and Russia’s internal model of colonization.
Roth’s protagonist calls his father ‘Franz Josef’s loyal deserter’; he is the descendant of a man who deserted an imperial dynasty whose empire no longer exists. His inheritance was a utopian ideal of reform for an empire that was no longer recoverable. When the Social Democrats came to power in Austria in 1918, outlawing the Habsburgs and all noble titles, the reform ideas of a generation of Habsburg elites were marooned in a past world whose preservation was no longer politically viable. To understand the ideals of these 1920s and 1930s idealists, it is important to know, just as with Franz Ferdinand von Trotta, the ideas they had inherited.
In the interwar years, Vienna became the capital of the Pan-European movement, a supra-party lobbying group associated with Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.Footnote 9 A graduate of the prestigious Theresianum school in Vienna where Austria’s imperial elite used to be trained, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi found no empire to serve as a diplomat, which would have been his father’s natural choice for him. Instead, in 1922, he presented a suggestion for a Pan-European Union with Austria at its heart.Footnote 10 The proposed federation endorsed Europe’s economic unity, multicultural diversity, and the use of Africa as a resource colony. He was opposed both to the idea of a German–Austrian Union and to the idea of an accommodation of German nobles within the existing post-Versailles boundaries. Instead, he wanted a multi-ethnic empire under Austrian leadership, whose political form was not necessarily monarchical. In the Austrian, German, and Czech press, Coudenhove-Kalergi criticized both Austrian-German parochialism in Bohemia and Austria, and Czech nationalism.
Franz Josef’s loyal deserters and their heirs
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire four years later created options for counterfactual thinking based on a dramatic break from a past whose continuity had been provided by the Habsburg dynasty. The heritage collection assembled by successive generations of Habsburgs, and the newly institutionalized form of the multinational museum created by Franz Ferdinand and his entourage, now themselves became specimen about the Habsburgs Habsburg artefacts as much as about their purported objects.
Among the ideological debris left behind were the utopian reform plans for a multinational empire. Utopic thinking is usually associated with progressivist historical epochs such as the Enlightenment. But, as we see here, utopic and Enlightenment thinking also have their place in the context of an otherwise melancholic discourse of decline. As Karl Popper put it, ‘the breakdown of the Austrian Empire and the aftermath of the First World War […] destroyed the world in which I had grown up’, making restoration and reform the two central tasks of his generation.Footnote 11 Imperialism imposed by an educated elite was seen by these liberal internationalists as a lesser evil than narrow-minded tribalism.Footnote 12
Like Roth’s Franz Ferdinand von Trotta, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was in many respects heir to his father’s ideas. He was critical of the conservative elements among the Habsburg aristocracy. The core conceit of the Paneuropa idea was the prospect of a United States of Europe to occupy a position of geopolitical balance with Asia, the Soviet Union, ‘Pan-America’ and the British Empire. It was a ‘programme of foreign policy’ which invited ‘leaders from all European parties’, ranging from conservatives to socialists, democrats, and liberals. Questions of the internal constitutions of states, he argued, were secondary to the overall goal of European unity, and thus Paneuropa welcomed ‘monarchies and republics, democracies and dictatorships’. It excluded only the ‘extreme nationalists’ and the ‘communists’, who were the ‘natural and irreconcilable enemies of the Paneuropa movement’.
Austria-Hungary provided many intellectual resources for rethinking social roles.Footnote 13 As diverse as any social network in that empire, the entourage of potential reformers around Franz Ferdinand, though most of them were elite administrators of high nobility, did not subscribe to any one ideology. Yet, in terms of the overall spectrum of political opinions in the empire, they shared a common interest – to promote the stability of a centrally organized empire rooted in loyalty to the Habsburg family. Preparing for his succession, Franz Ferdinand had surrounded himself with a circle that was to provide the foundation for his future reign. Many of these, he met during his world tour, and many had their main residence outside of the Austrian crown lands, especially in Bohemia (where Franz Ferdinand himself resided), Poland, Hungary, or Croatia. In the narrower circle of Franz Ferdinand’s supporters, we find such intellectuals as the moderate Baron Johann Heinrich von Chlumetzky, who, as a minister for agriculture in the imperial council in 1906, was instrumental in introducing such reforms as free elections with secret ballots.Footnote 14 Other supporters included the Romanian-born Baron Alfred von Koudelka, an admiral who had published travel notes on his journeys to America, the Croatian-born Emil Woinovich von Belobreska, and the Polish nobleman Theodor von Sosnosky, a historian.Footnote 15 Most of the aristocratic supporters had graduated from the Theresianum academy.
Among the non-noble reformers who put their hopes in Franz Ferdinand and were in turn supported by him was the Romanian scholar Aurel Popovici (1863–1917), who, in 1906, had published a proposal for the United States of Greater Austria in Leipzig.Footnote 16 In his model, the different ethno-cultural components of the Austro-Hungarian empire would be given greater national autonomy in matters of culture and education; in exchange, they would remain bound to Greater Austria by means of a federal union. In total, this union would comprise fifteen quasi-independent units defined by language. Each of the fifteen states in the union would receive votes in the legislative chamber of the imperial government.
Popovici’s theory was influenced by three models: Swiss federalism, as defended by the legal theorist Johann Caspar Bluntschli; the constitutional model of the United States; and Habsburg imperialism.Footnote 17 His explicit motivation in writing the work, aside from being a call to reject Magyarization, was to ensure the ‘future of the Habsburg empire’.Footnote 18 His book also exhibited an outspoken anti-Semitism, opening with a call to resist what he called the ‘Jewish liberal press’ represented by Viennese newspapers such as Neue Freie Presse and Die Zeit, but also provincial papers like the Bukowinaer Post. He demanded a new idea of a ‘greater Austrian state’, deliberately using the words ‘union’ and ‘empire’ interchangeably. While his anti-Magyar position, underlining pragmatic uses of nationalism for the sake of strengthening the central power of the Habsburg dynasty, was characteristic of Franz Fredinand’s entourage. Popovici combined his defence of multinational imperial reform with an anti-Semitic critique on the Jewish press of the Habsburg Empire.
By contrast, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s father, the Orientalist scholar and diplomat Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, also a believer in Franz Ferdinand’s reforms, sought to deconstruct the foundations of Habsburg anti-Semitism. What anti-Semites call the ‘Jewish press’ he argued, was in fact the empire’s national press; the Jewish press, by contrast, remained largely unknown to the general reader. As a speaker of Hebrew, among allegedly eighteen other languages, Coudenhove was familiar with such publications as Esperanza (published in Smyrna), Haam, published in Kolomea, Habazaleth in Jerusalem, Hasaron in Lemberg, the Corriere Israelito from Trieste, and El progreso, published in Hebrew in Vienna. In mentioning these newspapers, Coudenhove reminded his readers that the project of Europe was rooted in a commitment to the Enlightenment, which had always built on a series of micro-Enlightenments in each community for itself, one of which was the Jewish Haskalah movement. Coudenhove was drawing on an already established discourse of multicultural patriotism in the Habsburg lands, represented by a writer one generation younger, the novelist Leopold Sacher-Masoch. In Don Juan of Colomea (1866), he ‘recovers’ a link between the distant frontier town of Colomea with the Roman Empire by claiming that the word was related to ‘Colonia’ and that the small town had grown ‘on the soil of a Roman plantation settlement’.Footnote 19 Coudenhove-Kalergi senior shared Sacher-Masoch’s philo-Semitism and philo-Slavism, as well as the desire to preserve the peculiarity of the multicultural empire against the opposing, nationalizing tendencies coming from Prussia.Footnote 20 Aside from promoting reform within the old nobility, one of the Enlightenments he was particularly interested in was the Jewish one, which began with the reforms initiated by Joseph II. The supporters of Franz Ferdinand were military men of conservative views but they were also proponents of a vernacular sort of internationalism,
Another activity associated with Franz Ferdinand was a renewed interest in heritage preservation. In 1906, the Archduke had become the official head of the empire’s military department, which was also responsible for the maintenance of buildings and works of art. He personally invested much into maintaining the regional peculiarities of ‘his’ lands, such as the wooden churches of Galicia, for example, which residents themselves were quite willing to replace with more durable stone buildings, but which he placed under national protection.Footnote 21 He also considerably expanded the state’s art collection, not least through his world travels, during which he collected specimens of art and natural history from various cultures, creating one of the first ethnographic museums. The purpose of these activities was to maintain control over the existing cultural diversity of the empire so that the dynasty and its cultural institutions could retain a monopoly over the overarching unity bridging the diverse cultures. Franz Ferdinand, in other words, prepared the institutions that would enable the Habsburg dynasty to give a form of identity for a multitude of people who had previously thought of themselves merely as Franz Josef’s ‘peoples’.Footnote 22
The company of travellers who had accompanied Franz Ferdinand on his grand tour went on to witness further developments in Europe on the various fronts. Carl Pietzner became the Habsburg court photographer in 1914, in time to document the war on the eastern front.Footnote 23 Prince Kinsky served in the Austro-Hungarian army on the Russian front, but died of a nervous disorder shortly upon his return in 1919. Count Pronáy lived to see the rise of Béla Kún’s communist regime in Hungary that year and joined the White Guards under Miklós Horthy who, in turn, had accompanied Franz Ferdinand’s uncle, Emperor Franz Josef, on his world tour as a young man, eventually falling during the Soviet siege of Budapest in 1944.
Lessons in internal colonization from Russia, Britain, and Japan
Despite their conservatism in terms of cultural values and their critical attitudes towards rival empires such as Russia and Britain, Franz Ferdinand and his circle were also influenced by their experience of Russian, British, and non-European government reforms. On his world tour, for example, Franz Ferdinand met the Austro-Hungarian consul Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, a linguist of Dutch-Cretan origin, in Japan. Fluent in Japanese, among eighteen other, mostly Asiatic, languages, he had impressed Franz Ferdinand by translating a toast by Prince Arisugawa, a highly placed member of the imperial staff, honouring the Emperor.Footnote 24 Consul Coudenhove had been in Japan for two years by this point and, in 1893, married the young daughter of a well-to-do merchant, Mitsuko Aoyama.
Like some of Emperor Meiji’s consultants, Coudenhove was an advocate of reform; back in Austria, he had published a critical pamphlet suggesting that the nobility abandon its old practice of duelling, and had defended his doctoral dissertation with a critique of anti-Semitism.Footnote 25 The impact of his experience with the Meiji reforms and their abolition of the Samurai privileges found an unlikely interpretation in the context of Austrian society.Footnote 26 Coudenhove used his knowledge of the abolition of the Samurai practice of seppuku when in Japan to advocate the reform of duelling rights in Europe.
This was the third decade of the period now known as the Meiji Restoration, when a section of Japan’s governing elite actively sought to integrate Japan into world politics. In 1872–73, a Japanese committee of scientists and civil servants led by Prince Iwakura Tomomi inspected the practices of government and education in North America, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Sweden, and Italy.Footnote 27 The committee’s historian, Kume Kunitake, marvelled at the technological progress Europe had made in the forty years since he had last seen it, with its railways, telegraphs, and completely new fashions. Of the German states, however, it was Prussia and not Austria-Hungary that most impressed the delegation.Footnote 28
In taking up his father’s vision for an internal reform of the nobility by arguing for the foundation of a new aristocracy – a kind of composite elite – to be formed by mixing tradition and new talent, a ‘serendipitous aristocracy’, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi belonged to a minority in his generation. This was even more striking considering that, as he added, the vehicle for this form of social eugenics would be ‘socialism, the movement which started with the abolition of the nobility, the levelling of humanity’, but would culminate in the ‘cultivation of the nobility, the differentiation of humanity’. From the ‘ruins of pseudo-aristocracy’ humanity will create a ‘real, new nobility’.Footnote 29 In the 1920s, he wanted a multi-ethnic empire under Austrian leadership, whose political form was not necessarily monarchical. In the Austrian, German, and Czech press, Coudenhove criticized both Austrian-German parochialism in Bohemia and Austria, and Czech nationalism.
The Paneuropa project, with branches throughout central and western Europe, and sponsorship from Europe’s best-known banks and industries, went through stages in which it was called an association and a movement and, from 1932 onwards, a European party in a non-existent European parliament. From the start, the Austrian government had offered Coudenhove a representative space for his lobbying office in the Vienna Hofburg, so that the movement was registered under the illustrious address of ‘Paneuropa, Hofburg, Wien’ until the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938.Footnote 30
The Paneuropa congresses were decorated by large portraits of great Europeans: Kant, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Napoleon, Dante, and others.Footnote 31 In one publication covering the event, a photograph of this pantheon was placed next to the portrait of Krishnamurthi, a living sage who was very popular in Germany at the time [Fig. 9].Footnote 32
The Pan-Europeanists’ architecture of public memory formed part of a quixotic palace of European memory.Footnote 33 It would be futile to attempt to reinsert some inherent logic according to which these very different intellectuals and their ideas of politics form a coherent montage of a European ideal. What we need is to understand how the invocation of these memory portraits on the walls of public buildings and private homes functioned in the social fabric of those who did ‘European civilization talk’ between the world wars, before it became ‘European civilization’ talk.
Coudenhove had shared and discussed his vision at London’s Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank, from as early as 1931, the year that the first Indian Congress met in India.Footnote 34 As the British Empire was gradually transforming itself into a commonwealth, Coudenhove and his Pan-European followers tried to make sense of continental Europe, whose empires had already begun to crumble. In place of imperial nostalgia, he presented to the world a rebranded idea of empire. His was not just a disenchanted, rational international order, as Wilson’s Presbyterian-influenced League of Nations had it. He proposed an emotional European patriotism with echoes of a Catholic and a Dantean ideal of a universal monarchy, with a pinch of Habsburg nostalgia.Footnote 35
Coudenhove fluctuated between a weaker notion of a federation of states (Staatenbund), as reflected in various wartime alliances like the Entente, and a stronger notion of a Bundesstaat, eventually preferring the latter.Footnote 36 Formally speaking, the Union was considered to be the natural successor of the Holy Roman Empire after the Napoleonic Wars; it was supposed to become a strengthened version of the Confederation of States established under the Congress of Vienna regulations of 1815. In the twentieth century, on the stage of international politics, the idea of a Union was juxtaposed with other supranational political organizations, such as the Soviet Union (which soon revealed its foreign political face as a revised Russian Empire), the ‘Pan-American’ Empire, and the British Empire and Commonwealth. Paneuropa was to be a macro-regional organization with world influence.
Its map presented this Pan-European territory as already existing. National boundaries within Europe, with the exception of Turkey, which was marked with a question mark, were not visually represented. In 1924, the Paneuropa programme demanded a ‘systematic exploration of the European economic colony of West Africa (French Africa, Libya, the Congo, Angola) as a European resource’.Footnote 37 Coudenhove’s aim, as he put it in 1934, was to turn Europe into a community of values, constituted by ‘Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian religion, the lifestyle of a true gentleman and the declaration of human rights’.Footnote 38 The question mark on Turkey was due to some of its territory belonging to Europe ‘despite’ its Muslim heritage, a conceptual problem for Coudenhove’s Christian conception of European identity.
Coudenhove believed that ‘Nietzsche’s Will to Power is where the foundational thoughts of fascist and Paneuropean politics stand side by side’.Footnote 39 Kant’s presence in his pantheon of Europeanists, along with that of Hugo Grotius as well as the 18th-century balance of power theorists (Mirabeau, Abbé de St. Pierre), was due to their endorsement of European unity as an abstract goal, though this in many ways fits uncomfortably both with Nietzsche’s ‘aristocratic radicalism’ and with the discourse of national sovereignty signalled by the presence of Giuseppe Mazzini on Paneuropa’s symbolic map.
Drawing on Giuseppe Mazzini’s Europe: Its Conditions and Prospects, Coudenhove picked up on the traditions of the Young Europe movement, which bridged nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The combination between the two principles was also the motivation behind including the Bohemian humanist Comenius. Coudenhove’s journal, Paneuropa, devoted a great deal of attention to publishing seminal texts in which European identity was discussed. Nietzsche’s Will to Power manuscriptsFootnote 40 were part of a reading list Coudenhove-Kalergi set for future Pan-Europeans, which also included Napoleon’s Political Testament,Footnote 41 as well as about a dozen or so other works by Dante, Comenius, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini.Footnote 42 At the opening of the first Pan-European Congress in 1924, Coudenhove’s wife Ida Roland recited Victor Hugo’s speech on European unification ‘in the service of propaganda for the Paneuropean idea’.Footnote 43
The symbol of the Paneuropa movement, a red cross against the yellow sun of Hellenic Greece, reveals the intellectual legacies to which Coudenhove imagined himself heir: what could be called the Christian tradition of geopolitical integration, historically framed from the Crusades, to the European unification models of Abbé St. Pierre, and to the Christian socialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Within this tradition, Freemasonry was an important sub-group; and indeed, Coudenhove himself regarded Enlightenment projects which themselves criticized Christian traditions as falling within the Christian trajectory. The intellectual background of masonic eclecticism merged neo-Hellenic ideals with Kantian rationalism as well as the German ideal of Bildung, the ideal of culture and education, together with more recent calls for German cultural unity and an imperial discourse. These strands of thought were invoked at Coudenhove’s first international Paneuropa Congress.
This genealogy of European unity as Coudenhove presented it was thus composed of several sometimes contradictory traditions: ideas of a Christian empire and monarchy; ideas of national liberation which were based on resistance to large dynasties; ideas of a balance of power and contrary ideas of economic integration by its critics; and the emphasis on charismatic political leadership and technology as features of modern political systems, against the neo-medievalism of some of his other beliefs. Coudenhove’s Christian–Hellenic baggage did not prevent him from speaking of Vienna as ‘the Mecca of the Paneuropean Union’.Footnote 44 In establishing this account of Paneuropa’s pedigree, Coudenhove not only marketed the noble ancestry of his own idea, but also sought to borrow authorities from other political movements. He reclaimed Kant and Grotius from Wilson and the liberal internationalists; Mazzini from the European nationalists such as Masaryk; and Victor Hugo from the social democrats. In drawing on a variety of authors, Coudenhove emphasized the inherently cosmopolitan background of the European ideal. The masonic eclecticism of his ideal of Europe was, interestingly, strongly reminiscent of the City of the Sun narrative by Tommaso de Campanella, whose depiction of this ideal city included references to Egyptian and Roman polytheism just as to Christianity, Islam, and fiction.
Britain, Coudenhove argued, had to be excluded for reasons of a global balance of power, while Paneuropa was to be modelled after what Coudenhove called ‘Pan-America’ both in its federal structure and its attitude to colonial resource. Coudenhove called for a revision of the Versailles agreement, especially with regard to the question of German (and Austrian) war guilt; a perpetual peace between all the European states; doing away with any customs and other economic borders and bringing about a unified currency; a joint army and fleet; a European limes on its eastern border and erosion of all inner European borders; a true guarantee of minority rights and the introduction of punishment for any propaganda of hate in the press; a Europeanization of education at schools; and a Pan-European constitution.Footnote 45 Paneuropa was thus based on an essentialist perspective on European identity, and yet demanded policies of identity construction through education and infrastructure.
This vision had particular appeal among the non-British subjects of the Commonwealth present at gatherings such as the meeting at Chatham House. One of them was Abdullah Yusuf Ali, a Muslim British Indian and Qu’ran scholar who had been instrumental in securing Indian support for the allied war effort in the First World War. What Churchill, Coudenhove, and Yusuf Ali had in common was the belief that empires had to be reformed but not destroyed, that it was possible to decolonize without losing the sense of empire. The making of this memory was a complex social process, which was driven by the intellectual communities of interwar Europe.Footnote 46
Coudenhove thought of the Paneuropa movement as supra-political and was happy to invite fascists and corporatists such as Benito Mussolini in Italy and Kurt Schuschnigg and Engelbert Dollfuß in Austria to patronize it. Despite this, he resisted the Nazis on account of their racial ideology and their pan-German treatment of Austria, and was in turn blacklisted by the Nazi party in 1933. The night of the Dollfuß murder, the Coudenhoves fled together with Dollfuß’s wife via Hungary and Switzerland to Italy, where Coudenhove-Kalergi notified ‘Mussolini through an Italian envoy’ that they would be ‘passing through Italy with Mrs Dollfuss and her children’. When Coudenhove looked back at his life up to this point, he concluded: ‘The world in which I had grown up has disappeared. The dynasty [the Habsburgs] which my ancestors had followed from Holland to Belgium, and from Belgium to Austria, was overthrown and disempowered. The influence of the nobility was broken. The new world was democratic, republican, socialist and pacifist’.Footnote 47 After the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, when Coudenhove was forced to flee Austria, the movement’s central idea of reviving a European multi-ethnic empire based in Vienna had evidently failed. In 1940, the Coudenhoves left Europe for New York.
While Joseph Roth’s hero Franz Ferdinand went to the Capuchin vault to mourn, Coudenhove chose a different path, first becoming a professor of history at New York’s Columbia University and then an activist advocate for Paneuropa, in Switzerland, where the Habsburgs’ history had begun. Obtaining a teaching position in history and politics at New York University, supported by the Carnegie Foundation, Coudenhove revived Paneuropa in exile by founding a Research Centre for European Reconstruction which hosted a Pan-European congress there in 1943, inviting other exiles from Europe.Footnote 48 Here, in 1977, Otto von Habsburg unveiled a monument commemorating Aurel Popovici’s (and Franz Ferdinand’s) work.
Personified cosmopolitanism
Coudenhove’s movement was characterized by a tendency to relate the more abstract genealogy of European unity to concrete historical personalities, as well as to a performance of his own cosmopolitan history. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s mother, Mitsuko Aoyama, came from a Japanese Buddhist family and had converted to Catholicism.Footnote 49 She was one of the first Japanese women of her status to marry a western man. Coudenhove’s wife, who became a lifelong champion of his ideas and co-manager of the project, was the Austrian Jewish actress Ida Roland.Footnote 50 Having to choose a country of citizenship after the revolution of 1918, he opted for a Czechoslovakian passport based on his place of residence, arguing that he was ‘a citizen of the Republic of Czechoslovakia without feeling a commonality of sentiment with this state, apart from my personal admiration for its president Masaryk. Because I belong to German Bohemia and grew up there, I do not [even] have command of my country’s official language’.Footnote 51
The Enlightenment roots of his father’s ideas were still visible in the junior Coudenhove’s plans. His letter of application to the Humanitas lodge, of which his father was already a member, shows the importance of his multi-continental heritage for Coudenhove’s political ideas: ‘Being children of a European and an Asian, thought in terms not of nations but of continents. […] Thus in our eyes Europe was always evidently unified – it was the land of our father’.Footnote 52 He saw himself as a ‘half Japanese child’ whose projects culminated in the ‘first successes of the work on European unification’.Footnote 53 ‘My father’, Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote in this motivational letter, was ‘a European with Flemish, Greek, Russian, Polish, German, and Norwegian noble blood’, whilst his mother was of ‘bourgeois Japanese’ origin. It was as ‘a consequence of this background’ that Coudenhove therefore lacked ‘any exclusive belonging to a nation [Volk], to a race’. He considered himself to belong to the ‘European cultural community and, in a narrower sense, to the German one, but not in the sense of some sort of nationalism’. For these reasons, Coudenhove could only describe his political identity as cosmopolitan and his social circles as stretching across all ‘social spheres and professions’.Footnote 54
Coudenhove’s first individual publications bore close resemblance to the moral ideals behind the political activity of the Freemasons, which, for the first time, had gained formal legal acceptance in the Austrian republic. His book Ethik und Hyperethik (1922) was reviewed favourably in the Wiener Freimaurer-Zeitung (1/3, 1922), a new organ that had begun operating since the legalization of Freemasonry. By mid-1925, the master of the Viennese lodge, Richard Schlesinger, sent a circular to the masters of the great lodges of the world asking them to support Coudenhove-Kalergi’s political projects.Footnote 55
A number of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s contacts also shared a background in Masonic thought. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s application to join the Viennese Freemasons was supported, among others, by the engineer and social philosopher Josef Popper-Lynkaeus and the legal theorist, and future Schmitt opponent, Hugo Heller.Footnote 56 Although Coudenhove was admitted to the lodge, his notion of propaganda and open publicity of political ideals did not fit comfortably with the historically subtle influence of Masonic thought in Europe. Even though the Freemasons themselves expanded their modes of influencing the public after 1918 by founding a newspaper, Coudenhove’s use of publicity was not welcome. After 1926, Coudenhove had grown disenchanted with the Masons. Nonetheless, he probably owed his positive connection with Masaryk and Beneš – with whom he disagreed on almost all matters of policy, from the debate over the customs union between Austria and Germany in 1931, which he endorsed and they dreaded, to the status of Germans in Czechoslovakia – to their shared Masonic heritage adding to their perspectives a touch of cosmopolitan elitism.
Coudenhove-Kalergi also shared his father’s critique of anti-Semitism, which he had edited prior to its publication.Footnote 57 His wife, the actress Ida Roland, was Jewish. Rather than socializing at the salons of high nobility, he instead joined his wife’s more socially mixed circles of writers, artists, and publishers, such as the salon of the Zsolnay family, a Jewish family whose regular visitors included writers like Arthur Schnitzler and Max Brod. Coudenhove’s cosmopolitan elitism was more in tune with the views of a cosmopolitan elite based in Vienna. The notion of ‘Heimat’, or home country, was seen in this circle as parochial, petit-bourgeois, primitive, anti-urban and anti-enlightenment, worthy only of the sharpest criticism.Footnote 58
Paneuropa was one of many geopolitical concepts of European power politics developed between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1920s. This territorial perspective on identity was encompassed by the emerging discipline of geopolitics, which was founded, in the wake of the work of nineteenth-century German liberals such as Alexander von Humboldt, by conservative political theorists in Sweden and Germany, including Johan Rudolf Kjellén, Friedrich Ratzel, and Karl Haushofer.Footnote 59 But Paneuropa was also responding to radical alternatives on the political Left. In June 1923, Leon Trotsky called for a European Socialist Federation under the name of ‘The United States of Europe’, which he saw as a way out of the fragments of the old empires and towards a future worker-led global order. As he put it then, ‘the moment British capitalism is overthrown the British Isles will enter as a welcome member into the European Federation’.Footnote 60 Working against the Soviet paradigm of the European Union as an instrument for a permanent world revolution, but also competing with the idea of a devolved British Commonwealth, Coudenhove-Kalergi selectively appropriated some elements of both rival projects of Pan-European influence. He took the pathos and rhetoric from Trotsky, but rested the economic and ideological foundations of his organizations on the capitalist and imperialist principles of the Commonwealth. His archive of designs for the Paneuropa Congress contains examples of a set of newspapers from the Soviet Union with their characteristic modernist aesthetic as models for Paneuropa, alongside models of stamps coming from a more traditional empire, the British [Fig. 10]. This particular newspaper featured headings such as the need for ‘mass organisations’ of the future, an idea which also appealed to Coudenhove.
Figure 10 Soviet models for Paneuropa. Newspaper Upakovshchik [‘The Packer’].
The aristocrat as a social mediator
‘This book is designed to awaken a great political movement slumbering within all peoples of Europe’, Coudenhove pronounced in the first edition of his Pan-European project.Footnote 61 He sent several thousand free copies of his first Paneuropa manifesto to politicians around the world. It was translated into English in 1926, French in 1927, then Czech, Croatian, Spanish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and Greek, but never into Russian or Italian.Footnote 62
Coudenhove-Kalergi’s strategy of influence was a more insistent and efficient propaganda effort than those of most of his contemporary theorists on European unity. It comprised a fee-paying and listed membership in his Paneuropa association; the publication of programmatic articles and opinion surveys in different press formats; the foundation of the journal Paneuropa, which was explicitly devoted to propaganda and hence did not publish any critical articles of itself; and his own private correspondence and communication network, to which he and his wife devoted considerable time. Coudenhove also organized a number of international congresses, typically held in one of the European capitals’ large hotels, bringing together politicians and industrialists.Footnote 63
Coudenhove kept in touch with a diversity of what could be described as leader personalities from the spheres of politics, art and literature, and industry, and he put considerable effort into putting them in touch with each other. Many of the politicians and other activists Coudenhove worked with were also proponents of an eclectic blend of political views. This model of Europe as an imperial power was supported particularly by intellectuals. Interestingly, while Paneuropa attracted mostly reconstructed conservative thinkers like German Chancellor, and later Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, in France and in central Europe, it proved attractive to socialists, such as French President Aristide Briand, and the former Dreyfusards, such as radical socialist French Foreign Minister Edouard Herriot and economic theorist Francis Delaisi.Footnote 64
In Britain, a new, non-governmental think tank which emerged after the First World War, Chatham House, was an important semi-public site where the imperial and colonial elites tested their ideas of imperial devolution in Europe and the world of the European empires. Coudenhove was invited as a guest from the Continent, and his ideas were widely received.Footnote 65 Here, Coudenhove was in dialogue with Muslim representatives of the Indian Congress and other intellectuals. In Britain, this strand of thought led to the emerging discipline of International Relations in Aberystwyth.Footnote 66 At the same time, among his followers in central and eastern Europe, Coudenhove gained prominence not only through his connections to Masaryk and the Polish Foreign Minister Zaleski but also through his lecture tours, including a trip to Warsaw in 1925.Footnote 67 Among the statesmen most influenced by the Pan-European project were Aristide Briand – whose collaboration with Coudenhove culminated in his announcement of a European federation in 1930 – Edvard Beneš, Gustav Stresemann, and Tomas Masaryk.
In its initial stages, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Paneuropa project was financed wholly from his private sources.Footnote 68 He quickly attracted enough attention to bring in other funding, mostly through elite circles of bankers, industrialists, and aristocrats. These comprised the Czech entrepreneur (and owner of the famous shoe production chain), Tomas Bata; the German industrialists Paul Silverberg, Carl Siemens, Adam Opel, Edmund Stinnes, Richard Gütermann, and Hermann Bücher (of the AEG, the German General Electricity Company); Carl Duisberg (of the Bayer corporation); a group of private German bankers; the Dutch industrialist N.V. Philips; and the Austrian Otto Böhler.Footnote 69 The US-American Carnegie Foundation for Peace, headed by Nicholas Murray Butler – who published a book on Paneuropa six years before Coudenhove’s first publication on the subject – also supported the project.Footnote 70 All of these figures, along with the governments of several European states, donated money in support of Pan-European’s activities.Footnote 71 In the later 1920s, the founders of the summer conference at Pontigny in France and the Mayrisch circle in Colpach, Luxembourg, were among Coudenhove’s social contacts.Footnote 72 These events were occasions for members of the industrial elites, especially of France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany, and Austria, to meet and discuss concerns as well as to invite writers and poets for entertainment and what could be described as public relations purposes. Coudenhove played a role as a mediator on these occasions. The nature of his connection with bankers and industrialists can be illustrated by taking a more detailed look at Coudenhove’s relationship with three of them: the Hamburg-based banker Max Warburg, heir to the European branch of the private bank M.M. Warburg & CO; the Stuttgart-based industrialist Robert Bosch; and the Luxemburg-based Emile Mayrisch.
Banker Max Warburg heard about Coudenhove’s enterprise through Baron Louis Rothschild and offered to support the project with 60,000 gold marks. In 1926, Warburg also sponsored the travel costs and royalties for speakers attending the Paneuropa Congress in Vienna.Footnote 73 Warburg was simultaneously financially supporting other similar movements, ranging from Die Deutsche Nation to the Nietzsche Archive, his brother’s Warburg Institute, and a number of other projects, seeking always to maximize his reach and influence. By the end of the 1920s, Warburg’s support for Paneuropa subsided, since, as he put it to Coudenhove, his concern was that the movement was not sufficiently pragmatic.
Bosch’s support came thanks to the mediation of another sponsor of Paneuropa, Richard Heilner (head of a German linoleum company in Wuerttemberg), who in 1927 recommended Coudenhove-Kalergi to Bosch.Footnote 74 Like Warburg, Robert Bosch was also investing in a number of rival political movements, including Karl Anton Rohan’s Kulturbund, but expressly demanded not to be listed as a public supporter. In fact, Bosch, who was a good friend of the British internationalist David Davies, was at first critical of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s exclusion of Britain from his proposed union, but was ultimately convinced and provided a link between Coudenhove-Kalergi and a number of British internationalists of the period. Bosch promised to contribute an annual sum of 2,500 Reichsmarks beginning in 1928, but in fact contributed even more until 1933. In 1930, he encouraged Coudenhove to found the ‘Society for the Promotion of the Paneuropean Cause’ (Pan-Europäische Förderungsgesellschaft) and took a seat on its directorial board. But Bosch withdrew his support immediately when the Nazi government officially blacklisted Paneuropa, significantly undermining Pan-European activities in Germany.
In addition to prominent figures representing individual banks and industry, like Warburg and Bosch, one of Coudenhove’s most successful networking connections was with the founder of the European steel cartel, the Luxemburg industrialist Emile Mayrisch. Mayrisch was the organizer of a series of summer conferences at Colpach, which brought together politicians, industrialists, and intellectuals, especially of German, Austrian, and French origin. He was one of the interwar proponents of the idea that European integration had to begin with a union of German and French interests on the Rhine and founded the German-French Committee of Studies to discuss this form of integration. Coudenhove participated in these meetings, on the one hand as a representative of his own Paneuropa movement, and on the other hand as a representative of Czechoslovakia, whose cause he endorsed internationally by supporting the work of Masaryk and Beneš.
One of Coudenhove’s chief strategies of getting prominent politicians on board was offering them honorary presidencies at Pan-European congresses, which he organized at regular intervals. The most important politicians to back Paneuropa in this way were Tomáš Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, Gustav Stresemann, Aristide Briand, Leo Amery, Zaleski, and Winston Churchill. Like Coudenhove, Beneš, and Masaryk, Zaleski joined the Freemasons during the First World War; he was a lecturer in Polish language and literature in London at the time, and was foreign minister of Poland between 1926 and 1932.Footnote 75
Apart from Briand, socialists such as Karl Renner were typically reluctant if not entirely negative towards Paneuropa. Nationalists such as Masaryk and Beneš, on the other hand, supported Coudenhove’s work as an international political mediator and themselves encouraged other politicians to join his movement.
In connection with the organization of a Pan-European economic forum in the late 1920s, Coudenhove corresponded with, among other prominent politicians with a background in industry, the French Minister of Labour, Louis Loucheur.Footnote 76 He was put in touch with Loucheur through his friend and Paneuropa supporter, Edvard Beneš.Footnote 77 Beneš wrote a note to the French conservative politician and technocrat Louis Loucheur (1872–1931), then the French finance minister, in which he offered to bring Coudenhove to his first meeting with Loucheur in 1925: ‘Dear Sir, the bearer of this letter is Mr Coudenhove-Kalergi, whose writings on Pan-Europe you surely know. I ask you to give him a favourable welcome and to provide him with the opportunity to lay out his pacifist ideals.’Footnote 78 This encounter then led to a series of meetings Coudenhove encouraged between German industrialists and Loucheur.Footnote 79 In the course of Coudenhove’s correspondence with Loucheur, Coudenhove brought the Luxemburg industrialist Emile Mayrisch (January 1928), Bücher (of the AEG, February 1928), figures from Rhenish industry, Karl von Siemens, the director of the Warburg Bank, Karl Melchior, Caro of the Stickstoffwerke, Richard Heilner of the Linoleum factories, and Count Kanitz, German food minister (May 1928), together in a series of meetings.
The year when Germany joined the League of Nations, 1926, was also fortuitous for the Pan-European union. By 1927, Briand had become the honorary president of the union, and Coudenhove’s activities in this regard contributed significantly to the success of the Young plan, which was effectively a revision of the Versailles treaty, brought about following talks between Briand and Stresemann in 1929. In the spirit of international agreement following Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand pact stabilizing especially German–French relations, symbolized by the constructive policies of Stresemann and Briand, Briand produced a ‘Sketch for a Paneuropean pact’, officially presented in public in May 1930.Footnote 80 Indeed, in 1930, which perhaps was the culmination of Coudenhove’s activities for a Pan-European Union, Briand announced his plan to work on a European Union of twenty-six states based on Coudenhove’s model.Footnote 81 However, most European governments gave this publication a cool reception at best.
Coudenhove was also seeking to win over liberal internationalists, particularly German and Austrian liberals and social democrats, French socialists, and British liberal internationalists, especially proponents of a Christian empire espoused by figures such as Winston Churchill, David Davies, and Alfred Zimmern. From its inception, Coudenhove sought to involve Austrian, German, and French socialists in his Paneuropa movement – at least, those who sought no connection with Moscow. His move to contact the Briand government in 1925, after the defeat of the conservative Poincare, was motivated by the desire to engage the ‘new leftist government’ at a moment in time when they were ‘searching for a new slogan to replace the nationalistic sentiments of revenge and resentment’.Footnote 82 With the same intentions, Coudenhove published a questionnaire to be sent to politicians of different European countries, but especially to internationalists like socialists or liberals, asking their opinion of a Pan-European Union. He then published their responses in his journal. The social democrat Karl Renner responded to the questionnaire by saying that the union was indeed ‘an economic and cultural necessity’.Footnote 83 However, a year later, Renner distanced himself from the movement due to its express anti-Bolshevism.Footnote 84
Similarly, in 1918, Coudenhove associated himself with the socialist Kurt Hiller, whose ‘Political Council of Spiritual Workers’ (Politischer Rat geistiger Arbeiter), founded in November 1918 in Munich, attracted people who were socialist but felt uncomfortable in a socialist party. What attracted Coudenhove to this project was neither its advocated pacifism nor its idea of council democracy, but rather the intellectual elitism that was reflected in Hiller’s programme of a ‘global intellectual logocracy’.Footnote 85 Hiller, like Renner, later abandoned the connection due to Coudenhove’s explicit anti-Bolshevism.Footnote 86
Among Coudenhove’s least successful attempts to influence government members was his attempt at a solution of the Polish corridor problem, which, being an outcome of the Versailles settlement, separated two parts of Prussia from each other.Footnote 87 Realizing that Poland found it unacceptable to renounce its only access to its main port, Gdynia, whilst Germany could not accept East Prussia being separated, Coudenhove proposed building a special corridor comprising a double railway line and an automobile route, which would connect Danzig viz. East Prussia with the rest of the ‘Reich territory’. This line could not be maintained without infringing on Polish transportation within the corridor, ‘it will have to pass subterraneously through a tunnel. A commission consisting of a representative of the German and the Polish government will coordinate all the conflicts resulting from this technical-juridical construction’.Footnote 88
One of the reasons for Coudenhove’s project coming to a halt around 1931 was that, within a short time span, a number of influential politicians and industrialists who had been supporting Coudenhove had died: Emile Mayrisch died in 1928, Gustav Stresemann in 1929, Louis Loucheur in 1931, and Aristide Briand in 1932.
From Paneuropa to the Cold War
Beyond Germany, Austria, and central Europe, Paneuropa had a lasting legacy in the Christian conservative circles of the Anglo-American elite. These included Leo Amery who, like Coudenhove-Kalergi, had an ethnically mixed and cosmopolitan background; his mother was of Hungarian-Jewish background, and he grew up in India. A co-author of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, Amery supported Paneuropa in the 1930s and also corresponded with Coudenhove concerning other matters, such as the problem of Europe’s Jewish population, which Coudenhove proposed to settle in Rhodesia.
But the most prominent British politician to have been influenced by Coudenhove was Winston Churchill, who in his speech on Europe’s need to unite praised the ‘work […] done upon this task by the exertions of the Pan-European Union which owes so much to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and which commended the services of the famous French patriot and statesman, Aristide Briand’. Just like Coudenhove, who presented the union of Swiss cantons as an example for Europe, Churchill concluded his call for European unification by declaring that Europe should be ‘as free and happy as Switzerland is today’. This was far from Max Weber’s demand for national greatness to avoid succumbing to Swissification.Footnote 89 But Coudenhove’s propaganda efforts eventually were absorbed in the Franco-British plans for European integration. One of the images of Coudenhove after the Second World War shows him seated next to Robert Schuman in the European parliament.
Figure 11 Coudenhove with Robert Schuman in 1956.
In the last decades of the Cold War, political theorists in the United States began to use the term ‘transnational’ to speak of social connections beyond the control of states, as well as to call ‘soft power’ the ability to get people to do what you want without coercing them through weapons.Footnote 90 Unlike the ‘hard’, institutional power of states, soft power achieves influence through gradual projects in culture and education. But these terms also apply remarkably well to the remains of Austria-Hungary, a multinational empire that had no overseas possessions but rather a multicultural, internal space of influence. In addition to regular forms of coercion, Austria-Hungary was notable for centuries for the cultural prowess of its dynasty, the Habsburgs. After the revolution, aristocratic privilege in Austria was abolished and the Habsburgs sent into exile; however, many elements of their established practice of ‘soft power’ and of social connections across the borders of their empire’s component states survived. It was on the foundations of these traditions, I submit, that a number of Viennese intellectuals began to develop new projects for European unity. In the absence of the ‘hard’ power of an imperial army, which in the course of the Great War had fragmented into its national components, they embraced the ‘soft’ power of culture and informal networking between intellectuals, bankers, and industrialists.Footnote 91
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