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Post by Wayne Hall on Mar 14, 2023 14:54:00 GMT -5
Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
Martyn Bond
It is very rewarding to be back, at least virtually, to present to an interested audience what I discovered about Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, in part in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge. The count led an adventurous life in extraordinarily turbulent times. He lived in an age which invented geopolitics, a language which we are readopting nowadays, and his views of the geopolitics of the Continent were distinctive and far ahead of his time. He created, in political terms, the idea of Europe that we use today and he influenced Churchill both before, during and after the Second World War. This is the man who came of age politically in the 1920s in Vienna, the capital then of the small republic that had once been a mighty empire. Hitler condemned him as a cosmopolitan bastard, hence the title of this biography. That was in the third volume of "Mein Kampf" that Hitler wrote in1928. "Bastard?". Well yes, actually. Richard was the second son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and his geisha consort in Tokyo. Her two eldest children were only legitimized to secure an inheritance back in Bohemia. Otherwise it would have been a "Madame Butterfly" story. And "cosmopolitan"? Yes. As much an insult to the multicultural Vienna in which the Count lived as to his Jewish wife, Ida Roland. She was an internationally famous actress, Austria's answer to Sarah Bernhardt. The count also cast himself as a political alternative to the Nazis in the German-speaking world. That really worried Hitler.
This young, handsome, charismatic count was a competitor for public attention throughout the 1920s. They fought a battle of books. Two volumes by Hitler and three volumes of the count were published on alternate years. "Mein Kampf" by Hitler interleaved with "Mein Kampf um Europa". Both were mesmerizing orators in totally different styles. Both were well aware also of public relations and had clear views on what propaganda was about. But the two men stood for totally different philosophies and diametrically opposed policies. And they each knew who their enemy was. Seven or eight years ago I discovered the count's grave, quite by accident. I too have come as recently on detailed knowledge of the count as that. I was walking in the Bernese Oberland and I stumbled across a small private cemetery. It lay at the bottom of a long garden below a Swiss villa near Gstaad. The house, I discovered, had been the count's country retreat, the only home that he and his first wife ever owned. It was just a short walk from a small station on a single-track railway line that led., with easy connections, anywhere he wanted to go in Europe: east to Vienna, west to Geneva and Paris, north to Berlin and south to Rome. Here we are: the picture of the count's grave The count's gravestone, the second one there, circled in white, displays simply his name and his dates, with the inscription "Pioneer of the United States of Europe". He is buried there close to two of this three wives. His grave is now restored. It looks rather smart, but when I first saw it, it was neglected. I was intrigued and I looked in vain for a biography of this man in English. Apart from a couple of academic articles on his ideas there was nothing in English, only in French or in German. It was then that I realized I might as well write the biography myself.
And what an exciting story it has in fact turned out to be. The count indeed lived a long life. He was born before the end of the nineteenth century, in 1894, and died in 1972, the year that the UK joined the Common Market. He witnessed both world wars and fought in neither of them. Instead he wrote about them: their causes and their effects. In the Great War he was actually studying philosophy and history at the University of Vienna. As the Empire collapsed his reaction to it was not to think smaller, in nation states, but larger, in whole continents. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau did the very opposite at Versailles, creating new nation states out of the defeated empires. The count was concerned with Europe and its role in the world, even in that early beginning of his career. It was the outreach that the old empires had lost that concerned him, and that the British and French empires still had. In 1918 he was already a man with a geopolitical vision that was global. And in the Second World War, which he spent in America, the count was already warning of its postwar consequences: the rise of the Soviet Union as a superpower and the division of Europe.
Going back a long way, the count's father and his geisha wife had seven children in all and the count enjoyed an idyllic early childhood in their castle in Bohemia. But his father died when his son was just eleven years old and his intelligence, his multilingualism, his wide range of interests, his activities, all left a vivid and lasting impression on the young boy. He served as a fine and lasting example for him as he grew up.
When her husband died his Japanese widow sent the young boy, along with his brothers, to the most famous Viennese boarding school, the Theresianum. It was the Eton of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. He left school in the middle of 1913 and immediately met the most famous actress in Vienna at that time, Ida Roland. She was Jewish, 12 years older than the young count, already divorced and with a five-year-old daughter. Hardly, you would think, an immediate match. But he was starstruck and the coup de foudre was mutual. Despite fierce opposition from his traditional aristocratic family, the two of them were soon living together and formalised their marriage shortly after the outbreak of the war. His wife's circle of friends and acquaintances was much wider than the narrow social band in which the count had moved. She was also a pacifist, and war and peace were the immediate determining factors in their lives. Ida helped form her young husband's political outlook. There was another strand of thinking that appealed to this young intellectual count as well: the universal brotherhood of man. It was an ideal of the French Revolution now embedded in Masonic thinking. And Freemasonry was still technically outlawed in Austria until the end of the Empire, but its lodges opened from 1919 and made their mark within Viennese society. The count became a Mason, and the new movement fitted him like a glove. The count wove all these strands: pacifism, freemasonry, nostalgia for the lost international coherence of empire, into his vision of a new Europe that should arise from the ashes of the war and the errors of the Versailles settlement. He and his wife had been citizens of an empire that had now disappeared. Versailles made them citizens of Czechoslovakia but they lived in Vienna and in their eyes their new homeland was Europe. The Great War actually made them European patriots. The count conceived the political Europe including all the new nations given statehood by the Versailles settlement. Pan-Europa would include the whole continent, just as Pan-America enclosed a whole continent across the ocean. The leader of the peace movement at that time Hermann Fried had written in 1910 about Pan-America. Pan-regions were a fashionable idea at the time, part of the new jargon of geopolitics. Pan- had a positive connotation. And for the count it implied a single rule of law for the whole European continent and a supreme European court to settle disputes among all European states.
The count put down his ideas in a book which he published in October 1923, Pan-Europa. It was both a short political history of Europe and a manifesto for its future. Pan-Europa was a clarion call for the youth of Europe to make a new continent different from the old nationalisms of the past which had led to the war. The book became an immediate best-seller. Barely ten days after the book appeared, however, Hitler led the beer-hall putsch in Munich. The two events encapsulate the opposition between the two men and what they represented. represented. The count wanted to capture men's minds. Hitler wanted the street. The core of the count's message was that European should unite and become a federation. And then it would be strong again. Internal peace would deliver a world role to the Europeans that they had lost in the great civil war. This is the count's map of the world, divided into five parts: key power centres - Pan-America, fairly obvious on the left; Pan-Europa, the large black area, including all the colonies in Africa and elsewhere in Asia; the British Empire; the Soviet Union, and a fifth power which he called the amorphous Asian power. It was a simple and attractive message, and he presented it well. He quickly gained a continent-wide following, especially among the cultured elite. His first Pan-Europe congress in Vienna in 1926 brought over 2,000 cultural and political figures together from across the Continent.
And that was no small feat logistically in the days when you sent personal invitations by post or telegram. His contacts were so good that political figures from over twenty states came to Vienna that summer and the cultural elite could rub shoulders with Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, all supporters there discussing the future of Pan-Europa.
The count convinced many political leaders of his vision of a united Europe, including every Austrian chancellor in the 1920s and 30s. Thomas Garrigue Masaryk in Czechoslovakia, Gustav Stresemann in Germany and Aristide Briand in France. Briand, more than ten times French Prime Minister, and Minister of Foreign Affairs as well, took the Count's Pan-Europa plan to the League of Nations in 1929. There he called for a form of federal link between European states, a first step for what Pan-Europa should be. This step appeared to London as if the Europeans wanted to rival the British Empire. The U.K., perhaps predictably, kicked the proposal into the long grass. But circumstances also contrived to scupper the French plan anyway. It wasn't a good time for this sort of initiative. While the French were explaining their quasi-federal proposal to the member states of the League, Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, died. Wall Street crashed. The great depression started to bite. The Nazis became the second biggest party in the Reichstag. The night that Hitler came to power in 1933, the count was addressing a distinguished private discussion club in Berlin. He realized that Pan-Europa had no future wherever the Nazis ruled. His speech that night was, he said "the swansong of Pan-Europa in Germany. The Count fell back on Vienna, and there he made a pact with Chancellor Dollfuss to protect Austrian foreign interests, and in particular its independence from Germany. Pan-Europa wanted no Anschluss. Pan-Europa's offices were in the Hofburg next to the Chancellor's, and the count was closely identified with Austrofascism in the eyes of the opposition. Social Democrats condemned him therefore as a man of the Right, especially after the brief Austrian civil war in 1934. But four years later, when the Nazis annexed Vienna, he and his wife dramatically escaped the Gestapo. Within a few weeks he was in London, at Chatham House, speaking of his experiences and reporting on conditions in Central Europe. Over the next two years, until the fall of France, the Count was increasingly, incessantly, travelling. Based in Switzerland but frequently in London, Paris, Bruseels, the Hague and elsewhere, marshalling anti-Nazi sentiment everywhere. The networking count became the inspiration for the character of Victor Laszlo in "Casablanca", the Czech Resistance leader who knew all the anti-Nazis from Portugal to Poland. In June 1940 he had another dramatic escape across France, through Spain, to neutral Lisbon, and then away by plane to freedom, just like Victor Laszlo with Ingrid Bergman. But the Count's plane, the Yankee Clipper, offered luxury travel all the way to New York, where he spent the war years in exile. The film "Casablanca" was actually released on Thanksgiving Day in 1942 and Paul Henreid, who played the role of Victor Laszlo - his face is at the top on the left of the poster, not right at the top but the one just down from the man in the kepi - Bergman is next to him and Bogart with a gun in the front. Paul Henreid, the actor, knew the Coudenhove-Kalergi family very well. He had been at school with the Count's youngest brother, and many of the extras were also refugees from Germany and Austria and they all knew about the Count and his story.
And yet Coudenhove-Kalergi was not well-known in the U.K. He came to London on an information visit in 1925 and met the great and the good and tried hard to persuade them, but he was largely unsuccessful in telling them about the virtues of Pan-Europa. The British simply didn't want to know. It was still the country where the Empire counted and Europe was a secondary concern. He also spoke several times at Chatham House. His closest friend and ally was Leo Amery. He shared Churchill's anti-appeasement politics. He was invited to Chartwell in 1938. Two of his books were translated into English in the late 1930s. And he was supported by Duff Cooper, Siggy Warburg, Harold Nicholson, among others. And yet he never broke through into a wider popular circle. He never became a political celebrity in the U.K. as he was on the Continent. In New York, during the war, the Count was one of Britain's best cheerleaders in the struggle for American public opinion before the U.S. joined in. The Count contacted Churchill on seventeen separate occasions during the war, starting with congratulations on the Atlantic Charter. And Churchill responded personally several times. But Churchill's ambivalent attitude towards Europe is now well-known. It's also controversial. For him Europe was just one of three circles in which the U.K. could wield power. There was Europe indeed, but also the Empire. Importantly, the Empire. And of course the special relationship with the U.S.A. For the Count, by contrast, Europe was the only circle that really mattered. And the Count succeeded in nudging Churchill closer, ever closer, to making Europe his centre, especially in the closing years of World War II and post-1945. He was helped in that in particular by their shared view of the threat of Communism. When the Count came back to Europe in 1946 Churchill invited him to lunch, in a chateau where he was staying on a painting holiday. Hence this lovely illustration. That was beside the lake near Geneva. It was September, a few days before his famous Zurich speech. And in that speech Churchill publicly acknowledged his debt to the Count and Pan-Europa's pre-war work. Clementine, by the way, was ill at the time and Churchill's daughter Mary was the hostess at lunch. In a brief exchange of letters with the Count afterwards she underlined how much she was looking forward to seeing him again in London, as a reflection of how charming the Count had been and what he had sent her as a present after the lunch.
The Count was at Churchill's elbow for the next two years, nudging him towards a more federal Europe. He almost, but not quite, got him there. And Churchill was keen to secure the Count's support as well. It wasn't a one-way street. He invited him to lunch at Hyde Park Gate, his London home, as soon as he came back from America. A telegram from Churchill arrived on the ship just a couple of days out of New York, insisting that he and Ida come straight to London after landing in Southampton. Churchill listened to the Count because he was respected on the Continent and stood outside the British political scene, and because - when necessary - he could call in Continental socialists to influence British Labour. Here is a particularly interesting letter from Churchill to the Count in December 1949. In it he wrote - and it is highlighted here - "British participation is essential to the success of a European Union." That highlighted phrase was just about as far as the great man would go to saying we belong together with the Continent. It was certainly a lot further than the famous phrase he wrote in 1930 about Briand's initiative to unite Europe. Then he declared "we are with it but not of it." By the time of this letter, however, 1949, the Council of Europe was an important new European creation, praised on all sides. Yet Churchill knew that the Council of Europe was not the federal Europe that the Count wanted. And the Count knew that Churchill knew. The Count admired Churchill as a political leader and also as a gentleman. The continental Count, like his father, had a deep-seated respect for English culture and saw the English gentleman as an ethical exemplar for all humanity: a mixture of social elegance, political authority, mental rigour and moral rectitude, as well as understanding, justice and generosity. In the Count's eyes, Churchill lived up to this ideal. It was best illustrated by an example in 1953. As Prime Minister, Churchill graciously found time to write a foreword to one of the Count's books, even while he was weighted down with the cares of office. The Count appreciated that sort of gesture. In the Count's eyes, however, Churchill's son-in-law Duncan Sandys appeared less of a gentleman. One of the reasons that the Count could not quite convince Churchill on matters European was the influence that his son-in-law exercised on his father-in-law. In the book I somewhat provocatively call him the Count's Nemesis. Sandys visited the Count first in his Swiss retreat in summer 1946. The Count gave him the pre-war contracts of Pan-Europe to help him set up, at Churchill's behest, the United Europe Movement: what became the European Movement. Sandys repaid him the following year by attempting to oust the Count from the leadership role in the European Parliamentary Union that the Count had just created. The Count's supporters, especially the French supporters in the EPU, scuppered that. The coup failed but for the Count it left a very bitter taste.
A year after that, the Count and his wife arrived at The Hague for the Congress of Europe. They expected to find the venue for the meeting, the Knights' Hall, draped with the Pan-Europa flag well-known in European circles before the war. But Duncan Sandys had badged it, as you can see, with his new flag, for the European Movement. He considered the Count's flag both meaningless and old-fashioned. And of course he told the Count not a word about this decision. He also tried to block the Count from speaking immediately after Churchill at the opening ceremony, but in that he also failed, only though the intervention however behind the scenes by some of the Count's friends. This quarrel did colour the Count's relations with Churchill. But in 1951 Duncan Sandys joined the new Conservative government and stood down from the European Movement. That cleared the way for a change. Paul-Henri Spaak, an old friend of the Count's, became the new secretary-general of the European Movement and saw to it that the Count was invited to become one of the honorary presidents. That put him up on the Pantheon, alongside Churchill, Adenauer, Schuman and De Gasperi, all internationally acclaimed leaders and well above Duncan Sandys. But the difficulties caused by Sandys contributed to pushing the Count away from the U.K. and making him look to France, away from Churchill to De Gaulle in the 1950s.
Now I won't go into the De Gaulle saga here. There may be some questions. But let me try and summarize what was good and what was not quite so good about the Count. He did have two sides. I don't want to make a hagiographic biography of him here. On the plus side though, his style is crystal-clear and extremely appealing. He writes beautifully: German, French and English. And his lucid exposition matches the clarity of his vision. Then there is his charismatic personality. The Count was a pioneer, and also a persuasive voice. He formulated his Pan-Europa vision and called for a united Europe long before it become the received wisdom in the chancelleries of Europe. It was the Count who first proposed the symbols that would articulate the European identity: one flag, his flag; a single currency; a common passport; a European anthem, the Ode to Joy; and a Europe Day to celebrate European unity, not the Schuman Declaration day but very near it for another special occasion that he registered, in May. He was single-minded in his pursuit of this goal, through various iterations: in the 1920s against Hitler, in the 1930s without Germany, during the war, in exile in the U.S.A., in the late 40s close to Churchill, and after that beside De Gaulle as the strongest leader in Europe. The Count was a self-starter and extremely persistent. He thought big and he was prepared to act even when he was alone. He set up the Pan-Europa union in the 1920s and he set up the European Parliamentary Union in 1946. Both were private initiatives. Neither was government-sponsored. And he was successful. The European Parliamentary Union argued for a Council of Europe, and within three years governments felt obliged to establish the first ever official parliament for Europe, albeit an advisory parliament. He also saw the need for Franco-German reconciliation, early, and took the personal initiative of inviting parliamentarians from both countries to meet under private auspices well before the governments officially embraced such a policy.
But it was not all positive. The Count displayed also less acceptable characteristics. He was utterly convinced that his vision was right. And he had a very big ego. He had to lead, not to follow. And he had a strong sense of superiority and entitlement. He tolerated no opposition whatsoever within his political movement, the pan-Europa. And he admired strong leaders, among them Mussolini, though, to be fair, actually, so did many other politicians and statesmen at the time, Churchill included, in the early years. In many people's eyes, Mussolini was the acceptable face of fascism. He was adamantly anti-Communist as well, and this made the Count suspicious of socialism and social-democracy in any form. In fact he was suspicious of democracy tout court. On balance he came through it quite well. And he received widespread recognition in his lifetime. He was the first recipient of a Charlemagne Prize in 1950, and it was another five years before it was awarded to Churchill. He was awarded both French and German honours: the Legion d'Honneur and the Bundesverdienstkreuz, and numerous others, especially from Austria, Italy, Luxembourg and Belgium. Streets and squares were named after him as well. Here is the square Coudenhove-Kallergi, close to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And the stamp issued by Austria on the centenary of the Count's birth. He has been on European university syllabuses and taught in schools in several countries. He is widely recognized on the Continent. But the Nobel Prize eluded him. He is said to have commented wryly: "better to have earned it but not to have been awarded it than to have been awarded it but not to have earned it." Anyway, let me conclude. Like Churchill, the Count was good at writing his own history. He wrote five versions of his autobiography, the first in English during the war, while he was still only in his forties. He also wrote numerous articles and was frequently a contributor to radio in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In all he published thirty-three books, some of them philosophical, related to his early studies in university, and later, and many on political subjects. He left his mark on politics and on public life in Europe from the twenties to the seventies. And today the Count's ideas resonate again. The questions he raised - first in 1923 in response to the Great War, then in '45 in response to the second war, are still acute, after the end of the Cold War. Populists have played the identity card already, in each European nation. But the Count called for Europeans to discover their European identity. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister quoted Coudenhove-Kalergi some years ago in a speech in Strasbourg. President Macron more recently when he received the Charlemagne Prize spoke of the Count's "dream of desired unity", of concord over differences and of "a vast community all walking in the same direction". Has Europe yet found a political role which is more than its individual states? Can it become political as well as an economic force? Will it, can it, develop a meaningful union without Great Britain? All questions that the Count considered. At his death, John Biggs-Davison, a perceptive British M.P., wrote: "He never gave in or gave up. Not when hopes raised by Briand and Stresemann were dashed, not for the last time, by London. And not when on the run from Hitler. As a young man he saw visions. As an old man he dreamed dreams. He lived the future in his devoted life."
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Post by Wayne Hall on Apr 15, 2023 4:45:48 GMT -5
Europe's forgotten grandfather Richard Coudenhofe-Kalergi
Martyn Bond: 2.42 I really want to talk to you all today about an Austro-Hungarian count who is, I think, unjustly neglected in European circles. Hitler violently disagreed with him and called him a cosmopolitan bastard. The Count challenged Hitler with an alternative vision for the future of Europe, in the 1920s and 30s. Not racial domination but international co-operation. And the Count has been more influential long-term in shaping the Europe we live in then he is generally given credit for. Let me show you the first slide. There we are. This is Richard Count Coudenhofe-Kalergi, born in Tokyo 1894. Died in Austria 1972. Buried in Switzerland. A word first about his background and then about why we should remember him better.
Next slide. These are his parents: an ill-assorted couple, you might think. Heinrich, a gifted Austro-Hungarian diplomat. Mitsu, the beautiful daughter of a well-to-do shopkeeper in Tokyo. An unlikely match, you might think. And it was. Heinrich simply purchased her from her father as his concubine two weeks after he arrived in Japan. Not actually an uncommon practice at the time, however shocking it may seem now. But after she produced two sons Heinrich then married Mitsu to secure an inheritance back in Europe, where his father had just died. Then he legitimized the children, brought the family home so that he could enjoy his estates in Bohemia. Heinrich died, however, only about ten years later when Richard, the son with whom we are concerned, was about twelve, and the boy was sent to the prestigious international boarding school in Vienna, the Theresianium, as were his brothers. He left school in 1913, an auspicious year. Before going to university he met the woman who was to be the love of his life, the leading actress of the Viennese stage of the time, Ida Roland. She was thirteen years older than he was and he was just eighteen. This Ida was only eight years younger than his mother and the relationship led to a serious break with his aristocratic family. In 1914 he was declared exempt from the draft in the First World War on account of dubiously weak lungs. He continued his studies at university and gained a doctorate in Philosophy in 1917. At the end of the War he devised a plan to encourage the new states created by the Versailles Treaty to co-operate together. He didn't want them to fight, just as the old empires had done.
Next slide please. This gentleman, whom some of you may recognize, is Tomas Garik Masaryk, the first president of the newly created Czechoslovakia. He was one of the key players in the drive towards national self-determination in central and eastern Europe. And in 1919 young Richard Coudenhofe-Kalergi became a Czech citizen because the family castle in Bohemia, part of the Sudetenland, was in the territory of that new state. And it was to Masaryk that he went with his first ideas about restructuring Europe. To ensure peace among the new states Richard explained to Masaryk that what he needed was European states to form a single unit, to be able to speak for themselves as one rather than as many small states in the newly created League of Nations. But, Masaryk replied, nationalism, he knew, was too strong in those new states, that it could not be shared in that way, in the way that Coudenhofe was suggesting, at least not yet. So let's see the next slide, which is where Coudenhofe took his idea next. If individual states would not turn his plan for co-operation into reality, then Coudenhofe-Kalergi persuaded himself that the League of Nations would be the best place. The League was an early version of the United Nations. It's a simple comparison: a grand idea for global co-operation. And Coudenhofe wanted to make it concentrate on regional, that is to say European, peace. But while the League could overawe small states, it was run, actually, by the big states, just like the Security Council does today in the UN. Mussolini aptly described it as, and I quote, "Good when the sparrows chatter, useless when the eagles scream." Its secretariat was firmly in the hands of the British and when Coudenhofe took his idea of a European Union within the League to the British Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond, he was advised not to push his ideas too far or too fast. Incidentally, the Deputy Secretary General at that time was a certain Jean Monnet, to whom we shall refer again a little later. But now however the young Count turned to another young leader to try and put his ideas into practice. He turned to Mussolini. Next slide. Here is the young Mussolini, or youngish Mussolini. In the 1920s this man was a political phenomenon. With very clever use of mass media and propaganda, and command of the street, Mussolini seized power in Italy with the Black Shirts' march on Rome in October 1922. Since Masaryk had turned him down and Sir Eric Drummond had shut the door of the League in his face, Richard Coudenhofe-Kallergi now appealed to Mussolini to take up his ideas. He wrote him an open letter, published in the press in Austria, and in Italy, asking him to call a megaconference of all European states in Rome to agree mutual disarmament, economic co-operation and a common external tariff. That way Europe would project its united power outwards towards the rest of the world and would become a force that mattered, not just a collection of small states. Mussolini, not surprisingly, did not even deign to reply to this idealistic, rather public, rather, or slightly, foolish or naive, invitation from an outsider who was frankly unknown at that time.
Next slide please. So the young Count decided that he needed to be known, so what he decided to do was to write his own program and lead his own political movement. He put his ideas down on paper and self-published "Pan-Europa" in October 1923. It was a stunning success. Within a year it sold over 20,000 copies, which at the time was a remarkable figure. The following year the first translations appeared. It got positive reviews from the liberal press across the continent. It was damned by nationalists on the right and by communists on the left. In his book the Count appealed to the youth of Europe to make a reality out of his dream, to unite Europe internally by consent among all the nations and to project European values outside across the rest of the world.
Next slide please. The Count's book is essentially about geopolitics. Now this is a much-abused term but the rough definition is really how political power is determined by geographical factors. And he wrote about it also... by cultural and historical factors too. The difference between the Count and other thinkers of the time is that the Count did not start with a single nation, like Germany, centrally located, and extrapolate its possibilities in its region. He started with the concept of the whole continent, with Europe, and sought to enhance its role in the world, and at that level he identified five power centres, which are reflected in this map. The shading is not easy to see but I hope I can explain them as we go. On the left, except for Canada, you have Pan-America. That's the whole of the United States, Mexico and all the states of South America. It was the most developed part of the world at the time, independent from the old powers of Europe and not in any way affected negatively by being fought over, as in the First World War. Then to the right, of course, you have the Soviet Union, which Lenin had only just united after the civil war. It sought to spread its ideology world-wide by subverting the capitalist system through the Comintern, which was established that same year, '21. '22 I believe, sorry: the Communist International. Then came the British Empire, which at that time still ruled over a quarter of the world's population, including the whole of the Indian subcontinent, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and much much more. Then there was in Coudenhofe's eyes a rather amorphous entity which he called the Asian power centre, including China, Japan and Korea, and finally the European power centre that he conjured up in his book. This is Pan-Europa, the dark shading, the black parts of the map, from the Arctic north through the whole of the European continent to its colonies in north and west Africa, Madagascar, Indonesia, Vietnam, the neighbouring states of South-East Asia. Together they made up a European empire, nearly as populous as the empire that Britain then ruled. Now of course today decolonization has changed that aspect of the picture considerably. The British Empire is history: three major power centres remain: America, Russia, China, and potentially a fourth: the European Union.
Next slide please. This is again a large gathering. The Count and his actress wife, Ida Roland, were extraordinarily successful networkers. And with her stage reputation and his political best-selling book they had become European celebrities. Their first Pan-Europa congress opened in Vienna in 1926 with a performance of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy", the first time that that music would become the European anthem, used in events such as this. Over 2,000 of Europe's cultural and political elite from more than twenty countries cheered and applauded, among them Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein. They mingled, networked, listened to speeches from leading politicians, the young Count among them, attended the gala performance in the Burgtheater, where Ida Roland played a leading role, held their final banquet in the Schoenbrunn Palace, which the Austrian government had opened up especially for the occasion, the first time since the end of the war. Richard summed it up: for three days Vienna was the capital of Europe.
Next slide please. Among the political leaders that the Count impressed were two that mattered more than most: Aristide Briand, on the left here, the prime minister in Paris, and Gustav Stresemann, the Foreign Minister in Berlin. If the Count could reconcile French and German interests after the horrors of the First World War, the way would be open for his wider idea of European Union from Portugal to Poland, from Amsterdam to Athens. The Count had already met Gustav Stresemann in 1925 and made a positive impression then. Stresemann noted in his diary that the young Count was "a man of extraordinary knowledge and great energy. I am convinced he is going to play a great role." After the success of the Count's Pan-Europa congress the following year Aristide Briand became honorary president of the Count's political movement, the spinoff from Pan-Europa, the Pan-Europa Union. Three years later Briand himself took a French plan to the League of Nations loosely based on Pan-Europa's vision. He proposed a sort of federal link between neighbouring states on the European continent. Most other leaders, including Stresemann, thought this was a good idea. But events contrived to frustrate it. First the Wall Street Crash that same year ushered in the Great Depression. To solve the credit crunch and the unemployment crisis states turned inward, erected barriers to international trade. Self-sufficiency and competition became the rule. Interdependence was out. On the back of this the Nazis gained support and came to power in Germany by the end of January 1933. They immediately banned "Pan-Europa", seized its assets and burned the Count's books.
Next slide please. The Count and his wife fell back on Austria and concentrated on frustrating Nazi plans for German expansion. From their grand apartment - this marvellous building on the left here which was the old prior's apartment in a beautifully well-preserved part of central Vienna - from this grand apartment, aptly styled at the time the embassy of Pan-Europa, they organized innumerable conferences for the states of eastern and central Europe to encourage co-operation against German domination. Despite their best efforts, and the efforts of the Austrian chancellors Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, who supported them. In March 1938 Germany marched into Austria, and they fled. This plaque on the right - you can just see easily the words Richard Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi - this plaque records their dramatic escape from Vienna that night. With the Gestapo in hot pursuit the Count and his wife crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and finally, by a roundabout route, reached their country house in neutral Switzerland.
Next slide please. Thank you. Here is the Count, not quite so young now, in his mid-forties, in the foreground on the right here, with Ida seated beside him and her daughter by her first marriage Erika, who the count had adopted. In my biography I recounted a delightful story of how they discovered this house in the country and bought it and added little pieces of adjoining land so they had a really large garden. And it was a piece of the Swiss countryside. Richard greatly admired Switzerland, and not surprisingly. It was a federally organized state in which both Catholics and Protestants: French, German, Italian, speaking citizens, rural and urban cantons, all lived peacefully together. Just what he wanted Europeans to do on a larger scale. And from here, throughout 1938, -39 and the Phony War of 1940, he and his wife travelled to wherever they could, to encourage resistance to the Nazis and their plans. He was often in London, met Churchill there and visited him in his country house in Chartwell. He spoke several times at Chatham House and organized Pan-Europa events in Paris, Brussels and The Hague. Next slide please.
When Hollywood - this is something of a sidestep but when Hollywood later made "Casablanca" - a very well-known film obviously, the Count was the model for the Czech Resistance hero Victor Laszlo. You can probably see him. He's just behind Ingrid Bergman on the left-hand side there, above the barrel of the revolver. Victor Laszlo is the husband of the heroine in the play, and he organizes the singing of the Marseillaise in Rick's bar. Those of you who have seen the play will remember this extremely moving scene, where the Marseillaise totally disrupts the Germans who are trying to sing "Die Wacht am Rhein". But for the Count the war was actually no fiction at all. He was a wanted man. He escaped again in June 1940, just as the German army broke through France. He finally reached Lisbon, where he applied for visas both to Britain and to the United States. And next slide please. The British delayed for unexplained security reasons but the Americans whisked him and his family to freedom in New York, on board this Yankee Clipper, the most luxurious and the most expensive flying boat of its day. It is still not clear who found the several thousands of dollars to pay for the three refugees to get to New York and then to rent their upmarket flat there with a view over the Hudson River. But Coudenhofe-Kalergi certainly made his mark in America. In New York he spoke to the Council of Foreign Relations and International House, encouraging America to join the war against the Nazis. He was pleading the British cause, which in his eyes was also the European cause. It was vital to keep Britain out of the clutches of the Nazis. Just as later it would be vital to keep as much as possible of Europe out of the clutches of the Soviets. He saw them both as threats to civilization, threats to the values of the West, not just threats to territory. Next slide please. All this was music of course to Churchill's ears. The Count kept him informed about what he was doing and saying in America. He sent short messages congratulating him on British victories, like El Alamein in 1942, for instance. He sent Churchill articles that he published in American newspapers. In 1943 he organized the fifth Pan-Europa Congress in New York University, where he had been given a teaching post two years earlier. And he sent the results to Churchill. They included a draft Constitution for the United States of Europe after victory in the war. A steady stream of cables and letters went to 10 Downing Street. The Count also wrote the first of his five autobiographies while he was in New York. Called "The Crusade for Paneuropa", autobiography of a man and a movement, it was his first attempt to tell his own story the way he wanted others to see it, just like Churchill would do once the war was over. But the Count's message didn't go down well with President Roosevelt because he would not hide his anti-Soviet views. For Roosevelt Stalin was a vital ally right up to the end of the war. It was only when President Truman - next slide please - took over that the Count got through to the heart of the American administration. He networked so well that both the Secretary of State Marshall and the President accorded him private interviews. This half-Japanese count, who had objected to fighting in the First World War, got along famously with the president who had just dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and who thought that the United States of Europe was "an excellent idea", said Truman. And he left his mark on the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction, making sure that it was a condition of American aid that European states had to co-ordinate their requests rather than all coming begging one by one for American aid. Back in Europe in 1946 the Count polled 4,000 parliamentarians from all the democratically-elected parliaments of Europe for their views on the United States of Europe. He got an overwhelmingly positive response and invited 200 of them to meet here in the Gstaad Palace Hotel, if I change the slide please, thank you. Here is this magnificent great hotel in Gstaad was where they met in 1947, not very far from his country house. And they met in order to form the European Parliamentary Union or EPU. It was a pressure group of MPs in each parliament, ready to push their governments along the road towards union. They demanded an elected parliament for Europe, with the power to draft a federal constitution.
Next slide please. And the indefatigable count continued to advise Churchill. Notable just before his famous Zurich speech in September 1946, when Churchill acknowledged his debt to the Count and called for "a kind of United States of Europe". Two years later the Count was at this event, the Congress of Europe in The Hague, and was the next speaker after Churchill at the opening ceremony. Where Churchill is seen very much as the liberator of the Continent, the Count was widely recognized as "the grandfather of Europe".
Next slide please. Within two years of that event the Count's brainchild and creation, the EPU, achieved a great success. The Council of Europe was set up in August 1949. An integral part of the Council was a parliamentary assembly, the very first form of European Parliament. This plaque on the left shows where the Council of Europe first met, in the University of Strasbourg, because there was no other building big enough at the time. And quite rightly, there is a bust of the Count outside the main committee rooms of the new purpose-built headquarters of the Council, the Palais de l'Europe, alongside that of Adenauer. You can see it beside the number 7 Coudenhove, dark this side, Adenauer just beyond. For two years the parliamentary assembly was chaired by Paul-Henri Spaak, who tried his best to persuade governments to grant the assembly the right to draft the Constitution, but in vain. The British government especially dug its heels in and refused. The Europe that Britain wanted was based on intergovernmental assent, not supranational parliamentary initiative. Yet when the Iron Curtain eventually fell it was to the Council of Europe and its parliamentary assembly that the newly liberated countries of central and eastern Europe first delegated parliamentarians, long before their governments qualified to join the European Union.
Next slide please. It's hardly surprising that the Count was the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize, awarded for his outstanding contribution to European unification, by the city of Aachen in May 1950. Here he is, proudly wearing the medal on his chest with Ida by his side. Churchill was awarded the prize in 1956, Paul-Henri Spaak in 1957. In the early fifties, however, Churchill returned to power in the U.K. and bent his efforts on defeating socialism in Britain. He grew less and less concerned about European unity when he was once more prime minister of his country.
Next slide please. Coudenhofe-Kalergi turned away from Churchill during these years and towards De Gaulle. They corresponded at length and soon after he came back into power in 1958 the General put his friend on the presidentail payroll. He also helped to finance further Pan-Europa congresses in Paris and Vienna. It was a strange friendship, each man appreciating the strengths of the other. The Count offered advice, essentially on European and continental affairs and the President appreciated Coudenhofe's independence and breadth of vision. He helped the President by floating ideas in the media, acting as his unofficial channel for initiatives and warning of potential political fallout from his private vantage point. They exchanged books, and wrote personal dedications in them. The Count was genuinely grief-stricken when the President resigned in 1969, and even more so when he died the following year.
Next slide please. Jean Monnet: the Count's relationship with Jean Monnet was quite different. It ran at the same time as the 50s and 60s relationship with the General, but it was much more a question of rivalry really. Andre Fontaine, the editor of Le Monde called Jean Monnet the father of Europe, and the Count the grandfather, since he had started the project so much earlier. Monnet and the Count did meet on a few occasions but even if their ultimate goal was political union for Europe, their correspondence reveals serious differences in their approach. Monnet's practical method was strong on collaboration between multiparty groups and interests. He identified specific advantages, searching for compromise. Coudenhofe-Kalergi's intellectual approach was less collaborative, searched out the big picture, left all the tedious detail to negotiation at some lower level. For him it was big issues that needed to be settled: security, leadership, legitimacy, identity. Monnet's community method has brought the EU a long way but now it seems the big issues are crowding in again.
Next slide please. The Count died in July 1972 as I mentioned, a few weeks after the UK Parliament voted overwhelmingly to join the European Communities. He was buried in a private graveyard at the bottom of the garden of his country house in Switzerland. There is of course a great deal more in the book, but I hope this quick journey through the main events of his life, and his big ideas, has whetted your appetite and maybe suggested a few questions. I hope I've given you an idea of why he matters today. These big issues are back on the agenda. The conference on The Future of Europe has just opened. It's a two-year consultation about where Europe should go from here. And how. I trust that those who want to contribute to that will brush up on their knowledge of Richard Coudenhofe-Kalergi. I think it will help. Thank you very much.
HITLER'S COSMOPOLITAN BASTARD
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
A forgotten father of Europe?
(2.44)
(5.34) The Count, or RCK for shorthand speaking of him, began - really began his political life not as a rival to Hitler publicly but at exactly the same time as Hitler, within a week of his publishing his main publication Hitler staged the beer-hall putsch in Munich. That makes the contemporaneity of these two people absolutely clear. They are both trying to solve in their very different ways the political situation that they meet after the end of the First World War and the results of the Versailles Treaty. The difficulty was, from Hitler's point of view, that Coudenhofe-Kalergi was considerably more popular, more acceptable, than Hitler himself was in those early days. Hitler's popularity only rose at the end of the 20s whereas Coudenhofe-Kalergi's had been right at the beginning. Indeed Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" was selling so badly that his publisher refused to publish the third volume in 1928 because Coudenhofe-Kalergi's works were outselling him and Volumes I and II were left in the publisher's unsold stock. In "Mein Kampf" Volume III, which didn't get published then, Hitler condemned Coudenhofe as a "cosmopolitan bastard", hence the title of the book. And the threat from this rival vision, the threat that is posed to the Nazi dream of German racial domination in Europe was what he devoted several pages of that book to. Now this is the Europe of that time. This is Europe after the Versailles Treaty with about a dozen new states across central and eastern Europe. As the empires fell that principle of self-determination radically revised borders everywhere. The new Europe was a kaleidoscope of racial and linguistic conflicts that the League of Nations was very ill-equipped to either master or to pacify. RCK knew that this would lead to more wars, not to the peaceful continent that he and many many other people after 1918 desperately wanted.
This was his answer to the problem. In 1923 he published Pan-Europa, October '23 as I say, just a week or so before the beer-hall putsch. And it became an instant political best-seller. It offered a blueprint for the United States of Europe inspired by, if not actually modeled on, the USA. In a little over a year it sold 25,000 copies, which was big sales for the time, and the Count recruited 10,000 members to Pan-Europa, his Europe-wide political movement. They came largely from the European intelligentsia, and I just quote a few names: Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud were all members of Pan-Europa. He was befriended by the Rothschilds, financed by the Warburgs, rich Jewish bankers and also freemasons. In those circles he found the sort of support he needed.
If I go to the next click I show you his idea for world peace. It was not just European peace but world peace. If Europeans could get their act together and unite, the Count argued, then Pan-Europa could take its place alongside other superpowers in the contemporary world. The USA had a sphere of influence that included central and south America, away on the left. The Soviet Union stretched from the Baltic to the Bering straits. China and Japan controlled the far east. And Britain had its world-wide empire. If only the states of continental Europe would unite they and their colonies, marked here in black, would become a fifth superpower. Together these five superpowers would manage the peace of the world.
We all know that that did not happen. National rivalries in Europe led ultimately to the Second World War. The balance of power failed to keep the peace. Churchill, in opposition in the 1930s, grew ever more concerned with instability on the Continent. The growth of nationalist totalitarian regimes, in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Austria, and after a bitter civil war in Spain, pushed the democracies into a corner. The Count supported anti-Nazi regimes wherever he found them, and for that became a marked man, in German eyes. He dramatically escaped the Gestapo in Vienna in 1938, came to London, met and advised Churchill, eventually fled across France during the "phony war", and was finally spirited out of Lisbon to New York by American friends who were close to the nascent offices of the secret services. He and his Jewish wife, the famous actress Ida Rolland, flew in some luxury to America. The "Yankee Clipper" , shown here, was the latest in international air travel, taking 24 hours to cruise from Lisbon to New York. It was about 200 m.p.h. and very low, but it was very comfortable. It went via the Canaries and Bermuda, with small stopovers, and it had five star service on board, with sky-high prices to match. He couldn't afford it. People from America paid to get him out.
"Casablanca", known to everyone I know. Once Coudenhofe-Kalergi was in New York, he made a name for himself by promoting the cause of early American entry into the war in support of Great Britain, which was highly contested. He lobbied hard against the "America First" movement, led by Charles Lindbergh, and served as a model for the suave and aristocratic Czech Resistance hero in "Casablanca", Victor Laszlo. He was travelling, incidentally, on a Czech diplomatic passport at the time.
The next slide shows Murray Butler, the key American support for Coudenhofe-Kalergi. He was chairman of the Carnegie Foundatiion for international peace for many years, also president of Columbia University, as well as a prominent freemason. He knew everyone in the Washington and New York political elite. He was the contender himself for the Republican nomination as president and was a liberal-minded eminence grise of the East Coast establishment. He talent-spotted the Count on an early trip to Europe in the early twenties and organized a lecture-tour for him in the USA in 1925 to promote Pan-Europa. His support opened doors and provided finance now for the war-torn refugee and his family in New York.
This man is obviously President Truman, who in 1945 famously declared that the United States of Europe was "an excellent idea". RCK's own views, especially his untiring anti-Communism, gained the ear of the President, and through him his secretary of state George Marshall. RCK ensured that the massive post-war reconstruction program for Europe, Marshall Aid, was made conditional on European states co-operating with each other in preparing their reconstruction plans.
Back in Europe, RCK again drew close to Churchill, who quoted him by name in his great Zurich speech in September 1946, proposing himself "a kind of United States of Europe".
Here's the Grand Palace hotel in Gstaad, near the Count's country house in Switzerland. RCK brought together a powerful network of integrationist MPs to support his policy of European integration in all the democratically-elected parliaments on the Continent. He called it the European Parliamentary Union, the EPU, and it demanded a European Parliament, with the right to draft a European Constitution. He went on to be the first speaker after Churchill in the Congress in May 1948 in The Hague and when the Treaty of Europe established the Council of Europe the following year its parliamentary assembly, seen then as the first European Parliament, was attributed largely to the successful lobbying of RCK and his EPU.
From the early 1920s RCK had known about Jean Monnet, possibly had met, but that's uncertain, then deputy secretary -general of the League of Nations. But it wasn't until Monnet drafted the Schuman Declaration in 1950 that their paths crossed again for sure. RCK won the Charlemagne Prize that year but Monnet set up a structure that echoed RCK's long-term aim of peaceful political union but created a Community method of small incremental steps along the road towards a distant goal. In contrast, the Count was concerned with big symbolic gestures that would underline a European identity. He created the European flag, was first to use Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as a common anthem. He was the first to demand a common currency, even a common European passport and driving licence. He and his wife declared themselves "European patriots". Monnet's gradual accretion of common economic interests was a very different approach to the Count's grand geopolitical vision of a united Europe in a dangerous world.
Charles de Gaulle is my next slide. Now as British enthusiasm for a united Europe waned in the 1950s and 196os after Conservatives came back to power, so RCK turned towards the most powerful European leader who would embody at least some of his European ideals. Charles de Gaulle. The President's aim might be a Europe of nation states rather than the federal Europe that RCK aspired to but they both saw the need for strong leadership if Europe was ever to fulfil its potential in a brutally divided geopolitical world of the Cold War. They struck up what may appear at first sight an unlikely political friendship. But it was genuine and lasted until the President's death in 1970. Two years later the Count himself also died, aged 78, in a hotel in Austrian Voralberg. His body was brought back to Gstaad and buried with a private ceremony in this small private cemetery today. It lies just a couple of hundred yards from the converted farmhouse he and his wife used as their country home for many years. It was also very close to the linguistic border between French and French-speaking and German-speaking cantons in what he recognized as the best-governed federal, or perhaps confederal, state in Europe. All Europe, the Count once prophesied, would one day be as rich as America and as peaceful as Switzerland. If only it would unite. On his gravestone is inscribed his pithy epigraph: "Pioneer of the United States of Europe."
That's where my screen-sharing comes to an end. I hope I've given a good account of the turbulent times of the 20th century, living through coming-of-age in the First World War and dying the very year that Britain in fact joined the Common Market. So that's the span of his life and he put his mark on it. I think he is worth looking at again and I think many of the ideas he pursued, in particular the stress on identity, are coming back right into vogue. We are all in a big debate about European identity and the European Union, which has grown much more strongly from the roots laid down by Monnet, using the method that Monnet introduced is facing - it would be an exaggeration to say "too critical" at this stage but it is a serious stage, being asked to grasp big issues, issues of defence, which aren't solvable by small minor steps. They are big leaps. They are more like the leaps of faith, perhaps, of vision, certainly, that Coudenhofe proposed.
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Post by Wayne Hall on Aug 13, 2023 9:59:03 GMT -5
www.lifo.gr/now/entertainment/xekina-16o-festibal-kinimatografoy-aiginas
A "Greek" Count, architect of Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi
Adolf Hitler despised him and everything he stood for. Hitler's followers and many others who regard themselves simply as "patriots" persist in distorting his message, which is becoming ever more pertinent.
On 28th August 2023, in the context of Aegina's 16th Cinema Festival, a screening on the pioneer of the European Union Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, with commentary from Evangelos Venetis, who in summer 2022 spoke in Aegina on the relations between Ioannis Capodistrias and the Duchess of Plaisance.
I don't want to cover the same content as in the screening but I think it is worth emphasizing that there are two drastically conflicting assessments of Coudenhove-Kalergi, typified in Greece by the relevant writings of two journalists or groups of journalists, on the one hand Michalis Stoukas in Proto Thema ("his dream (was) the replacement of white Europeans by people of mixed race", on the other the Protagon group ("With roots in Crete's great Kalergis family, an intellectual and political activist whose devotion to European unification remained unshaken from the end of the Great War up to his death in 1972"). Both of these assessments are from 2021, the year of publication of the first biography in English on Coudenhove-Kalergi, entitled "Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard".
Here in Aegina the question of European integration has since 2008 preoccupied some of us in the Aegina Active Citizens' Association. It was in that year that we organized the first conference linking the name of Ioannis Capodistrias, first governor of modern Greece but also pioneer of a united Europe, with that of Altiero Spinelli, perhaps the keenest advocate of the need for a democratic European parliament.
On 31st July 2023 immediately prior to the annual Cinema Festival, in his introduction to the talk by the historian Andreas Koukos on modern Greece's history as a debtor state ("a beginning with no end"), Stratos Pantavos, vice-president of our association, described the fifteen-year course of this discussion.
An Italian former Europarliamentarian who visited us in 2013, the late Giulietto Chiesa, in the notes he prepared for his address, wrote the following:
"I want to recall two fundamental points, which were at the basis, at the origin of the European idea, two very simple words. Peace and cooperation. Neither of the two now exists as a fundamental principle of Europe, of the European Union. Immediately after the very beginning of the process, the Cold War began, and the European idea of peace and cooperation was twisted and diverted. Cooperation was replaced by the word competition.
After 1989 the historical divide was closed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The process had taken a turn for the worse. Gradually, without our realizing it, we were delivered into the hands of an oligarchy without a home and without a soul, whose only bond is the delusion of omnipotence resulting from the possession of money that it infinitely creates.
The peaceful process of building a new European state without war was gradually distorted with ideas of a divisive “cooperation”. The project was first stopped and then distorted beyond recognition. It was the good idea of building a new supranational state without recourse to conquest, violence and war, but with the participation with equal rights of all partners, large and small. It should have been the birth of a new world leader for peace, able to play an independent role and not subordinated to the politics and to the interests of the other giants.
The instruments put in place since 1990 that have produced the social and economic crisis of the European peoples have not been side effects of “wrong” choices. They were consistent with the intended project. American globalization has been imposed on Europe (and European leaders have accepted and adopted it). American rules were exported along with the deregulation, privatization, demolition of states, the deification of markets, the radical transformation of human relationships, and the subjugation of politics to economy and money . Political power has passed into the hands of internationalized high finance."
Today new players have emerged in the international area, centred on an axis hetween China and Russia but with participation from other states such as the BRICS countries. What would the attitude of a Coudenhove-Kalergi have been towards them were he still alive today?
The Count was anti-Communist all his adult life but the celebrated Western Civilization is not confronted today by the Communism it knew a century ago. What has changed? Are the related analyses of Shahid Bolsen on his "Middle Nation" site of any use as a compass?
SPECIFICALLY: As I have talked about before, the West doesn't fear BRICS, they don't fear the pivot to the Global South; they have anticipated it and are helping orchestrate it. The ideal arrangement for them would be reproduction of the Bretton Woods system, but in reverse, with the beneficiaries and victims of the system exchanging places. What they fear, and what they are trying very hard to prevent, is that this shift results in a shift in HOW the global economy is managed; a shift in the neoliberal paradigm.
Bolsen reminds us that the initial conception of BRICS came from Goldman-Sachs, twenty years ago.
So the question remains: is Coudenhove-Kalergi overtaken by time or, on the contrary, has the way the world has changed made him more relevant than ever?
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