Books: One Europe

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What if Europe were to unite as the Swiss cantons have united, or the U.S.A.? Conceivably a federated Continent, based on a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, could live in peace with itself and be no menace to anyone who refrained from attacking it. The grand crusade carried on by Count Coudenhove-Kalergi ever since Versailles has been motivated by the belief that a united Europe need be no menace either to Britain on the west or Soviet Russia on the east. The Count has only to look into his own heart—or his own lineage—to know that nationalism is, as he says, "an incurable disease." His mother was an ivory-skinned Japanese girl who forswore the Orient to follow the Count's father to an estate in Bohemia. When her husband died, leaving her with seven children, the amazing Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi proved her Europeanization and her internationalization by administering the family estates and raising her brood as citizens of the "dual" Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the Habsburgs.

East and West. From his father, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, the boy also learned the "oneness" of the European idea. The Coudenhoves originally rose to great estate in The Netherlands and Belgium. They followed their dukes from the Low Countries into Austria when the French Revolution turned Europe upside down. The Kalergis originated as a family with a great name in Grecian Crete. Eventually the Coudenhoves and the Kalergis came together, but only after mixing their bloods with the blood of Balts, Germans, Norwegians and Polish Russians. Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi's union with a Japanese girl was quite in line with the marrying tradition of his family.

In his "autobiography of a man and a movement," Count Coudenhove-Kalergi tells about the effect of Woodrow Wilson's oratory on liberal inhabitants of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. The Count was all for Wilson, but Versailles soon disillusioned him. Where Coudenhove-Kalergi had hoped for a united Europe in 1919, he soon discovered that every little language was getting a country of its own.

During the interlude between the two world wars, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi spent his time traveling about Europe organizing Pan-European units. For a time things looked propitious. But the depression and the sudden rise of Hitlerian National Socialism in Germany wrote finis to the Count's hopes. Throughout the '30s the Pan-European Union fought a rearguard action, trying to rally good nationalists to a program that would result in an effective encirclement of Hitler.