Dan Snow's History Hit - Uniting Europe After WWII

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

Count Coudenhove-Kalergi was one of the most influential 20th Century European thinkers that you've never heard of. He was a pioneer of European integration, advocating for the free movement of people across European borders, a common currency and a single passport. Unsurprisingly, his ideas attracted the ire of right-wing thinkers across the continent; Hitler angrily denounced him in Mein Kampf, and even today he is the subject of a right-wing antisemitic conspiracy theory called 'The Kalergi Plan'. But how influential was his vision for Europe? In what ways did he help to shape the modern European Union? Dan is joined by the journalist Martyn Bond, author of Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard, to discuss his life and legacy.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Welcome everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about someone on the podcast today who may well turn out to be, we don't know yet, but he may well turn out to be one of the most important people you've never heard of. So let's put that right, let's make sure we all know exactly who this man is. Richard von Kudnov-Kalergi, the Count of Kudnov-Kalergi, born at the end of the 19th century. He was half Austrian, half Japanese. He was a politician. He was a historian, you'll be glad to know. He was a philosopher and he was a pioneer of European integration. He wrote a best-selling book called Pan Europa. He founded a movement called the Pan Europa Movement. Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud attended a congress of his. Winston Churchill

praised him. Various important states people, most recently Emmanuel Macron, president of France, have cited him as a powerful influence. He believed in one Europe, one European state, stretching from, well, the borders of Russia right the way to the English Channel. He never quite thought the Brits would get into it, although he did suggest in order to get the Brits in that the Windsor family, the kings and queens of the United Kingdom, could be made hereditary presidents of Europe. Should have taken up that offer. He proposed Beethoven's Ode to Joy as the anthem of Europe in 1929, and it is in fact the anthem today. And he won the ultimate accolade. Hitler called him a bastard. He called him a rootless, cosmopolitan, half-breed bastard. Think about that next time

someone's talking about the globalists on social media. Think about the history of where that kind of language comes from. So that's all about this remarkable man. I've got Martin Bond on the podcast. He was an academic, he taught European politics, he was a European civil servant, he was in the press office of the Council of Ministers in Brussels, and he ended up running the European Parliament office in London. He was also briefly a BBC correspondent in the 1980s, so many of you will recognise his voice from that era. He's just written a book, Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard, all about the life and times of Count Richard von Kutynow-Kalagi. It's a really good one, this. Enjoy. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Martin, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. My pleasure. Who was Richard von Kudden of Kalagi? Well, it's a marvellous name, isn't it? I mean, it's a wonder that anyone can pronounce it and you manage it pretty well there. Thanks. He was a really major figure in the 1920s and 30s, even later when he came back from exile in America and back to Europe in the 50s and 60s, and was very influential on building Europe.

And everyone in the mainstream has forgotten him. Okay, well, let's start with the history of him. Who were his parents in his early life? He's got a fantastic family history. This is like the backstory, as it were. This guy is born in 1894. So he's 20 at the beginning of the First World War. But his dad has died when he was only 11. And his dad had an extraordinary background. My book goes into it, but I won't give you a lot. Basically, he was sent as a diplomat to Tokyo when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was opening up an embassy to the Empire of the Rising Sun. And he was the first ambassador there. Within a fortnight of arriving, he basically bought the eldest daughter of one of the tradesmen who helped set

up the embassy furniture, who was very keen to have this sort of entree into diplomatic circles. So this poor 17-year-old daughter, who was ravishingly beautiful, no wonder she was bought so quickly by the ambassador, became his concubine in the embassy and bore him two children. Now, that starts to sound a bit like Madame Butterfly or something terrible is going to happen, he's going to sail away, and that's the end of it. On the contrary, his father back in Austro-Hungarian Empire, he died and the inheritance, it turned out, was not going to be passed to this diplomat, but to his eldest legitimate son. This poses a big problem. He's got two illegitimate sons and no legitimate child. So he has to get the wife

converted from Buddhism to Christianity, permission from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, permission from the Japanese emperor for them to marry in the cathedral in Tokyo, and the two children to be legitimized. Well, he manages that within about a period of a year to 18 months and brings them all the way back to Austria. That's the somewhat inauspicious start, you might say, for what turns out to be a fantastic career. He then has five more children in their chateau in far west of Bohemia, in what became the Sudetenland. And when, as I say, his second son was 11. The father suddenly dies of a heart attack. They were. That's the first dramatic bit of this opening story. That is extraordinary.

The wife who comes back, called Mitsu, is the first Japanese woman to live on a permanent basis in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She has herself become an iconic figure back in Japan for her later life, because when she's widowed, the Austrian family move in to say, well, this poor foreign woman who can hardly speak German isn't fit to manage the estates, which were very large estates, very large indeed. They had an estate in Austria, they had hunting estates in Hungary, and they had a large castle on the Danube, which are pretty good for a diplomat's family. And they said, well, she can't do it. We'll

have to put in a guardian for the whole thing. And she can be a poor Japanese woman just trailing along on the fringes of the family. And she took the family to court and she won, which given the dates, this is 1907, is staggering. And this woman won in court. Partly she was just so damn beautiful, quite frankly, even after seven children, she said she could put her hands around her waist. She was incredibly slim, dressed magnificently, was all subservience while her husband was alive. And the moment he was dead, she became the Asian tiger woman who ruled her household with a rod of iron. Every child had to be extraordinarily obedient. And of course, they all revolted, all by one. The one who lived with her as a carer when she went on into older life.

All the rest of them revolted. Richard, one of said sons, he parted the Australian Geren Empire. It collapses famously in 1918. But people within it kept the dream of a sort of pan-European polity alive, didn't they? Not just him, but some of the Habsburgs, some of them famously went on to become MEPs. But there must be something about that generation who thought that a kind of pan-European supra-state was preferable to the mini-successor states that followed, like Czech Republic, for example. Yes, you're right. I mean, there was a lot of nostalgia around for the old system. I mean, that lasted for a long while. You know very well, and I'm sure many listeners to this know too, that it took a long while for the Habsburg successors to be allowed back into Austria. And then there was a reconciliation. And then the whole notion that the Republic had been accepted by everybody didn't really happen until much later, until after the Second World War. It was quite clearly a viable state, an active state, until the Nazis took it over.

But then, of course, it had to be recreated again after the Second World War. And that old division within it had to be overcome once more, as it was, very fortunately, by some intelligent people. And so how did he become a thought leader, a philosopher of pan-Europeanism? Well, in a strange way, it's both him and his wife who do this. And that also is an extremely dramatic story. He's the first of the children to revolt. He and his two brothers are sent off to the elite boarding school in Vienna, the Trajanium. And he's the brightest of the three. And he revolts early as soon as he leaves the school and is heading for university. He meets the leading lady of the Austrian stage at that

time, a woman called Ida Roland, half Jewish, already divorced, has a five-year-old child, is a success in Berlin and Munich before coming on to Vienna. And there she's getting astronomic, sort of Hollywood style fees. Basically, they fall in love. I think that would be very true to say, yes, it's a coup de foudre for the two of them. There's this 17-year-old student and this 31, 32-year-old actress.

And they just set up there an item as simple as that. It happens very, very quickly. Mother doesn't like this. I mean, the mother, not surprisingly, the Japanese mom, is only a few years older than Ida Rowland. And she sees her second son only leaving the nest and going in to make his own nest elsewhere. But Ida Rowland has sized up this young student.

He obviously has tremendous potential. And she has tremendous force of personality and tremendous wealth to back him, which is what she does. She encourages his philosophical and historical studies, gets writing for political journals. He starts to write about relations in Central and Eastern Europe, specifically after 1918. And he makes a name for himself. He makes such a name for himself. Well, it's amply magnified

with a 1923 book entitled Pan Europa. That sums it up in its title. It's more than just the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. It's a whole of Europe should be united because the advantages of these big units are that you don't have battles inside them. The whole point is they may have battles outside, but they don't have battles inside. And so this, in a funny way, is very much consonant with what the peace movement wanted at the time. Very, very strong social movement at the time, notably after the First World War, where people wanted the assurance of peace in the future. And this rang all the right bells in 1923. Was it just a way of the Austro-Hungarian elite having lost an empire, trying to find a role for themselves? Or do you think it was a way of the Austro-Hungarian elite having lost an empire trying to find a role

for themselves? Or do you think it was a serious attempt to look back over the mistakes that had blighted the beginning of the 20th century and try and come up with a new way of being? Oh, I think it's very much a new way of being. I mean, part of the psychological motivation and the sympathizers who gathered around him would have had other motives or would have tried to re-evaluate their past or the past of the country that they loved. But the thrust of it was to be really pan-European and not just centered on Central Europe and where the Habsburgs had been. This certainly included all of Germany. It certainly included France.

I mean, he could see that quite clearly the crucial relationship was going to be Franco-German and the other countries were all smaller. So France and Germany were the two that had to be reconciled. His first journeys after the 1923 publication and his fame were to Berlin, where he spent three months cozying up to, persuading the elite of the Weimar Republic that this was a good idea, and then three months in Paris, all financed very kindly. Paris, all financed very kindly. Rothschild was a fellow mason in Vienna at the time and recommended him to Max Warburg, who was a very important banker in Hamburg, who went on to help the finance minister under the Nazis. Surprisingly, he went on to be extremely helpful in making the

financial policies in the 20s and the 30s, both in the Weimar Republic and later under the Nazis, as little destructive of other nations' finances as possible. But in that way, as helpful as they could be rather than as harmful as they might have been. What did Hitler make of him? Hitler couldn't stand him. Absolutely couldn't stand him.

I mean, he gives him about six pages in the third volume of Mein Kampf, the volume that wasn't published in his lifetime, but got published in the 1960s in West Germany, a sort of academic edition. But Hitler couldn't stand him, called him his cosmopolitan bastard. But he did have a lot of respect for what he thought. So really, it was like a personal rivalry rather than a total disagreement. Because he said in his pages, in summary, he says, if you look at the pan-Europa plan, and you're only a rationalist, you could think it's pretty good. Actually, it really does do the right things. But the problem is, it doesn't have what he called the spiritual edge or spiritual content. Who would fight for it? If you're going to fight for it, you've got to have a sense of patriotism. You've got to belong somewhere. It's our big debate, if you like, between the people

of nowhere and the people of somewhere. And in Hitler's eyes, Kudanow was a man of nowhere because he wanted to belong everywhere. He wanted the whole of Europe in one bundle, whereas Hitler and the people who supported him were very much people of somewhere, quite clearly a folkish, racist state. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about Hitler's antithesis. More coming up. I'm Tristan Hughes, host of the Ancients from History Hit, where twice a week, every week, we delve into our ancient past. I'm joined by leading experts, academics and authors who

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Tell me about his plan. What was his plan? Was there a constitution he recommended? But also, what do you mean by Europe? That's a tricky one. he said, the Macedonia to the Greek states of Europe. It would be the great force outside that would eventually conquer them if they didn't get their act together. His slogan was unite or die, which is absolutely right. And we're seeing that play out right now in Eastern Europe, far out in the far end of Ukraine. He would have recognized that immediately. He knows just what's happening. And the other side, he said, the element that you won't get into a united Europe is the British Empire, because the British Empire is worldwide.

It's already fully extended. It doesn't see Europe as a priority. It sees the rest of the world as a priority. Well, I hear echoes of global Britain there. I mean, the old arguments just come around full circle with different labels on them. And so that's what he meant by Europe. What about institutions? Was it going to be a monarchy? Was Parliament a republic? It was going to be republican. Yeah, that's very true. I mean, he bought the republic in Austria

and he bought the notion of republicanism, but he realised that there were many royal houses and there was no reason why individual states shouldn't continue to have monarchies, no question of it. At one stage, when he was toying with trying to get the British Empire in, if and when the empire ever went, would Britain ever join? And he said he considered, briefly at least, making the royal family of Great Britain the hereditary presidents of Pan Europa, which would have been hilarious. But he gave that up because he realized the Brits were too preoccupied with India. He would have been Republican, has all the full, fully-fledged things you'd expect on, if you like, a quasi-federal state. It would have a parliament, it would have a government, what he knew of, and it would have a court. The key thing was the court of arbitration,

because this was the way of stopping there being any wars inside the new state. Everything would go to court. That would be much better than going to war. Churchill managed that with jaw-jaw, not war-war. But that notion is exactly the same. And it's what we've got in the EU. We've got a court of justice, granted its powers are limited to the substance of the treaty. It can't deal with everything. But he imagined this rather more like a supreme court, what the Americans have got. And he imagined there'd be two houses in the parliament, there'd be a direct election, where he said roughly one million people would elect one, what we call MEP. There would also be a house, a bit like the Council of Ministers in the EU, which would represent the states. And he expected it like

the Senate in America, just have one or two people for each state, not to have qualified majority voting and different strengths of states. We haven't quite got the simple thing that he had in mind. But essential key points are there. It would have a common market internally. It would have a common currency. It would have a common postal system, so everyone would have the same postage stamps. Wonderful idea. It would be a visa-free zone, obviously, for travel internally, but it would have a common external border, which is what we've got now. And he said you'd have to have the army, a common army, which would control the border externally, keep you safe from Russia. Well, partway there. Were Jews allowed to be part of this?

Very much. I mean, his wife was half Jewish. I mean, Ida Rowland was half Jewish, and he was quite contrary to the Nazi position of having a racial state. I think, if anything, you could say he had more sympathy with the idea of it being a state with essentially Christian values, because that was the feeling of his time, I think. It would have been technically, I mean, he wasn't against the notion of racial mixing at all. I mean, and that's where his theories get very much distorted in the Plan Kaleagi, which is a much more modern offshoot and reinterpretation of one of his comments in an essay about the mixing of races. But the mixing of races was a positive thing in his eyes, not a

negative thing. He just noted it as globalization went ahead, so the races would get closer to each other and they would mix. Did it give any traction? Yes, plenty of traction. His book was a bestseller. It came out about a fortnight before the beer hall putsch. How's that for a coincidence of events? Hitler fails the beer hall putsch a fortnight after Kuhn and Kalege has a colossal publishing success in Vienna. And he sells 1,000 copies before the end of the year and 5,000 the following year, sells 25,000 before the end of the decade. And it outsells Hitler between 23, 24, I think 25 Hitler published Mein Kampf, volume one, and I think it's 26, volume two, thereabouts.

The third volume, from which I quoted the bit about Hitler's views on Kudenhof, was in manuscript form in 1928. And Hitler's publisher said, I'm sorry, I can't publish it because your volumes one and two aren't selling as well as Kudenhof-Kalergi's books. Kudenhof-Kalergi was out selling Hitler up till 1930. What about other decision makers other than Hitler? I mean, it sounds like it was popular with the reading public. Was he known across Europe? Did he become a kind of transnational figure? Yes, yes, indeed. I mean, he had 10,000 members spread across chapters or groups, if you like, in different

countries, quite a lot, I think 2,500 in Germany, something of that order. And then the others spread all over Europe in different groups. But they were always made up of a mixture of leading politicians, big cultural figures. I mean, Freud and Einstein were enthusiastic followers of him. He had 10,000 of these across the continent. And he had the ear of leading politicians in Germany, France, Italy, and Britain, indeed. He visited Britain and tried to persuade people. He didn't succeed very well, but he did at least put his case to leading figures in 1926. And he went to America and went on a big lecture show of America and did the same. So the biggest direct support he got, I think, was from Aristide Brion, who was premier in France six or seven times, maybe more. And in 1929, took his idea to the League of Nations

and said, what we ought to have is a sort of federal link, that's the quote, between the nations of Europe. And this was in his peace offering to the Germans, basically, is to say, let's not quarrel about the Rhine anymore. Let's have a federal link all across Europe. And the Franco-German problem then would have become a European solution, would have found a European solution. Didn't get very far. It was sent by the League of Nations back to all the member states for comment. The French did a memo. It lasted a year before they came back and discussed again. They set up a committee for European affairs. And then unfortunately, events overtook it. The great crash in America

occurred in the same October that the impact in Europe anyway raised unemployment and the elections in 1930 brought the Nazis up to over 100 members in the German parliament. And that was the end of any German cooperation on that issue. Where did he spend the Second World War? Well, he had to flee in 1938 when the Nazis took over Vienna. And he was whisked off to New York, partly with the help probably of the American Secret Services, but certainly of the Carnegie Foundation that backed his cost of flying out of Lisbon, rather dramatic exit. He and his wife and her daughter all escaped together.

And they set up in New York, where he taught history for a while in NYU University. And he also convened another great congress there in 1943 of pro-Europeans in exile. And that one drafted a constitution for Europe, for a post-war Europe, looking a bit again like America. In fact, he tried very hard to get the American administration on board, but Roosevelt initially didn't buy the anti-Soviet line that he took, couldn't keep his mouth shut. He always said what he thought. And once he got into this sort of political discussion, he said, your first war will be with Hitler and the Nazis because they are totally against any Christian values, any civilized values.

And your second war will be against Joe Stalin and the Bolsheviks because they too have a materialist approach, which is unacceptable in our civilization. Now, that didn't go down well until the war had been won. When the war had been won, and in fact, Roosevelt had died and we had the next president, Truman was there. Truman was very open to this line and he took it on board. After an interview with the president, the president said, and you can tell people, I think the idea of a United States of Europe is a very fine thing. That's pretty good from the president of the United States.

We don't quite hear that ringing out from Joe Biden even. And he's sympathetic. The genesis of what is now the EU, the various iterations it's been through, how important do you think he is in that DNA? Were the founding fathers of that movement influenced by him? Well, yes. I mean, certainly Jean Monnet, Jean Monnet knew him well. Jean Monnet was deputy head of the League of Nations when Kudnu Kaleagi took his idea to the Secretary General of the League of Nations and said, this is what we ought to do. We ought to use the League to set up basically a European League inside it, which is the nuggetry Union of Europe. And the British Secretary General said, hold on a minute, please don't hurry with these things, will you?

But it must be that his paper would have been seen by Jean Monnet then because the Brits' number two man was Jean Monnet for France. It's impossible that he didn't know about what Kudenhove was saying and speaking. They didn't meet, that I know of, until the 1950s. Even when they were in America, there's no record of the meeting. Monnet was in Washington when Kudenhove was based in New York. He went to Washington quite often, but there's no record of their meeting. And Monet had the inside track to Roosevelt that Kudenhoove didn't have. But there are so many similarities. Is this just a matter of convergent evolution?

If anyone's thinking about this, they tend to think on the same track. Or do you think some of his thinking is important in the foundation of what is now the EU? Oh, I'm sure it is. When Churchill gave his great speech in Zurich in 1946, September 46, he had lunch with Kudanhov-Kalergi a week beforehand in a chateau on the shores of Lake Geneva. And Churchill said in his speech, all we owe to Kudanhov-Kalergi and the pan-European movement before the war. He made this reference to the Europeanization of the problem of France and Germany. And then he went on to talk about how you can't build a strong Europe without a great Germany and without a great France, culturally

speaking. And the great revolutionary thing, of course, was that he was the British leader saying that you need a strong Germany only one year after the war. And that's the sort of peace thrust which was underlay the whole of what Kutnab was after. Fascinating stuff. Do you think when he died in 1972, he would have felt like he'd failed? Or do you think he felt excited that he had begun something? Yeah, I think he would have had very mixed feelings for quite a long while. Well, everyone was surprised, put it like that, by the Schuman Declaration in May 1950.

This happened about 10 days after Kudenhove had just been awarded the Charlemagne Prize, the first person to have received this great prize by the city of Aachen for contributions to European integration. And obviously the people in Aachen hadn't a clue that this was going to come out. Ten days later, this suggestion that we should just pull the coal and steel interests

of France, Germany, and the Benelux to begin with. Then it became Italy, and we were asked, but we declined. But nonetheless, it became the six who pulled that and, in a sense, stopped the capacity for any one country to rearm independently. It meant that they couldn't rearm and fight each other. So that was a beginning again of a peace project, but it was done for economic reasons. And Monet saw that through. He was the first president of the first three years.

But when he left, he wasn't dismissed at all. He left of his own volition. He then set up his pressure group for the United States of Europe, which was exactly what Kudenhoof had been doing. So although Kudenhoof very much liked what he had done, he was very jealous of what Monet was then able to do, because if Monet had all the current contemporary contacts, and Kudenhoof's contacts may have been killed in the war or they've gone into exile, a few of them had come back and taken over, but he must have felt that others looked on him as yesterday's man, even though he was younger than Jean Monnet. This guy had been a sort of prodigy in the 20s and the 30s with what he'd achieved, and yet he'd been bypassed, which is sad. He worked a lot with de Gaulle. And of course, that didn't endear him to the Brussels traditionalists, as it were, because de Gaulle has been the linchpin of those who wanted nationalism rather than supranationalism. But that's a rather simplistic interpretation. But I think he's probably been a bit sidelined because of that association.

What a fascinating story, and one that we don't know yet the ending of. Perhaps we'll say he was a naive dreamer traveling on one of history's cul-de-sacs, or perhaps he will be revered as a founding father of a great and lasting transnational Europe. Who knows? Well, President Macron quotes him in his speeches. If you track some of Macron's speeches, you'll find references to Kudanhov Kalagy. So he's not dead yet. Well, thank you very much indeed. Now, what is your book called? It's called Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard, and then the subtitle, Count Richard Kudenhof Kalergi and His Vision of Europe.

Go and get it, everybody. Thank you very much, Martin Bond, for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you very much.