Paneurope

Bertrand Vayssière
Translated by Regan Kramer
Digital Encyclopedia of European History

The International Paneuropean Union was founded in 1926 by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972), a Count. Three years earlier, he had published a programmatic book, Pan-Europa, that would become the movement’s manifesto. The Europeanist organization established its headquarters in Vienna, in the Hofburg, the former imperial palace, and disseminated its ideas via the journal Paneuropa, which had been published in the Austrian capital since 1924. So the term Paneurope can refer to three things: a book, a journal and soon after, an organization.

Coudenhove’s reasoning was geopolitical above all: the issue was to preserve Europe’s existence between two larger powers, the vast United States and the worrisome USSR. His continentalism acknowledged the revolutions in economics and communication technology that were rendering national frameworks obsolete in Europe. From that standpoint, Coudenhove identified five major powers in the world, defined by their respective importance: Europe (including its colonies), the British Empire, Russia, America and Asia. So he considered neither the United Kingdom nor the Soviet world as part of Europe. The USSR was excluded for ideological reasons, since the Pan-European movement was imbued with its founder’s virulent anti-Communism. Coudenhove was less rigid in his stance towards the United Kingdom, which had its own Europeanist projects. Nonetheless, his attempt to set up an affiliated group there in 1930 disappeared virtually without a trace.

The movement’s organization was extremely hierarchical: the Central Committee, led by Coudenhove, was set up in Vienna, and national branches established in various other European countries were supported by committees composed of businessmen and politicians. Recruitment was motivated by individuals’ beliefs (the first members had been drawn in by Coudenhove’s appeals in the press), personal contacts and cooptation. Confidentiality’s importance cannot be denied: the process, in which connections were paramount, led to a highly elitist membership. The fact is that Paneurope quickly drew support from influential people, including Edvard Beneš, future president of Czechoslovakia; Paul Löbe, president of the German Reichstag, and French Prime Minister Édouard Herriot.

Coudenhove also found a decisive ally in Aristide Briand, who he met when he was preparing for the first Pan-European Congress in Vienna (3-6 October, 1926). The French Minister of Foreign Affairs accepted the title of Honorary President of the movement. Some of the other people whose support Coudenhove solicited, such as Mussolini, whom he met with twice in the 1930s, show that his project did not always stay within the usual definition of democracy. For Coudenhove’s contemporaries, the term Paneurope gradually came to be synonymous with Europeanism or pro-European-unity. Yet it cannot be said that the cause was popularized until the Paneuropean Congress in Basel, in October 1932. That was when the idea was raised of creating a “European Party,” able to oppose the rise of extremist movements. But the European-unity idea was already ebbing too greatly by then.

So the time was not ripe, and the project supporting the establishment of a “sort of federal bond” between European countries that Aristide Briand presented at the League of Nations on September 5, 1929, soon collapsed. In so doing, it swept away the hopes of Paneurope, whose general outlines it had followed (Coudenhove went so far as to say “inspired” it). So Paneurope withdrew to Austria, in an effort of reviviscence of the Mittel Europa formula – and a certain nostalgia for the Habsburgs’ Danubian monarchy. The model was, however, totally out of sync with the geopolitical realities of Europe at that time. With National-Socialism’s rise to power in Germany and its expansion across the continent, Paneurope went from being fought against to being hunted down after the Anschluss. Coudenhove wound up fleeing to the United States in 1940.

The post-war period experienced a rebirth of European-unity ideals, despite the many difficulties and a context powerfully impacted by confrontation between the two superpowers. For some people, the creation of trans-European institutions, albeit limited to western Europe, represented the fulfillment of the ideals of cooperation and integration that the Paneuropean Union had stood for from the start. The main difference being that the Union was no longer alone in supporting the process of unification; it was soon overtaken by the militant activism of highly ideological groups. Indeed, in accord with the ideals that had triumphed at the time of the Liberation from the Nazis, there was a general drift towards the left in the European political landscape, and that tended to marginalize the Paneurope movement, which was seen as being too conservative.

Generally speaking, post-1945 Europeanism saw itself as having emerged “spontaneously” and did not recognize bonds connecting it with the pre-war world. Although Coudenhove did attend the “Congress of Europe” in The Hague in May 1948, his movement now played only a secondary role even in the mind of the Count himself, who had founded the European Parliamentary Union (EPU) in 1947. Members formed intergroups in western parliaments: 114 MPs and senators from ten different countries attended the UEP’s first full conference, in Gstaad (8-10 September, 1948).

It wasn’t until 1952 that Coudenhove really relaunched Paneurope, but with a more cautious message. Since the failure of the European Defence Community (EDC), militant Europeanism could no longer proclaim its federalist intentions as forcefully as it had before. That was not particularly problematic for the Paneuropean movement, as it had always deliberately left the question of the project’s political objective open, in order to be compatible with the idea of a confederation of member states. That last point brought the movement closer to de Gaulle: Coudenhove did not conceal his admiration for de Gaulle’s Fouchet Plan despite the fact that it was rejected by most European-unity movements.

Since its founder’s death, in 1972, Paneurope has continued its efforts at defending pro-European ideas in public opinion, first under the leadership of Otto de Habsbourg, then, since 2004, under the Frenchman Alain Terrenoire. The movement’s goal is still the creation of a United States of Europe, in accordance with the ideals that motivated Coudenhove. That has resulted in various initiatives that caught the media’s attention when the two-superpower system began to be challenged: the most popular of them has undoubtedly been the “Pan-European Picnic” near the Hungarian border town of Sopron. On that day, August 19, 1989, 661 people from East Germany were able to escape to the West, creating the first tear in the Iron Curtain.

By studying the Pan-European movement, we can demonstrate the bond that existed between the rise of the idea of European unity and the Great War. Indeed, we have the first elements of challenge to traditional political schemas, which seemed to grant some leaders and intellectuals a keener awareness of Europe’s fragility in the world that had been created by the Armistice. Yet two pitfalls kept the idea from catching on, and they affected Paneurope, among others: the power of various nationalisms and ideological differences that were also the products of the war that had just ended and that seemed better adapted to the massification of the issues; and competition from internationalism, whether Communist or Wilsonian, which made Europeanism seem less urgent. It would take another world war to move from awareness to necessity, which granted free rein to what Paneurope wanted to do in the 1920s, i.e. militant pro-European activism. But by that time, Coudenhove himself was no longer truly the man of the hour, all the less so in that that surge could not be separated from a reality that championed the Europe community: the Cold War. Once again, we can see that a crisis is a driving force in European integration, but in this case, it was a crisis that started out by leading to its division.

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