Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Europe Must Unite is a political tract from 1938, written as the continent slid toward catastrophe. It is an argument, not a story: a sustained case for a voluntary federation of European nations, advanced through diagnosis of what had failed, prescription of what might work, and appeal to the will of ordinary Europeans. The book speaks from the shadow of the First World War and the collapse of the League of Nations, and it addresses a Europe already menaced by the alternatives of Soviet revolution and German hegemony.
“Any other solution signifies not the salvation but the suicide of Europe.”
Three Roads Out of Europe’s Disintegration
Coudenhove-Kalergi opens with a prediction rather than a lament: technical progress will end Europe’s dismemberment before the century is out. What remains uncertain is the method. He names three possibilities. Europe might be absorbed into the Soviet Union through social revolution; it might fall under the hegemony of the Third Reich, extended across the continent by war or the threat of war; or it might unite voluntarily as a league of free and equal nations. Only the third matches the aim of the Paneuropa movement, and the author is careful to say what his movement will not accept. It rejects union “at any price,” even at the cost of Europe’s culture and freedom, and it rejects an extreme pacifism that would trade culture and freedom for peace. Better to postpone European union than to see it realized under a Bolshevist or nationalist dictatorship. The movement fights for a peace founded on national equality and European culture; any other settlement, he writes, would mean Europe’s suicide rather than its salvation.
From this follows a blunt strategic conclusion. Victory for Great Britain and France is the condition of a Pan-European solution, because the victors would dictate the peace and could found the United States of Europe, making a third European war impossible and laying the ground for reconciliation and common economic revival. The text turns back to 1919, when the victors had that opportunity and missed it, producing instead a world-wide but powerless League of Nations and a Europe torn by hate, vengefulness, nationalism, and distress behind tariff and currency barriers. Had the Paneuropa movement been strong before the World War, a European league might have become reality as early as 1919. Two lessons are drawn from the years since: a policy of national revenge only breeds new national revenge, and a world-wide league of nations is at least a century ahead of its time. The conclusion is reconciliation of conquerors and conquered within a strong European league.
The Broken Authority of Geneva
A clear-eyed admission that the League of Nations has failed is, for Coudenhove-Kalergi, the essential precondition for thinking clearly about Europe. He understands why many Europeans still cling to Geneva: Soviet adherence, and the membership of Britain’s Dominions and India, make the League look preferable to France and to Britain respectively. But the League’s states lack any ideological, geographical, cultural, or historical foundation for federal union. Lacking physical power, it relied on moral authority, and that authority sank as member states in Asia, America, and Africa waged wars it could not stop. What remained was lost when three European members were annexed and occupied by a neighbour and the League failed even to protest—a situation he compares to a fire insurance company refusing to pay a householder whose house burned despite punctual premiums. Collective security and sanctions have collapsed; Wilson’s conception is wrecked.
Yet the author does not want the League disbanded. Its technical work in Geneva—epidemics, the white-slave traffic, opium smuggling—has proved useful, and its non-political importance will grow. The task is to remove the League from politics and make its universality real: a moral world authority without physical power, better suited to serving peace between continents and races. He also warns against a subtler danger. The League becomes actively harmful only if, after its moral collapse, it claims to protect European freedom and so suggests that closer European union is superfluous. All Pan-Europeans must combat that falsity, because the League’s fiasco has left the way free for the United States of Europe while also handing anti-Europeans an argument: if the League failed to build a European system of co-operation, security, and peace, then any similar plan must be impossible.
Europe Is Not the World
The answer to that argument, in Coudenhove-Kalergi’s telling, is a failure of scale and vocabulary. The League of Nations idea has as little to do with Paneuropa as with Pan-America. Europe covers only four per cent of the world’s surface and one-fifth of its population, so “European” and “international” cannot be used interchangeably. No American would treat “Pan-American” and “international” as synonyms, even though the American continent is almost seven times the size of Europe; Americans call institutions confined to their continent “Pan-American” or “inter-American.” Europe, by contrast, suffers from a megalomania of believing it rules the world and is identical with it—hence the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Union of Agriculture, and the Trade Union International carry the name “international” without separate European sections. Only from this false perspective can the failure of world union be used against European union. The union of Europe stands on today’s agenda; world union belongs to the distant future. Overlooking that difference was the fundamental mistake of Wilson and his collaborators. The League has become a disappointment, but Paneuropa remains the greatest hope of the generation and the only reasonable issue of the present war.
Learning from Switzerland, Borrowing from Panama
The name “United States of Europe,” he insists, should mean only the unification of European states, not an imitation of the United States of America, whose political foundations differ totally from Europe’s. Europe can learn only from a European example, and it has one: the Swiss Federation, which he calls the laboratory of European unification. There can be no European president on the American model, only a European directorate with a changing presidency, as in the Swiss Bundesrat; since no canton may nominate more than one of the seven members, the same principle would apply to European states. The two chambers furnish a further model—the Standerat with equal representation for all cantons, the Nationalrat with equal representation for all Swiss citizens. He points as well to the division of the seven federal offices (Foreign, Home, War, Commerce, Finance, Communications, Justice), the division of sovereignty and financial power between federation and cantons, and the fundamental rights and safeguards of equality irrespective of language or religion. Adapted to the European order of magnitude and to the different histories and constitutions of the European states, the Swiss federal constitution furnishes the broad lines for Paneuropa’s own.
None of this is achievable at a blow. As a first step he proposes a Pan-European union of states on the model of the Pan-American Union—seated in Washington, with an executive council of Latin-American diplomatic representatives under the American Secretary of State, meeting monthly and holding a Pan-American Congress every five years in an American capital. Such a Pan-European union could become effective at once if Great Britain played the same role the United States plays in the Pan-American Union. Britain is the one European great power with no territorial ambitions on the continent, and no one would suspect it of seeking national domination or hegemony; its part, given its close relations with the United States, would guarantee that Paneuropa was not directed against Pan-America but would secure eternal peace within the Atlantic world in concert with that sister organization. Nor does Paneuropa need a common language: Switzerland shows that, with good will, understanding and collaboration are possible without a single tongue.
Language, Economics, and the Order of Causes
Still, European solidarity would gain greatly, he argues, if Europe agreed on a single spoken language that every European would learn within a generation, in addition to his mother tongue. Which language the governments choose is a matter of indifference in itself, but European culture favors a natural, living language over an artificial or dead one. English would deserve first consideration: it has the widest currency of any European language, is among the easiest to learn, and is already in practice the language understood outside Europe. It would suffice to make its study obligatory first in teaching colleges and higher schools, and only afterward extend it to elementary schools. After one generation, a German, a Frenchman, and an Italian could understand each other in English as easily as educated Japanese, Chinese, and Indian people do today—while national language and national culture would be carefully preserved and the speech barriers between Europe’s peoples would disappear.
The book then takes up a question often put to the movement: should European unification arise from politics, economics, or a change of spirit? In practice, he answers, preparatory labor must advance on all three planes at once—in politics through regional union and a realistic peace policy; in economics through the removal of most-favoured-nation treatment and the inception of a European system of preference; in spirit through propagation of the European idea. Economic union depends on political union, and political change on a change of spirit. A customs union is impossible between states that are military threats to each other, since a threatened state must resort to autarky to produce within its own boundaries, in case of war or blockade, everything needed for life and warfare. It therefore makes no sense to ask that Europe first unify economically and afterward politically on the basis of economic interdependence.
As collective security must precede economic union, so a European spirit must precede political unification. While extreme nationalism prevails, every signed guarantee of freedom remains a scrap of paper that a signatory or his successor can tear up in the alleged interest of his nation. Only a guarantee borne on the broad current of public opinion can become the foundation of European union. Neither the Swiss federal constitution nor the Swiss customs union could prevent the inhabitants of Tessin from seceding were they not filled with a strong, living Swiss patriotism; only a strong, living European spirit can cement Europe’s peoples in a lasting political and economic association.
The Duty to Will It
The Paneuropa movement is, in this sense, a living foundation of European unification. Its success so far is that all Europe’s nations would hail the statesman who continued Briand’s work and realized Europe’s peaceable unification. Its next aim is to convert passive readiness into active demand: peoples should insist on a Pan-European attitude in their leaders, compel unification through growing public-opinion pressure, withhold votes from candidates and parties not openly subscribing to Paneuropa, read no newspaper not working for the European idea, regard Europe’s enemies as enemies of their nation, family, and person, publicly acknowledge themselves Pan-Europeans, and recruit supporters. Ideas and money are the raw materials of public opinion, without which no great political change can be fought for. Whoever realizes European union’s necessity yet does nothing is guilty of a crime against his fellow human beings and himself, becoming an accomplice in the catastrophes, war, revolution, and distress threatening lacerated Europe. It is therefore the most sacred duty of all European men and women to join the movement even without agreeing with every point of its programme; details and paragraphs are not important—what matters is creating a new European will and spirit.
The appeal is deliberately broad. To liberal groups, Paneuropa promises the salvation of freedom and personality in their direst crisis. To socialist groups, economic unification is the sole condition for the social progress of Europeans living in misery. To conservative groups, only a unified Europe can secure Europe’s finest traditions against a barbaric world revolution. To national groups that recognize sister nations’ progress as the complement to their own national mission, to friends of peace who see in Paneuropa the one means of preventing world wars of inconceivable horror after the League’s collapse, to the agrarian population securable only by union against America’s spacious grain factories, to industrial workers threatened by Asia’s humbler, cheaper hands, to merchants and business men whose activity collides with senseless tariff walls and currency restrictions dismembering their natural market, and to artists, thinkers, writers, research workers, and scholars who see the reconciliation of the hemisphere as essential to culture’s re-blossoming in the Western world.
What the Book Leaves Behind
Read today, the tract is a document of its moment and a blueprint that outlived it. Its strategic judgments are inseparable from 1938—the faith placed in British and French victory, the reading of the League’s collapse, the fear of both Soviet and German absorption. Yet the conceptual architecture proved durable: the distinction between European and international institutions, the argument that security must precede economics and spirit must precede politics, the Swiss laboratory and the Pan-American first step, the insistence that union must be voluntary and grounded in equality rather than imposed by a victor. Coudenhove-Kalergi wrote as an activist rather than a spectator, and the book’s final measure is not whether its predictions held but whether it helped create the European will it demanded.
