Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s History of the Paneuropean Movement, from 1922–1962 is an account, written by the movement’s founder, of the Pan-Europa idea and the organization built around it during that period. It traces the movement from its launching in 1922 as a campaign for a federated Europe, through its organizational growth, congresses, publications, and efforts to win support among political leaders, intellectuals, and public opinion. The book presents Pan-Europa as a response to war, nationalism, and the fragmentation of the European continent, and it follows the movement’s attempts to promote European political and economic unification in the interwar years and after the Second World War.
The narrative is primarily an organizational and political chronicle rather than a general history of Europe. It concentrates on the movement’s meetings, resolutions, internal debates, propaganda, and relations with other European and international bodies, including the League of Nations and postwar institutions of European cooperation. It also records the movement’s setbacks under fascism and Nazism, the disruption caused by the Second World War, and its postwar revival and adaptation to the new forms of European integration emerging by the early 1960s. The book closes with the state of the Paneuropean movement in 1962, within the time span indicated by its title.
As a history written by the movement’s founder, the book presents the Pan-Europa idea as a continuous project rather than as a series of separate campaigns. It treats the movement as a non-partisan and transnational enterprise and stresses its effort to build a constituency for European federation across national boundaries, while interpreting the movement’s own history as evidence of the durability of that goal.
A recurring theme is the movement’s self-understanding as an advocacy organization with a fixed aim—a federated Europe—pursued through changing political circumstances. The book frames the movement’s earlier campaigns and its postwar activity as parts of a single trajectory, and it presents the postwar institutions of European cooperation as partial and gradual realizations of the Pan-Europa program.
Its significance lies in this combination of record and argument: it is a primary account of the movement’s activities and self-understanding, and it makes a case for the movement’s place in the longer history of European unification. It documents how the Pan-Europa idea was presented to governments, intellectuals, and publics, and how the movement understood its own role in relation to other efforts at European cooperation.
