Richard Nikolaus Eijiro von Coudenhove-Kalergi, pioneer of European integration. He was the founder and President for 49 years of the Paneuropean Union. Coudenhove-Kalergi is recognized as the founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe. His intellectual influences ranged from Rudolf Kjellén and Oswald Spengler to Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In politics, he was an enthusiastic supporter of fourteen points made by Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918 and pacifist initiatives of Kurt Hiller. In the early 1920s he joined a Masonic lodge at Vienna, where he would reach several degrees. In 1922 he co-founded the Pan-European Union (PEU) with Archduke Otto von Habsburg, as the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia.[5] In 1923, he published a manifesto entitled Pan-Europa, each copy containing a membership form which invited the reader to become a member of the Pan-Europa movement. He favored social democracy as an improvement on the feudal aristocracy of the sword But his ambition was to create a conservative society that superseded democracy with the social aristocracy of the spirit.[6] According to his autobiography, at the beginning of 1924 he came through Baron Louis de Rothschild in contact with Max Warburg who offered to finance his movement for the next 3 years giving him 60,000 gold marks; Warburg eventually remained sincerely interested in the movement for his entire life and served as an intermediate man as to bring him in contact with influential personalities in America such as banker Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch accompanying him there. In April 1924 Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the journal Paneuropa (1924-1938) of which he was editor and principal author. The next year he started publishing his main work, the Kampf um Paneuropa (The fight for Paneuropa, 1925-1928, three volumes). In 1926 the first Congress of the Pan-European Union was held in Vienna and the 2,000 delegates elected Coudenhove-Kalergi as president of the Central Council a position he held until his death (1972). He believed that individualism and socialism would learn to cooperate instead of compete, and urged that capitalism and communism cross-fertilize each other just as the Protestant Reformation had spurred the Catholic Church to regenerate itself. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Coudenhove-Kalergi
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 20:44:23 +0000
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