Friedrich and Kingscourt were finally home. After 20 years in exile, the Jewish lawyer and Prussian aristocrat found what they were searching for: a land where remarkable advances in technology had been put to work in an efficient, thriving, cosmopolitan society. Transportation was quick and orderly. Cooperatively managed industry flourished. A lively and free press kept the universally literate and highly educated public informed and superb artistic, musical, and literary institutions gratified their cultivated tastes. The society was diverse and people of all religions and races participated equally in economic, political, and cultural life. The year was 1923. The place was Palestine. It was a veritable utopia.
Friedrich and Kingscourt were the imaginary creations of Theodor Herzl, the main characters of his 1902 utopian novel, Altneuland (Old New Land). That the two Europeans would find their home in a Zionist utopia might seem odd, but it is not—the polity, culture, and language were all intimately familiar to them. 1 With delight, Kingscourt remarked, “I don’t have to ask the natives about it. I know Old-New-Land quite well. It’s a mosaic. A Mosaic mosaic. Good joke, what?” Friedrich also felt at home; not because he found himself in a national homeland rooted in Jewish ethnicity and culture, but because he had discovered a home away from home for elite, cosmopolitan Europeans. A place where Jews equally belonged. 2
Like Altneuland, this book is about a Jew, an aristocrat, and their attempt to create a homeland for cosmopolitans who could not find a home within Europe. Unlike Altneuland, it is not about a journey to foreign lands, but about a quest to re-fashion Europe so it is no longer foreign. Alfred Fried (1864–1921) was the Austrian Jewish founder of the German Peace Society and one of Central Europe’s most prominent internationalists in the decades before the First World War. His work influenced the aristocrat, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972), a Bohemian nobleman who founded the most successful interwar movement for European unity, the Pan-European Union. Coudenhove’s manifesto Paneuropa appeared in 1923, the very year in which Herzl’s utopian tale took place, and it rested on a similar collection of ideals, on liberal principles of free press, free trade, and individual freedom, as well as on progressive provisions for social responsibility, enthusiasm for technological advancement, and an aristocratic conservative vision for leadership by a cosmopolitan, cultured, meritocratic neoaristocracy.
Coudenhove was the son of a Japanese merchant’s daughter and a Habsburg diplomat. He summoned rarified charisma and an influential aristocratic network to promote his ideas. To say that he was the face of Pan-Europe does justice to neither his status nor his ambitions: the Pan-European flag Coudenhove designed bears a striking resemblance to his family’s aristocratic crest, and though liberalism and democracy were among the movement’s foundational principles, Coudenhove did not shy from courting dictators like Mussolini. 3 Though he failed in this particular effort, the Pan-European Union won numerous other illustrious supporters such as Aristide Briand, Leon Blum, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, and a score of prominent intellectuals, among them Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud. The organization was honored with headquarters at Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, and Austria’s Catholic conservative chancellor Ignaz Seipel served as the union’s first honorary president. After his death in 1932, Christian Social chancellors Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg held the position. Once the integration process took off in the aftermath of the Second World War, Catholic conservatives were generally credited as its engine, a fact that is reflected in both the official and popular memory of European unification. 4 In 1950, Coudenhove was honored with the first Charlemagne Prize and is nowadays often referred to as the “grandfather of European unity.” 5
In truth, Coudenhove did not draw much from the work of fellow Catholic conservatives and aristocrats for his pan-European idea. 6 Rather, he found his main inspiration in the work of Alfred Fried, German pacifism’s chief theoretician. 7 History has been unkind to Fried. Two recent German-language biographies go some way toward restoring him to his proper place in history as a leader of the peace movement in German-speaking Europe, but outside the circle of historians of European pacifism, he remains essentially unknown. 8 Even in his own time, fortune did not look kindly on Fried. Despite an astounding body of published work, he spent most of his career outside the spotlight. Upon receipt of the news that Fried had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911, Kaiser Wilhelm II responded with “I’ve never heard of the fool!” Only one year earlier, Fried had published a book titled The German Emperor and the Peace of the World. 9
There is no evidence that Fried and Coudenhove ever met. In important respects, however, their stories strikingly overlap. Both were Viennese Masons. Both moved in the same circles of pacifists and progressive social reformers. Both shared friends and benefactors in the likes of the Baroness and Baron Bertha and Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, leaders of the Austrian peace movement, the women’s movement, and the movement to oppose antisemitism. 10 Most importantly, it was from Fried’s publications on Pan-Europe—which he envisioned as a loose confederation of European states that would lead the process of international organization to its end in a world state—that Coudenhove got the idea for his pan-European Union. But the idea out of which Coudenhove made a career and a mythos did little for Fried’s legacy. This book asks why.
I investigate the sources of Fried’s obscurity and the reasons his contributions to the body of proposals for European unity have been mostly overlooked. Indeed, the forgetting of Fried’s initiative is particularly surprising given the emergence, over the last 30 years or so, of a narrative that casts Jews as the ideal citizens or even embodiment of a post-national Europe. From Romano Prodi (former president of the European Commission), who described Jews as the “oldest Europeans” from whom non-Jews can “learn the complex art of living with multiple allegiances,” to Milan Kundera, who portrayed Jews as the glue holding multinational Central Europe together, politicians and public intellectuals of various political leanings celebrate the Jews’ historical non-territoriality as evidence that they are Europe’s quintessential insiders. 11 Fried’s thinking was part of a larger body of Jewish internationalist thought that I argue is central to understanding the project of European unification. It began to be obscured in the interwar period and, after the destruction of Europe’s Jewish community in the Holocaust, was fully eclipsed by the Catholic conservative vision mentioned above. But the recent reinvention of Jews as ideal Europeans is a rhetorical phenomenon; it has not involved an attempt to recover forgotten histories.
I evaluate the impact of Fried’s absence on both popular and scholarly understandings of the ideal of European unity and the path to unification. I argue that the story of the pan-European idea, its origins in Fried’s pacifism, and its reincarnation in Coudenhove’s work illustrate the fascinating ways in which initiatives for European unity were prompted not just by fears of decline among European insiders, but by national marginalization among cosmopolitans who could not find a home within Europe, by cosmopolitan outsiders, within. This is one of the several ways in which the story of Pan-Europe provides a window into broader themes in the history of internationalism and the idea of European unity in the first half of the twentieth century. I address three main themes: marginality as a context for internationalism, the place of empire in the project of international organization, and the role of social evolutionism in internationalist thought.
As Holly Case has recently shown in Between States, some of the most innovative thinking about European integration during the Second World War came out of debates in and about regions whose membership in Europe was contested. 12 The need to justify one’s very inclusion in Europe prompted thinking concerning the European idea and the prospects for continental integration. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine draws attention to the fact that debates about the eastern boundaries of Europe are far from settled and that in the course of these debates, Europe is continuously redefined by its margins. In fact, because the question of where Europe ends is and has always been fraught, geography has tended to dominate discussions of European marginality.
But marginality in European history has involved more than geography. While arguments on the extreme right about Islam’s incompatibility with Europe rest on the assumption that Muslims are a geographically foreign element—echoing similar arguments about Jews a century ago—such arguments do not hold up. Islam and Judaism have deep, historical roots within Europe. Their marginality is internal and cultural rather than geographical. It is precisely because of the importance of marginality as a context for understanding the pan-European idea that I tell its story through the biographies of the two men who championed it. Their biographies are dominated by internal, cultural marginalization within a region whose geographical Europeanness was not questioned. To this end, I show that although Fried’s Jewish and Coudenhove’s aristocratic circumstances seem dissimilar in obvious ways, their intentions in proposing Pan-Europe reveal some of the same dilemmas of marginality. I demonstrate that just as marginal regions in Europe can be sources of innovative perspectives on the idea of European unity, so too can marginalized thinkers in states whose geographical Europeanness is not questioned. I show that marginal figures whose inclusion in Europe could not be taken for granted had a pressing reason to elaborate ideas and proposals for a transnational Europe. In Fried’s case, this meant offering a pan-European solution to problems associated with unlimited state sovereignty, problems that as a pacifist and a marginalized Austrian Jew, he perceived decades before most Europeans were willing to compromise national sovereignty in exchange for integration. As a German-speaking aristocrat—and thus a pariah—in interwar Czechoslovakia, Coudenhove shared many of Fried’s concerns. I ask whether Coudenhove should, in fact, be understood as participating, if selectively and electively, in a tradition of Jewish internationalism. Such an evaluation has important implications. If we are going to continue calling him the grandfather of European unity, we need to reconsider our assumptions about the intellectual traditions in which the European Union is rooted. Specifically, we need to pay closer attention to the ways in which Jewish difference mediated some of the pre- and interwar thinking about European unity, thinking that anticipated the later unification process. 13
Second, I engage the relationship of empire to internationalism. Recent literature challenges the centrality of Woodrow Wilson and American progressivism to the internationalism behind the League of Nations. It instead poses empire, particularly the British Empire, as the model for the view of international organization and law that formed the League’s foundation. The Mandates System, specifically, has received attention as a pivotal institution through which European powers began to shift tensions over non-consensual rule into the international realm. The Mandates System thus served as a forum for debates among representatives of the great powers about whether and how empire should be internationalized. 14 Central European states, in particular, often championed collective administration of overseas colonies and mandates. And little wonder—for states with few or no colonies, international stewardship of overseas possessions meant access to raw materials that were otherwise out of reach. 15 Fried and Coudenhove conformed to this pattern. They both saw empire as central to the project of international organization, and Fried’s proposals for collabo...