One Europe

CRUSADE FOR PAN-EUROPE--Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi--Putnam ($3.50).

Thousands of U.S. citizens have been taking their ideas on postwar international organization from Walter Lippmann's best-selling U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (TIME, June 14). Lippmann bases his chief hopes for a protracted period of peace on Anglo-American agreement as the basis of the Atlantic system. But where, in this design for control, does the continent of Europe (pop: 400,000,000) come in? Mr. Lippmann also assumes that Russia and Britain must and will settle the European question. But he never says how.

One answer to that "how" is Count Coudenhove-Kalergi's Crusade for Pan-Europe. The Count is serving at present at New York University as the somewhat obscure director of a research seminar on a postwar European federation. But from 1919 to 1940 Coudenhove-Kalergi might have been found in any one of a dozen European capitals, now plucking the sleeve of the sympathetic Aristide Briand, now arguing his case for a federated Europe with noncommittal Englishmen, sometimes going so far as to lobby Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht or Benito Mussolini.

Sea Peoples v. Land Peoples. Unfortunately for the future peace of a continent, Europeans themselves are by no means agreed on the truth or falsity of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi's ideas. The Europeans have many answers to the "how," and no doubt the arguments in the concentration camps behind the walls of Festung Europa are as diverse as the populations that Hitler has enslaved. Fear of Russian intentions, fear of chaos, fear of the liquidation of the middle classes, fear of the possible postwar recrudescence of German might -- these are merely a few of the fears that provoke Europeans to yeasty thinking. But the basic European quarrel is between those who look to the Atlantic Ocean for their freedom and those who regard every one of the 31 States that clutter up Europe from the Bay of Biscay to the Pripet Marshes as being an integral part of a cultural and spiritual entity. Underneath every other battle for the soul of Europe, the fight between the seaward-looking peoples and the continental landmass peoples rages unchecked.

In one sense, the battle has been raging ever since the breakup of medieval Christendom. Before Tudor times, Englishmen believed in the Catholic version of the landmass theory. They even tried to climb onto the Continent by attempting to conquer and rule France in the Hundred Years' War. But ever since Christendom split into Protestant and Catholic wings, Britons have been opposed to European unification. Marlborough, Pitt and Wellington have all fought to keep a balance of power on the European continent, and the small trading nations--The Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries--have usually welcomed British intercession. When madmen like the French Bourbons, Napoleon and Hitler have tried to reconstitute the fabric of a united Europe by force, they have gone down to defeat.

Liberty v. Unity. Since Christian Europe has liberty even more than unity in its blood, the diversionary policies of Britain have been lucky not only for Englishmen but for Europeans. But what if sane men could put Europe together again where the madmen have failed?

What if Europe were to unite as the Swiss cantons have united, or the U.S.A.? Conceivably a federated Continent, based on a Bill of Rights and a Constitution, could live in peace with itself and be no menace to anyone who refrained from attacking it. The grand crusade carried on by Count Coudenhove-Kalergi ever since Versailles has been motivated by the belief that a united Europe need be no menace either to Britain on the west or Soviet Russia on the east. The Count has only to look into his own heart--or his own lineage--to know that nationalism is, as he says, "an incurable disease." His mother was an ivory-skinned Japanese girl who forswore the Orient to follow the Count's father to an estate in Bohemia. When her husband died, leaving her with seven children, the amazing Mitsuko Coudenhove-Kalergi proved her Europeanization and her internationalization by administering the family estates and raising her brood as citizens of the "dual" Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the Habsburgs.

East and West. From his father, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, the boy also learned the "oneness" of the European idea. The Coudenhoves originally rose to great estate in The Netherlands and Belgium. They followed their dukes from the Low Countries into Austria when the French Revolution turned Europe upside down. The Kalergis originated as a family with a great name in Grecian Crete. Eventually the Coudenhoves and the Kalergis came together, but only after mixing their bloods with the blood of Balts, Germans, Norwegians and Polish Russians. Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi's union with a Japanese girl was quite in line with the marrying tradition of his family.

In his "autobiography of a man and a movement," Count Coudenhove-Kalergi tells about the effect of Woodrow Wilson's oratory on liberal inhabitants of the old Austro-Hungarian empire. The Count was all for Wilson, but Versailles soon disillusioned him. Where Coudenhove-Kalergi had hoped for a united Europe in 1919, he soon discovered that every little language was getting a country of its own.

During the interlude between the two world wars, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi spent his time traveling about Europe organizing Pan-European units. For a time things looked propitious. But the depression and the sudden rise of Hitlerian National Socialism in Germany wrote finis to the Count's hopes. Throughout the '30s the Pan-European Union fought a rearguard action, trying to rally good nationalists to a program that would result in an effective encirclement of Hitler.

Federation or Force. Eventually Count Coudenhove-Kalergi would like to see a federated world. Lacking that, he hopes the U.S. will preserve the peace by keeping a preponderant air force in being to supplement the work of the British Navy. As for Europe, he does not despair of federalizing it after the war is over. He would have the European federal units accept a common Bill of Rights, and elect members of a European House of Representatives on a population basis. The European Senate would consist of the prime ministers and foreign ministers of the various countries. Together the two Houses of Parliament would elect a federal executive of seven members, each of whom would be in charge of a special department: foreign affairs, army, finance, commerce, interior, justice and transport. The annually changing chairman of the executive body would perform the functions of President of the United States of Europe.

Logically, there is nothing to be said against the Count's idea. But does Britain want it, does Stalin want it, and, finally, do the Europeans themselves want it? The Norwegians have already indicated their desire to link their postwar destinies with those of Britain. The Dutch presumably hope to regain their empire. France is an African power as well as a European power. In general, the saltwater peoples have divisive ideas about "Mother Europe." Nor do the landlocked countries of eastern Europe dare come out for the idea of federation. The Czecho-Slovak Government in Exile has already made its peace with Stalin and turned thumbs down on a union with Poland. It looks as if Europe were going to remain fragmented, or merely united on the negative idea of keeping the German continental center powerless.

None of this, however, will daunt Count Coudenhove-Kalergi. A famous name in Europe, the Count can be relied upon to drum up much sentiment for his ideas in the federalist U.S. He has a quite obvious appeal for internationalists. But he also has a program that can legitimately interest the isolationists. For his federalized Europe could presumably get along without the New World. The isolationists would like that just as much as the Europeans.

But whatever one may think of Coudenhove-Kalergi's ideas, the opening chapters make Crusade for Pan-Europe one of the best autobiographies in years.

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