on 17 May 1930 Coudenhove-Kalergi is recognized as the founder of the first popular movement for a united Europe. His intellectual influences ranged from
Immanuel Kant,
Rudolf Kjellén and
Oswald Spengler to
Arthur Schopenhauer and
Friedrich Nietzsche. In politics, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the
Fourteen Points made by
Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918 and
pacifist initiatives of
Kurt Hiller. In December 1921, he joined the
Masonic lodge "Humanitas" in Vienna. According to
Stephen Dorril, in 1922, he co-founded the Pan-European Union (PEU), as "the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia." 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as an improvement on "the feudal aristocracy of the sword" but his ambition was to create a conservative society that superseded democracy with "the social aristocracy of the spirit." European freemason lodges supported his movement, including the lodge Humanitas.
Pan-Europa was translated into the languages of European countries (excluding Italian, which edition was not published at that time), the constructed language
Occidental and a multitude of other languages, except for Russian. 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 in 1972. His original vision was for a world divided into only five states: a United States of Europe that would link continental countries with French and Italian possessions in Africa; a Pan-American Union encompassing North and South Americas; the British Commonwealth circling the globe; the USSR spanning Eurasia; and a Pan-Asian Union whereby Japan and China would control most of the Pacific. To him, the only hope for a Europe devastated by war was to federate along lines that the Hungarian-born Romanian
Aurel Popovici and others had proposed for the dissolved multinational Empire of Austria-Hungary. According to Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europe would encompass and extend a more flexible and more competitive Austria-Hungary, with English serving as the world language, spoken by everyone in addition to their native tongue. He believed that individualism and socialism would learn to cooperate instead of compete, and urged that capitalism and communism cross-fertilise each other just as the Protestant Reformation had spurred the Catholic Church to regenerate itself. Coudenhove-Kalergi attempted to enlist prominent European politicians in his pan-European cause. He offered the presidency of the Austrian branch of the Pan-European Union to
Ignaz Seipel, who accepted the offer unhesitatingly and rewarded his beneficiary with an office in the old Imperial palace in Vienna. Coudenhove-Kalergi had less success with
Tomáš Masaryk, who referred him to his uncooperative Prime Minister
Edvard Beneš. However, the idea of pan-Europe elicited support from politicians as diverse as the Italian anti-Fascist politician
Carlo Sforza and the German President of the
Reichsbank under
Hitler,
Hjalmar Schacht. Although Coudenhove-Kalergi found himself unable to sway
Benito Mussolini, his ideas influenced
Aristide Briand through his speech in favour of a European Union in the
League of Nations on 8 September 1929, as well as his famous 1930 "Memorandum on the Organisation of a Regime of European Federal Union." Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" as the
Anthem of Europe in 1929, His Pan-Europeanism earned vivid loathing from Adolf Hitler, who excoriated its pacifism and mechanical economism and belittled its founder as "a bastard." Hitler's view of Coudenhove-Kalergi was that the "rootless, cosmopolitan, and elitist half-breed" was going to repeat the historical mistakes of Coudenhove ancestors who had served the
House of Habsburg. In 1928, Hitler wrote about his political opponent in his
Zweites Buch, describing him as "Allerweltsbastard (commonplace bastard) Coudenhove". Hitler argued in his 1928
Secret Book that they are unfit for the future defense of Europe against America. As America fills its North American
lebensraum, "the natural activist urge that is peculiar to young nations will turn outward." But then "a pacifist-democratic Pan-European hodgepodge state" would not be able to oppose the United States, as it is "according to the conception of that commonplace bastard, Coudenhove-Kalergi..." Nazi criticism and propaganda against Coudenhove-Kalergi, and his European worldview, would decades later form the basis of the racist
Kalergi plan conspiracy theory. Nazis considered the Pan-European Union to be under the control of
Freemasonry. In 1938, a
Nazi propaganda book, (
Freemasonry: Its World View, Organization and Policies), was released in German, which targeted Coudenhove-Kalergi's membership of Freemasonry, the organization
suppressed by Nazis. Coudenhove-Kalergi had already left the Viennese Masonic Lodge in 1926 to avoid the criticism that occurred at that time of the relationship between the Pan-European movement and Freemasonry. After
the annexation of Austria by
Nazi Germany in 1938, Coudenhove-Kalergi fled to
Czechoslovakia, and thence to France. As France fell to Germany in 1940, he escaped to the United States by way of Switzerland and Portugal. When he passed a few days after the successful escape to the United States, he listened to the radio announcing the possibility that he had died. During World War II, he continued his call for the unification of Europe along the Paris-London axis. His wartime politics and adventures served as the real life basis for fictional Resistance hero Victor Laszlo, the
Paul Henreid character in
Casablanca. Coudenhove-Kalergi published his work
Crusade for Paneurope in 1944. His appeal for the unification of Europe enjoyed some support from
Winston Churchill,
Allen Dulles, and
"Wild Bill" Donovan. After the announcement of the
Atlantic Charter on 14 August 1941, he composed a memorandum entitled "Austria's Independence in the light of the Atlantic Charter" and sent it to
Winston Churchill and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In his position statement, Coudenhove-Kalergi took up the goals of the charter and recommended himself as head of government in exile. Both Churchill and Roosevelt distanced themselves from this document. From 1942 until his return to France in 1945, he taught at the
New York University, which appointed him professor of history in 1944. At the same university Professor
Ludwig von Mises studied currency problems for Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement. On 22 July 1943, Nazis deprived him of his Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Vienna, with the racist argument, that as a "Jew" he was not considered worthy of an academic degree from a German university ("
eines akademischen Grades einer deutschen Hochschule unwürdig") – even though he was not Jewish nor was his family Jewish. His doctorate degree was only regranted on 15 May 1955, six years after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany and thus ten years after the end of
Nazism. The end of the World War II inaugurated a revival of pan-European hopes. In the winter of 1945,
Harry S. Truman read an article in the December issue of ''
Collier's magazine'' that Coudenhove-Kalergi posted about the integration of Europe. His article impressed Truman, and it was adopted to the United States' official policy. Winston Churchill's celebrated speech of 19 September 1946 to the Academic Youth in
Zurich commended "the exertions of the Pan-European Union which owes so much to Count Coudenhove-Kalergi and which commanded the services of the famous French patriot and statesman Aristide Briand." In November 1946 and the spring of 1947, Coudenhove-Kalergi circulated an enquiry addressed to members of European parliaments. This enquiry resulted in the founding of the
European Parliamentary Union (EPU), a nominally private organization that held its preliminary conference on 4–5 July at Gstaad, Switzerland, and followed it with its first full conference from 8 to 12 September. Speaking at the first EPU conference, Coudenhove-Kalergi argued that the constitution of a wide market with a stable currency was the vehicle for Europe to reconstruct its potential and take the place it deserves within the concert of Nations. On less guarded occasions he was heard to advocate a revival of
Charlemagne's empire. In 1950 he received the first annual
Karlspreis (Charlemagne Award), given by the German city of
Aachen to people who contributed to the European idea and European peace. In Japan, a politician
Ichirō Hatoyama was influenced by Coudenhove-Kalergi's fraternity in his book
The Totalitarian State Against Man. It was translated into Japanese by Hatoyama and published in 1952. Coudenhove-Kalergi was appointed the honorary chairman of the fraternal youth association that Hatoyama, with the influence of his book, had established in 1953. In 1955, he proposed the
Beethoven's "
Ode to Joy" as the music for the
European Anthem, a suggestion that the
Council of Europe took up 16 years later. In the 1960s, Coudenhove-Kalergi urged Austria to pursue "an active policy of peace", as a "fight against the
Cold War and its continuation, the atomic war". He advocated Austrian involvement in world politics in order to keep the peace, as "active neutrality". He continued his advocacy of European unification in memoranda circulated to the governments of the Federal Republic of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy. He recommended negotiations between the
European Community and the
European Free Trade Association towards forming a "European customs union" that would be free of political and military connections, but would eventually adopt a monetary union. == Views on race and religion ==