COUNCIL OF EUROPE 70 years and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi with his ideas of a unification of Europe

EUROPEAN LETTER OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY COUDENHOVE-KALERGI by Walter Schwimmer, former Secretary General of the Council of Europe and consultant on European affairs It may seem astonishing, but the idea of a voluntary association of the states and peoples of Europe does not come out of the 20th century, but has been emerging time and again since the Middle Ages. Thus the Bohemian king Georg Podiebrad suggested the creation of a community (universitas) of Christian Europe after the fall of Constantinople—it included an assembly of sitting representatives, a council, a corps of civil servants, a budget, and legislative and judicial competencies. In Abbé Saint-Pierre's 1713 treatise on lasting peace, stable institutions of a "European Union" are envisioned. And in the 19th century, Victor Hugo addressed his "European compatriots" in 1872 with the vision of a "European Republic." The European vision turned into a realizable utopia in the wake of the catastrophe of World War One, through Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, son of a Japanese woman and an Austrian diplomat with Flemish and Greek ancestry. At first, Coudenhove-Kalergi had been attracted to the ideas of American president Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations he had initiated, but ended up deeply disappointed. Instead, he turned to propagating "Pan-Europa," "self help through Europe's association into a political-economic administrative union." The steps that Coudenhove-Kalergi suggested to take towards that goal would at first include a periodically-meeting Pan-European conference with its own secretariat and, importantly, select committees tasked with issues such as arbitration, guarantees, de-armament, minorities, traffic and commerce, tariffs, currency, debts, and culture, though not with question of drawing borders. In a second step, he intended a comprehensive treaty on an obligatory system of arbitration. Additionally, the states of Europe should enter into mutual guarantees of their borders. Coudenhove-Kalergi was convinced that eventually all European states would enter into such an evidently beneficial association of peace. A third step would then consist of a gradual creation of a tariffs union and a unified economic zone, possibly even currency unions on a smaller scale at first. Ultimately, this all would be crowned by the formation of a United States of Europe, after the model of the United States of America. Europe would thus be able to face other continents and world powers as a united whole. With the Pan-Europa Union, which he founded and presided over during his lifetime, Coudenhove-Kalergi received much encouragement, in spite of his numerous antagonists, such as nationalists and chauvinists, Communists, militarists, but also industrial enterprises isolated by protectionist policies. His ideas were adopted, among others, by Aristide Briant, the architect of the Locarno treaties, who later became honorary president of the Pan-Europa Union and campaigned at the League of Nations for a European Association inspired by Coudenhove-Kalergi, but also by Winston Churchill, who in 1930 published an article on the "United States of Europe." In Austria, and despite the otherwise tremendous political tensions in the country, both major political camps supported the Pan-Europa idea, which manifested in the presidency and vice presidency of the Austrian section being held by Christian-social federal chancellor Ignaz Seipel, and Social Democrat and the republic's first state chancellor Karl Renner, respectively. . Yet the history of Europe prior to 1939 took a course that was different from the dream of pacifist and Pan-European Coudenhove-Kalergi, and after the German annexation of Austria, he went into exile in America. Upon his return after the war, he found new initiatives and movements that had emerged without his doing, but were expansions on his ideas. One more time he took the initiative, this time on the parliamentary level, and founded the Union of European Parliamentarians, which held its first congress in September of 1947 in Gstaad, Switzerland, and demanded the creation of a "United States of Europe" and a "European Parliament." These demands would, in an moderated version, lead to the programme of the Hague Congress of Europe. Churchill and the Hague Congress Meanwhile, Winston Churchill (Coudenhove-Kalergi had, due to its empire, not envisioned the United Kingdom as part of Pan-Europa) had begun to take a leading role in the new movement of European unification. Already when he took office as "wartime prime minister," and then in one of his weekly radio broadcasts in 1943, right in the middle of World War Two, he publicly suggested the foundation of a European council after the war. In his famous speech to students in Zurich on September 19th 1946, for which he had consulted with Coudenhove-Kalergi, he said verbatim: "Under and within that world concept (i.e. the United Nations) we must recreate the European Family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. And the first practical step would be to form a Council of Europe." Churchill founded the "United European Movement," which, together with the "Union of European Federalists" founded by the Dutchman Brugmans, formed the International Coordination Committee for a United Europe, directed by Churchill's son in law, Duncan Sandys. This committee convened the European Congress in The Hague from May 5th to May 11th, in which more than 700 delegates from sixteen countries participated, among them the Austrian founder of Pan-Europa, Coudenhove-Kalergi. Other prominent participants were, among others, Léon Blum, Paul Reynaud, Jean Monnet, François Mitterrand, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alcide de Gasperi, Konrad Adenauer, and Walter Hallstein. The congress was presided over by Winston Churchill, and demanded the creation of a European Council, a European (parliamentary) assembly of consultation, a charter of human rights, and a court of justice to monitor them. The European movement that emerged from that congress submitted its suggestions to the governments of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, who then proceeded, together with Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and Sweden to elaborate the charter of an intergovernmental European organisation: The Council of Europe! The founding of the Council of Europe On May 5th, 1949, ten countries founded the Council of Europe on London's St. James's Palace: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Greece, Turkey, Iceland, and the Federal Republic of Germany joined in 1951. With the exception of the European micro-states, and potentially or truly neutral states Austria (joined in 1956), Switzerland (1963), and Finland (1989), all European democratic constitutional states at the beginning of the 1950s were members of the Council of Europe. Its charter and especially its competencies were far less than what Coudenhove-Kalergi and then the Gstaad Congress of the European Union of Parliamentarians had envisioned, but at least the Council of Europe's statute assigned it the task of achieving "a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage." Its members were duty-bound to respect the primacy of the law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms