Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi (16 November 1894 – 27 July 1972) was an Austrian-Japanese politician, philosopher and Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi. A pioneer of European integration, he served as the founding president of the Paneuropean Union for 49 years.

Quotes

Pan-Europa, 1923

• The European question is: ‘Can Europe, in its political and economic fragmentation, preserve its peace and independence in the face of the growing non-European world powers – or is it forced, in order to save its existence, to organize itself into a federation of states?’.
  • Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, Pan-Europa Verlag, Wien-Leipzig, 1924, page IX.

• “Every great political happening began as a Utopia and ended as a Reality.”
  • Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, Pan-Europa Verlag, Wien-Leipzig, 1924, page VII.

• Europe has become the battlefield of the earth. Its richest regions have been devastated, the flower of its population killed. Civilization is declining, while universal hatred and envy are growing. If Europe learns nothing from history, it will share the further fate of the Holy Roman Empire: it will become, politically and militarily, the chessboard of the world—an object of world politics, whereas once it was its subject.
  • Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, Pan-Europa Verlag, Wien-Leipzig, 1924, page 26.

• There is still time to save Europe from this destiny. The salvation is Pan-Europe: the political and economic merger of all states from Poland to Portugal into a federation of states.
  • Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, Pan-Europa, Pan-Europa Verlag, Wien-Leipzig, 1924, page 27.

Practical Idealism, 1925

• The man of the future will be of mixed race. Today's races and classes will gradually disappear owing to the vanishing of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid race of the future will replace the diversity of peoples with a diversity of individuals. [...] Instead of destroying European Jewry, Europe, against its own will, refined and educated this people into a future leader-nation through this artificial selection process. No wonder that this people, that escaped Ghetto-Prison, developed into a spiritual nobility of Europe. Therefore a gracious Providence provided Europe with a new race of nobility by the Grace of Spirit. This happened at the moment when Europe's feudal aristocracy became dilapidated, and thanks to Jewish emancipation.
  • "Praktischer Idealismus" (Practical Idealism), Wien/Leipzig 1925, pages 20, 23, 50

External links

Media related to Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi on Wikimedia Commons

• International Paneuropean Union
• European Society Coudenhove-Kalergi
• Archival sources on the Paneuropean Union and the European Parliamentary Union at the Historical Archives of the EU in Florence
• Newspaper clippings about Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Recordings of interviews and speeches with Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi in the Online Archive of the Österreichische Mediathek (in German). Retrieved 29 July 2019