Dec 12, 2016 Genealogy profile for Karl Oswald. von Schmidt. Genealogy for Karl Oswald. Alexander von Schmidt, Prof. (1823 - 1890) family tree on Geni, with over 190 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. People Projects Discussions Surnames. Genealogy profile for Karl Oswald. von Schmidt. Genealogy for Karl Oswald. Alexander von Schmidt, Prof. (1823 - 1890) family tree on Geni, with over 190 million profiles of ancestors and living relatives. People Projects Discussions Surnames.
Born | 11 July 1888 Plettenberg, Prussia, German Empire |
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Died | 7 April 1985 (aged 96) |
Alma mater | University of Berlin (1907) University of Munich (1908) University of Strasbourg (Dr. jur., 1910; Dr. habil., 1916) |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Continental philosophy |
Institutions | University of Greifswald (1921) University of Bonn (1921) Technische Universität München (1928) University of Cologne (1933) University of Berlin (1933–1945) |
Main interests | |
State of exception, the friend–enemy distinction, sovereignty as a 'borderline concept', the legality–legitimacy distinction |
Carl Schmitt (/ʃmɪt/; German: [ʃmɪt]; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a conservative[1][2] German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. His work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy and political theology, and remains both influential and controversial due to his close association and juridical-political allegiance with Nazism. He is known as the 'crown jurist of the Third Reich'.[3]
Schmitt's work has attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Waldemar Gurian, Jaime Guzmán, Friedrich Hayek,[4]Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Leo Strauss, Adrian Vermeule,[5] and Slavoj Žižek among others.
Schmitt was born in Plettenberg, Westphalia, German Empire. His parents were Roman Catholics from the German Eifel region who had settled in Plettenberg. His father was a minor businessman. He studied law at Berlin, Munich and Strasbourg and took his graduation and state examinations in then-German Strasbourg during 1915.[6] His 1910 doctoral thesis was titled Über Schuld und Schuldarten (On Guilt and Types of Guilt).[7]
He volunteered for the army during 1916.[6] The same year, he earned his habilitation at Strasbourg with a thesis under the title Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen (The Value of the State and the Significance of the Individual). He then taught at various business schools and universities, namely at the University of Greifswald (1921), the University of Bonn (1921), the Technische Universität München (1928), the University of Cologne (1933), and the University of Berlin (1933–1945).
During 1916, Schmitt married his first wife, Pavla[notes 1] Dorotić,[8] a Serbian woman who pretended to be a countess. They were divorced, though an appeal to the Catholic Church for an annulment was rejected. During 1926 he married his second wife, Duška Todorović (1903–1950), also Serbian; they had one daughter, named Anima. Subsequently, Schmitt was excommunicated because his first marriage had not been annulled by the Church.[8] His daughter Anima Schmitt de Otero (1931–1983) was married, from 1957, to Alfonso Otero Valera (1925–2001), a Spanish law professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela and a member of the ruling Spanish Falange party under the Franco régime. She translated several works by her father into Spanish. Letters from Carl Schmitt to his son-in-law have also been published.
As a young man, Schmitt was 'a devoted Catholic until his break with the church in the mid twenties.'[9] From around the end of the First World War, he began to describe his Catholicism as 'displaced' and 'de-totalised'.[10] Consequently, Gross argues that his work 'cannot be reduced to Roman Catholic theology given a political turn. Rather, Schmitt should be understood as carrying an atheistic political-theological tradition to an extreme.'[11] Schmitt met Mircea Eliade in Berlin during the summer of 1942 and spoke later of Eliade to his friend Ernst Jünger and of his interest to Eliade's works.[12]
Apart from his academic functions, in 1932, Schmitt was counsel for the Reich government in the case 'Preussen contra Reich' ('Prussia v. Reich') in which the Social Democratic Party of Germany-controlled government of the state of Prussia disputed its dismissal by the right-wing Reich government of Franz von Papen. Papen was motivated to do so because Prussia, by far the largest state in Germany, served as a powerful base for the political left and provided it with institutional power, particularly in the form of the Prussian police. Schmitt, Carl Bilfinger and Erwin Jacobi represented the Reich[13] and one of the counsel for the Prussian government was Hermann Heller. The court ruled in October 1932 that the Prussian government had been suspended unlawfully but that the Reich had the right to install a commissar.[13] In German history, the struggle resulting in the de facto destruction of federalism in the Weimar republic is known as the 'Preußenschlag.'
Schmitt remarked on 31 January 1933 that with Adolf Hitler's appointment, 'one can say that 'Hegel died.''[14]Richard Wolin observes:
it is Hegel qua philosopher of the 'bureaucratic class' or Beamtenstaat that has been definitely surpassed with Hitler's triumph... this class of civil servants—which Hegel in the Rechtsphilosophie deems the 'universal class'—represents an impermissible drag on the sovereignty of executive authority. For Schmitt... the very essence of the bureaucratic conduct of business is reverence for the norm, a standpoint that could not but exist in great tension with the doctrines of Carl Schmitt... Hegel had set an ignominious precedent by according this putative universal class a position of preeminence in his political thought, insofar as the primacy of the bureaucracy tends to diminish or supplant the prerogative of sovereign authority.[15]
After the Nazis forced through the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933, which changed the Weimar Constitution to allow the 'present government' to rule by decree, bypassing both the President, Paul von Hindenburg, and the Reichstag, Alfred Hugenberg, the leader of the German National People's Party – which was one of the Nazi's partners in the coalition government, but was being squeezed out of existence – hoped to slow down the Nazi takeover of the country by threatening to quit his ministry position in the Cabinet. Hugenberg reasoned that by doing so, the government would thereby be changed, and the Enabling Act would no longer apply, as the 'present government' that had been would no longer exist. It was a legal opinion by Carl Schmitt which prevented this political maneuver from succeeding. Schmitt, well known as a constitutional theorist, declared that 'present government' did not refer to the specific make-up of the Cabinet when the Act was passed, but to the 'completely different kind of government' – that is, different from the democracy of the Weimar Republic – which the Hitler cabinet had brought into existence.[16]
Schmitt joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933.[17] Within days, Schmitt was party to the burning of books by Jewish authors, rejoicing in the burning of 'un-German' and 'anti-German' material, and calling for a much more extensive purge, to include works by authors influenced by Jewish ideas.[18] In July he was appointed State Councillor for Prussia by Hermann Göring and in November he became the president of the 'Union of National-Socialist Jurists'. He also replaced Hermann Heller as a professor at the University of Berlin,[19] a position he would hold until the end of World War II. He presented his theories as an ideological foundation of the Nazi dictatorship, and a justification of the Führer state concerning legal philosophy, particularly through the concept of auctoritas.
In June 1934, Schmitt was appointed editor-in-chief of the Nazi newspaper for lawyers, the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung ('German Jurists' Journal').[20] In July he published in it 'The Leader Protects the Law (Der Führer schützt das Recht)', a justification of the political murders of the Night of the Long Knives with the authority of Hitler as the 'highest form of administrative justice (höchste Form administrativer Justiz)'.[21] Schmitt presented himself as a radical anti-semite and also was the chairman of a law teachers' convention in Berlin during October 1936,[22] where he demanded that German law be cleansed of the 'Jewish spirit (jüdischem Geist)', going so far as to demand that all publications by Jewish scientists should henceforth be marked with a small symbol.
Nevertheless, in December 1936, the Schutzstaffel (SS) publication Das schwarze Korps accused Schmitt of being an opportunist, a Hegelian state thinker, and a Catholic, and called his anti-semitism a mere pretense, citing earlier statements in which he criticized the Nazis' racial theories.[23][24][25] After this, Schmitt resigned from his position as Reichsfachgruppenleiter (Reich Professional Group Leader), although he retained his job as a professor in Berlin and his title 'Prussian State Councillor'. Although Schmitt continued to be investigated into 1937, further reprisals were stopped by Göring.[26][27]
In 1945, Schmitt was captured by American forces and, after spending more than a year in an internment camp, he returned to his home town of Plettenberg and later to the house of his housekeeper Anni Stand in Plettenberg-Pasel. Schmitt refused every attempt at de-nazification, which effectively barred him from academic jobs. Despite being isolated from the mainstream of the scholarly and political community, he continued his studies especially of international law from the 1950s on, and he frequently received visitors, both colleagues and younger intellectuals, until well into his old age. Important among these visitors were Ernst Jünger, Jacob Taubes and Alexandre Kojève.
In 1962, Schmitt gave lectures in Francoist Spain, two of which resulted in the publication, the next year, of Theory of the Partisan (Telos Press, 2007), in which he characterized the Spanish Civil War as a 'war of national liberation' against 'international Communism'. Schmitt regarded the partisan as a specific and significant phenomenon which, during the latter half of the 20th century, indicated the emergence of a new theory of warfare.
Schmitt died on 7 April 1985 and is buried in Plettenberg.
During 1921, Schmitt became a professor at the University of Greifswald, where he published his essay Die Diktatur (on dictatorship), in which he discussed the foundations of the newly established Weimar Republic, emphasising the office of the Reichspräsident. In this essay, Schmitt compared and contrasted what he saw as the effective and ineffective elements of the new constitution of his country. He saw the office of the president as a comparatively effective element, because of the power granted to the president to declare a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand). This power, which Schmitt discussed and implicitly praised as dictatorial,[21] was more in line with the underlying mentality of executive power than the comparatively slow and ineffective processes of legislative power reached through parliamentary discussion and compromise.
Schmitt was at pains to remove what he saw as a taboo surrounding the concept of 'dictatorship' and to show that the concept is implicit whenever power is wielded by means other than the slow processes of parliamentary politics and the bureaucracy:
If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.[28]
For Schmitt, every government capable of decisive action must include a dictatorial element within its constitution. Although the German concept of Ausnahmezustand is best translated as 'state of emergency', it literally means 'state of exception' which, according to Schmitt, frees the executive from any legal restraints to its power that would normally apply. The use of the term 'exceptional' has to be underlined here: Schmitt defines sovereignty as the power to decide the instauration of state of exception, as Giorgio Agamben has noted. According to Agamben,[29] Schmitt's conceptualization of the 'state of exception' as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a 'pure' or 'revolutionary' violence, which did not enter into any relationship whatsoever with right. Through the state of exception, Schmitt included all types of violence under right, in the case of the authority of Hitler leading to the formulation 'The leader defends the law' ('Der Führer schützt das Recht').[21]
Schmitt opposed what he termed 'commissarial dictatorship', or the declaration of a state of emergency in order to save the legal order (a temporary suspension of law, defined itself by moral or legal right): the state of emergency is limited (even if a posteriori, by law) to 'sovereign dictatorship', in which law was suspended, as in the classical state of exception, not to 'save the Constitution', but rather to create another constitution. This is how he theorized Hitler's continual suspension of the legal constitutional order during the Third Reich (the Weimar Republic's Constitution was never abrogated, emphasized Giorgio Agamben;[30] rather, it was 'suspended' for four years, first with the 28 February 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree, with the suspension renewed every four years, implying a continual state of emergency).
On Dictatorship was followed by another essay in 1922, titled Politische Theologie (political theology); in it, Schmitt, who at the time was working as a professor at the University of Bonn, gave further substance to his authoritarian theories, analysing the concept of 'free will' influenced by Christian-Catholic thinkers. The book begins with Schmitt's famous, or notorious, definition: 'Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' By 'exception', Schmitt means the appropriate moment for stepping outside the rule of law in the public interest (see discussion of On Dictatorship above). Schmitt proposes this definition to those offered by contemporary theorists of sovereignty, particularly Hans Kelsen, whose work is criticized at several points in the essay.
The book's title derives from Schmitt's assertion (in chapter 3) that 'all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts'—in other words, that political theory addresses the state (and sovereignty) in much the same manner as theology does God.
A year later, Schmitt supported the emergence of totalitarian power structures in his paper 'Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus' (roughly: 'The Intellectual-Historical Situation of Today's Parliamentarianism', translated as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy by Ellen Kennedy). Schmitt criticized the institutional practices of liberal politics, arguing that they are justified by a faith in rational discussion and openness that is at odds with actual parliamentary party politics, in which outcomes are hammered out in smoke-filled rooms by party leaders. Schmitt also posits an essential division between the liberal doctrine of separation of powers and what he holds to be the nature of democracy itself, the identity of the rulers and the ruled. Although many critics of Schmitt today, such as Stephen Holmes in his The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism, take exception to his fundamentally authoritarian outlook, the idea of incompatibility between liberalism and democracy is one reason for the continued interest in his political philosophy.[31]
In chapter 4 of his State of Exception (2005), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued that Schmitt's Political Theology ought to be read as a response to Walter Benjamin's influential essay Towards the Critique of Violence.
Schmitt changed universities in 1926, when he became professor of law at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, and again in 1932, when he accepted a position in Cologne. It was from lectures at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin that he wrote his most famous paper, 'Der Begriff des Politischen' ('The Concept of the Political'), in which he developed his theory of 'the political'.[32] Distinct from party politics, 'the political' is the essence of politics. While churches are predominant in religion or society is predominant in economics, the state is predominant in politics. Yet for Schmitt the political was not an autonomous domain equivalent to the other domains, but rather the existential basis that would determine any other domain should it reach the point of politics (e.g. religion ceases to be merely theological when it makes a clear distinction between the 'friend' and the 'enemy'). The political is not equal to any other domain, such as the economic (which distinguishes between profitable and not profitable), but instead is the most essential to identity.
Schmitt, in perhaps his best-known formulation, bases his conceptual realm of state sovereignty and autonomy upon the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction is to be determined 'existentially', which is to say that the enemy is whoever is 'in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.'[3] Such an enemy need not even be based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything.
Although there have been divergent interpretations concerning this work, there is broad agreement that 'The Concept of the Political' is an attempt to achieve state unity by defining the content of politics as opposition to the 'other' (that is to say, an enemy, a stranger. This applies to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one's own interests.) Additionally, the prominence of the state stands as a neutral force dominating potentially fractious civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to affect politics, lest civil war result.
Schmitt's positive reference for Leo Strauss, and Schmitt's approval of his work, had been instrumental in winning Strauss the scholarship funding that allowed him to leave Germany.[33] In turn, Strauss's critique and clarifications of The Concept of the Political led Schmitt to make significant emendations in its second edition. Writing to Schmitt during 1932, Strauss summarized Schmitt's political theology thus: '[B]ecause man is by nature evil, he therefore needs dominion. But dominion can be established, that is, men can be unified only in a unity against—against other men. Every association of men is necessarily a separation from other men ... the political thus understood is not the constitutive principle of the state, of order, but a condition of the state.'[34] Some of the letters between Schmitt and Strauss have been published.
The Nomos of the Earth is Schmitt's most historical and geopolitical work. Published in 1950, it was also one of his final texts. It describes the origin of the Eurocentric global order, which Schmitt dates from the discovery of the New World, discusses its specific character and its contribution to civilization, analyses the reasons for its decline at the end of the 19th century, and concludes with prospects for a new world order. It defends European achievements, not only in creating the first truly global order of international law, but also in limiting war to conflicts among sovereign states, which, in effect, civilized war. In Schmitt's view, the European sovereign state was the greatest achievement of Occidental rationalism; in becoming the principal agency of secularization, the European state created the modern age.
Notable in Schmitt's discussion of the European epoch of world history is the role played by the New World, which ultimately replaced the old world as the centre of the Earth and became the arbiter in European and world politics. According to Schmitt, the United States' internal conflicts between economic presence and political absence, between isolationism and interventionism, are global problems, which today continue to hamper the creation of a new world order. But however critical Schmitt is of American actions at the end of the 19th century and after World War I, he considered the United States to be the only political entity capable of resolving the crisis of global order.
Published in 1956, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play was Schmitt's most extended piece of literary criticism. In it Schmitt focuses his attention on Shakespeare's Hamlet and argues that the significance of the work hinges on its ability to integrate history in the form of the taboo of the queen and the deformation of the figure of the avenger. Schmitt uses this interpretation to develop a theory of myth and politics that serves as a cultural foundation for his concept of political representation. Beyond literary criticism or historical analysis, Schmitt's book also reveals a comprehensive theory of the relationship between aesthetics and politics that responds to alternative ideas developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.
Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan originated in two lectures delivered during 1962,[35] and has been seen as a rethinking of The Concept of the Political.[36] It addressed the transformation of war in the post-European age, analysing a specific and significant phenomenon that ushered in a new theory of war and enmity. It contains an implicit theory of the terrorist, which during the 21st century has resulted in yet another new theory of war and enmity. In the lectures, Schmitt directly tackles the issues surrounding 'the problem of the Partisan' figure: the guerrilla or revolutionary who 'fights irregularly' (p. 3).[37] Both because of its scope, with extended discussions on historical figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, as well as the events marking the beginning of the 20th century, Schmitt's text has had a resurgence of popularity. Jacques Derrida, in his Politics of Friendship remarked:
Despite certain signs of ironic distrust in the areas of metaphysics and ontology, The Concept of the Political was, as we have seen, a philosophical type of essay to 'frame' the topic of a concept unable to constitute itself on philosophical ground. But in Theory of the Partisan, it is in the same areas that the topic of this concept is both radicalized and properly uprooted, where Schmitt wished to regrasp in history the event or node of events that engaged this uprooting radicalisation, and it is precisely there that the philosophical as such intervenes again.[38]
Schmitt concludes Theory of the Partisan with the statement: 'The theory of the partisan flows into the question of the concept of the political, into the question of the real enemy and of a new nomos of the earth.'[39] Schmitt's work on the Partisan has since spurred comparisons with the post-9/11 'terrorist' in recent scholarship.[40]
Through Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Arato, Chantal Mouffe and other writers, Schmitt has become a common reference in recent writings of the intellectual left as well as the right.[41] These discussions concern not only the interpretation of Schmitt's own positions, but also matters relevant to contemporary politics: the idea that laws of the state cannot strictly limit actions of its sovereign, the problem of a 'state of exception' (later expanded upon by Agamben).[42]
Schmitt's argument that political concepts are secularized theological concepts has also recently been seen as consequential for those interested in contemporary political theology. The German-Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes, for example, engaged Schmitt widely in his study of Saint Paul, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford Univ. Press, 2004). Taubes' understanding of political theology is, however, very different from Schmitt's, and emphasizes the political aspect of theological claims, rather than the religious derivation of political claims.
Schmitt is described as a 'classic of political thought' by Herfried Münkler,[43] while in the same article Münkler speaks of his post-war writings as reflecting an: 'embittered, jealous, occasionally malicious man' ('verbitterten, eifersüchtigen, gelegentlich bösartigen Mann'). Schmitt was termed the 'Crown Jurist of the Third Reich' ('Kronjurist des Dritten Reiches') by Waldemar Gurian.
Timothy D. Snyder has asserted that Schmitt's work has greatly influenced Eurasianist philosophy in Russia by revealing a counter to the liberal order.[44]
According to historian Renato Cristi in the writing of the present Constitution of ChilePinochet collaborator Jaime Guzmán based his work on the pouvoir constituant concept used by Schmitt as well as drawing inspiration in the ideas of market society of Friedrich Hayek. This way Guzmán would have enabled a framework for an authoritarian state with a free market system.[45]
Some have argued that neoconservativism has been influenced by Schmitt.[46] Most notably the legal opinions offered by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo et al. by invoking the unitary executive theory to justify highly controversial policies in the war on terror—such as introducing unlawful combatant status which purportedly would eliminate protection by the Geneva Conventions,[47]torture, NSA electronic surveillance program—mimic his writings.[46] Professor David Luban said in 2011 that '[a] Lexis search reveals five law review references to Schmitt between 1980 and 1990; 114 between 1990 and 2000; and 420 since 2000, with almost twice as many in the last five years as the previous five'.[48]
Note: a complete bibliography of all English translations of Schmitt's books, articles, essays, and correspondence is available here.
Works in German
Informational notes
Citations
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Carl Schmitt |
Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi | |
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Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi | |
Born | 16 November 1894 Tokyo, Japan |
Died | 27 July 1972 (aged 77) Schruns, Austria |
Noble family | Coudenhove-Kalergi |
Father | Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi |
Mother | Mitsuko Aoyama |
Occupation | Politician |
Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi[1] (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. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer and major landowner in Tokyo.[2] His childhood name in Japan was Aoyama Eijiro. He became a Czechoslovak citizen in 1919 and then took French nationality from 1939 until his death.
His first book, Pan-Europa, was published in 1923 and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement, which held its first Congress in 1926 in Vienna. In 1927, Aristide Briand was elected honorary president of the Pan-Europa movement. Public figures who attended Pan-Europa congresses included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud.[3] Nazi propaganda against his pluralist pan-European vision would re-emerge towards the end of the 20th-century, spawning the antisemitic Kalergi Plan conspiracy theory a variant of the white genocide conspiracy theory.
Coudenhove-Kalergi was the first recipient of the Charlemagne Prize in 1950. The 1972–1973 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour. Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' as the music for the European Anthem. He also proposed a Europe Day, European postage stamp[4] and many artifacts for the movement (e.g. badges and pennants).[5]
Coudenhove-Kalergi was the second son of Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1859–1906), an Austro-Hungarian count and diplomat of mixed European origin and Mitsuko Aoyama (1874–1941). His father, who spoke sixteen languages and embraced travel as the only means of prolonging life, yet died in his forties, had prematurely abandoned a career in the Austrian diplomatic service that took him to Athens, Constantinople, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, to devote himself to study and writing.
Coudenhove-Kalergi's parents met when his mother helped the Austro-Hungarian diplomat after he fell off a horse while riding in Japan. In commenting on their union, Whittaker Chambers described the future originator of Pan-Europe as 'practically a Pan-European organization himself.' He elaborated: 'The Coudenhoves were a wealthy Flemish family that fled to Austria during the French Revolution. The Kalergis were a wealthy Greek family from Crete. The line has been further crossed with Poles, Norwegians, Balts, French and Germans, but since the families were selective as well as cosmopolitan, the hybridization has been consistently successful.'[6] The Kalergis family roots trace to Byzantine royalty via Venetian aristocracy, connecting with the Phokas imperial dynasty. In 1300, Coudenhove-Kalergi's ancestor Alexios Phokas-Kalergis signed the treaty that made Crete a dominion of Venice.
During his childhood, Coudenhove-Kalergi's mother had read aloud to him Momotarō and other Japanese fairy tales.[7]
Coudenhove-Kalergi spent his adolescence on Bohemian family estates in Ronsperg, known today as Poběžovice. His father personally taught his two sons Russian and Hungarian and toughened them both physically and morally. He took them on long walks in all weather, made them sleep on straw mattresses and take cold showers, and taught them to shoot and fence so well that no one would ever dare challenge them. He also took them to Mass every Sunday. On every Good Friday, as the liturgy came to the exhortation 'oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis' ('Let us also pray for the faithless Jews'), the old count allegedly rose and walked out of the church in a protest against this supposed expression of antisemitism.[6]
Coudenhove-Kalergi studied at the Augustiner-Gymnasium in Brixen before attending the Theresianische Akademie in Vienna from 1908 until 1913. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on Die Objectivität als Grundprinzip der Moral (Objectivity as the Fundamental Principle of Morals) in 1917 from the University of Vienna.
During his student years, Coudenhove-Kalergi married the famous Jewish Viennese actress Ida Roland in April 1915. His marriage to a divorcée thirteen years his senior, and a commoner, caused a temporary split with his family. His mother Mitsuko did not accept Ida, considering her a 'beggar living on the riverbank,'[8] a traditional Japanese point of view against actors and performers. His mother, as head of the family, banned him from the family temporarily, but retracted when Coudenhove-Kalergi became renowned for his pan-European concept.
Aristocratic in his origins and elitist in his ideas, Coudenhove-Kalergi identified and collaborated with such politicians as Engelbert Dollfuss, Kurt Schuschnigg, Otto von Habsburg, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle.[9] His ideal political constituent was a gentleman who must respect and protect ladies, a person adhering to honesty, fair play, courtesy, and rational discourse.[10][11] He strove to replace the nationalist German ideal of racial community with the goal of an ethnically heterogeneous European nation based on a commonality of culture[citation needed], a nation whose geniuses were the 'great Europeans' such as abbé de Saint-Pierre, Kant, Napoleon, Giuseppe Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
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 '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.[12] In 1922, he co-founded[citation needed] the Pan-European Union (PEU) with Archduke Otto von Habsburg, as 'the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia.'[13] 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.'[14] European freemason lodges supported his movement, including the lodge Humanitas.[15]Pan-Europa was translated into the languages of European countries (excluding Italian, which edition was not published at that time) and a multitude of other languages, except for Russian.[16]
According to his autobiography, at the beginning of 1924 his friend Baron Louis de Rothschild introduced him to Max Warburg who offered to finance his movement for the next three years by giving him 60,000 gold marks. Warburg remained sincerely interested in the movement for the remainder of his life and served as an intermediate for Coudenhove-Kalergi with influential Americans such as banker Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch. 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.[17]
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 inspired 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.'[18]
Coudenhove-Kalergi proposed Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' as the Anthem of Europe in 1929,[4] which he later proposed in 1955 as Anthem for the European Union. In 1930, he proposed a Europe Day in May[4] and in 1932 he proposed to celebrate every 17 May, the anniversary of Aristide Briand's 'Memorandum' being published in 1930.[19] However, his Pan-Europeanism earned vivid loathing from Adolf Hitler, who excoriated its pacifism and mechanical economism and belittled its founder as 'a bastard.'[20][21] 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.[22] In 1928, Hitler wrote about his political opponent in his Zweites Buch, describing him as 'Allerweltsbastarden (commonplace bastard) Coudenhove'.[23][24]
Hitler did not share the ideas of his Austrian compatriot. He 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…”[25] Nazi criticism and propaganda against Coudenhove-Kalergi, and his European worldview, would decades later form the basis of the racist Kalergi plan conspiracy theory.[26]
Nazis considered the Pan-European Union to be under the control of Freemasonry.[27] In 1938, a Nazi propaganda book Die Freimaurerei: Weltanschauung, Organisation und Politik was released in German.[28] It revealed Coudenhove-Kalergi's membership of Freemasonry, the organization suppressed by Nazis.[29] On the other hand, his name was not to be found in Masonic directories 10,000 Famous Freemasons published in 1957–1960 by the United States' freemasons.[30] He had already left the Viennese Masonic Lodge in 1926 to avoid the criticism that had occurred at that time against the relationship between the Pan-European movement and Freemasonry. He wrote about his Masonic membership in Ein Leben für Europa (A Life for Europe) published in 1966.[31] In fact, its Nazi propaganda book also described his action in 1924–1925 only. However, this propaganda also stated that 'The Grand Lodge of Wien went enthusiastically to work for the Pan European Union in a call to all Masonic chief authorities. Even the Masonic newspaper The Beacon enthused about the thoughts of the higher degree Freemason Coudenhove-Kalergi, and stated in March 1925:'Freemasonry, especially Austrian Freemasonry, may be eminently satisfied to have Coudenhove-Kalergi among its members. Austrian Freemasonry can rightly report that Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi fights for his Pan European beliefs: political honesty, social insight, the struggle against lies, striving for the recognition and cooperation of all those of good will. In this higher sense, Brother Coudenhove-Kalergi's program is a Masonic work of the highest order, and to be able to work on it together is a lofty task for all brother Masons.'[32]
After the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich 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.[33] 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. He 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.[34] 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.[35]
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' was not considered dignified an academic degree of a German university ('eines akademischen Grades einer deutschen Hochschule unwürdig') – even though he was not Jewish nor was his family Jewish.[36] His doctorate degree was only regranted on 15 May 1955 – a very long time after the end of Nazism.[36]
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.[37] 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.'[38] 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.[39] 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,[40] 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.
In his attitudes towards race and religion, Coudenhove-Kalergi continued the work of his father. In his youth, the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi was an antisemite. He had expected to confirm his antipathy towards the Jews when he started working on his treatise Das Wesen des Antisemitismus (The Essence of Antisemitism); but, Coudenhove-Kalergi came to a different conclusion by the time he published his book in 1901. Following an ironic critique of the new racial theories, he declared that the essence of antisemitism amounted to nothing more credible than fanatical religious hatred. He traced that fanaticism to religious bigotry that originated in the promulgation of Torah under Ezra. According to the elder Coudenhove-Kalergi, Jewish religious bigotry provoked opposition from the relatively tolerant Greco-Roman polytheists, eliciting their anti-Judaic reaction. Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi credited the Jews with originating religious intolerance, and condemned it as a violation of genuine religious principles. He branded every sort of anti-Judaism unchristian. He further urged liberal Christians and Jews to ally in protecting both of their religions, and religion as such, against the emerging menace of secularism.[41]
Despite his opposition to simplistic racial theory, Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi agreed that Jews are racially distinct. Although he pointed out that there is no Semitic race, because Semitic is an ethno-linguistic group, he equivocated by also remarking that the charges that Semites were uncreative were belied by civilizations formed by the Assyrians and Babylonians, who spoke Semitic languages. He further sought to defend the Jews against charges of parasitic greed and cowardice with anecdotal counterexamples of Jewish industriousness and martial courage.[42]
In an interview in the first Pan-European Congress in 1926, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi expressed the support of Jews by the Pan-European movement and the benefits to Jews with the elimination of racial hatred and economic rivalry brought by the United States of Europe.[43]
In 1932, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi composed a preface for a new edition of his father's condemnation of antisemitism, reissued by his own publishing house. In 1933, he responded to the ascendance of Nazism by collaborating with Heinrich Mann, Arthur Holitscher, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Max Brod in writing and publishing the pamphlet Gegen die Phrase vom jüdischen Schädling (Against the Phrase 'Jewish Parasite').
In his book Praktischer Idealismus (Practical Idealism), written in 1925, he describes the future of Jews in Europe and of European racial composition with the following words:[44]
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-Negroidrace of the future, similar in its appearance to the Ancient Egyptians, 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.
The Pan-European idea influenced a young Japanese diplomat – in the future, the president of Kajima Corporation – Morinosuke Kajima during his residence in Berlin in 1922.[45] Coudenhove-Kalergi formed a friendship with Kajima and then asked him to translate the book Pan-Europa into Japanese.[45] He proposed Pan-Asia to Kajima and promised to give Dutch East Indies as their friendship after the realization of the task to establish Pan-Asia.[45] Kajima published Pan-Europa in Japanese in 1927. In 1930 Kajima retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to become MP. His ambition to become an MP was due to Coudenhove-Kalergi's influence.[46] In 1970–1971 he published the complete works of Coudenhove-Kalergi from Kajima Institute Publishing that was established by Morinosuke Kajima. He respected Coudenhove-Kalergi over a lifetime, dreaming of the realization of Pan-Asia.[45]
In Japan, the Pan-European idea also influenced a journalist Yoshinori Maeda, the president of NHK. He became a pioneer of Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union with the image of Pan-Europa that he read in his student days.[47]
In 1953 Ichirō Hatoyama established Yuai Youth Association (later Yuai Association), the fraternal association as the successor of fraternity that Coudenhove-Kalergi mentioned in The Totalitarian State Against Man. The Japanese word yūai (友愛) has several meanings but especially the word used by Hatoyama means fraternity and in German brüderlichkeit.[48] It can also be considered equivalent to 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' (Brotherhood), the motto of the French Republic. An educator Kaoru Hatoyama became the second president of the association after her husband Ichirō, the first president, died in 1959.
In 1967 Coudenhove-Kalergi was awarded the Kajima Peace Award, and was invited to Japan by Morinosuke Kajima as the president of Kajima Institute of International Peace, Yoshinori Maeda as the president of NHK, and Kaoru Hatoyama as the president of Yuai Youth Association. Together with his second wife Alexandra in a wheelchair,[49] Coudenhove-Kalergi stayed in Japan from 26 October to 8 November. He was also accompanied by his young brother Gerolf's daughter Barbara.[50] Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was also awarded First Order of the Sacred Treasure of Japan. He was granted an audience with the Emperor Hirohito, Empress Kōjun, their son Crown Prince Akihito to whom he had presented his book in 1953 in Switzerland, and Crown Princess Michiko. This time, he had returned to Japan for the first time since his childhood 71 years earlier. He gave several lectures and met various leaders. Coudenhove-Kalergi spent 2 weeks in Japan as a guest of Japanese TV, radio, newspaper, magazines and other media.[51] While in Japan, Coudenhove-Kalergi specifically asked for a meeting with the president of Soka Gakkai, Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, as Coudenhove-Kalergi had been interested in Ikeda's work for many years. After their first meeting in October 1967, Coudenhove-Kalergi described Ikeda as 'very energetic, life-loving, honorable, friendly and intelligent.'[52]
Coudenhove-Kalergi visited Japan again at the invitation of the Soka Gakkai in October 1970.[53] During his stay, he and Daisaku Ikeda conducted a formal dialogue over the course of several days, a total of more than 12 hours of which was recorded for posterity.[54] He also visited the campus of Soka University in Tokyo, which was under construction at that time.[53]
Two decades later, in 1990, Ikeda proposed that Coudenhove-Kalergi's favorite song, Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy,' be regularly performed at major Soka Gakkai meetings. It was reported in Japan that this was one cause of the split between the Soka Gakkai and Soka Gakkai International (SGI) from Nichiren Shoshu in 1991, as the Nichiren Shoshu priesthood objected to the song's 'Christian origins.'
According to a masonic report, Coudenhove-Kalergi died of a stroke.[55] His secretary, however, indicated that Coudenhove-Kalergi possibly committed suicide. In the memoir his secretary wrote, she said his death had been kept secret so as not to disappoint those who considered him to be the great visionary of European integration.[56] Coudenhove-Kalergi was the head of the Pan-European Union until his death. The presidency was succeeded by Otto von Habsburg.
Coudenhove-Kalergi is buried at Gruben near Gstaad.[57] His grave, covered with wild grapes, is located in a Japanese rock garden in the Swiss Alps. The grave is unpretentious and upon it is the French epitaph 'Pionnier des États-Unis d'Europe' (Pioneer of the United States of Europe), with none of the other great titles that many supporters believe he had earned.[58]
Coudenhove-Kalergi was married three times: to Ida Roland (1881–1951), to Alexandra Gräfin von Tiele-Winkler (1896–1968), and to Melanie Benatzky-Hoffmann (1909–1983). His known children were Ida's daughter Erika and Alexandra's son Alexander, both of whom were his step-children.[59]
Jedes große historische Geschehen begann als Utopie und endete als Realität.(Translation:) Every great historical event began as a utopia and ended as a reality.
We are experiencing the most dangerous revolution in world history: the revolution of the State against man. We are experiencing the worst idolatry of all time: the deification of the state.
One actual step forward is worth more than a thousand imagined steps.
幼き日に母親に日本の童話、例えば「桃太郎」を読んでもらったとの彼の回想がある
for Coudenhove-Kalergi it meant adherence to the ideals [ . . . ]: honesty, fair play, courtesy, rational discourse.
... the word Gentleman as he used referred to British type Gentleman in the chivalric medieval Europe, who may be characterized by such attributes as elegant, well-educated, polite, honest, humorous, cleanly, etc. ... Gentleman, however, must bear the moral responsibility to respect and protect Lady ...
Dieses Paneuropa nach Auffassung des Allerweltsbastarden Coudenhove würde der amerikanischen Union oder einem national erwachten China gegenüber einst dieselbe Rolle spielen wie der altösterreichische Staat gegenüber Deutschland oder Rußland.
The reasons why Kalergi has once again become a scarecrow of the extreme right are quite evident by re-reading what Hitler wrote about him more than 80 years ago. Kalergi argued for the need to temper the differences between peoples in the name of a collective community, wider than the individual state, a recipe that can only be greeted with annoyance by the nationalists of the 1930s as well as those of the 2000s.
Jedes große historische Geschehen begann als Utopie und endete als Realität.
Every great political happening began as a Utopia and ended as a Reality.(Knopf's other version in 1926 on Google Books)
Media related to Count Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi (category) at Wikimedia Commons
Richard Nikolaus Eijiro Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi Born: 16 November 1894Died: 27 July 1972 | ||
New creation | International President of the Paneuropean Union 1926–1972 | Succeeded by Otto von Habsburg(elected in 1973) |