36 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021
ing in grand hotels while recruiting for his movement.
He also got money from Max Warburg, the power
ful German banker. CoudenhoveKalergi’s theory of
politics was aristocratic: Europe could be unified by
cultivating leaders and elites. He was quietly encour
aged by Tomas Masaryk, the first president of indepen
dent Czechoslovakia, and openly supported by Aris
tide Briand, prime minister of France. Churchill was
interested too. At the beginning of the 1930s it seemed
the project might work.
By the late 1930s it was clear it would not. The Nazis
crushed the German chapters of the Paneuropean Un
ion. In 1938 CoudenhoveKalergi was running his
movement from Vienna. He and Ida were hosting a
dinner party when news arrived of the Anschluss. He
was on a Gestapo hit list. They hopped into the Bentley
and rode to Zagreb, alerting the Italian government
that they planned to cross to Switzerland. Couden
hoveKalergi’s cultivation of Mussolini paid off: he
sent an honour guard to escort them.
When France fell they jumped in the Bentley again,
rode to Lisbon and got seats on the fully booked sea
plane to New York, apparently via sympathisers in the
American government. (The claim that this was the
origin of the Victor Laszlo plotline in the film “Casa
blanca” is circumstantial but persuasive. Among other
things, Paul Henreid, who played Laszlo, was a fellow
graduate of the Theresianum.) Friends landed Cou
denhoveKalergi a professorship at New York Univer
sity while he sought to persuade President Franklin
Roosevelt to back European unification. He failed, in
part because his anticommunism was inconvenient
at a time when the Soviet Union was an ally. But the
war convinced him of democracy’s virtues. In its after
math a European Union seemed no more Utopian than
the other new international organisations.
After the war CoudenhoveKalergi had to get his
older brother out of jail. Hansi had turned rather
strange, stuffing Ronsperg with kitschy portraits of hishead of the nationalist spdparty, Tomio Okamura.
Mr Okamura is the son of a Japanese father and a
Czech mother. His parents married in communist
Czechoslovakia; he was born in Tokyo in 1972. He came
to Prague as a child, when his mother returned with
her three sons after the marriage failed. His move from
Japan was tougher than CoudenhoveKalergi’s: his de
pressed mother was sent to a psychiatric clinic. An
aunt took in the oldest boy, but Tomio and his younger
brother spent a miserable year or so in an orphanage.
Mr Okamura came to attention as a guest on televi
sion shows in the 2000s, having built a successful tra
vel business focused on Asian tourists. He was a peppy
salesman for Czech culture, making light of his back
ground by calling himself “the only slanteyed Moravi
an”. In 2010 he published a bestselling autobiography,
“Tomio Okamura: the Czech Dream”. He launched his
first party three years later.
Initially Mr Okamura ran denouncing corruption
and advocating referendums, but he soon shifted to
bashing Islam and the eu. He is best known abroad for
claiming refugees will introduce “monkey plague” to
Europe and calling for a referendum on Czexit. In the
latest election, in October, the spdwon 10% of the vote,
a bit below its share in 2017.
Richard CoudenhoveKalergi and Tomio Okamura
make for curious bookends to Europe’s past century.
CoudenhoveKalergi’s detractors asked what business
a halfJapanese interloper had telling European na
tions to unite. Mr Okamura’s critics wonder how he
manages to square his xenophobia with his back
ground. How did they end up on opposite sides of the
European question? Was it character? Or has the direc
tion of history changed?the aristocrat
In “PanEuropa”, CoudenhoveKalergi argued that un
less Europe chose political and economic union, it
would slide, again, into war and end up ruled by Amer
ica and Russia. These were inhuman societies, one
commercial, the other military. As the home of civili
sation and freedom, Europe had to unite and merge its
colonial empires to seize back its role in history.
The notion of a European federation had existed
since the 18th century, and CoudenhoveKalergi’s ver
sion would largely appeal to today’s Europhiles. But
they would not approve of his ambivalence towards
democracy. He believed in an aristocracy of education
and talent, and associated universal suffrage with na
tionalism. In one essay he proposed that politics be or
ganised by profession and class rather than simple de
mocracy. He was intrigued by Benito Mussolini, Italy’s
dictator who had entertained similar ideas, and
sought to enlist him in his movement.
In his 1925 book “Practical Idealism” Coudenhove
Kalergi’s interest in aristocracy spilled over into the
language of race, including the lines underlying the
“Kalergi plan” myth. Due to migration, he wrote, “to
day’s races and castes will gradually disappear,” be
coming “the EurasianNegroid race of the future”. The
Jewswould furnish the “leaders of humanity”.
The passages praising Jews are significant. In 1915,
at 20, he had married Ida Roland, a famous Jewish ac
tress 13 years his senior. (He first saw her playing Cath
erine the Great.) It was a happy marriage, though Mit
suko disapproved. Ida subsidised Richard’s lifestyle:
driving around Europe in a chauffeured Bentley, stay“Vienna was
full of people
thinking about
a new world
order, in every
café”