The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 37
thousand kilometres away who never lived together
with us in the Czech Republic...speaking in some lan
guages we don’t understand. I’m sorry but I don’t un
derstand English and French,” he said, speaking in
English. “Czech citizens [are] the most Eurosceptic na
tion in the European Union.”
This is an exaggeration, but most surveys show
Czechs to be among the less enthusiastic eumembers.
For Mr Okamura, mentioning the economic benefits
provokes only resentment. Czechs are not so poor, he
says, that we need to be grateful for the eu’s money.
Many Czechs think Mr Okamura’s pugnacity has
something to do with his youth. A Czech documentary
in 2019, “The Okamura Brothers”, includes a television
interview in which Mr Okamura called the orphanage
the most intense experience of his childhood. “I was
bullied there. From that time I had a stammer until I
was about 22,” he says. He realised he would “always
[have] to rely solely on myself”.
Like the CoudenhoveKalergi brothers, the Oka
mura brothers have handled their mixed identities dif
ferently. Tomio’s older brother, Hayato, has deferential
Japanese manners. He has had a career as a tour guide
in Prague, partly through Tomio’s agency. Upset at the
effect of Tomio’s politics on the family name, he has
repeatedly run for parliament as a Christian Democrat.
This year he got in. Asked about Hayato, Tomio cannot
resist a dig: he would be happy to offer his brother
more work someday. “He is a very good tour guide.”
The youngest brother, Osamu, is a successful archi
tect who votes for liberal parties. He and his brothers
try to stay out of each others’ politics. But one of To
mio’s statements in April made that difficult for Osa
mu, who is gay. In parliament Tomio had denounced a
bill that would permit samesex couples to adopt chil
dren. “I grew up in an orphanage for part of my child
hood,” he had said, “and I can tell you that if a samesex
couple adopted me, I’d rather jump out the window.”
Dreams and nightmares are formed in childhood,
those of Europe, too. What room in Ronsperg Castle
did Richard CoudenhoveKalergi see when he imag
ined his united Europe? His father’s library, with its
statues of Buddha and Plato? What room does Tomio
Okamura see when he thinks of the eu, with its open
doors of nationality and sexuality, and its directors
lecturing in unfamiliar languages?
In Pobezovice today only the medieval centre re
calls the Ronsperg that Mitsuko rode into 125 years ago.
The Nazis burned down the synagogue and murdered
the Jewish inhabitants, and postwar Czechoslovakia
expelled the Germanspeakers. On a rainy day in Sep
tember it was impossible to find anyone who spoke
German, though the border is just 10km away. A few
young people spoke halting English. They had never
heard of CoudenhoveKalergi.
Ronsperg Castle boasts a visitor’s centre but it is
run on a shoestring budget. On the gates of the lower
courtyard, marble plaques in Czech and German com
memorate CoudenhoveKalergi as the “father of the
idea of European Union”. The palace is crumbling, its
windows painted over with fairytale characters in a
forlorn effort at civic renewal. At the entrance a stone
arch bears a legend in Latin: erit hora, “the hour will
come”. Some nobleman’s motto, or perhaps one of
Hansi’s fakes. Acrossthestreet at the EuroOil station a
woman understood enoughRussian to point the way
to the Jewish cemetery.nCoudenhove ancestors. He liked to travel with a mum
my that he had bought in Egypt. The Czechs charged
him with consorting with Nazi officers—he was prob
ably protecting his wife, who, like Ida, was Jewish.
Meanwhile, CoudenhoveKalergi worked his contacts
with Churchill, who was pushing for a United States of
Europe, and with de Gaulle.
But by now other players were on the scene. A rival
Britishbacked group, the United European Move
ment, did most of the planning for the Congress of Eu
rope in 1948, which led to the Council of Europe, an in
terparliamentary body. Two years later Jean Monnet,
a French businessman and civil servant, laid the foun
dation of the euby helping negotiate the European
Coal and Steel Community. Monnet apparently saw
CoudenhoveKalergi as a useless idealist. In the 1950s
and 1960s he found himself gradually sidelined. He left
little institutional legacy when he died in 1972.
CoudenhoveKalergi himself seems to have wor
ried he was too much of a dreamer. In “Practical Ideal
ism” he writes that people of mixed race can see things
from many sides, but the more they do so, “the weaker
usually is their will to act”. The “heroic, singleminded
man” must set aside diverse perspectives to achieve
great things. This makes his quest for European unity
seem an effort to resolve anxieties over his identity,
much like Hansi’s ancestor portraits.
Yet Barbara CoudenhoveKalergi, Richard’s niece,
thinks it is simpler: “He was a child of the multination
al Habsburg empire.” Barbara is the daughter of the
third brother, Gerolf, who worked for Japan’s embassy
in Prague. In Barbara’s telling, the brothers’ identity
crisis was not so much about being halfJapanese as
being fully AustroHungarian. After the war her family
was kicked out of Czechoslovakia along with 3m other
Germanspeakers as collective punishment for Nazi
misdeeds. But her father said the expulsion was noth
ing compared to seeing his homeland dissolve in 1918.
As for Richard’s dreams, “you have to remember
that when he was young Vienna was full of people
thinking about a new world order, in every café,” Bar
bara explains. Trotsky, Stalin and Hitler all lived there
in 1913. “Lots of cranks with ideas about the future were
mixing, and Dicky was one of them.”
the striver
On a sunny day in September 2021, Tomio Okamura
stood in a town square 100km south of Prague, warn
ing several hundred voters about his liberal oppo
nents: “They want more migrants, they want to intro
duce the euro, they want to get rid of gender, they want
to raise property taxes.” Next to the stage, stalls in the
colours of his Freedom and Direct Democracy (spd)
party were selling Czech produce, promoting his plan
to make the country selfsufficient in basic foodstuffs.
The spdresembles other populist parties in Eu
rope, combining rightwing stances on immigrants,
gender and the euwith leftwing ones on social wel
fare and pensions. Mr Okamura banters endlessly with
constituents, and like many populists he has good
comic timing. (“I’m sorry but we’re born either with or
without a weewee,” gets a big laugh.) Many Czechs
who remember his earlier, jovial TVpersonality won
der whether his xenophobia is an act.
But in an interview after the rally, Mr Okamura
evinced genuine antipathy towards the eu. “For us it’s
not important what the eusays, some foreigners a
“Lots of
cranks with
ideas about
the future
were mixing”