Coudenhove-Kalergi and Kant
In the European Letters series published by the Coudenhove-Kalergi European Society, a text entitled Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi - Philosophical Successor of Immanuel Kant was published to mark the 130th birthday of the founder of the Pan-European Union and the 300th anniversary of the birth of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. The author of the article is Secretary General Pavo Barišić.
EUROPEAN LETTER OF THE ESCK - EUROPEAN SOCIETY COUDENHOVE-KALERGI
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi – A Philosophical Successor to Immanuel Kant
On 17 November 2024, we commemorated the 130th birthday of Richard Coudenhove- Kalergi, the Tokyo-born founder of the Pan-European Union and one of the key architects of a united Europe. This year also marks the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant, one of Europe’s most renowned philosophers born in Königsberg. This jubilee is celebrated all over the world. These two “fathers of Europe” share a deeper intellectual connection, which I would like to highlight in this tribute. Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi can rightly be considered a philosophical heir to Kant, the thinker who built a profound philosophy of peace and a vision of a world federation of peoples grounded in the Categorical Imperative.
It is well-known and occasionally mentioned that at the first Pan-European Congress, held in Vienna from 3 to 6 October 1926, Kant took an honourable place among the founding fathers who are credited with outstanding services to Europe’s intellectual heritage. In his book A Life for Europe, Coudenhove-Kalergi proudly recounted how a portrait of Kant adorned the background of the grand marble hall of the Vienna Concert House during the event.
What remains less explored and less known, however, is the extent to which Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi created his Pan-European mission under the influence of Kant’s philosophical legacy. Kant’s influence on his peace-minded successor is significant. Leading advocates of the unification of European states, such as the then French Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Edouard Herriot, have been pointing this out since the 1920s. This knowledge has faded somewhat over time.
On his first trip to Paris in January 1925, Coudenhove-Kalergi, describing the city as the “metropolis of Europe”, met with Édouard Herriot, the first European statesman to explicitly advocate for a “United States of Europe”. In 1930, the French head of state published a book on Europe, which was printed in Leipzig in the same year under the title Vereinigte Staaten von Europa in German and in London in the English translation The United States of Europe. In this book, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was explicitly recognised and praised as the intellectual successor to Immanuel Kant.
France’s leading statesman described the climate of intellectual circles in Europe at the time as an endeavour by the best of the younger generation, dedicated to the task of putting Immanuel Kant’s outstanding doctrine of peace into practice. He wrote the following words of praise for the originator of the Pan-European mission:
“The merit of being at the head of these intellectual groups belongs to the man who in recent years most exclusively used his personality in the struggle for European federation, Count Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi. Count Coudenhove developed his ideas in a series of works which today form the best handbook for the Pan-European collaborator; one cannot praise his accuracy and clarity enough.” (Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, A Life for Europe. The Autobiography, Paneuropa-Verlag, Augsburg 2019, p. 376)
No less a personage than the distinguished President of the French government declared Coudenhove-Kalergi the leader of the young generation striving to turn Kant’s philosophy of perpetual peace and the unification of the European peoples from ideas into reality. And he guessed it well. It is indeed possible to find an intellectual proximity and connection to Kant in both Coudenhove-Kalergi’s philosophical and political work.
In 1921, Coudenhove-Kalergi published an abridged version of his dissertation under the title Ethics and Hyperethics in Leipzig. Using the term hyperethics, he attempted to develop a more comprehensive ethics on an aesthetic basis. His motto was that “virtue is human, and beauty is divine”. In Kant’s approach, he recognised the unification of aesthetics and ethics as a doctrine of the beautiful in us. For him, Kant’s Categorical Imperative was nothing other than the “natural law of beauty” (ibid., p. 106). The harmony of the good and the beautiful lies in the spirit and in nature.
As in the field of philosophy, Coudenhove-Kalergi continued to apply Kant’s maxims in practice in his Pan-European activities. Kant’s philosophy of peace became the core of his theory of the union of peoples and the unification of Europe. Some of the programme points in the essay Paneuropa. A Proposal were evidently written under the influence of the Preliminary and Definitive Articles of the Treatise On Eternal Peace.
The reflections of these two “fathers of Europe” on establishing a peaceful world order have a timeless value and are still of inestimable topicality today. The postulate of world peace is not just an empty idea. The world order built on the idea of peace represents the possibility of organising the real world according to the principles of reason, law and justice. The teachings of the world sage from Königsberg and his Pan-European follower stand as enduring testimonies to this ideal.
Prof Pavo Barišić, Secretary General of the International Pan-European Union