1. Context, Motivations, and Inspiration

Born in 1864, Fried grew up in an educated bourgeois Hungarian-Jewish family in Vienna. Until the Stock Exchange crash of 1873, the prosperous family lived in a wealthy, almost exclusively non-Jewish Viennese neighborhood. The Frieds were secular and liberal in political outlook, and Fried recalled having “experienced almost nothing of Jewish belief” during his upbringing.Footnote ⁹ After the crash, the family moved to Leopoldstadt, or “Matzoh Island,” the neighborhood that was home to the majority of poor, recent East European Jewish immigrants. In 1879, after three of the four required years of gymnasium, Fried left school to apprentice with a bookseller, his father being unable to support the family of eleven. In Leopoldstadt, Fried also developed an interest in his Jewish heritage and began reading Jewish history.Footnote ¹⁰ He never became observant, but his interest in his Jewish background persisted. He would refuse to convert when asked to do so by a colleague in the German peace movement;Footnote ¹¹ he was deeply distressed by the pogroms in the Russian Empire and by the Dreyfus Affair, and he maintained that:

Fried originally hoped to make his mark as an intellectual by becoming a writer. However, after failed attempts to get poems published and after discouraging responses to his narrative writing, he decided to concentrate on securing a stable living in publishing and followed a job opportunity to Berlin in 1883. He did not discover the peace movement until the beginning of the 1890s—when he was in his mid-twenties—but, as he would later put it, pacifist inclinations were latent in his earlier views. He described an early interest in pacifism, for example, awoken by an exhibit in 1881 of paintings inspired by the Russo-Turkish war, as playing a role in shaping his left-leaning political convictions, his interest in democracy and free thought, and his “active opposition to all things conservative and nationalist.”Footnote ¹³ In 1887, he opened his own press and, when he heard in 1891 of Suttner's founding of the Austrian Peace Society, he wrote to her to offer his support and they began what would be a lifelong collaboration.

On Fried's suggestion, in 1892, Suttner began to edit a journal named for her novel, Die Waffen Nieder!, which Fried published and promoted.Footnote ¹⁴ He founded the German Peace Society in the same year, and his career, from that point forward, was devoted entirely to the peace movement. He served as editor of the journal Monatliche Friedenskorrespondenz from 1896 to 1899, when he took over editorship of Die Waffen Neider!, changed its name to Die Friedens-Warte, and significantly expanded its scope and reach. As a result, the journal was increasingly cited in works on international law, both by the pacifist international lawyers Walter Schücking and Heinrich Lammasch, and more broadly by the professors of international law, Karl Lamprecht and Josef Redlich.Footnote ¹⁵ Left liberal and Social Democratic politicians, including Georg Gothein and Albert Südekum, also contributed to the journal.Footnote ¹⁶

In 1911, Fried recruited Schücking and the legal scholar Otfried Nippold to establish the Verband für internationale Verständigung, which was to cultivate public opinion in favor of treaties of international law and enlist the support of economic elites—individuals who presumably had a financial stake in the maintenance of international peace and security.Footnote ¹⁷ Related to these organizing efforts, Fried produced an astounding body of work in the form of more than seventy-five books and countless journal articles. Die Friedens-Warte soon become established as one of the top pacifist journals internationally, won the support of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and had a circulation of nearly ten thousand by 1914.Footnote ¹⁸ Fried won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911. In Switzerland during the war, he continued to publish and write for Die Friedens-Warte, advocating Wilson's ideals and arguing against a dictated peace.

Die Friedens-Warte was intended as a clearinghouse, and the peace movement was explicitly supposed to be bipartisan. Fried would ally himself with anyone willing to further the peace movement's cause. Nonetheless, if we want to understand his pacifism and pan-European idea, it is helpful to understand the political and ideological convictions that motivated him and the particular problems he undertook to solve. To this end, in this section, I discuss first the reforms Fried sought in his political engagement with progressive movements; second, his view concerning the ideals represented in the Austrian multiethnic empire and the German national empire; and third, his incorporation of principles drawn from progressive social reform and from Habsburg multiethnicity into an ideology he called “scientific pacifism.”

Throughout his career, Fried was left-leaning in his political views. He joined the Social Democratic Party when in Berlin and remained a member through the 1890s. He was also sympathetic to the cause of progressive social reform and, when he returned to Vienna in 1903, he became involved in a number of reform movements, where he found like-minded activists. Progressive groups offered a solution to the crisis of liberalism that coincided with the rise of modern, racial anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century Central Europe. Led by Viennese cosmopolitans like Josef Popper-Lynkeus, they proposed to secure societal progress by social and political reforms promoted through what Ingrid Belke has termed “enlightenment-progressive reform associations.”Footnote ¹⁹ Their methods were to promote gradual change—they did not call for violent upheaval. Belke describes them as “anything but extremists, one could best compare them with the English ‘Radicals,’ the more so as they often pointed to the Anglo-Saxon example for their program.”Footnote ²⁰ As we shall see, Fried's pacifism was characterized by a similar, gradualist approach.

Social, political, and cultural reformers belonged to a loose grouping of movements, some of which, like the Fabians, proposed a broad reform program, whereas others, like the temperance movement, were more limited in their focus. Some progressives, like Fried, kept up appearances with Viennese high society; others, like the vegetarians, wore linen and grew long beards (Fried received much correspondence from them, but he appears to have remained unconvinced).Footnote ²¹ He was a member of groups that opposed dueling, vivisection, and capital punishment, but his highest profile involvement was in the Esperanto movement, of which he was a leader.Footnote ²²

Progressive social reform went hand in hand with pacifism. Indeed, though most leaders in the peace movement did not wish pacifism to be understood as a social movement, social reform movements contributed much to achieving pacifist goals and have often been treated as part of the peace movement, broadly construed.Footnote ²³ This makes sense: progressive social reform was widely understood by pacifists to be a critical stepping-stone toward the achievement of lasting peace. Suttner, for example, saw the primary task of the peace movement as the cultivation of the conditions for peace. Pacifists were therefore to do much more than simply oppose escalating armament and promote the development of international law and the use of arbitration. In addition, they were to combat nationalism, religious intolerance, and social injustice, and to fight for human rights, especially women's rights. Suttner was also active in the fight against anti-Semitism.Footnote ²⁴ Fried's investment in progressive social reform was, in short, not only consistent with, but also integral to his pacifism.

Fried also found allies and supporters among the freemasons, who were sympathetic to internationalism, tended to embrace a cosmopolitan worldview, and were often involved in progressive social reform. Because freemasonry was illegal in Austria from 1868–1919, Austrian masons had to create what were called “border lodges” just over the border in the Hungarian half of the monarchy. Their presence in Vienna was established through charitable and social reform associations. The association affiliated with Fried's lodge—the Socrates benevolent society—was the most progressive in the city. Freemasons would become some of Fried's strongest supporters in Vienna.Footnote ²⁵ Later, they would provide key early support to Coudenhove, who was also a freemason.Footnote ²⁶

In general, freemasons and progressive social reformers were members of cosmopolitan networks in fin-de-siècle and interwar Austria and were mostly, though not entirely, Austrians of Jewish background. Importantly, their cosmopolitanism went hand in hand with their loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy, a loyalty I believe one can reasonably expect to have influenced Fried's perspective on international organization.Footnote ²⁷

Like progressive social reform, celebration of Habsburg multiculturalism was a response to the crisis of liberalism at the close of the nineteenth century. The crisis in the Habsburg monarchy had implications for Austro-Hungarian Jewry that extended beyond its borders. If the Habsburg monarchy, and by extension Europe, were to be composed of ethnically defined nation-states (instead of multiethnic states), Jews would be unwelcome in the monarchy, and by extension, in all of Europe. Jews were, therefore, more willing to embrace the idea of multiethnic Habsburg patriotism than other ethnic groups in the monarchy. The orthodox rabbi and politician, Joseph Bloch (1850–1923), summed it up nicely when he wrote: “If one could construct a specifically Austrian nationality, Jews would form its foundation.”Footnote ²⁸ In the early twentieth century, Jewish intellectuals joined Catholic Jews like Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Catholic aristocrats in an attempt to breathe new life into the image of the monarchy as the conciliatory, pluralist and, frankly, better embodiment of Germandom.Footnote ²⁹ In fact, Fried made his own contribution to the Austrian myth in 1908 with Wien-Berlin: Ein Vergleich, in which he portrayed Austria as a model of moderation, in contrast to Germany.Footnote ³⁰ Wien-Berlin is, I argue, important because it illustrates how Fried's pacifism, though international in scope and even global in ambition, was grounded in, if not motivated by, an Austrian context.

In Wien-Berlin Fried described Berlin as a young city of cultural neophytes with poor aesthetic taste, militarist tendencies, and a ruthless habit of prioritizing, above all else, order, efficiency, and productivity. “A Ringstrasse,” he wrote, “would be entirely impossible in Berlin because it does not lead somewhere.”Footnote ³¹ Berlin was designed for practicality; Vienna, for beauty.Footnote ³² He tied a litany of objectionable cultural tendencies among Berliners to political and nationalist extremism. The “vehemence, bitterness, and intransigence” among Berliners, Fried quipped, “is unthinkable in Vienna.”Footnote ³³ According to him, Berlin lacked neutral political ground where people of different persuasions, classes, and races could interact. In ecumenical Vienna, on the other hand—even under Karl Lueger—“Jews and antisemites, socialists and feudalists, Germans and Czechs are pleasant to each other in coffee houses, restaurants, street cars, and trains.”Footnote ³⁴ This evaluation of early twentieth-century Vienna as a bastion of reason and moderation (possessed, apparently, even by anti-Semites) starkly contrasted with Fried's evaluation of Germany: Germany was the home of intolerance; Austria, of pluralist civility.

Wien-Berlin was an expression of Fried's frustration with the hostility to pacifism he had encountered in Germany. His work to organize an active peace movement in Germany from the early 1890s until 1903 had been filled with disappointments.Footnote ³⁵ In fact, he had become convinced through his first attempts to promote Bertha von Suttner's work in Germany that Suttner's moral pacifism had no chance there. Accordingly, by the time of the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899, a decade after he had discovered the peace movement, Fried adapted his pacifism to what he called Germany's “bitter” and “abrasive” political atmosphere.Footnote ³⁶ Inspired by the work of Eugen Schlief, whom Fried described as having brought a “north German rationalism” to pacifism, Fried came to believe that in Germany—where he posited that militarist attitudes were more entrenched in the national soul (Volksseele) than in Austria—pacifism only had a chance if packaged in a “soulless shrewdness.”Footnote ³⁷ When Die Friedens-Warte replaced Die Waffen Nieder! in 1899, the new journal reflected Fried's strategic shift from Suttner's moral pacifism toward materialist pacifism. Though Die Friedens-Warte remained a forum for a broad variety of antiwar ideas, ethical and material, and though Fried himself remained convinced of the “moral feeling” that drove Suttner's pacifism, such sentiment would not appear in his own writing for Die Friedens-Warte. Footnote ³⁸

To summarize my argument thus far, Fried's pacifist goals were rooted in progressive social reform and informed by the ideal of Austrian multiethnicity. These, in turn, were responses to the crisis of liberalism, the rise of radicalizing nationalism, and the dilemma of Jewish exclusion. The materialist pacifism that Fried embraced in the 1890s represented his attempt to give pacifism a social scientific foundation and, thereby, to withstand the dismissal moral pacifism suffered in a hostile German political climate. In elaborating what he termed “scientific pacifism,” Fried strayed slightly from the basic premise that was the point of departure for most pacifists, moral or otherwise. This premise, as mentioned above, was that the purpose of the peace movement was to cultivate the conditions for peace by promoting the implementation of international law and binding arbitration.Footnote ³⁹ Although Fried generally agreed with the movement's legalist approach to internationalism, he focused on what he viewed as a necessary prerequisite. Before legal reforms could be successful, there would have to be widespread acceptance of something pacifists took to be self-evident: the existence of an international community that transcended state borders.Footnote ⁴⁰

This international community was understood to have both an ethical and a material dimension. All human beings were part of the ethical community “because of their very humanity and their innate disposition to rational and ethical conduct.”Footnote ⁴¹ Pacifists believed that the ethical community's material infrastructure was developing in the form of “the ongoing social and economic internationalization of European life,” which would result in a transnational community of interests. A developed ethical and material international community “would make the elimination of warfare a question of economic utility, as well as one of moral precept.”Footnote ⁴² Suttner concentrated on building the ethical dimension of the international community; Fried focused on promoting its material infrastructure through international organization. It was in this effort that Pan-Europe would become a key element.

Despite its emphasis on material conditions, Fried's materialist pacifism was anything but Marxist, though he did take from Marx the basic premise that political action was the result of economic forces, not moral consciousness.Footnote ⁴³ Rather, Fried's pacifism reflected the nineteenth-century peace movement's middle-class, liberal roots.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, a greater influence than Marx was the Russian financier, Ivan Bloch, who argued that precisely because of the growing economic and infrastructural interdependence in Europe that came with industrialization, any future war would be an unprecedented disaster. And though Fried also took from Marx the notion that the economic forces guiding politics progressed along determined patterns, he was far more influenced in this regard by the Russian sociologist, Jacob Novicow.Footnote ⁴⁵ Novicow's argument, influenced by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Comte, and Spencer, was that society was governed by identifiable rules and that natural development according to these rules would result in world federation. Novicow subscribed to a branch of fin de siècle evolutionist thought—organicism—that posited increasingly complex self-organization rather than competition as the engine of evolution in human civilization. This may seem like an unconventional interpretation of the role of evolution in societal development—and, indeed, Fried was unable to find a publisher for a German translation of Novicow's La Critique du Darwinisme social—yet the juxtaposition of evolution with socially progressive causes was conventional enough for Carnegie to fund both the peace movement and eugenics research in German-speaking Europe.Footnote ⁴⁶

Like eugenicists in medicine, Novicow believed that intervention in the evolutionary process—again, understood mostly as a process of increasingly complex self-organization and less as a process of “survival of the fittest”—could speed up progress. He hoped to achieve a European federation within his lifetime and believed this to be realistic in part because his plan respected national sovereignty. He cautioned that “the European federation shall not interfere in the internal affairs of the [constituent] countries.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The individual characteristics of each country, he asserted, must be protected so that “[i]f the French prefer to live in a republic, the English in a parliamentary monarchy, and the Russians in an absolute monarchy, that is their business.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The sense in which he used “federation” was, Novicow admonished, “the most conservative.”

Fried's contribution was to take the work of Bloch, Novicow, and other materialist antiwar thinkers and assemble them into a coherent ideology, “scientific pacifism,” which was a success insofar as it attracted serious discussion and some sympathy in the German academy.Footnote ⁴⁹ Fried became known as the chief publicist and theoretician of pacifism in Central Europe. Through Pan-Europe, he hoped to realize the goals of scientific pacifism.

2. Fried's Prewar Pan-Europe

Fried's pan-European idea grew from a study he had published on the Pan-American Union, an organization of Latin and North American diplomatic representatives in Washington, DC, that promoted economic integration, standardization of transport, and cultural and educational exchange.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fried's book on Pan-America was anything but a detached study of that union. He was interested in Pan-America as a model for Europe and went into what he described a period of “eremitic isolation” in order to write the final and most difficult chapter on pan-Americanism as a model for Europe.Footnote ⁵¹ It was this study that Coudenhove cited in his famous 1923 book, Pan-Europa. Footnote ⁵² Indeed, as Anita Prettenthaler-Ziegerhofer has recently noted, Coudenhove was aware of a number of plans for Europe, but Fried's influence was the strongest—in fact, his work alone was quoted in Pan-Europa. Footnote ⁵³

This section discusses the pan-European idea in detail. First, I put Fried's idea in context—he was not the only European pacifist inspired by pan-Americanism. I discuss the reasons pan-Americanism had heuristic value for European pacifists and then outline the specific influences at work in Fried's pan-European proposal. Second, I discuss the functions, membership, leadership, and goals of Fried's proposed confederation. Third, I provide an overview of his attempts to head off potential objections, as well as the objections that his pacifist colleagues actually raised to his proposal for a pan-European bureau. And fourth, I conclude the section with a brief discussion of how and why Fried nonetheless persisted in promoting Pan-Europe throughout World War I, paving the way for Coudenhove.

As mentioned, Fried was not alone in viewing the Pan-American Union as a model for Europe. The pan-European idea had another early proponent in Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, who as early as 1906 had lamented that no sister organization to the Pan-American Union existed in Europe.Footnote ⁵⁴ A member of the French senate, leading pacifist, and president of the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, d'Estournelles was one of Fried's long-time collaborators. Both men had a long track record of promoting international organization as a solution to conflicts within Europe.Footnote ⁵⁵ They hoped, for example, that the result of the European response to the Boxer Rebellion could be a cooperative protectorate through which a strong local government could be overseen by a “European Colonial Union.” This form of indirect rule, they stipulated, would synchronize global politics (Weltpolitik) and would serve as a means to coordinate European interests.Footnote ⁵⁶ This foundation could, they argued, ultimately lead to European political unity, something essential in order for Europe to maintain its status as the world's leading bearer of culture (erstrangiger Kulturträger). The culmination, d'Estournelles hoped, would be a United States of Europe.Footnote ⁵⁷

In agreement with d'Estournelles and other prominent figures who would become leaders of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, such as Elihu Root, Fried viewed colonialism in unproblematic terms as fuel for global international organization.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1899, for example, he proposed the establishment of a European Colonial Union to oversee global politics (Weltpolitik). Footnote ⁵⁹ This union was to include the major European powers and “Europeanized America”—“I include Turkey and the Balkans,” he wrote, “as little as I include China and Japan.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Fried eschewed the peace movement's goal—which he regarded as a dream—of a permanent international court of arbitration to which all states would be answerable and whose decisions would be binding. In the short term, Fried argued, conflicts on the European continent being so intractable, the community of interest that a colonial union would build in the administration of overseas possessions was a step in the right direction.Footnote ⁶¹ The union would channel European colonial interests toward a common trade agenda, the common administration of possessions in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, and ultimately global law.Footnote ⁶²

Although this idea found some supporters among German pacifists, it also incited substantial controversy and criticism. Suttner, notably, voiced strong objection to the politics of exploitation as a means to forge international organization.Footnote ⁶³ This did not mean, however, that Suttner opposed colonialism in and of itself, simply that she was more concerned than Fried was about colonizers' methods. Suttner represented the consensus among those who promoted international oversight of colonial administration in her simultaneous concern for the welfare of colonized populations and her assumption that without excessive exploitation and violence, colonialism could carry out a benevolent, civilizing mission. Suttner initially joined Fried in supporting a European military presence in China after the Boxer Rebellion, seeing in it the seeds of a new phase of international organization in Europe, but she became disillusioned by the troops' tactics.Footnote ⁶⁴ Fried did not focus on such concerns about native welfare—likely he would have classed them as belonging to the kind of moral pacifism that he rejected. Instead, he was concerned with how colonialism could promote peace and integration within Europe and thereby enable Europe to promote cooperation and, eventually, integration at the global level.

Nevertheless, having failed to find adequate support for a colonial union, Fried returned to the goal of fostering communities of interests on the European continent. His 1910 study of pan-Americanism as a gradualist model of European regional integration was the first in-depth exploration of the pan-European idea. Where d'Estournelles lamented the lack of pan-European congresses like those held by the Pan-American Union, Fried offered a concrete proposal for their realization.Footnote ⁶⁵

The most direct influence informing Fried's proposal was Novicow, in particular his La fédération de l'Europe, which Fried translated into German in 1901.Footnote ⁶⁶ In La fédération, Novicow made the argument briefly discussed above, that it was the task of pacifists to intervene in Europe's evolutionary path, which had strayed from its natural trajectory of international organization into a trajectory of imperialism and militarism. Intervention, Novicow argued, could right Europe's evolutionary path and lead to the creation of a United States of Europe within his lifetime. Indeed, Novicow proposed federation as a panacea for most of Europe's problems. For example, as a solution to conflict over Alsace-Lorraine, he proposed a league of small neutral states including Belgium, Switzerland, and the two contested provinces.Footnote ⁶⁷ Fried borrowed heavily from Novicow's evolutionary paradigm, but he disagreed that federation, even in its most conservative form, was possible within a generation.

Fried's skepticism about the speed of international organization charted at the time as the most retrained or cautious form of contemporary thinking regarding federation among antiwar thinkers.Footnote ⁶⁸ In contrast to Novicow, Fried argued that if the project of building a large, federal state were undertaken in the short term, it would fail for lack of a sufficient foundation in regional interdependence.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, it was “a mistake always to look upon the United States of America as a model for Europe.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Fried's proposal for international organization was, in other words, gradualist, even conservative. Although his worldview was cosmopolitan and idealistic, his approach to integration was first and foremost pragmatic.

However, Novicow's confidence and Fried's caution about the potential speed of international organization notwithstanding, their difference was one of degree, not of kind. They both dismissed utopian visions of unity along with any ideas they regarded as idealistic, overambitious, or politically extremist. Victor Hugo's romantic nationalist and Mikhail Bakunin's anarchist proposals for a United States of Europe are two prominent examples that they rejected.Footnote ⁷¹ Fried's choice not to promote Novicow's United States of Europe, but to introduce a more cautious pan-European proposal likely reflects his concern about the particularly inhospitable Central European audience. Furthermore, his concern with selling international organization to the likes of Bismarck and Wilhelm II is, as I will discuss in more detail below, one of the keys to understanding not only the restrained goals of Pan-Europe, but also its purported vagueness.

This brings me to the second point of this section, concerning the specific steps Fried envisioned for Pan-Europe's realization. He identified four areas of priority in the Pan-American Union, which were to be mirrored in Pan-Europe. The first was trade and transport. Specific initiatives included extended railroad connections, agreements concerning free maritime transport and port trade, a standing international customs commission, steps toward the standardization of weights and measures, plans for international coinage, the establishment of an international bank, expanded consular services, commissions to promote important regional industries, and an international trade dictionary.Footnote ⁷² Beyond these areas of first priority, Fried identified public health and civil law as the second tier. Specific goals included internationally coordinated sanitation administrations, extradition agreements, standardization of the legal status of foreigners, the protection of intellectual property, and ultimately the establishment of a commission to codify international civil law and sponsor pan-European conventions.Footnote ⁷³ The third tier of “purely ideal goods,” which Fried also hoped could be managed internationally, included the protection of natural treasures, the establishment of an inventory of region-wide natural resources, the collection and sharing of key statistical information such as census data, a coordinated archaeological commission, an international natural and art museum, the exchange of official state publications and bibliographic information, support for international academic conferences, and exchange programs for professors and students.Footnote ⁷⁴ The final step, which was to be talked about only after significant progress in all the other areas discussed, would be the establishment of arbitration agreements.Footnote ⁷⁵ Fried probably left this for last not because it was least important, but because it was most likely to prompt resistance as an infringement on sovereignty, particularly among a German audience—German delegates to the 1907 Hague Convention had led the veto against a binding international arbitration agreement.Footnote ⁷⁶

Fried hoped that this gradualist approach, focused on small steps in many fields, would be attractive to Europe's political realists. In highlighting the improvement in the quality of everyday life that an international organization would bring to the citizens of European countries, Fried presented integration as an expression of rational self-interest rather than an attack on national identity. He hoped that support from leaders in industry, politics, and the academy would give Pan-Europe credibility and enable it to grow into a loose confederation of states whose economies were integrated, whose transportation systems were standardized, and in which cultural and educational exchanges were extensive.

Eventually, Pan-Europe would also administer a common legal system and resolve disputes through arbitration. Although the bureau would have little power, it would be a stable alliance as long as Europeans came to recognize and invest in their membership in an international community. In short, he wrote, “Europe must finally become Europe”:

Thus, to reiterate, Pan-Europe, even after the realization of all the measures discussed, was to be confederal, not federal: a federation could not succeed unless Europe were already organized. Only when common interests and interconnections in Europe developed beyond the spheres of economics, infrastructure, and technology to permeate educational and cultural life could federation be considered. As Fried had been arguing since at least 1901, even before he had settled on the Pan-American Union as a specific model, “an economically unified Europe must necessarily develop into a politically unified Europe.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Having outlined the steps to be taken and the goals to be realized, the delicate question of where the bureau would be located and what countries it would represent remained. Even in his attempts to court Wilhelm II, in which he suggested that the kaiser would be the ideal leader of an organized Europe, he suggested that the seat of power be a less controversial location than Berlin. That city was out of the question—having been expelled from the German Peace Society, Fried had neither a strong network of collaborators there, nor the endorsement of the German liberals he had courted.Footnote ⁷⁹

Fried endorsed the idea of establishing pan-European headquarters in a neutral country. Interestingly, d'Estournelles did not agree. In his own mentions of the desirability of a Pan-European Union, he simply assumed Paris would be headquarters.Footnote ⁸⁰ I bring up this unapologetic promotion of Paris as European headquarters because it contrasts strikingly with Fried's avoidance of Berlin. It stands to reason that, in addition to reflecting a predictable attitude concerning Paris as the fount of civilization, d'Estournelles was operating on the assumption that his public would be flattered by the proposition of Paris as headquarters of a supranational European organization. In contradistinction, as we have seen in several other instances, Fried was concerned that his public would be offended by such a suggestion for Germany's capital. The choice of location for Pan-Europe's capital again suggests Fried's concern with his hostile, Central European audience. This is further evident in his sometimes awkward attempts at once to win German supporters and to chastise his German radical nationalist opposition. Fried's book on the German kaiser and the peace movement balances flattery of Wilhelm II against exasperation with what he characterized as the closed-minded German public and the “threatening and overbearing” pan-German press.Footnote ⁸¹

The question of pan-European membership was equally fraught, in part as it called for some sort of definition of Europe. Though he never provided a list of proposed constituent countries, Fried's previous proposal for a colonial union suggests the membership he had in mind for Pan-Europe. Membership was not to be assumed for all European states: “It must be considered,” Fried wrote in 1911, “that in the gradual development of an inter-state union, not all states that constitute geographic Europe will be able to be incorporated initially. The states with the highest cultural development will initiate the process.”Footnote ⁸² As is usual in attempts to define the boundaries of Europe, questions arose about Britain and Eastern Europe. As mentioned above, Fried excluded Britain, which he argued would come to constitute its own federation within its empire. He included the Russian Empire and objected to rhetoric about Russian backwardness. In his introduction to his German translation of Novicow's La fédération de l'Europe, Fried wrote:

The inclusion of a region and ethnicity often excluded from ideas of Europe at the time points to the fact that these categories were not definitional for Fried. Europe was a secular community of “cultured states” in which membership was defined by the evolutionary sociological concept of intellectual struggle—states with the highest cultural value were the ones farthest removed from physical struggle.Footnote ⁸⁴ The focus of his pacifism was the construction of an international social and economic infrastructure that would serve, if you will, as a body for this mind. Though Pan-Europe was to be composed of sovereign states, its success depended upon the citizens of those states recognizing their membership in a moral and cultural community that transcended national boundaries. Thus, although not a challenge to the nation-state in and of itself, the international community that underpinned Pan-Europe was absolutely incompatible with the radicalizing nationalism that was gaining currency in the early twentieth century. And in Wien-Berlin, Fried had depicted the alternative: intellectual, rather than physical, struggle in a supranational polity.

Radicalized nationalism was not just an obstacle in the way of Fried's internationalist goals; it was in important ways a point of departure: Pan-Europe offered a solution to the Jewish predicament of exclusion. It offered a model in which Europe's nation-states would not be constituted by ethnic belonging, and Jews would retain their membership in their home states and, by extension, in Europe.

Clearly, Fried could not mobilize broad-based support for Pan-Europe around this Jewish dilemma. Instead, Europe's public and political leaders would have to become convinced that international organization was in their own self-interest. This would be a protracted, evolutionary process. For this reason, I believe, he declined to elaborate specific, detailed plans for the composition, functioning, and governance of Pan-Europe. Some of the greatest obstacles to international organization included the charges of naive utopianism and infringement on national sovereignty; Fried chose not to incite those charges. Rather, following the strategy of the international peace movement, he concentrated less on the end goal and more on cultivating the necessary conditions for its eventual achievement. In short, what has been understood as vagueness was in fact public relations strategy.

I now move to the third point of this section, which concerns another aspect of Fried's public relations strategy: the attempt to head off objections. In what follows, I discuss Fried's answers to concerns about the appropriateness of the pan-American model for Europe and the ultimate rejection of his proposal. Like d'Estournelles, Fried was wholly uncritical of the pan-American example, but had nonetheless to justify his position to others. The most substantial critique he had to address was that pan-Americanism was simply a vehicle for United States hegemony in the Western hemisphere and, if emulated, would similarly lead to the domination of Europe by one great power. In a nutshell, Fried's reply was that the United States' preeminence in the Pan-American Union was consistent with European and American colonial interests, that the United States' dominant role was nonetheless benign, and that checks against the violation of national sovereignty existed within the union that would serve equally well in a pan-European union.

Following his evolutionist paradigm, Fried premised his argument with the assertion that pan-Americanism was the result of inevitable, evolutionary development, development in which Europe lagged behind. The Pan-American Union indicated that the Western hemisphere was progressing faster along the trajectory of international organization and would therefore have an advantage on the world stage should Europe fail to follow its lead. Furthermore, pan-Americanism was not only a model for Europe, but was even a potential vehicle for European economic conquest in Latin America. He observed that the participation of pan-American member countries in the second Hague conference in 1907 conveyed an “advantage for the Europeans, who through this opportunity, ... discovered South America for the second time.”Footnote ⁸⁵

In thus condoning European colonialism, he was far from alone among pacifists. Otto Umfrid, the German Peace Society's spokesman on colonial affairs, argued that although brutal conquest could not be advocated, nonetheless dynamic and populous nations had a right to expand abroad and to acquire territory in stagnating and underpopulated parts of the world—namely in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.Footnote ⁸⁶ The United States and Europe, in other words, were justified in conducting colonial exploits alongside or as part of efforts toward cultivating international trade and law. That the United States would assert economic or cultural hegemony in the Western hemisphere through the Pan-American Union was thus, in Fried's estimation, natural and unproblematic.Footnote ⁸⁷

The United States' hegemonic position in the Pan-American Union was, Fried further argued, not only natural, but also beneficial to Latin American countries. He quoted from Latin American delegates who confirmed this assertion, for example, a Chilean scholar of international law who reported that:

In a similar vein, Fried quoted a 1908 speech delivered at the University of Chicago by a Brazilian Statesman asserting that:

Fried insisted that the United States' dominant role was constructive as long as it was not militarist, and he sought to assure his readers that the United States was explicitly anti-interventionist:

Fried's protestations notwithstanding, the power dynamic in the Pan-American Union brought into serious doubt its applicability as a model for Pan-Europe. The Pan-American Union's permanent central bureau was, after all, in Washington, DC. Its representatives were Latin American diplomats stationed in Washington. The sitting secretary was the United States Secretary of State. In Fried's optimistic estimation, by the first decade of the twentieth century, this central bureau in Washington had become a kind of ministry of the interior for all of America.Footnote ⁹¹

The question of which European state would occupy an equivalently preeminent role in Pan-Europe was an obvious problem. Could an attempt at a regional confederation succeed without one powerful country taking a leadership role? Fried himself had acknowledged that the Pan-American Union had had several false starts in the early nineteenth century because “it lacked a power capable of taking on the leadership role.”Footnote ⁹² Only when the United States joined and assumed leadership did pan-Americanism take off.

Nonetheless, Pan-Europe, according to Fried, would be made up of continental European states and would not be a vehicle for any one state's imperialist aspirations. Although, as mentioned above, most German pacifists agreed that colonialism was acceptable outside of Europe, they held that imperialist conquest was unacceptable on the continent. In fact, German pacifists were staunch defenders of Europe's existing territorial boundaries; they did not want their movement to be associated with any policy that called into question the status quo concerning Alsace-Lorraine.Footnote ⁹³ Yet again, Fried argued, a model for ensuring the stability of Europe's borders was to be found in the Pan-American Union, specifically in the principle of inviolable state sovereignty, which that union was supposed to uphold.

Rather ironically, Latin American delegates had deployed this very principle in their attempts to combat the United States' hegemonic tendencies within the Pan-American Union. By pressuring the United States to accept state sovereignty as a basic principle of pan-Americanism, they hoped to deter violations of their sovereignty.Footnote ⁹⁴ Fried imported this principle to the radically different European context, where it allowed him to argue that Pan-Europe would not become a vehicle for the dominance of one great power. Using a principle deployed by weaker states against interference by a great power, Fried offered Europe's great powers two assurances: first, that joining Pan-Europe would shore up their global standing and, second, that it would secure their preeminent standing within Europe. Pan-Europe would not, in other words, disturb the European political and territorial status quo. Having, he thought, made a watertight argument for the applicability of pan-Americanism as a model for the organization of Europe, Fried made his proposal for institutional backing to his fellow pacifists.

In October of 1909, a year before his book on pan-Americanism appeared, Fried made his formal call for the creation of a pan-European office. He gave a speech outlining his goals for Pan-Europe to International Peace Bureau's General Assembly at the Universal Peace Congress in Brussels. It was received with applause.Footnote ⁹⁵ The assembly then adopted Fried's resolution, which read as follows:

In spite of the initial enthusiasm with which his proposal was received, it soon became clear that support would not be as categorical as Fried had hoped. Even the limited financial support he won for the project came with lukewarm endorsement. The Hungarian pacifist and feminist, Ilona Zipernowsky, who incidentally was elected as a Hungarian delegate to the committee of the International Peace Bureau at the Brussels congress, provided what appears to be the only funding Fried succeeded in securing.Footnote ⁹⁷ In September of 1910, Zipernowsky reported to Fried that she and her husband, Károly, were willing to send Fried financial support, but they were skeptical about his pan-European proposal and preferred that he use the funds to support one of his pacifist publications. However, she continued, “if you think that something can be made of the Pan-European Bureau idea, that would be fine as well.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Fried soon faced concerns from fellow pacifists about the possibility that a pan-European initiative could be a source of economic strain with the United States and, therefore, stand in the way of world organization. The issue of tensions with the United States was a long-standing concern that Fried had tried long ago—apparently unsuccessfully—to lay to rest.Footnote ⁹⁹ But, unfortunately, Fried had also been inconsistent on this issue. He had a record of objecting to proposals for regional integration that he thought would constitute stumbling blocks for continental or global organization. He particularly objected to Friedrich Naumann's Mitteleuropa idea.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ I contend that his objection to regional proposals like Naumann's had less to do with their regional nature and more with ideological underpinnings that Fried opposed. Fried criticized Naumann's “pronounced nationalist views” elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But it did not help Fried's argument for Pan-Europe that he chose to mask such ideological concerns behind arguments about the deficits of regional integration, because this very criticism could legitimately be leveled at a number of his own projects.

Such inconsistencies aside, Fried's response to his colleagues' concerns about Pan-Europe inciting tensions between regional and global integration hinged on his conviction that they misunderstood his proposal. He thus reemphasized that he was not calling for the creation of a polity, something that would indeed hinder the project of world organization. Rather, he emphasized, the Pan-American Union upon which the Pan-European bureau was modeled was simply “a kind of commercial, sanitary, and scientific information office, a headquarters for the study of common American affairs dedicated to preparing for later agreements, a headquarters for exchange and documentation, news, etc.”Footnote ¹⁰² Although a political organization of European states would, he contended, hamper increased cooperation with the Americas, the kind of information office he had in mind could only promote world organization. Moreover, by providing examples of the benefits of international organization, the pan-European bureau would help Europeans to overcome the psychological obstacle that stood in the way of integration. They would awaken to the aspiration for international organization, which would position them to lead the effort toward world organization.Footnote ¹⁰³

Though Fried's insistence that he was not proposing an obstacle to world organization rested on a fine distinction, he could point to Andrew Carnegie, on whose initiative the Pan-American Union was founded, for corroboration. Carnegie had published an article in Die Friedens-Warte in 1907 promoting European economic integration and arguing that such integration was necessary if Europe were to remain economically competitive with the United States.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Nonetheless, one can see how Fried's pacifist colleagues remained skeptical. Even if Fried's proposal for Europe would not throw up any new institutional barriers to global collaboration, Fried clearly did intend for the Pan-European Union not only to catch up to the Pan-American Union, but also to supersede it. It is hard to see how this would not provoke concern from colleagues in the United States.

The pan-European proposal was not taken up again at the next meeting of the General Assembly in Berne in 1911. The meeting was devoted almost exclusively to the pressing problems of the Morocco crisis and the Italo-Turkish war, and no further resolution on Pan-Europe was passed at this or the final two Universal Peace Congresses before the outbreak of World War I.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The mixed response Fried received after the Universal Peace Congresses did not weaken his investment in the pan-European idea to any degree. Similarly, the war did not occasion a shift in his pacifism. This brings me to the fourth and final point of this section—namely Fried's promotion of Pan-Europe during World War I, which he spent in exile in Switzerland. In his first wartime work, Europäische Wiederherstellung, which came out in 1915, he argued that the war did not necessitate a revision of the peace movement's primary goals and strategies because:

Thus, Fried continued to assert in Europäische Wiederherstellung that war was not inevitable, but rather an aberration from the true evolutionary path: sociological evolution followed, he argued, “a universal natural law that leads from chaos to world-organization as from cell to Homo Sapiens. Evolution is always the outcome of association and organization.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The war, in Fried's opinion, was the consequence of a “fatal error” in the interpretation of Darwin's theory, which allowed militarists to “see in history nothing but the decisions of force, entirely overlooking the fact that the whole course of world-history is a process of constantly increasing organization … The fact that the lion tears open the antelope does not imply that the massacre of the population of one state by that of another is a natural law.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Rather, Fried argued, “an uninterrupted line of progress leads from isolated primitive man up to modern pan-Americanism [original emphasis].”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Europe, moreover, desperately needed to follow the example of pan-Americanism, because the war itself demonstrated:

For this reason, the organization of Europe was as pressing as ever. Fried purposed a European Cooperative Union, to be overseen by a pan-European bureau located in a neutral country.Footnote ¹¹¹ Its purpose would be to promote association between states based upon nonpolitical common interests.Footnote ¹¹² By eschewing the political, Fried hoped that “we shall meet less opposition than if we attempt simultaneously to organize them politically.”Footnote ¹¹³

Therefore, as before the war, Fried focused on propaganda for the key ideas behind his integrationist ideal, instead of outlining concrete steps toward political integration. He was careful in Die Friedens-Warte to make it clear that he was not calling for an end to national sovereignty. In a 1916 article on pan-Americanism, he wrote that the creation of a pan-European bureau would not necessitate political reorganization:

As always, the proposal was for uncontroversial, initial steps in nonpolitical fields, but the ultimate goal was political union:

This long-term process of international organization, moreover, would ultimately temper nationalism. Fried remained highly critical of nationalism, claiming that it emphasized “certain superficialities, which it misrepresents as the highest ideals of humanity” and that behind it was merely “the desire to repulse all that is outwardly different.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ In short, according to Fried, nationalism represented a primitive stage in evolution, was “created by disorganization, and [could] serve only disorganization.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Whereas before the war, appeals to Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm had seemed reasonable to Fried, by 1917 he was appealing to Austrian leaders, presumably on the assumption that they would share his frustration with radicalized nationalism. Fried argued specifically that Austria had a special role to play in building Pan-Europe not only because of its domestic multiethnicity, but also because the monarchy did not, he claimed, have a legacy of imperial conquest (he failed to address the question of Bosnia). This, he argued, made Austria unique among European powers. With recourse to both Austria's domestic and international moderation, he suggested in a letter to Austria's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Ottokar Czernin, on 2 June 1917 that the monarchy:

Fried had believed that the principle of nationality would not survive the war with any legitimacy, but the monarchy disintegrated along national lines within a year and a half of this letter. He was convinced that European history would become dominated by “the new, the constructive, safeguarding and liberating principle of international justice.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The establishment of the League of Nations seemed like a vindication, but he died in 1921, before the abject failure of the League to protect national minorities in Europe's nationalizing states.Footnote ¹²⁰

In summary, Fried's pan-European initiative was intended to remedy the very nationalist conflicts that characterized the interwar period, conflicts that were particularly disastrous for Europe's Jews. His proposal certainly had shortcomings, of which his uncritical embrace of the pan-American example was significant. Nevertheless, Pan-Europe failed before World War I first and foremost because of the hostile context of fin-de-siècle Central Europe into which it was introduced. War was widely expected, even eagerly anticipated, and nationalism became increasingly radicalized. The peace movement came late to Central Europe and remained marginal there. Little wonder, too, that the pacifist ideal of international organization should find one of its foremost champions in a Jewish progressive reformer: Jews had everything to lose from the disintegration of multiethnic states and the reorganization of Europe along national lines that defined them as ethnic or racial outsiders. The disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy placed Central European Jews in bleak circumstances. The interwar period was also bleak for the region's aristocrats, who had to embrace nationalism or propose cosmopolitan alternatives. Coudenhove found precisely such an alternative in Fried's pan-European idea.

3. Coudenhove's Interwar Pan-Europe

In the interwar period, a revised and reoriented peace movement found broader support in Austria and Germany than it had before World War I, and the pressing problem of minorities in Central and Eastern Europe's new and reconfigured nation-states eventuated a reorientation of pacifism toward human rights.Footnote ¹²¹ The new national divisions in Europe also introduced a whole new spectrum of concerns and a profoundly changed political climate in which the pan-European idea attracted far wider support than it had during Fried's lifetime.

In the early 1920s, a flurry of publications and new organizations called for European political, economic, and cultural unity. These movements, it is widely argued, derived from pessimism about the future of Europe as a great power.Footnote ¹²² Europeans felt threatened by the rising economic power of the United States and Japan and the political menace of Communist Russia, and thus sought to reconstruct Europe as a stable power and ensure its leading position in the world. According to Katiana Orluc, “European consciousness arose in the interwar period in the context of shock and loss—shock at the cruelty of the First World War and loss of the ‘occidental culture’ of a Europe that, prior to 1914, had existed as something self-evident.”Footnote ¹²³

Coudenhove noted in Pan-Europa that “Mr. A. H. Fried ... asserts that in the year 1914 the existence of a pan-European bureau would unquestionably have prevented the outbreak of the World War—which is very likely true.”Footnote ¹²⁴ With the Pan-European Union, Coudenhove attempted to adapt Fried's idea to respond to interwar tensions and prevent future war in Europe. In response to the climate of urgency in the 1920s, he introduced three significant changes. In this final section, I give an overview of those changes, discuss Coudenhove's reasons for making them, and evaluate their significance. Finally, I offer an argument for the reasons why Coudenhove had greater success than Fried.

Coudenhove's first change was to advocate that the first steps toward political unification be taken immediately. He offered the following reasoning: the only decisive impediment to the political organization of Europe before the war had been the fact that Europe was composed of different kinds of polities. After the war, he argued, the twenty-six European democratic nation-states could begin the process of political unification.Footnote ¹²⁵ This line of reasoning did not follow seamlessly from Fried's thinking. Fried had argued that because Pan-Europe was to be nonpolitical, it could represent the interests of different kinds of polities.Footnote ¹²⁶ However, the implication was not that political heterogeneity was the only impediment to federalization. Rather, the major stumbling block was the pervasive mindset among Europeans that held national sovereignty (regardless of the form of polity) as sacred. Nevertheless, though Coudenhove inverted the order of Fried's steps toward the realization of Pan-Europe, he retained Fried's cautious, measured approach. Political integration would be a slow, step-by-step process.

Coudenhove elaborated the initial steps that were to be taken as follows. First, European governments would summon pan-European conferences that would meet periodically to discuss any relevant political matters except territorial disputes. The second step would be the signing of arbitration agreements between democratic states. The third step would be the establishment of a European customs union, and the final step would be the establishment of a United States of Europe. Like Fried, he did not provide much detail about the nature of this culminating European polity. Coudenhove even failed to specify whether the United States of Europe would be federal or confederal.Footnote ¹²⁷ In short, he saw his inversion of the pan-European trajectory—from Fried's economy followed by politics to the reverse—as an adaptation to interwar circumstances. However, the implication of his reversal of the order of Fried's steps is fascinating in hindsight. Fried's prewar program was strikingly like the functionalist path that the first steps toward integration followed in the 1950s. In putting political integration first, Coudenhove was in step with interwar thinking about integration, but he was out of step with what turned out to be Fried's more accurate estimation of the most realistic path to achieve European unification.

Coudenhove's second change to Fried's Pan-Europe was the addition of a European military alliance and common European Air Force.Footnote ¹²⁸ This was less of a departure than one might think. Most prewar continental pacifists, Fried included, condoned defensive military force.Footnote ¹²⁹ Fried likely left military infrastructure out of his pan-European proposal for the same reason he did not include a political apparatus: he believed it to be too ambitious for the time. Thus, in incorporating military capability, Coudenhove was adapting Fried's Pan-Europe to meet what he considered to be interwar realities that were more conducive than prewar circumstances. Coudenhove's interest in creating a pan-European military does not imply that his conception of Pan-Europe was less rooted in pacifism. Coudenhove envisioned a purely defensive European military alliance. It would ensure Europe's right to its own Monroe Doctrine, which, for Coudenhove, meant that foreign powers would not be able to meddle in European domestic affairs. The military alliance would enable Europe to protect itself, but, Coudenhove argued, Europe's multilingual nature would act as a check on offensive, imperialist aggression.Footnote ¹³⁰ In other words, Coudenhove's advocacy of a military component in Pan-Europe was compatible with his vision of Pan-Europe as leading the world “from world anarchy to world peace.”Footnote ¹³¹

Indeed, just as Fried's countenance of defensive military force was typical of prewar pacifism, Coudenhove's advocacy of a pan-European army did not single him out among interwar pacifists. As Ofer Ashkenazi has shown, Einstein—a supporter of Coudenhove's Pan-European Union—also supported the idea of a world army. Antiwar thinkers in the interwar period embraced a variety of ideas and proposals that, he argues, scholars have sometimes regarded as incoherent or contradictory, but were in fact all in service of “a central ideological thrust within ... networks of activists, which sought to establish mechanisms to overcome the inherent threat posed by unlimited national sovereignty.”Footnote ¹³² Thus, as with his introduction of political unification into Fried's pan-European proposal, Coudenhove's addition of a military dimension was an adaption to the interwar context. In this case, however, it is worth noting with hindsight that given the failed European Defense Community, Fried's plan was more accurately predictive of post-1945 developments.

Coudenhove's third change to Fried's proposal was the greater emphasis he placed on Europe's spiritual and cultural dimensions. Coudenhove saw nations as outgrowths of “the actions and reactions between gifted peoples and their great men” as expressed “through the medium of language, religion, art, and politics.”Footnote ¹³³ His definition of nationhood is important. Like his prewar pacifist predecessors, Coudenhove did not oppose the national idea as such. He opposed national chauvinism and, in particular, the “race myth” that asserted nations were racial communities.Footnote ¹³⁴ He understood chauvinism—the fear and hatred of other nations—as the primary obstacle for Pan-Europe to overcome because it prevented Europeans from recognizing their membership in an international moral and cultural community.Footnote ¹³⁵ Thus, cultivating a supranational Pan-Europe did not, for Coudenhove, mean the end of national identities. Rather, the nature of such identities would be revealed by a proper cultivation of heterogeneous pan-European culture, which would lead to the eventual separation of nation and state, an erroneous linkage that actually stifled national cultures.Footnote ¹³⁶ Coudenhove said more than Fried about nations as spiritual communities—Fried mostly restricted his proposal to material conditions.Footnote ¹³⁷ But what he did write on the subject anticipated Coudenhove's arguments. In Europäische Wiederherstellung, Fried had written that nationalism undermined the “inner life of nations,” that it oppressed rather than liberated them, and that each nation would only “attain its full freedom and become an active agent of human progress” through “the political organization of all mankind.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Taken together, the changes that Coudenhove made to Fried's proposal amounted to a reformulation of the pan-European idea in bolder terms that reflected the urgency and priorities of the interwar period. Fried's slogan—“organize the world!”—and Coudenhove's—“integration or collapse!”—encapsulate the difference. The threat of American economic competition, which Fried had dismissed as alarmist, became compounded by shock at the devastation of World War I and fear that Europe would destroy itself through future wars or fall victim to Soviet military aggression.Footnote ¹³⁹ Thus, a principal purpose of Pan-Europe for Coudenhove was to defend Europe from these threats. Moreover, because Europe was now a politically homogeneous community of nation-states, he believed it was feasible to undertake the political unification that Fried had (accurately, as it happens) thought premature.

Historical hindsight aside, in the interwar years, Coudenhove gained far more traction among politicians, leaders in industry, and high-profile public intellectuals than Fried ever did, though his Pan-European Union never produced the mass movement he envisioned. Coudenhove's greater success is, in part, explained by the more conducive interwar context, but that context does not provide a full explanation—the interwar period in Central Europe was itself, after all, hardly hospitable to cosmopolitan and internationalist initiatives. Coudenhove succeeded in bringing Pan-Europe out of the political margins because he had access to resources and connections that had eluded Fried.

The first supporters for Coudenhove's Pan-European Union were Viennese freemasons, most of them progressive social reformers like Fried himself. However, Coudenhove soon realized that wider support would require that he appeal to more conservative ideologies that would alienate his original audience.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ To this end, he used the resources with which his aristocratic background furnished him. Coudenhove was a member of the Bohemian aristocracy, a group whose status shifted dramatically in the immediate aftermath of the war from that of a political and economic elite to that of a marginal, pariah class. Many nobles adapted to the new national climate by attempting to shed their image as symbols of Habsburg German domination and privilege. Some became Czech nationalists, others pan-German nationalists, and still others, Coudenhove among them, embraced pan-European cosmopolitanism.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Eagle Glassheim has noted of Coudenhove and Otto von Habsburg that “[t]he triple curse of being noble, German, and a Habsburg in a new world of nation-states and minorities was an essential impetus to these men's pan-European dreams.”Footnote ¹⁴²

Their sudden marginal status notwithstanding, nobles throughout Central Europe still commanded tremendous, if reduced, wealth and maintained influential political and economic networks.Footnote ¹⁴³ It was these networks that Coudenhove marshaled to launch his Pan-European Union into prominent, international circles. Baron Louis Rothschild, for example, recruited supporters for Coudenhove in the German banking industry. The Warburg family and others consequently provided the bulk of the Pan-European Union's funding, and the union only went into decline when that funding decreased in 1929 with the Great Depression and then dried up completely in 1933 when the Nazis banned the Pan-European Union in Germany.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In short, although Coudenhove formulated his pan-European proposal in the progressive and pacifist circles that he and Fried both moved in as freemasons, he soon realized that this network could offer more by way of inspiration than influence, and used his considerable resources to widen the movement's reach.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Furthermore, having rejected pan-German nationalism, Coudenhove was also able to recruit supporters among that movement's strongest opponents—Christian Socialists—who shared his Habsburg nostalgia and respected his aristocratic credentials. Christian Socialism offered influence among clerical and conservative members of the German Right, and though Coudenhove himself was not anti-Semitic—his wife was partly of Jewish heritage and he and his father had both published critiques of anti-Semitism—he was able to turn a blind eye to the anti-Semitic conflation of Jews with liberalism that was a fundamental element of Christian Social ideology.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ For Fried, Catholic conservatives, even those who supported federalization of the Habsburg monarchy and of Europe, were not a source of support, but rather constituted the opposition. In a 1910 letter to Suttner, he argued that no patriotic, progressive-minded Austrian could countenance rule by such figures as Francis Ferdinand, pastor Clemens von Galen, Karl Lueger, and Alois von Aehrenthal.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Fried, a secular progressive, did not support the worldview of such figures, but regardless, he did not have the option of their support. Coudenhove did.

In short, Coudenhove made major inroads into powerful circles thanks to his background. Consequently, the central office of the Pan-European Union was established with governmental support at Vienna's Hofburg in 1925. Chancellor Ignaz Seipel served as honorary president until his death in 1932 and was followed by subsequent Christian Social chancellors, Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg. Outside Austria, Coudenhove's supporters included Aristide Briand, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill, and a score of prominent intellectuals, among them Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud. The result was that, in spite of the fact that they both operated in climates hostile to internationalism, Coudenhove fared far better than Fried.

Recent scholarship has shed light on the dilemma that Jews and Catholic aristocrats shared in the decades bracketing World War I. As Malachi Hacohen has noted, neither group had anything to gain from the disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy; indeed, its disintegration was traumatic for both.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Among the wide variety of responses to this dilemma was a series of cosmopolitan initiatives offering an alternative to the ethnic belonging dictated by the radicalized nationalism ultimately deployed in Central Europe's interwar nationalizing states.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ But Catholic aristocrats had more options than Jews—at stake was their relevance in a Europe of nation-states, not their very membership therein. Nobles could adapt the language of aristocratic entitlement to a language of national entitlement, and some, like Karl Anton Rohan, embraced pan-German nationalism, racial anti-Semitism, and ultimately Nazism.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Coudenhove attempted instead to breathe new life into the liberal cosmopolitanism cultivated among early-twentieth-century progressives and pacifists, many of whom were Jews. He was well aware of the intellectual genealogy to which he contributed. In fact, in a rather bizarre proposal, he offered a means for its perpetuation. He advocated a process of “social eugenics,” by which the old, landed “blood nobility” (Blutadel) would merge with the urban, Jewish “nobility of the mind” (Geistesadel) and form a new moral rather than political “aristocracy of the future.”Footnote ¹⁵¹