The time and space of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe, 1923-1939
Publication Date
July 16, 2018
Creator
Abstract
This thesis investigates the historical geographies of the Pan-European Union, and its founder and leader Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, focusing in the main on the period from 1923 to 1939. A mixed-race Austrian aristocrat, philosopher and writer who made it his life’s mission to see Europe politically united, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s was a singular life, which he used to his advantage by weaving his life story into his political campaigning. The thesis opens by investigating the relationship between a life lived and a life told, and about the consequences for researchers attempting to recover his biography.
The bulk of the thesis looks at the ways in which Pan-Europeanism both responded and itself contributed to shaping three broad sets of spatial and temporal ideas, each revolving around the notion of a supranational European polity. First, it confronts the way history was invoked both to bring into being a ‘literature’ that would add prestige to its arguments, and to craft a narrative arc that would add the force of apparent inevitability to its arguments. Second, it looks at the way in which Pan-Europeanism employed a form of spatial reasoning that shared many points of reference with the German school of geopolitik, despite a fundamentally incompatible view of international politics. And third, it analyses the Pan-European invention of ‘Eurafrica’ as a neo-colonial system that would offer a ‘third path’ internationalism that fell between the imperialism of the British Empire, and the Mandate-based theory of international governance advocated by the League. Each of these sets of ideas, I argue, persisted both outside the bounds of the Pan-European Union, and after its eventual marginalisation.
Item Type
ethesis
Thesis Type
PhD
Supervisors
Subjects (LC)
Associated Schools / Departments
School of Geography
eprints ID
51778
UoN Repository URI
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Name
Thesis [10.05.18].pdf
Type
Full-text
Description
Examined
Size
6.23 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a944ef017634c0ed85792f74c50ebbc7