Richard Nicolas von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europe”: the relevance of a manifesto from a hundred years ago

This material evokes the main ideas of the „Pan-Europe” manifesto, launched in 1923 by Count Ruchard Nicolas von Coudenhove-Kalergi, in the context in which Europe was divided between Russian Bolshevism, Germany’s dissatisfaction with the Versailles order and new technologies which Western societies were beginning to enjoy. Through his project of pan-European unification, Kalergi aimed to protect from further humanitarian disasters. In order not to force integration processes, he spoke in favor of identifying an optimal relationship between national policies and integration policy at the European scale. Imagining the frontiers of Pan-Europe, his creed was: „Rather than a victorious war, some bad frontiers”. The Romanian Dniester, in Kalergi’s conception, fixed a hundred years ago the Eastern border of Pan-Europe as a space of freedom and democracy.