Europe Awake! A Brief Biography of Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

07 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

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Abendland Movement, Charlemagne, christendom, European Union, Holy Roman Empire, Otto von Habsburg, paneuropa, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi

The inner meaning of freedom is not freedom to produce anarchy or chaos, but freedom to develop according to form. Where there is freedom it is not arbitrariness which prevails, but inner law… Whoever confuses freedom and arbitrariness soon loses freedom, which he neither deserves nor can carry.

-Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, The Totalitarian State Against Man.

Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi, one of the most influential and mischaracterized founders of the Pan-European Movement, was born in Tokyo in 1894, the first son of the Austrian-Hungarian Ambassador Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi and Mitsuko Maria Aoyama, a Japanese convert to Catholicism. The Coudenhove family were Flemish nobles who inherited the patrimony of the Greco-Venetian Kallegris, and Aoyama was the daughter of a moderately wealthy Japanese commoner. Richard was raised in Ronsperg, in the Austrian Crownland of Bohemia, the second eldest of seven children, and was destined to follow his father into the diplomatic service. Though exempt from service due to his studies at the Theresianum, his first hand experience of the horrors of the first “European Civil War,” and the growing menace of Soviet Russia convinced him of the necessity of Pan-European federal state, one capable of standing militarily and economically against Bolshevism. Continue reading →

Abendland: A Post-Nationalist Vision of Europe

03 Saturday Aug 2019

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom, HRM Archive

≈ 6 Comments

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1930s, 1950s, Abendland Movement, Carolingian Empire, christendom, Europe, European Union, History, Holy Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Nationalism, Supernationalism, Virgil

The “Abendlanders” proposed the creation of a unified Europe, but they imagined it as an organic unity based on its shared Christian heritage, an association of “fatherlands”, reminiscent of the social order willed by God that was destroyed by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the emergence of nation-states, and the nationalism that had resulted in the First World War. Their Europe was not merely a political and economic association but rather an ordered society giving way to “eine neue Lebensform des europäischen Menschen” (“a new way of life for European people”) and the restoration, even a genuine rebirth, of Christendom: a deep unity of Empire [Reich] and Church. The “Abendlanders” initially saw the ancient Carolingian empire or the Holy Roman Empire as their model, but they also imagined a connection with Classical Rome (Virgil) and early Christianity.

-John Carter Wood, Christianity and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Europe

Europe is the Empire: Contra the False “Christendom” of The Paris Statement

11 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

≈ 4 Comments

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christendom, Countries, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Empire, Essay, Europe is the Empire, European Union, Holy Roman Empire, Multicultralism, Nationalism, The Paris Statement

Nationalism is also present wherever the nation is ranked above communities of even higher value, such as larger communities of people or mankind as a whole… The horrible heresy of nationalism not only destroys the unity of the West, but also corrodes each individual nation from within.

-Dietrich von Hildebrand, Austria and Nationalism

The authors of the so-called Paris Statement or “A Europe We Can Believe In” seem to believe that the true meaning of Europe is incompatible with “political empire” and that “resistance to empire” is part of invaluable heritage which Europe is losing to the “faux Christendom of universal human rights”. The authors admit that the “allure of the imperial form endured,” but that “the nation-state prevailed, the political form that joins peoplehood with sovereignty.” Yet is this really true? Is the nation-state “the hallmark of European civilization” that this manifesto claims it to be?

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Europe is the Empire: The Social Order of Tomorrow

02 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

≈ 3 Comments

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Charlemagne, christendom, Democracy, Europe is the Empire, European Union, Holy Roman Empire, Judicial Primacy, Legitimacy, Monarchy, Otto Von Hapsburg, Sacred Ages, The Social Order of Tomorrow

The West is Europe and Europe is the Empire; Europe is the Empire Revisited; Europe is the Empire: Benedict Edition

The Social Order of Tomorrow by the his late majesty Otto of Austria is book which every true Rightist should read. His vision of the repersonalization of economics brought about by the coming “Atomic Age” has not come to pass, however all of the underlying societal, economic, and especially political principles (with one exception that will be discussed later) remain as true today as they were eight hundred years before the book was written. In examining the political aspect, let us begin where his Majesty began, with this very important principle;

We are not the playthings of blind forces, but free men who, in accordance with the will of God, are able to shape their own lives.

Continue reading →

The European Union: What Went Wrong?

16 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by Matthew Scarince in Christendom

≈ 4 Comments

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christendom, EU, European Union, Holy Roman Empire, UN

It is increasingly frustrating to the watch knee-jerk reaction into Leftist Nationalism which plagues so many “Conservatives” and Rightists. Suspicion of the ordered unity necessary for stability appears to be especially pandemic in “pan-monarchists” among others (a side note but an important one: while monarchy is among the best forms of government, it is not the only legitimate form of government). Yet how is it possible that such a blatantly Leftist ideology as Nationalism could have infiltrated so far?