|
" The time and space of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, 1923-1939 "
Thorpe, Benjamin J.
| Document Type
|
:
|
Latin Dissertation
|
| Record Number
|
:
|
1102724
|
| Doc. No
|
:
|
TLets757465
|
| Main Entry
|
:
|
Thorpe, Benjamin J.
|
| Title & Author
|
:
|
The time and space of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, 1923-1939\ Thorpe, Benjamin J.
|
| College
|
:
|
University of Nottingham
|
| Date
|
:
|
2018
|
| student score
|
:
|
2018
|
| Degree
|
:
|
Ph.D.
|
| 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.
|
| Subject
|
:
|
D History (General)
|
|
|
:
|
JN Political institutions (Europe)
|
| Added Entry
|
:
|
University of Nottingham
|
| |