There, in Kakania, that state since vanished that no one understood, in many ways an exemplary state, though unappreciated, there was a tempo too, but not too much tempo. Whenever one thought of that country from someplace abroad, the memory that hovered before one’s eyes was of white, wide, prosperous-looking roads dating from the era of foot marches and mail coaches, roads that crisscrossed the country in every direction like rivers of order, like ribbons of bright military twill, the paper-white arm of the administration holding all the provinces in its embrace. And what provinces they were! Glaciers and sea, Karst limestone and Bohemian fields of grain, nights on the Adriatic chirping with restless cicadas, and Slovakian villages where the smoke rose from chimneys as from upturned nostrils while the village cowered between two small hills as if the earth had parted its lips to warm its child between them.
–Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
That Europe as a whole is in a bad way, from Ireland to the Urals (or San Francisco to Vladivostok, in Otto von Habsburg’s memorable phrase) will be readily apparent to the vast majority of the readers of these pages. The European Union, three of whose founders (Adenauer, de Gasperi, and Schuman) were or are candidates for beatification by the Catholic Church, has become something of a nightmare of secularising woke oppression—though to be fair, in this it reflects most of the governments of Western Europe, including His Majesty’s new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Integral to these governments’ policies are the repression of the natives’ freedom of speech and a permissiveness towards the actions of increasingly restive foreign immigrants. Not surprisingly, many of those whom the ruling establishments label ‘far right’ have little use for the EU. Given what the establishment embraces in terms of evil conduct, it is very easy to understand this feeling.
Yet, it must be admitted that the original vision of the founders remains compelling, especially in the face of both the ongoing moral degradation espoused by the Americano-European elites, and also the threat emanating from Russia. Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s 1949 speech, given when he accepted the Karlspreis in Aachen, contains a memorable paragraph, typical of the notions in vogue at the time:
The ‘Union Charlemagne’ should […] be established not as an economical union but as a six-state confederacy: Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg. We are dealing with no less than the renewal of the Carolingian Empire on a democratic, federal and social basis. […] Therefore I appeal to all those of good will to bring a movement to life for the total reconciliation between the Germans and the French through the renewal of the Empire of Charlemagne as a confederacy of free nations. Today this Charlemagne movement should stem from Aachen in the memory of that German–French emperor, to transform Europe from a battlefield of recurring world wars to a peaceful and blooming worldly empire of free people!
Heady stuff, if utterly irrelevant in the Brussels of to-day. Yet Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Union soldiers on, thanks to the life breathed into it by the late Otto von Habsburg, the son of the last Austrian Emperor to date. As their Austrian branch tells us:
For us, Europe is not just a geographical term that covers the area between the Atlantic and the Urals. Due to their centuries-long common fate, the peoples of our continent form a spiritual unity, which must now finally be followed by politics, so that Europe can exist in peace and freedom as an equal partner of the great powers. The soul of this continent is Christianity. Anyone who removes it from political action turns Europe into a soulless body, a fragile construction that is exposed to all influences and currents of the zeitgeist. Austria, which has already been a European factor of order once in history, can show the way how a community of peoples could master the common problems of the present and future in brotherly coexistence. For the old nation states are only capable of managing the permanent crisis.
This vision, adopted by Archduke Otto after the Second World War, appeared to end any hope for a Habsburg Monarchical restoration in the then-primarily Soviet-occupied Central Europe. At the same time, it seemed to have a tangible base in the six nations Coudenhove-Kalergi pointed out in his speech. Dominated by Christian Democrats at a time when both of those labels were truly accurate, and when the Catholic Church’s hierarchy still believed in specifically Christian politics, it seemed like an achievable vision.
To-day, with the partial exception of Italy, those countries and their establishment parties have rushed to the forefront of jettisoning anything that might be recognised as either “Christian” or “democratic.” This is particularly true of the remaining “Christian Democratic” parties, as shown by their expulsion of Hungary’s Fidesz party from the European People’s Party. Needless to say, anything remotely resembling the vision of the EU’s founders, Coudenhove-Kalergi, or the Archduke Otto has absolutely no chance with the Eurocrats in Brussels. At first look, that vision seems as unachievable as anything else.
But not necessarily. Orban’s Hungary, constantly harassed by the Eurocracy as it is, offers refuge to the Otto von Habsburg Foundation. Partly funded by Prime Minister Orban’s own office and by the Bethlen Gabor Fund, the Foundation obviously operates within the parameters of Orban’s approval. According to its website, “The Foundation’s primary purpose is to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage of Otto von Habsburg in a dignified manner, arrange it into a single collection, process it and provide access to it. The Foundation also aims to support the creation of a future-oriented European ideology based on the work of Otto von Habsburg.”
This may be a revelation, since Orban and his allies in Hungary are consistently portrayed as being anti-European. The truth is a bit different. Back in 2019, when speaking about the persecution of Christians around the world, Orban declared:
The greatest mistake a European person can make hearing about the persecution of Christians is to say that this could never happen to him in his country. However, terror has struck Europe repeatedly, Europe’s Western countries have given the Islamic State many soldiers, and masses following radical Islam have come to Europe as part of illegal and uncontrolled migration flows. According to demographic forecasts, in the not very distant future there will be European countries where religious and cultural ratios will swiftly change. Europe can only be saved from this if it can find its way back to its Christian identity.
For Orban, Otto von Habsburg’s vision of a United Christian Europe is not a nice idea, but a political, economic, cultural, and indeed religious necessity, whose urgency is ever increasing as Islamic, Western elitist, and Russian pressure builds.
But how to get from here to there? It is necessary to go back before World War II to Otto’s original vision, which he had inherited from his father, Bl. Emperor-King Karl, who had in turn received it from his uncle, the murdered heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There is an irony here, in that for many Hungarians to-day, Franz Ferdinand is considered to be the acme of the anti-Magyar. He certainly was opposed to Hungary’s ruling Liberal Party and its dominant Tisza family (who ironically have given their name to one of the parties opposing Orban). Franz Ferdinand stood against the Liberals’ Magyarising policies toward the Slovak, Ruthenian, Romanian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Serb minorities. But he was close to the Hungarian Catholic Party led by the Zichy clan. During his time as an army officer in the Hungarian town of Gyor, he mingled with the townspeople, who called him “our Archduke.” It was there that he began to learn Hungarian under the tutelage of Fr. Josef Lanyi. The beloved Hungarian cleric would baptise Franz Ferdinand’s children; and, as a bishop, he would gain somewhat grisly fame for a prophetic dream he had of the murder at Sarajevo on the night before it happened.
Having dispensed with the myth of Franz Ferdinand’s anti-Magyarism, it remains to examine his ideas about the internal reorganisation of the Monarchy that he was to inherit. The Kingdom of Croatia was in personal union with the Kingdom of Hungary, much as Hungary was in personal union with Austria. During the 1848 Hungarian Revolution, the minorities—including the Croats—had rallied to the dynasty and the Apostolic Crown against Kossuth’s republicans. Due to his defeat in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Emperor Franz Joseph felt constrained to make some sort of compromise with the more restive element of the Hungarians. This Ausgleich, as it was called, made Hungary an equal party with the collection of territories called Austria; but the dominance of Hungary by the Tszas led to the aforementioned Magyarising policies. Initially, it occurred to Franz Ferdinand and his advisers to make Croatia an equal third party, and to add to it the Austrian territories inhabited by Croats, such as Dalmatia.
However, this “Trialism” not only left out the other minorities in Hungary, it also failed to deal with those in Austria. As the early years of the 20th century progressed, Franz Ferdinand gathered a group of scholars and politicians around him—a ‘kitchen cabinet,’ as we would say to-day. In 1906, this coterie, spearheaded by ethnic Romanian Aurel Popovici, came up with a proposal for a “United States of Greater Austria,” which would transform the Dual Monarchy into a multinational federation. It would, of course, be a federation of Monarchies under the Habsburg Emperor-King as constitutional head, albeit retaining enough power—in the pithy phrase of Franz Joseph—to “protect my people from their politicians.” These plans were sidelined when the man who sought to advance them was so brutally murdered.
But they were not lost. Franz Ferdinand had impressed upon his nephew Karl—who became heir to the throne after Sarajevo—the need for these reforms. Becoming Emperor in the midst of a war in which he had no part, Karl soon realised—as a valiant combat veteran himself—that ending the war must be his first priority. But his second priority was federating the Empire; and the Kings of Saxony, Bavaria, and Wuertemmberg even showed interest in joining such a postwar, Prussia-free union. Karl failed in both efforts; betrayed by those who should have stood by him, and literally driven from office by a vengeful Woodrow Wilson. But even in Swiss exile, as Zoltan Becsi’s recent volume, Forbidden Federalism relates, Karl continued to work to this end. He saw the federation as of a piece with his Restoration; had either of his attempts to retake the Hungarian throne in 1921 succeeded, it would doubtless have led to a regrouping of Central European States in equality but around a common centre. This was a goal he maintained to his death. On the very day of his passing, Karl declared that he was suffering “that my peoples might come back together.”
Unsurprisingly, those intentions remained the goal for his empress, Zita, when she acted as regent over a sort of phantom realm for young Otto. When he came of age in 1930, he took it up himself. During World War II, when he advised FDR, he initially persuaded the American president to see the utility of the dream which Winston Churchill came to share. But Roosevelt eventually became enamoured of Josef Stalin as an advisor, and the result was the Soviet-American dyarchy over Europe. As we saw, the impossibility of achieving his original goal under these circumstances, and the emergence of the six nation Christian Democratic EU appeared to be the best way to fulfil his familial quest. Communism fell in 1991, and Otto died in 2011.
To this writer, it ironically seems that the best way to achieve Otto’s later goal is to try to tackle his earlier one first—a Central European Federation. An FPO-dominated Austria joined with Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Croatia would make an enormous amount of sense, and Orban is very sensibly reaching out to Slovakia, whose relationship with Hungary is a bit like Ireland’s with Great Britain. But the mutual hatreds and resentments of the past two centuries must be dropped if these countries are to retain their own identities into the future. None of the six must seem dominant over the others. Traditionally, there have been two glues which held these disparate folk together: Christianity—particularly Catholicism—and the House of Habsburg.
As different as these countries are from each other, the mark of Habsburg-era influence is easily visible in each. Rather than being a mere memory, this shared heritage will be most effective if it is living. With the Head of the House of Habsburg as sovereign over each of the six countries, in a modernised version of what has been sought for so long, there would be a power not to be trifled with in Central Europe. Their combined population at the moment is over 41 million, and their joint economies and armed forces could not be ignored, whether this Federation stayed in or withdrew from the EU as it now stands. In short, they could not be bullied. The role of the joint Monarch would be to maintain impartiality.
In a panel discussion commemorating the 750th anniversary of the Habsburgs coming to power, Otto’s son, Archduke Karl, was asked what he would do if he were reigning Emperor. The heir replied that it was a meaningless question, in terms of specifics—“I would not say something like, ‘There shall be no more dinners on Tuesday.’” But he then said, “I would try to defend my peoples from the demons,” comparing his statement to Franz Joseph’s 1905 definition of his role of protecting his people from their politicians. Whether Karl or another of his immediate family one day ascends the thrones of their fathers, such a role for the family would be essential in building trust amongst Central Europe’s peoples so that they might once again work together as once they did. Such a Federation would itself be a tangible thing around which the rest of Europe could in time coalesce, achieving the kind of Christian unity for which the founders of the EU, Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Archduke Otto—and yes, Viktor Orban—have all striven.
