3 - 4 novembre 2023
Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti
Campo S. Stefano, 2945

Convegno

A hundred years ago the project book by Nikolaus von Coudenhove - Kalergi was released in Austria to promote the European Union on culture, languages, traditions, albeit different, but the result of the same common roots of classicism and Judeo-Christian thought.
The paper starts from the tragedy of the First World War, defined by the author as a "European civil war" and proposes the coordinates of broad autonomy, but of strong ethical and political value: In necessaris unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas. Divided into stages and precise programs, the project did not go through, for various reasons, but essentially for one. The US intervention imposed its own liberal economic paradigm on which it had forged the cohabitation of immigrants from the most diverse nations, aggregated on the lowest common denominator of the exchange economy. The League of Nations was born, clearly unable to unravel the nationalisms that triggered the First War and which were fatally leading to the second, precisely on the claims of access to essential resources that could not be overcome in a perspective of liberal exchange economy , impossible where demand far exceeds supply and there is a need to identify distribution criteria on a political or, in any case, not merely economic basis.
Having denounced the nihilistic approach of National Socialism, after the Anschluss of Austria, he emigrated to Switzerland, France and then to the United States, where he was a professor at New York University. Returning to his country, he was a tireless advocate of a Europe united on political and cultural foundations, from which - then - to derive the economic rules. He approached and shared his ideas with many of the most influential figures of the Second World War, facilitated by the friendships established during the exile and propitiated by the exchange of books.
Among those who participated in the first phase of the movement were Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Miguel de Unamuno, Salvador de Madariaga, Ortega y Gasset, Denis de Rougemont (whom he met in Vienna in 1927 and in New York in 1942).
In the second phase, personalities such as Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi and Winston Churchill were included, the latter being a supporter of the United States of Europe, who should not have foreseen the United Kingdom, moreover at the time still a juridical empire, then the center of a Commonwealth of a mixed political-economic nature.
At a time when the European Union - shaped on competition, free trade and the single currency - demonstrates its fragility and loses the most seafaring of its states, it is worth rethinking the perspective suggested a hundred years ago by Coudenhove - Kalergi to start that much desired (but never really wanted) leap in quality, progress towards a political union. In fact, a common foreign policy now seems unavoidable, for defence, international crises and migration, taking charge of everyone's needs and promoting everyone's interest, in order to have a solid European home, rather than a fragile economic hut.

Friday 3 November 2023 3.00 - 6.00 p.m.
Palazzo Loredan

Welcome Words
Gianna Di Danieli, President Paneuropa Italia

Chair
Maria Laura Picchio Forlati, University of Padua - Member of IVSLA

SpeakersMirko Sossai, University of Roma 3
The Kalergi European Project 1923-1924. An introduction in today perspective.
Marino Zorzi, Former Director of Marciana Library, Venice - Member of IVSLA
The Kalergi, from the island of Candia to the cosmopolitanism of Venice.
Rainhard Kloucek, Paneuropa Austria
The Pan-European Movement of the origins, from an intuition to a congress: 1922-1924.
Claudio Cressati, University of Udine
Luigi Einaudi: another voice for European unity after the "suicide of civilized Europe".

Poster Presentation
Debate

Saturday 4 November 2023 9.30 a.m.-1.00 p.m.
Palazzo Loredan

Chair
Marcello M. Fracanzani (Paneuropa Italia - Member IVSLA)

Speakers
Davide Fini, researcher
Archive research on the journal Paneuropa, 1923-1939.
Giacomo Biasutti, University of Trieste
Cultural heritage, competition and identity: between Kalergi perspective and the paradoxes of the subsidized economy
Laris Gaiser, researcher - Paneuropa Slovenia
The difficult road from Balkan nationalism to the European Union: is there a Kalergi Option?

Conclusions
Walburga von Habsburg Duglas, International Paneuropa Movement