In his unpublished Second Book on foreign policy, Adolf Hitler offers the following critique of Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Movement, which argued for the peaceful unification of Europe. Kalergi is very much a precursor to the post-1945 effort to integrate the Old Continent, culminating in the European Union.

Hitler raises essentially two objections:

The idea that Europe could peacefully unite into a powerful state is completely unrealistic and, instead, such attempts would lead only to a feeble and flaccid entity. Europeans themselves are of uneven racial quality, whereas the United States of America was made up overwhelmingly of northwest European stock, and so would still be able to dominate Europe.

On the idea of peaceful confederation, Hitler wrote:

The attempt to realize the pan-European idea through a purely formal union of European peoples, without being brought about by force in centuries-long battles by a European supreme power, will lead to an entity whose entire strength and energy will be absorbed by internal rivalries and conflicts. This happened before in the German Confederation. Not until the internal German question was ultimately solved by Prussian superiority could the nation exert its united strength outwards. . . . [A]s the American people progressively fulfill the internal colonization task, the natural activist drive, which is inherent particularly in young peoples, will turn outward. The surprise, however, . . . would least of all be countered with serious resistance by a pacifist, democratic, pan-European muddled state. This pan-Europe, in the view of the biggest bastard in the world, Coudenhove, would play the same role opposite the American Union or a nationally-awakened China as the old Austrian state played opposite Germany or Russia.

Indeed, the German Confederation was a Nineteenth Century association of German-speaking principalities, including Austria and Prussia, which was largely impotent. The Confederation, like the European Union, had some success in abolishing tariff barriers, establishing a customs union, and forming a currency area. The Confederation was replaced by the second German Reich, a true nation-state, following Otto von Bismarck’s victories in several wars through “blood and iron.”

For Hitler, European unification could only occur as “the result of a centuries-long struggle”:

We know from past experience that lasting unions can only take place when the peoples in question are of equal racial quality and related, and second, when their union takes place in the shape of the slow process of a struggle for hegemony. That was how Rome once conquered the Latin states . . .

I would add that the United States of America only became a truly united great power not through the elevated debates and Constitution of those fine and philosophical men of 1787, but through Abraham Lincoln’s armies, who triumphed according to law of force.

Hitler would probably not be surprised to learn that the European Union has been wracked by periodic gridlock and crisis for decades, and, outside the economic sphere, is not taken seriously by the world’s great powers, above all the United States and China.

Hitler has this to say about American immigration policy and Europe’s racial heterogeneity:

The American Union was . . . unable to merge foreign people with a pronounced national feeling or racial instinct. . . . The fact that the American Union feels itself to be a Nordic-Germanic state and not at all an international mishmash of peoples can be seen in the way in which the immigration quotas for the European peoples are allotted. Scandinavians, Englishmen, and finally Germans are allocated the largest contingents. . . . It is a utopia to want to oppose this . . . predominantly Nordic state with a European coalition or pan-Europe consisting of Mongols, Slavs, Germans, Romanians, and so on, in which anything but Germans would dominate, as a factor capable of resistance. Indeed, a very dangerous utopia when one considers that many countless Germans see a rosy future again without having to make the most serious sacrifices for it. The fact that this utopia originates in Austria of all places does not lack a certain comic element. This state and its fate [the fall of Austria-Hungary] are the clearest example of the enormous strength inherent in such artificially glued together but intrinsically unnatural entities.

Hitler’s last sarcastic comment shows again how much his views were shaped by the failures of the multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire. We again see his penchant for hyperbole (“Mongols”!).

Hitler would perhaps not be surprised to learn that southern Europe has continued to economically underperform relative to northern Europe and to have a perennial inability to eliminate “corruption.” Americans may counter that Irish, Italians, and Poles make up a substantial assimilated contingent of White America who have contributed to national greatness.

One wonders what Hitler would make of the fact that, maddeningly, northern Europe has principally used its prosperity and social organization in order to import and baby-sit Third World immigrants, whereas it is the Italians, Poles, and Hungarians today who are fighting the most to preserve Europe.

Finally, Hitler has an extremely forceful comment on the psychology of big business and globalism. The latter appears natural if we think of all humans as equal and individual atoms, but natural differences mean ethnic hierarchies must inevitably form:

The pan-European movement rests from the beginning on the fundamental basic mistake that quality of population can be made up for with quantity of population. This completely mechanical view completely avoids the forces that shape life. . . . This view fits as well with the pointlessness of our Western democracy as with the cowardly pacifism of our big business circles. It is obvious that this is the ideal of all inferior or half-breed bastards. Likewise, the Jew particularly welcomes such a concept: in its consistent observance it leads to racial chaos and confusion, to a bastardizaton and niggerization of civilized humanity, and finally to such a deterioration in its racial value that the Hebrew who keeps himself free from it can gradually rise to be master of the world. At least, he imagines that he can one day ascend to become the brain of this humanity that has been made worthless.

Notes

Adolf Hitler (trans. Kristina Smith), Hitler’s Second Book (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), p. 116-17.

Ibid., p. 115.

Ibid., p. 114.

I will spare you the colorful language U.S. and European officials have been known to use in private to qualify their relationship.

Ibid., 117-18.

Ibid., p. 114.