WORLD VIEW:What links ‘ Casablanca’ hero Victor Laszlo and Japan’s new prime minister? writes PATRICK SMYTH

‘AND WHAT if you track down these men and kill them, what if you killed all of us? From every corner of Europe, hundreds, thousands would rise up to take our places. Even Nazis can’t kill that fast.” – Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), Casablanca, 1942

STIRRING STUFF. And now, the pub quiz question: What’s the connection between Casablanca’s fleeing resistance hero, Victor Laszlo, and Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama?

Answer: Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, aristocratic son of an Austrian diplomat and Japanese mother, champion of the idea of a united states of Europe in the interwar period and seen by many as one of the inspirers of the European Economic Community. And the inspiration, it is said, for the character of Laszlo.

For this curious link, I am indebted to Prof Yoshibumi Wakamiya, a senior columnist at Asahi Shimbunand a professor of political journalism. On Monday at UCD he delivered a fascinating account of political change in Japan in which Coudenhove- Kalergi’s ideas are playing a prominent part.

The victory of Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in last month’s general election represents a landmark in the country’s democratic history, notably by ending half a century’s dominance by the conservative Liberal Democrats (LDP).

Apart from radical domestic reform, Hatoyama has moved quickly to strengthen Japan’s commitment to climate change and to improving relations with China and Korea, notably by making clear he is sensitive to concerns about Japan’s history and will not visit the controversial Yasukuni war shrine.

He has also given strong support to an idea that has been gaining increasing currency in the region: an East Asian Community modelled on the EU. Indeed, the Japan-China-Korea summit in Beijing two weeks ago agreed to discuss this vision as a long-term target.

Hatoyama has been explicit about his personal inspiration: the writings of Coudenhove-Kalergi, whose 1923 book Pan-Europa was translated into Japanese by the prime minister’s father, Ichiro Hatoyama, himself an LDP prime minister in the 1950s.

In 1922, Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union with Archduke Otto von Habsburg as “the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia”. His ideas were inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s 14-point peace plan and what he saw as the need to preserve European culture from communism and fascism. The League of Nations would be too weak to save Europe; he wanted a “united states of Europe”, and he sought with limited success to recruit politicians from left and right to his cause.

In the postwar period, after exile in the US, he would be involved in the establishment of the European Parliamentary Union, which would merge with the European Movement and on whose board he would serve. His ideas would provide inspiration for a new generation of European conservative politicians.

Although fighting to establish a middle ground for democratic values, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s elitist instincts never left him. He tried unsuccessfully to recruit Mussolini to his cause, and was an admirer of Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss and later Charles de Gaulle, admitting that his conception involved “the best, the brightest, the most intelligent” in power.

Coudenhove-Kalergi’s writings, particularly his emphasis on the French revolutionary idea of “fraternity” – translated into Japanese by Ichiro Hatoyama as yuai– would, however, be the basis both for the ideology of the LDP’s early years and Yukio Hatoyama’s vision for the DPJ.

In a lengthy article* ahead of the election in September, Hatoyama extols Coudenhove- Kalergi, defining yuaias “the compass that determines our political direction, a yardstick for deciding our policies. I believe it is also the spirit that supports our attempts to achieve ‘an era of independence and coexistence’.”

The notion, what we might call “friendship” or “community”, is, he makes clear, as much a driver of domestic policy as the corner- stone of his vision for an East Asian Community: “I . . . feel that as a result of the failure of the Iraq war and the financial crisis,” he writes, “the era of the US-led globalism is coming to an end and that we are moving away from a unipolar world led by the US towards an era of multipolarity.

“However, at present, there is no one country ready to replace the US as the world’s most dominant country. Neither is there a currency ready to replace the dollar as the world’s key currency. I believe that we should aspire to the move towards regional currency integration as a natural extension of the path of the rapid economic growth begun by Japan, followed by South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and then achieved by the Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] and China.”

The idea of an economic and currency union of the region, which generates one-quarter of global income, will take time to gestate and will, initially at least, have to forgo the democratic underpinnings of the EU, as Wakamiya acknowledged.

“For such a single currency to bring about political integration will surely take longer still,” writes Hatoyama. But he concludes his article optimistically, with the words of Coudenhove-Kalergi:

“All great historical ideas started as a utopian dream and ended with reality.”

“ My Political Philosophy” first appeared in the September issue of Japanese journal Voice. psmyth@irishtimes.com