Edward Spears was a member of parliament and close friend of Winston Churchill, who during the Second World War appointed him the prime minister’s liaison to the French and later minister to Syria and Lebanon. An essay, “Great Contemporaries: Louis Spears, Liaison to the French” by the author of this blog has been published on the Churchill Project. The article is available here.
In his famous speech in Zurich on September 19, 1946, Winston Churchill made a call to recreate the European family and to “build a kind of United States of Europe.” In the speech, Churchill specifically gave credit to the work already completed towards European unity made by the Pan-European Union and its founder and leader Count Richard Coundenhove-Kalergi. Churchill had met Coundenhove-Kalergi for the second time a few days before delivering the speech, having first met him in 1938 at Chartwell before the Second World War. An Austrian aristocrat, Coundenhove-Kalergi had founded the Pan-European Union in 1923 and would spend the next half-century promoting a peaceful and united Europe. In the process Coundenhove-Kalergi earned the hatred of Hitler, who attacked him as a “cosmopolitan bastard.” Forced to flee to the United States in 1940, Coundenhove-Kalergi returned to Europe after the war, at a time when his ideas for a united Europe were finding a more ready audience. Churchill and Coundenhove-Kalergi were associated in the years after the Zurich speech in the campaign for greater European integration.
Hitler’s Cosmopolitan Bastard: Count Richard Coundenhove-Kalergi and His Vision of Europe by Martyn Bond is the first English language biography of its subject. It is a detailed and well-researched study of the fascinating life of an “apostle of European unity.”