Cosmopolitan Outsiders: Imperial Inclusion, National Exclusion, and the Pan-European Idea, 1900–1930 by Katherine Sorrels (review)

The future of European unity is a timely topic. As we watch the negotiations around Brexit and remember the Greek financial crisis of a few years ago, it is easy to think that the idea of the continent working in harmony is a new and faddish one. In reality, the idea of uniting Europe in order to ensure peace and stability is not a postwar invention but rather one that has its origins in the multicultural empires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Katherine Sorrels’s book Cosmopolitan Outsiders is an interesting examination of the lives and work of two men who advocated for European integration in the early twentieth century, Alfred Fried and Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. The two men had very different personal stories and do not seem to have known each other (although Coudenhove-Kalergi was certainly aware of Fried’s writings), but Sorrels makes a compelling argument for examining them together, as their ultimate goals were assuredly interconnected.

Alfred Fried was a secular Viennese Jew and the founder of the German Peace Society. He had relocated to Berlin and was inspired by Bertha von Suttner and the Austrian Peace Society to create a similar institution in his new home. Fried was expelled from the organization within a year of its founding, and eventually he made his way back to Vienna. His experiences in Germany, specifically the highly militaristic nationalism that he encountered in his adopted home, left him even more convinced of the importance of pacifism and shaped his future writing. Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, who created the Pan-European Union in the early twentieth century, was inspired by Fried’s ideas but conceived of European unity in different terms. Coudenhove’s father, a Bohemian aristocrat and diplomat, had written at length about the problem of anti-Semitism specifically and about progressive causes more generally. Coudenhove’s mother was the daughter of a Japanese merchant, and his biracial identity reinforced his sense that crossing cultural boundaries was inherently valuable.

The most important conclusion Sorrels draws is that earlier historians were incorrect to suggest that European unity was the exclusive project of elite insiders. She shows that marginalized people, particularly Jews like Fried, also understood the benefits of overcoming the nationalisms of the nineteenth century and advocated for greater international connections. Marginality could be the result of geography, but she also demonstrates that marginality can be defined by thinking and beliefs outside of the mainstream. This is what binds Fried to Coudenhove, a German-speaking aristocrat in interwar Czechoslovakia. Both men were not members of the cultural majority, and this afforded them the ability to see the issues of European unity in a different light.

Perhaps the most compelling sections of Sorrels’s work are those where she links Coudenhove’s ideology of pan-Europeanism and the building of a new elite to the work of two of Austria’s most noteworthy Jewish writers, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. She notes that Zweig was approximately half a generation older than both Coudenhove and Roth and confirmedly part of the Viennese intellectual elite; consequently he romanticized a form of liberalism that was essentially defunct by the time Roth became a public figure. Coudenhove, despite being younger, was more compatible intellectually with the older Zweig. Both men saw Prussian militarism as the essential impediment to a peaceful, united Europe, whereas Roth, who was born in Galicia and had a less privileged upbringing, leaned toward Socialism and identified many socioeconomic factors preventing Europe from achieving a lasting peace. Sorrels notes that, just as Fried and Coudenhove rejected the more northerly version of German nationalism as arrogant and dismissive of its southern neighbors, Roth saw the West-centrism of the Viennese elite as counterproductive and critiqued the older generation of liberal, assimilated Jews, like Zweig, who failed to include the Jews of Eastern Europe in their vision of European unity. She suggests that it was...