NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
July 6, 2011
Another Europe
Otto von Habsburg died Monday, age 98. He was, from the demise of his father Karl, on April 1, 1922, the legitimate heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, and by extension, "pretender" to the thrones of 11 different countries in Central Europe.The visit of Will and Kate has put us all in mind of monarchy this week: pitched constitutional monarchists against "idealist" republicans in Canadian print and electronic prattle; pitched royal "sentimentalists" against those who think they must be rationalists, since they are free of common sense and humour. Let us now pause to consider this man, who, though he never occupied a throne (he declined that of Spain, and finally renounced his own claim to Austria), nevertheless played a major and under-appreciated role in modern European history. Otto von Habsburg has been described, for instance, as the father of the European parliament. He led opposition to Hitler in the Austria of the 1930s; was an important and trusted adviser to both Roosevelt and Churchill during the Second World War; was a significant opponent of the spread of Soviet Communism after the Second World War; played a role in bringing down the Iron Curtain; and in a hundred ways advanced the re-integration of eastern with western Europe through the decades thereafter. He was a major figure in pan-European politics until (literally) this week. As a human being, born into extraordinary circumstances, power, and wealth, in an ancient house that came crashing down; then exiled and reduced by increments to stateless penury; he is interesting and inspiring. Those who have memorized the "If" poem of Rudyard Kipling, will find every line of it explicated in this man's illustrious life. For it is not in easy victory, but in painful and comprehensive defeat, that we see the true measure of a man. Author of some 40 books, articulate journalist and debater in seven languages (he was thrown into journalism simply to support his family), it would be hard to argue that Otto von Habsburg was a "nobody" except for the accident of his birth. He was, too, symbol and spokesman for something above mundane politics, for he embodied in his person and in his writings the continuation of the Catholic Christian conception of Europe itself. The Europe for which he struggled, from his final Bavarian home, was not the Europe of the dark EU bureaucracies, nor the nihilist vision of "progressives" who seek to wipe every vestige of Europe's actual cultural history, and replace it with some image of themselves. He struggled instead to preserve, and reanimate. His full name, given at his christening in the little Viennese palace of Hetzendorf in 1912 - Franz Josef Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xavier Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius - was like a synaptic chart of his relations, spiritual as well as genealogical. (His late father was beatified by Pope John Paul II.) To the gutter egalitarian, such a name is mere "pretension." But pretence pertains only to claims that are false. My reader is invited to think, for a moment, of the alternative world, where wise statesmen were able to avoid the First World War, in the wake of Archduke Ferdinand's assassination at Sarajevo. "Imagine," for a moment, a world in which that war-to-begin-all-total-wars did not happen, and in the upshot of which, that Austro-Hungarian Empire did not disintegrate, the Bolshevik Revolution could not occur, Adolf Hitler had no opportunity to rise, and so many vast slaughters could not follow from the triumph of "nationalisms" and "socialisms," having been deprived of their root cause. Think thus of a "backward" world in which "Western Civ." were still fully intact, and in which Emperor Otto might have reigned these last 89 years. (His great-grand uncle, Franz Josef, ruled for only 68, seeing off innumerable nationalist movements throughout his realms. Queen Victoria ruled for less than 64, and our present Queen celebrates her Diamond Jubilee not until next year.) Imagine, for a moment, a tranquil reign of that length, in which all the various peoples of the Austro-Hungarian realms had been able to live out their lives, uninterrupted by catastrophic wars and murderous desolations, each triggered by some abstract, revolutionary cause. Consider the actual history of each of the countries that were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of that Great War, and ask if their peoples actually benefited from the destruction of the Habsburg dynasty (itself, a continuum of 650 years). I wrote "backward," and I meant backward. No imaginary world is attainable (as the nationalists and socialists of all parties have never learned, and cannot learn). It was a mental exercise, only, to glimpse what life might have been like in the absence of every "progressive" cause. It might also provide an opportunity for my reader to think about what freedom is; and what freedom isn't. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top