100th Anniversary Congress on Wheels

The oldest European unification movement celebrated its 100th anniversary as part of the 48th Pan-European Days of the Pan-European Union Germany.

The four-day ‘100th Anniversary Congress on Wheels’ took place across borders in Nuremberg, in Poběžovice (Ronsperg), the Bohemian hometown of Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, who founded the Pan-European Union in 1922, and in the buildings of the European Parliament and the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.

At the ceremony in the historic town hall of Nuremberg, Bavaria's Minister President Markus Söder honoured the non-governmental Pan-European Union as the ‘first and strongest peace movement we have’.

The speech by the Czech Minister for Europe, Mikuláš Bek, attracted particular attention because Bohemia, in the shape of Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, founded the Pan-European Union 100 years ago and will hold the EU Council Presidency from 1 July to the end of the year.

The President of the Pan-European Union Germany, Bernd Posselt, emphasised that the Pan-European Union was not only a peace movement, but also a freedom movement and therefore not pacifist in a defenceless way, but an advocate of a Europe-wide defensive democracy that could defend itself against war and totalitarianism.

International Pan-European President Alain Terrenoire from Paris warned against relying solely on the USA and NATO in the defence against Russian aggression and China's striving for dominance. The United States could tilt back towards Trump as early as the autumn elections, and two years later another President could take a completely different direction.

Nuremberg's Lord Mayor Marcus König welcomed the guests from 18 nations to his 14th century town hall, where the Peace Banquet was held in 1649 after the Thirty Years' War.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had sent a written greeting in which she called the Pan-European Union a ‘very special European association’, which was the first to call for a democratic federation of all European states and thus anchored the ideas of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament in the EU.

The participants then travelled to Ronsperg (Poběžovice) in Bohemia in a series of buses.

The International Secretary General of the Pan-European Union and former Minister of Science and Education of Croatia, Prof Pavo Barišić, fascinated the audience with a keynote speech in which he praised the ‘Conference on the Future of Europe’, which has now been held with 50,000 participants, as a ‘unique act of deliberative democracy’.

At the festive opening of the Congress the previous evening in Nuremberg, the German Pan-European President Bernd Posselt had honoured a prominent Pan-European member, the EPP parliamentary group and party chairman Manfred Weber, with the special level of the Pan-European Medal of Merit.

The President of the co-organising Czech Pan-European Union, Marian Švejda, formerly a civil rights activist against communism, recalled Otto von Habsburg's first visit to Charles University shortly after the Velvet Revolution, where he had made a statement.

Afterwards, an international Pan-European delegation travelled to Strasbourg to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, the creation of which was initiated decades ago by the Pan-European movement.