ABSTRACT
The ideal of united Europe was espoused by small groups of political idealists in the course of the nineteenth century. In France writers such as the novelist Victor Hugo were attracted to the concept of a "United States of Europe" on lines similar to the USA. Coudenhove Kalergi was a philosophical idealist who revolted against the materialism of Marxism. He was part of a group of patrician European intellectuals in the inter-war years who looked to European unification being a means to contain and control the entry of "the masses" into political involvement. The ideal of Pan Europa was largely formulated in response to this ethical vacuum by reviving the esprit de corps of the traditional European ruling aristocracies at the continental level. The Pan European ideal accorded with the desire of the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, for Locarno to be a means for establishing an equilibrium in European power politics on the basis of the Versailles Treaty.
