Austria and Europe, 1923-2000: a study in ambivalence

On entering Austria in 1938, the Nazi regime banned Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove's Pan-European Union; Coudenhove himself went into exile in Paris where he unsuccessfully tried to put together an Austrian government in exile. During the war, having moved to the United States, Coudenhove-Kalergi temporarily converted to the idea of a monarchic restoration in Austria as a safeguard against pan-Germanism. After the Second World War, Austrian attitudes to participation in closer European cooperation were overshadowed by the overriding strategic aim, which was almost universally accepted in Austria, of negotiating the withdrawal of allied occupation troops and regaining national sovereignty. In 1948, Austria joined the Organization for European Economic Cooperation despite the refusal by the Soviet Union and its East European satellites to participate. In 1955 the exact shape of Austria's future neutrality policy and how it would limit Austria's policy choice in matters of European integration still had to be defined.