Martyn Bond

Academic, journalist and author Dr Martyn Bond uncovers the life of an Austrian count who set up a pro-European movement to rival the Nazis and was the first to create a European flag and call for a European stamp, a common currency, and a European passport.

Bond has written the first English biography of Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, branded a “cosmopolitan bastard” by Hitler on account of his Jewish wife and his Japanese mother. Bond explains how Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ideas on European unity have long outlived Hitler. The count twice escaped assassination and fled to New York where he rallied fellow Europeans behind the idea of a united Europe after the war. He was the model for Viktor Laszlo in the famous wartime film Casablanca. The count influenced Churchill’s views on a united Europe, and both French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have recently quoted him in their speeches.

Bond is a fellow at regent’s University London. He is a former senior European civil servant, a former BBC Berlin correspondent and a writer and academic working on contemporary European themes.