European Documentation and Information Centre - Organization and Members

Organization and Members

The annual congresses of the CEDI, which were nearly always held in Spain, brought together many office bearers and dignitaries of the conservative milieu. Besides the Spanish initiators – hereunder Franco’s foreign minister Alberto Martín Artajo, the director of the Institute for Hispanic Culture Alfredo Sánchez Bella and José Ignacio Escobar Kirkpatrick Marqués de Valdeiglesias – there was a strong support for CEDI’s activities in Germany, Austria and France. The expelled Austrian Heir Apparent Otto von Habsburg was the founding and, later on, honorary president of the organization. Germany was represented by high-ranking members of the Christian Democratic and Christian Socialist parties, as for example the ministers Hans-Joachim von Merkatz and Richard Jaeger. The French section of the Documentation Centre was led by the Count François de la Noë and Michel Habib-Deloncle.

Among the first British supporters were William Teeling, Sir Frederick Corfield MP and Sir John Rodgers MP, who even held CEDI’s international presidency from 1965 to 1967. Over the years, the Austrian secretary general Georg von Gaupp-Berghausen turned more and more out to be the actual organizational and programmatic head of the Documentation Centre.