The village in which he was born, Oberndorf in central Austria, with a population of just 2,000 or so, would come to exert a disproportionate influence on Kohr's thinking.

Kohr went on to study at the LSE with the likes of fellow Austrian thinker Friedrich von Hayek. In 1938 he left Europe for America, a place he would make his home for the next 25 years.

In September 1941, just as the mass murder of the Jewish inhabitants of Vilnius was beginning, Kohr wrote the first part of what would become his masterwork, 'The Breakdown of Nations'.

In it he argued that Europe should be "cantonized" back into the sort of small, political regions that had existed in the past and that still persisted in democratic hold-outs like Switzerland.