Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

174 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

a centralised state with a government in Berlin. He proposed that Berlin should be figuratively turned into a lake, whilst Germany should be transformed into a federation consisting of the different elements that had once been states themselves. To ensure that Germany remained a federation it should be occupied not by the great powers, who would only fight over her, but by the small neighbouring countries who had been ravaged and occupied by her. He further proposed that the great powers—the USSR, Britain, France and the USA—should pay for the occupation. He proposed that the two greatest powers USA and USSR should become “World Wings’ or protecting powers in conjunction with one another, each having a major sphere of influence. Europe should become three federations which he called ‘Europa-Noricum’ consisting of Britain, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries, and which would look towards USA: ‘Europa Latina’ consisting of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, which would be oriented towards the two federations of Africa and South America; and ‘Europa-Scythia, including the Balkan peninsula and extending to the Baltic, which would be protected by USSR. He envisaged many different links between various aspects of these powers, and federations so as to weave the whole planet into an organically diversified unity.

One of his ideas in this respect was the possibility that the world of block nation states should be superseded by three different kinds of federations of which the component units would have different borders. These would be respectively economic, cultural and political. Many of the problems of central Europe concerned regions which administratively belonged to one country, but which economically fitted better with another and were culturally and linguistically related to a third. In many such cases throughout the world the different regions could be administratively devolved and be more closely related to different neighbours in different respects.

The statement which Mitrinovic¢ gave to the press at Simpson’s Restaurant in the Strand was the only public account he gave of his suggestions for a World Organic Order. It followed the lines of his previous thinking and culminated in a proposal for two world initiatives ‘a triune Eastern Alliance of the Pacific’ consisting of Japan, China and India, and ‘a triune Western Alliance of the Atlantic’ consisting of America, Russia and Europe. He also proposed that Britain and the British Commonwealth should give the initiative and act as intermediator for this Western Alliance.

Mitrinovié spent most of the time after the war reworking and reformulating ideas and insights which he had been developing and trying to communicate to others during his lifetime. These had been expressed and worked out in many different contexts, in different movements and among different sets