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

190 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

informed that movement still have relevance today, as increasing numbers of people search for new means of social transformation which do not fall into the trap of concentrating on the attainment of central state power at the cost of developing the necessary base for a socialist commonwealth through the creation in the ‘here-and-now’ of new social formations that embody the values of individual freedom and community.”

Moreover, the relevance of the proposals raised by the New Europe Group for a federation of European peoples in a new cultural order begins to take on a renewed relevance in the 1980s as it becomes increasingly apparent that a new transcontinental spirit is abroad in Europe. Over the last few years the revolt against the military and strategic situation that threatens us with nuclear annihilation has grown. In response to this threat an Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament was launched in April 1980. It urged Europeans “to act as if a united, neutral and pacific Europe already exists. We must learn to be loyal, not to ‘East, or “West, but to each other.” According to one leading figure in this movement, E. P. Thompson, the search is on for “a third way” beyond the hegemony of the two superpowers. Thompson points to a new process taking place in Europe, “a détente of peoples rather than states—a movement of peoples which sometimes dislodges states from their blocs and brings them into a new diplomacy of conciliation,”™* and has called for a reunification of European political culture informed by “a new internationalist code of honour conducted by citizens.”® The language is different, but it is not difficult to discern echoes of the pleas made by Mitrinovié in his articles in The New Age in 1920 when he called for ‘new Europeans’ to create “an all inclusive European culture” and make Europe “consciously and self-consciously one.”

It should not be imagined that I am claiming that the specific proposals of Mitrinovié about the re-ordering of the world, the kinds of alliances and federations to be established, should be taken uncritically and transposed into contemporary thinking and practice. Times have changed and new situations require new approaches. What does remain, however, is the general thrust of his work which should act as a stimulus and example to all who are concerned about the future of humanity: the creative intellectual energy to think about the world as a single whole; the courage to face up to the awesome conflicts and tensions that exist within the world, and the ‘utopian mentality’ to suggest ways of transcending them in the direction of a new harmonious world order; the refusal to entrust our fate to the power politics of states but to locate the responsibility for change with the individual people and groups that together make up the nations of the world.