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

THE YOUNG BOSNIAN 15

and sentimental enthusiasm for ‘harmony’ is ridiculous, but party politics should not descend from the heights of principle to the depths of petty and unworthy disputes . .. In our politics there still rules a spirit of authoritarianism, so that our politics are usually not the politics of reason and wisdom, but the politics of authoritarianism and rhetoric . . . The sacred ambition to possess a conscience and intellectual integrity have almost disappeared .. .

Less caprice, more principle! This should be the motto of those who are able to do something to transform our swampy and senseless society into a different society, healthy and vital.!7

The Young Bosnians saw it as their mission to inspire the equivalent of a spiritual or religious movement amongst the youth of the South Slav provinces; a movement that would lead to a federation of all the national groups following the overthrow of the Hapsburg empire. Indeed Dedijer has written that:

The most positive contribution of the Young Bosnians to the South Slav struggle for national liberation was that they tried to rise above the religious and national strife which raged among the inhabitants of Bosnia and Hercegovina, ethnically the purest South Slav province but divided into various religious and national groups by its historical development.!8

One of the most significant steps towards this goal of a Yugoslav federalism was taken in Sarajevo in 1911 when radical Croat and Serb students formed a joint secret society, Srpsko-Hrvatsku Naprednu Organizaciju. Its first president was Ivo Andri¢ who, a half century later, was to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the first to join was Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian who was to fire the shots that killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28th 1914. In a letter to his tutor written in 1912 Princip observed that the new secret society accepted “the revolutionary program of Mitrinovi¢.”!9

Much of Mitrinovié’s “First Draft of a General Programme for the Youth Club People’s Unification” was written while he was in hospital in Zagreb suffering once again from some respiratory difficulty. It embodied many of the key ideas of the Young Bosnians. In particular it emphasised the need not only to wage a struggle against the injustices of the Austro-Hungarian regime, but the necessity of fighting for the moral, spiritual and cultural rebirth of the people of the occupied lands. Its main points included:

1. To oppose everything national and antinational in the material and spiritual life of our peoples by means of: (a) Radical anticlericalism. (b) Radical elimination of destructive alien influence and promotion of