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

THE NEW AGE 81

the example of America. It would appear, indeed, as if the governing purpose of Europe were to divide up the Black race and administer it solely to Europe’s good. Europe has not come to her senses in the full meaning of the word. There is no organised European mind; Europe as a cultural entity has not yet been developed. It follows that Europe’s relations with the Black, as well as with the Yellow, race have been largely instinctive—in other words, not specifically European: for to be instinctive and not intelligent is to be essentially non-European.>°

Europe, in general, had revealed herself as “too exclusive, too small-minded” to discharge her proper duties towards the rest of humanity.*° Moreover, within the continent itself, relationships between nations and groups were conducted in a “satanical and terrible way.”>”

Despite the historical fact that Europe had revealed herself so far as only willing to take advantages of her privileges rather than fulfill her responsibilities to the rest of the world, as “the consciousness of the species”>* she remained the only agency capable of initiating a world-synthesis. For,

. no organ, other than the brain itself, can possibly discharge effectually the work of the brain... as the world is only the individual writ large, what is true of the individual is true, though on a larger plan and scale, of the worldmind itself. No other racial organ than the European can possibly discharge the intellectual and spiritual function of Europe.%?

As a first initiative towards the organic ordering of the world, Europe needed to begin with herself and make herself whole. “The Federation of Europe, the synthesis of Europe, is the primary condition of the Alliance of Humanity, of the world-synthesis.”©° But by a federation of Europe (and in Europe he also included Russia, the Balkans, Britain, and the mediterranean countries) Mitrinovié was not advocating merely a formal political unification. If Europe was to become “the instrument of the intelligent organisation of the world,”*! then its future unity needed to be a spiritual or cultural one rather than founded on a political or military basis. The world needed a spiritual Europe,

a Europe consciously and self-consciously one, a Europe whose parts freely consent in a harmony of Christendom, a Europe worthy of the world’s reference of values. That is the constructive idea for a new Europe... Assuming that the intention of the world is to become born in the consciousness of mankind; and that on Europeans, as the most conscious of all the races, the duty and responsibility of exemplary leadership falls—the spiritual task before Europe is to realise its obligations, before it is too late, and to create an all-inclusive European culture, as a preliminary, not to imposing it upon the world, but to maintaining it as the world’s standard of reference.®