Races and nations as functions of the world whole

civilisation future and distant but inevitable and also providential’.

At the time when he wrote the 1920 articles it was essentially Europe that he saw as responsible for world guidance. Later, in the New Britain articles, he saw this responsibility primarily in Britain. And though he believed that Europe, in its colonial exploitation, and in the First World War—which he regarded as a European civil war—had grievously betrayed both the world and herself, nevertheless he maintained that Europe alone could, if she would, exercise her function of world-organisation.

‘Europe’, he wrote, ‘may be said to have discovered the world; and discovery is in this sense almost equal to creation’.

It is not possible to go in detail into all the reasons, both positive and negative, which he gave for this judgement. Europe has indeed been the scene of the development of mind, of the world’s own thinking process. In Europe and its extensions into the Americas and the British Empire and Commonwealth the vast majority of invention, scholarship, criticism, and philosophy in the modern sense have had their birth. Europe may not have been the birthplace of any of the world religions, but the study and critical scholarship of religion has been European, and in general this individually critical approach has been the contribution of Europe to the world. In modern times, of course, the striking factor has been science and technology. It is therefore the specific contribution of reason and mind that he calls for in the world interest, so that Mankind can ‘think out’ what to do.

That this is a long process in which every race and nation must take part Mitrinovic showed that he fully realised when he wrote:

“We cannot pretend to be able to define here and now the particular solutions of the problems contained in a worldplan applicable to all races and nations. To discover the natural, the intended, functions of races would demand the intuitive study of history, of science, of philosophy and religion; a work that is only in its infancy in Europe... The solutions must be such that while they satisfy the European mind they satisfy the best minds of all other