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

106 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

discussion groups and seek to implement the ideas in the realm of their daily life was also contained in Politics: a new age required a new citizen.

The task of the new citizen will include not only—not even primarily—the organisation of political societies, but the organisation of the very sphere of life in which he finds himself. He will know and feel the roots of all politics in the structure of everyday life; he will know how the health of public discussion depends upon the relations that prevail in more intimate cooperation. To make his household communal, to make his business cooperative in spirit and practice, and to share his life of recreation and ideals with others—these will be his sure and certain work upon the very foundations of politics . . . the State’s politics, different as they are in form and application, are all based ultimately upon these lesser politics of social gathering, factory, office or fireside.

It is from the daily activities of such individuals that a new politics will be born.!4

Ultimately, the contributors to Politics argued, the future of Britain and of the world depended “upon those citizens, whoever they may be, who can rise to world-orientation and maintain it in the affairs of the common life.”!> But if the future of Britain lay in the devolution and decentralisation of power and decision-making, the future of the world lay in federation. Such a development, however, could not be imposed by some super-power:

The solution of the world problem—the ‘parliament of man and federation of the world’—can only come from the cooperation of free peoples.!®

World federation, then, was “the inescapable need as well as the highest hope of the future.”!” But such a development within the international system depended, in the final analysis, upon reconstruction within societies and changes in the consciousness and actions of individuals. In the evolution towards such a world system, a particular responsibility lay with the British people, the British nation:

Her own foresight and sagacity, apart from loftier ambitions, should impel England to work openly for the synthesis of world politics and world economics; now that her relative supremacy cannot endure for very many decades. Hers is potentially the world language, hers is the widest world empire, which might be the pattern for the Republic of Mankind, and hers and hers only whilst there is yet time, is the greatest persuasive power to propose it. No enterprise in her whole history, full of glory as it is, could equal such an effort in splendour and historical consequence.!®