Dimitrije Mitrinović and the European Union Project

This paper addresses ideas and actions of Dimitrije Mitrinović (1887–1953), who devoted forty years (1913–53) promoting the idea of the creation of the Union of European Republics (European Federation). He went to Munich in 1913, to write his Ph.D. thesis on Modern art, but got involved in other issues that he understood as more urgent—to bring together intellectuals from various European countries in order to create a platform that would help to avoid future conflicts. In 1914 he left for Great Britain, and from 1920–53 he developed the same idea of the federation for Europe as the best means to avoid continental as well as world-war conflicts.

Mitrinović considered the European identity to be connected with a new, cosmopolitan identity and citizenship of man. For many in the 1920s and 30s, this concept was utopian. Nevertheless, with British co-workers, Mitrinović organized the “New Europe Group” in London in 1931 in order to promote this idea and platform. He was one of the most consistent visionaries of the Federation or Union of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. For Mitrinović, the idea of unity and federation for Europe, and, ultimately, for all of humanity, was the ultimate solution for the history of mankind—solution for economic, political, and ecological issues that could also end the history of wars.

The Visionary

Dimitrije Mitrinović was born in Donji Poplat, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1887. He became one of the key figures in the “Young Bosnian” movement, a nationalist grouping of south Slavs (mostly Serbs) who sought a cultural and moral renaissance as part of the struggle against the Austro-Hungarian empire—with the ambition to create a state of South Slavs (later, Yugoslavia). At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, although Bosnia and Herzegovina remained under nominal Ottoman sovereignty, control over the provinces passed to Austria-Hungary, and in 1908 Bosnia-Herzegovina was annexed to Austria-Hungary.

The Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) group was especially active among university and secondary-school students. It had its radical wing, inculcating immediate action, which came to the front with actions by Gaćinović in 1910, and by Gavrilo Princip in 1914 and the universalist, cultural wing, whose actions were on the culture front, represented by Mitrinović.¹ In the period 1905–12 Mitrinović published a substantial number of poems, art and literary critiques, and essays in the following periodicals in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia: Bosanska vila, Nova iskra, Delo, Srđ, Brankovo kolo, Srbobran, Pokret, Hrvatski pokret, Slovenski jug.²

Mitrinović came to Munich from Bosnia in 1913, to study art history and modern art, under the leading art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin. At the start he was involved with the modern art group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), led by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. He became an active member and propagator of the group. Beside other activities, he delivered a lecture “Kandinsky and the New Art: or ‘Taking Tomorrow by Storm’” in the Great Hall of the Museum of Munich on February 27, 1914. In his lecture he also foresaw the violence that was soon to erupt. Namely, during the same year, “tomorrow” would be taken by the storm of WWI; yet, Mitrinović had in mind a positive, culture “storm.” Many contemporary thinkers had also been deeply disturbed by what they saw as a major world crisis. Mitrinović saw the political upheavals as the symptoms of profound change which was taking place on all levels of human life.

Therefore, in the first half of 1914, Mitrinović became more and more involved with another project. With Wassily Kandinsky, and Erich Gutkind, he initiated an international movement, whose goal was “Towards the Mankind of Future through the Aryan Europe,” trying to establish a network including many other European intellectuals, beside those already gathered round Der Blaue Reiter group. The program and gathering was to be promoted in a Yearbook Aryan Europe,³ with contributors such as Peter Kropotkin, Thomas Masaryk, Knut Hamsun, Maurice Maeterlinck, Emile Verhaeren, Anatole France, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Henri Bergson, Erich Gutkind, Franc Oppenheimer, Frederik van...