The New Europe Group and New Britain Movement (1931–1935)
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Pioneers of European Federalism: the New Europe Group and New Britain Movement (1931–1935) By: David Graham Page A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy The University of Sheffield Faculty of Arts and Humanities Department of History October 2016 ABSTRACT This thesis is the first in-depth study of the early 1930s Bloomsbury-based New Europe Group (NEG) and New Britain Movement (NBM), which constituted a politicised social movement led by Dimitrije Mitrinović. The Introduction situates the NEG/NBM as the British manifestation of the nouvelles relèves , the northwest European cluster of extra-parliamentary political groups that were neither plainly left-wing nor right-wing, but rather were infused with a spiritually based ideology influenced by the Personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. Chapter 1 scrutinises the NEG/NBM as an antisystem challenger to the National Government, and analyses the movement’s ‘political perfectionist’ antisystemness in the context of the syncretic turn in British extra- parliamentary politics. Chapter 2 discusses the dynamics of the NEG/NBM, including its ‘prefigurative politics’ and Mitrinović’s use of ‘strategic ambiguity.’ Chapter 3 contextualises the European federalist thought of Mitrinović and other prominent figures in the NEG/NBM, and examines their understanding of the ‘European civil war’ and perception of the European and world ‘crisis.’ Chapter 4 begins with a comparative analysis of the proposals for European unity advanced by Richard Nikolaus von Coudenhove-Kalergi, Aristide Briand, and Mitrinović and the NEG/NBM. The chapter then details the lines of reasoning the NEG/NBM used to make a case for Eurofederalism, and explains the movement’s proposals for European governance and federal institutions. The first complete list of the NEG/NBM’s periodicals is provided in an Appendix. The main finding presented is that the NEG/NBM (rather than Federal Union) was the first genuine Eurofederalist group in Britain. Another finding is that during the early years of the National Government, the NEG/NBM turned many readers of its periodicals into a ‘networked audience’ in order to maximise the movement’s delegitimising impact on the MacDonald–Baldwin axis. This thesis redresses the neglect of the NEG/NBM in the historiography on significant fringe movements in interwar Britain. Pioneers of European Federalism: the New Europe Group and New Britain Movement (1931–1935) CONTENTS Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1 – Countering the ‘Crisis’ with Political Perfectionism: Dimitrije Mitrinović, His Followers, and the New Europe Group Chapter 2 – The Rise and Demise of the New Britain Movement Chapter 3 – The NEG/NBM as Britain’s First Genuine European Federalist Group Chapter 4 – To Create a ‘New Europe’: the NEG/NBM’s Reasoning and Vision, in Context Conclusion Appendix: a Complete List of Periodicals under Mitrinović’s Direction Bibliography i Acknowledgements First and foremost I very gratefully acknowledge Dr Julie Gottlieb, my primary supervisor. Without Dr Gottlieb’s invaluable guidance, great encouragement and tremendous patience I would not have been able to bring to fruition this thesis. Her insights helped shape this work from the outset, and prompted me to make countless substantive and stylistic improvements. I am also grateful to Prof. Mary Vincent, my secondary supervisor, for comments and advice from which this thesis benefited. At the J. B. Priestley Library, University of Bradford, Emma Burgham – the Project Archivist for the New Atlantis Foundation Dimitrije Mitrinović Archive – was a great help. She enthusiastically shared her knowledge, and her meticulous work cataloguing the extremely rich archive is sure to be immensely appreciated by scholars working on any of the groups associated with Mitrinović. Alison Cullingford (Special Collections Librarian) and Martin Levy (Special Collections Assistant) provided a warm welcome and first-rate assistance. In New York, I am grateful to Brigette C. Kamsler and Betty Bolden of the Burke Library at the Union Theological Seminary, Columbia University, for their help accessing the Harry F. Ward Papers. In Sils Maria, Peter Villwock at Nietzsche Haus allowed me to consult the Oscar Levy Papers prior to completion of the accession process. At the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, the University Archives staff provided a good deal of help with the Watson Thomson Fonds over the course of several visits. My debts to scholars will be fully apparent from the text and notes. Last but not least, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my wife, Miwa Gardner-Page, for all the support she has provided throughout this project. My better half has shown forbearance in the face of my seemingly endless cogitations on ‘Neg- nebbum,’ as she calls the NEG/NBM. I simply could not have done this without her. ii List of Abbreviations BUF British Union of Fascists CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain Eleventh Hour The Eleventh Hour New Series EU European Union FO Foreign Office FU Federal Union ILP Independent Labour Party LNU League of Nations Union MI5 Military Intelligence, Section 5 NAFDMA New Atlantis Foundation Dimitrije Mitrinović Archive NBM New Britain Movement NEG New Europe Group New Albion New Albion: For British Renaissance and Western Alliance New Atlantis New Atlantis: For Western Renaissance and World Socialism New Britain quarterly New Britain: Quarterly Organ of the XIth Hour Club or New Britain: Quarterly Organ for National Renaissance (specified in notes) New Britain quarterly New Britain: For British Revolution and the Social State New Series New Britain weekly New Britain: A Weekly Organ of National Renaissance New Europe New Europe: A monthly Journal for Federation and Disarmament NF New Force Thomson Fonds Watson Thomson Fonds UEF Union of European Federalists iii Introduction The Subject, Significance and Sources of this Thesis The Subject The subject of this thesis is the concentric couple of Bloomsbury-based political groups called the New Europe Group (NEG) and the New Britain Movement (NBM), active in the first half of the 1930s. Sharing a set of organisers, the NEG (founded in 1931) and the outgrowth NBM (which had a public profile in 1933–4, and published its last surviving periodical until mid-1935) had no substantive ideological differences. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to the NEG and the NBM together as ‘the NEG/NBM’ or ‘the movement.’ I will make an exception every time a distinction need be made between the NEG (which, for the most part, organised lectures and discussion groups, while conducting and publicising research) and the NBM, a politicised social movement that grew to operate in all four corners of the kingdom. The NEG/NBM was the brainchild of the London-based self-exile Dimitrije Mitrinović, a charismatic Herzegovinian Serb who was the movement’s undisputed leader. 1 The NBM’s objective was to ‘create a New Britain organised in Social Unity and for the economic freedom of every individual’ through the use of methods including the ‘equitable distribution of wealth’; the ‘national control of the issue of money’; the ‘constitutional reorganisation of national politics upon a regional basis’; the ‘functional organisation of industry in the service of the community as a whole’; and the creation of a ‘European Federation … as the basis of a new world order and a 1 Mitrinović was born on 21 October 1887 in a village near the town of Stolac, and died on 28 August 1953 in Richmond-upon-Thames; see Andrew Rigby, Initiation and Initiative: An Exploration of the Life and Ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović (Boulder, 1984), p. 7 and p. 185. 1 means towards active peace.’ 2 The NEG/NBM captured the imagination of thousands: New Britain: A Weekly Organ of National Renaissance (hereafter New Britain weekly), the movement’s main periodical, had a peak readership of half a million. 3 In its day, commentators recognised the NEG/NBM as a significant voice in the political sphere: for example, John Middleton Murry told readers of The Adelphi that the movement gave ‘definite focus’ to the ‘aspirations of [a middle-class] mass of opinion,’ ‘“radically” inclined as no body of opinion in its class has been before,’ on the ‘defects’ of ‘national and international organisation.’ 4 The Significance Peter Clarke has identified the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) as the main beneficiaries of the ‘bankruptcy of bourgeois politics’ that many Britons began to perceive in 1931, when a politico- economic crisis caused Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to effectively suspend party politics.5 MacDonald was expelled from the Labour Party a week after forming the National Government (whose benches were dominated by MPs from the Conservative Party, led by Stanley Baldwin), which he headed until mid-1935. Many Britons disapproved of what Robert Boothby would later call the ‘get-together on the part of the Boys of the Old Brigade.’ 6 Some Britons who cared just as little for the rump Labour 2 University of Bradford Special Collections: New Atlantis Foundation Dimitrije Mitrinović Archive [hereafter NAFDMA], 6/1/1, ‘The New Britain Alliance’ [‘The Constitution of the New Britain Alliance’], 15 December 1933 (published January 1934), p. 2. 3 David Davies put New Britain weekly’s peak circulation at 70,000; see D. R. Davies, In Search of Myself: The Autobiography of D. R. Davies (London, 1961), p. 131. I calculated the peak readership using the ‘serious weeklies’ readership-to-circulation ratio given on p. 183 of Benny Morris, The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany during the 1930s (London, 1991). 4 John Middleton Murry, ‘A Word to Spiritual Aristocrats’, The Adelphi , November 1933, p. 89. Mitrinović privately referred to Middleton Murry as ‘Muddleton Mirray’; the two men were not close. Adelphi contributor Jack Common also wrote for NBM periodicals. See NAFDMA, 1/9/13, R.