David Mitrany, Romania and the Search for a New European Order: Lessons for Today

‘David Mitrany was one of the originators, almost the founding father, of the functional approach to world government, and his pragmatic ideas have proved as relevant [now] as when they were first fully expounded in the early 1940s’. D. Anderson, Review of International Studies.

David Mitrany (1888–1975) was a Romanian-born, naturalized British scholar, historian and political theorist who studied at the LSE and is best known today for his work on international functionalism, an idea which influenced the development of European integration and the organisation of United Nations specialised agencies after World War II.

What is often ignored in the West is his work on South-East Europe. During the inter-war period Mitrany studied both the operation of war government and the subsequent peasant revolution in the Balkans. War government demonstrated that political organisation could bridge the gap between social action and private property, while the peasant social revolution showed that the abstract economics associated with both capitalist and Marxist economics was not applicable outside of urban industrial production. It was through his studies of South-East Europe that Mitrany drew many of the lessons and concepts that were to form the foundations of his international theory.