The reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF

The positive character of Panslavism is revealed in the historic mission assigned to the Slav race by its geographical position. Destiny has placed it on the confines of two worlds: the East and the West. All its life has been a prolonged struggle between these two principles : the Aryan outlook with strong belief in progress and the intrinsic value of individual life and effort; and the Mongolian, or Buddhist, which denies progress and conceives society as a rigid and definite equilibrium of certain given relations. In politics the Aryan outlook means democracy, the Mongolian represents the doctrine of order at any cost. In Russia it finds its natural expression in Autocracy, which shows a tendency to realise the Chinese theory of an unchangeable Celestial Empire, in which the Emperor is regarded as the Son of Heaven. But in Russia the tendency to deification of the actual is radically opposed by an irreconcilable hostile movement—though from the same source and, on the whole, of the same spirit—the Nihilist movement. It is the denial of all absolute values, the tendency to destroy everything and to reject all authority.

“But also the Western tendency—though starting from the opposite direction to that of Orientalism, Autocracy, and Nihilism—and making a complete circuit of evolution, has reached the same result : the denial of the meaning of life. The existence of the world is, when we exclude a divine purpose, absurd. The

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