Sphinx

This year of all years, one might hope that Remembrance Day would encompass all the dead of the First World War – not just in the carefully orchestrated public ceremonies at national level, where diplomatic protocols will play a role, but across Britain. Judging by the flags around the town where I live, that’s a bit of hopeless liberal idealism. I’m not actually objecting to the waves of union jacks, with a sprinkling of the flags of the home nations; of course this will be primarily a commemoration of ‘our’ dead – and it still always strikes me how many of the surnames on the war memorial are familiar from the locality today.

No, it’s the other flags. Australia, Canada, New Zealand; first reaction (certainly from non-historians) will be, okay, that’s the good old Commonwealth, and India and the like weren’t independent yet so it’s a shame but it would be inaccurate to display their flags – except that of course the Commonwealth wasn’t founded until 1931, so this is actually all about Empire, and isn’t it convenient that we end up including ‘our’ white comrades in arms and quietly passing over the rest? Echoes of the CANZUK twaddle that some Brexit ideologues have been peddling, too, though that’s surely inadvertent.

And then France and the United States. If we’re doing ‘allies’, where’s Italy – or Russia? (Some Russian imperial flags would be rather a nice addition…). But of course this isn’t about historical accuracy; it’s about the extension of the scope of ‘us’ in directions that are not neutral or innocent, that emphasise victory and celebration rather more than commemoration and mourning (so definitely no German flags), that carry strong echoes not of the First but of the Second World War, and its aftermath (I don’t imagine we’d see many Soviet Union flags, even if celebrating Allied victory in WWII – and Italy isn’t the sort of WWI ally anyone wants to claim).

The past – albeit mostly in the form of myth and fragmented fictions – retains its power to shape present conceptions of who we are, while at the same time present-day concerns reshape claims about the past. I spent yesterday thinking about this from the perspective of appropriations of classical antiquity, at an excellent workshop in London organised by Naoise Mac Sweeney and Helen Roche on ‘Claiming the Classical’, focused on brief reports about this phenomenon from across the globe (though inevitably with more focus on the anglophone sphere). From South Africa to Mexico, China to Turkey, Germany to Ghana, classical images, and above all their association with an idea of ‘Western Civilisation’, are deployed for political purposes that mainly present themselves as a simple echo of a real, straightforward and unpolitical past. I didn’t go looking for parallels, I just happened to look at classical antiquity and there they were…

A case in point: the recent speech by Roger Scruton in Budapest, ‘The Need for Nations’, that has contributed to the row about his appointment as a government expert in beautiful buildings. Something that hasn’t received much attention so far is the role of the Roman Empire in his argument:

As an Englishman and a lover of the civilisation of Rome I am not opposed to Empire. But it is important to recognise what it involves and to distinguish the good from the bad forms of it. In my view the good forms serve to protect local loyalties and customs under a canopy of civilisation and law; the bad forms try to extinguish local customs and rival loyalties and to replace them by a lawless and centralised power. The European Union has elements of both arrangements: but it suffers from one overwhelming defect, which is that it has never persuaded the people of Europe to accept it. Europe is, and in my view has ever been, a civilisation of nation states, founded on a specific kind of pre-political allegiance, which is the allegiance that puts territory and custom first and religion and dynasty second in the order of government. Give them a voice, therefore, and the people of Europe will express their loyalties in those terms. In so far as they have unconditional loyalties – loyalties that are a matter of identity rather than agreement – they take a national form.

It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of a very familiar theme that I was looking at for the CTC workshop: the deployment of comparisons between the Roman Empire and the European Union in order to discredit the latter. Scruton’s account is striking because he is happy to admit to a nostalgia for empire on his own terms – the problem with the EU is that it’s the Wrong Sort of empire, because it’s trying to rule over Noble Englishmen and their Always-Already-Existing National Spirit, rather than over benighted non-European primitives who haven’t yet recognised the Hegelian truth of the primacy of national identity. And because the Nation is defined in völkisch terms, Scruton then feels no hesitation in supporting the right of Hungarians to feel suspicious of the Roma who inconveniently occupy the same territory as them without meeting their standards for belonging, and of the Jews who persistently fall into cosmopolitanism and liberal attitudes – it’s perfectly reasonable, in his terms, to see them as potentially subversive and disruptive.

Conservative politicians in Britain often speak of recapturing powers from Brussels, as though these powers will not have been altered by captivity, and as though they can be easily domesticated when they are brought back home. This is like Menelaus thinking that home life in Mycenae would be just the same when he had returned victorious from Troy, the recaptured Helen obediently trotting behind, as it was in the good old days before she left.

This is… disturbing. And a rather peculiar reading of that section of the Odyssey. And what would Menelaus be doing in Mycenae anyway – is Scruton confusing this episode with the Oresteia? At any rate, British sovereignty is conceived as a woman, in order to plug into tropes about the way in which her purity and character will be irrevocably altered by tramping about with other men.

It’s a decent example of a question which recurred in the workshop: what, as classicists, ought we to do about this sort of thing? Simply point out that it’s tendentious, ahistorical, sexist rubbish? Add it to the bulging database of right-wing British politicians and commentators sprinkling classical ‘erudition’ on their speeches (Powell, Johnson…)? Try to develop alternative ‘myths’, equally powerful narratives to counter these reactionary messages, even at the expense of suppressing our instinct to point out that the past is always problematic and complex? Or try to think of ways of conveying that complexity in a more sophisticated way than just lecturing people?

Patriotic displays are designed to draw lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’, to build and reinforce the imagined community (albeit, in the case of the flags, expanding that imagined community beyond its usual boundaries) and to identify the malcontents and subversives. Like all myth, they provide answers without ever admitting that there were questions – and they set a trap for those whose instinctive response is to oppose all such displays, just as the invocations of history sets a trap for those whose instinctive response is to offer pedantic corrections. Sometimes – often – these responses are necessary and important, but they always come with the risk of alienating those who are not peddling such myths but are happy to accept them at face value, as straightforward and unpolitical. Sometimes, therefore, we need different tactics.

So the title of this post is not meant ironically at all. We’re going to have flags; why not lots of flags, as a means of opening up new conversations? At the moment, it’s a matter of: why these, but not others? Let’s have Germany, and Austria; let’s have all the Balkan countries, as a reminder both of the 1914 spark of conflict and of the unpalatable fact that many of the factors that drove conflict in WWI *and* WWII have not gone away. Let’s have the historical flags of 1914, and the flags of modern Europe – and of the European Union. A provocation, in the Brexity West Country – but surely better than the silent erasure of people, and bits of history, that don’t fit a highly politicised idea of ‘us’ that pretends to be unpolitical and natural.