A thought provoking essay but the idea of Britain being reunited with EU in the face to a common enemy (Trump) is too steep a climb for me. As with Brexit, Trump divides people. It’s not hard to find fault with his behaviour and rhetoric yet only those blinded by prejudice fail to recognise some powerful home truths amongst his inarticulate rambling.
I have often wondered if England might never have been considered a core part of Latin Christendom had Harold Godwinson won at Hastings because he was regarded as an illegitimate usurper by the Pope.
In the alternate timelines where the Anglo-Saxons won at Hastings, I can see England remaining more oriented towards Scandinavia than the historic Frankish realms on the continent. Also, better relations with Constantinople for sure as in our timeline, there was clearly enough of an affinity between Constantinople and the Anglo-Saxons for the former to host the exiles in places like the Varangian Guard.
Good points. But if Rome still rejected Harold Godwinson after a hypothetical victory of the Normans, where else would the Anglo-Saxon ruling class turn. Even if they stayed with Rome, as opposed to Constantinople, theologically, I can still see the subsequent England being more geopolitically oriented towards Scandinavia.
I was a massive Remainer who has grown disenchanted with the EU because it's a moral vision rather than a serious power bloc. If Trump has achieved anything with his antics it has been to expose that.
"Oswald Mosley was once Britain’s most passionate Europhile." He loved Europe so much he married his wife at the home of a German politician, with an Austrian present who went on to attempt to unite the continent!
What a popinjay he was! The fascists, starting in Italy, did envisage a united Europe, and drew heavily on the imagery of the Roman Empire: the salute, “Hail!”, the eagle and the standards, the militarism, etc
"Europeans felt a common bond when surrounded by alien peoples in dangerous environments, but their primary identity was always with their nations, regions or cities, and it took tens of millions of deaths in the 20th century for European leaders to finally abandon these murderous loyalties. "
The original idea behind the European Coal and Steel Community, which later became the European Economic Community and then the European Union, was by a Frenchman who, after three big wars between France and Germany over the previous century, didn't want the old halves of the Frankish Empire fighting again (particularly in a world where Marxism-Leninism now dominated half of the continent and much of the broader world):
"The Schuman Declaration had the stated aim of preventing further antagonism between France and Germany[5] and among other European states[6] by tackling the root cause of war through the establishment of common foundations for economic development.[7] Schuman proposed the formation of the ECSC primarily with France and Germany in mind: "The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries."[6] Portraying the coal and steel industries as integral to the production of munitions,[8] Schuman proposed that uniting these two industries across France and Germany under an innovative supranational system (that also included a European anti-cartel agency) would "make war between France and Germany [...] not only unthinkable but materially impossible""
"It could never be done politically, but that never stopped a sense of common identity that first united around the idea of ‘Christendom’, possibly the first English word to achieve international dominance - crīstendōm originating in Wessex sometime in the ninth century. Later, and with the age of discovery and then the Enlightenment, this idea of a civilisation came to be called ‘the West’."
Wow, I didn't know that about the origin of "Christendom". I did know about how Carolingian miniscule was developed by Alcuin of York in terms of Dark Age English inventions.
I was a strong supporter of the EU till the day (in 2004 I think) I started to think about the latest initiative to introduce majority voting and I realised the EU cannot be a democracy because it isn't a Demos. (I later realised that, even if it were a Demos, the unelected pygmies of the Commission hold sway - getting rid of them is presumably the improvement that could be made if enough people willed it).
Joining a United States of Europe to protect our democracy from the Russians and Chinese would therefore seems a somewhat pointless gesture.
Stupid American here. Nothing exemplifies the American Disease like how Europe responded to the George Floyd madness. It was then that I realized how rotten American institutions had become and that our cultural exports were just as rotten.
A right of center, unified Europe with sensible immigration policies sounds like a marvelous tonic. If it happens, maybe the Old World, with all its intellectual traditions, can come forth to the rescue of the New.
The EU are more left progressive than the US Dems and a horrendous blight on Europe in their bloated, mad, technocratic, anti democratic form. In comparison to Trump their representatives sound superficially more reasonable but that patina makes their self destructive, impenetrable policies worse somehow.
I think the way the word 'Europe' is used is the key.
For my part, I have always been careful to observe the distinction between Europe and 'Europe®'. The first Europe is a thing of inescapable rapture and sempiternal longing most particularly to us Germanics ('Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn') while the latter is a late-stage managerialist greyscape.
I have long noticed that the term Europe® is used by Eurocrats in the same cajoling and exclusionary way that 'The Church' has historically been used by Roman Catholics.
And we who do not subscribe to the preposterous Claims of Supremacy of either organisation resent being told we are outside the communion.
That said, if at any point the Brussels commissars did decide to vote to abolish themselves and reinstate the Holy Roman Empire, with Charles III (&VI) assuming the Reichskrone at the hands of the Pope in St Peter's Basilica and enthroned at Aachen and Frankfort in the presence of the assmbled Imperial Diet and Electors - my enthusiasm for the 'European Project' could as good as be guaranteed.
This is why I liked the idea of a via media, an associate membership of the EU, the Anglican position of being neither entirely one thing nor the other.
It is a clever idea but I would argue that one cannot be an 'associate member' of organisation claiming what either the Roman Church or the European Union claim about themselves.
It is simply a false starting point.
As with 'Anglo-Catholicism' and Rome, it eventually dawns on the High Churchmen that the Vatican doesn't 'do' complementarianism.
Similarly, for Britain to seek 'associate' status with Brussels is to misunderstand what the EU claims, fundamentally and axiomatically, for and of itself.
In her eyes our claims to European-ness are "absolutely null and utterly void" until and unless we accept the moral and legal Supremacy of the EU 'ab initio'.
OR Christianity is a debating club with no clear idea of its own doctrines.
The most preposterous thing of all is believing that no Supremacy exists - ie that Jesus was as much a complete idiot as modern Christians and didn't want a Supremacy to exist.
Obviously He did. Since No Head of State = No State. The Church needs a Head as much as the human body does.
Besides, Anglicans are the galactic grandmasters of the Preposterous.
Friend, no doubt you know the case against, as I know the case for the various aspects of Romanism. I have no doubt of your sincerity or your intelligence.
The hour is very late in the West for disputes of this sort.
We will all have to answer at a Greater Tribunal for the manner in which we usd our time on earth. I would like to say I spent mine, living in peace and goodwill with all who profess "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all."
"The early sense of Christian identity noted by Fulcher arose because the new European civilisation, born on the borderlands between Latin and Germanic speakers not far from where today’s EU capital is based, was weak and vulnerable compared to the far more sophisticated Islamic civilisation which controlled the Mediterranean."
I recently finished a fascinating book I received for Christmas about the largely forgotten theological conflict of Late Antiquity between Monophysites and "Two Natures" Christians. The author details how the contingent triumph of the latter played a key role as to why Christianity's ancient heartlands of Egypt and the Levant were lost to the Persians and later the Muslim Arabs in the 7th Century. He speculates that had the Monophysites been victorious, with the lack of premature death of one emperor (Theodosius II), the Christian world would likely have remained centered on the South and (especially) East of the Mediterranean and what we would call the heartland of "Europe" would have remained peripheral and possibly even largely Arian!
England has had a historic ambivalent ambiguous relationship with Europe, and continues to do so. Russia has also had an ambiguous ambivalent relationship with “Europe” and the dividing line has been contested for centuries, and is still being currently contested.
Trump is doing “Europe” a great favor(either purposefully or not, always difficult to tell with Trump) putting them through a Foreign policy “boot camp”. They need to extensively “toughen up” in a myriad of areas.
I think that he maybe, although his main impact is to drive European voters towards the mainstream parties who are least likely to do anything about it.
Right-wing Europeanism is an oxymoron. A United States of Europe means no sovereignty for nations. Most right wing British people would be happy to see Marine Le Pen ruling France, but they wouldn't want her, or any other foreigner, making our laws.
I'd say the 2020 hysteria had a deeper impact in Europe than in the US. Certainly I don't think any Americans have been jailed for making George Floyd jokes.
It's worth noting that the ultra-Remainer, belligerently progressive newspaper the New European has changed its name to 'The New World'. They may have thought that, what with the Overton window shift on immigration, 'European' now had an identitarian ring to it.
The fundamental problem with nationalists, as we've seen with Trump, is that they tend to not be able to coordinate. They are too self-centred.
There are lots of examples in history -- Italy was opposed to Nazi Austria, Nazi Germany opposed to right-wing Poland. Left-nationalist Vietnam and the Soviet Union opposed to left-nationalist China.
Once you gin up your own people on nationalism, then the targets of that nationalism tend to be rival nationalists.
Internationalists have many weaknesses, one of which is that few people want to die for them, but they seem to be pretty good at coordinating (scheming) and policing themselves.
Personally, I would rather not have to be a nationalist -- I am liberal by temperament, if not ideology -- but I feel increasingly pushed in the direction of nationalism as a matter of existential self-defence, because I fear the future for my culture, people and (hopeful) descendants without it.
I suppose that is the kind of soft shared "international" nationalism Ed is getting at, but am not sure whether it can triumph over the "hard" self-centred nationalism that motivates people to sacrifice, fight and die for their countries
I also love Europe. I moved to Germany when I was 19 and lived in Spain for 7 years and Poland for one. But Europe and the EU are two separate things and while the former is populated by ordinary people the latter is staffed exclusively by progressive liberals. Why would anyone on the right want closer relations with THEM?
But yes, turf them out and I think many, perhaps even most Brits would like a closer relationship with Europeans. And in many ways we ARE closer to them than to Americans. I have just been exchanging favourite pop songs online with someone and while her list is full of American power ballads and songs with electric guitar solos, mine isn't. I think we Europeans generally frown at such things, just as we used to scoff at the razzmatazz of American politics with their politicians who always have perfectly even white teeth and wholesome families.
A thought provoking essay but the idea of Britain being reunited with EU in the face to a common enemy (Trump) is too steep a climb for me. As with Brexit, Trump divides people. It’s not hard to find fault with his behaviour and rhetoric yet only those blinded by prejudice fail to recognise some powerful home truths amongst his inarticulate rambling.
Yeah I don’t see us rejoining, and I’m not sure future shape Europe will be in. I’m going to speculate in a follow-up easy but who knows.
I have often wondered if England might never have been considered a core part of Latin Christendom had Harold Godwinson won at Hastings because he was regarded as an illegitimate usurper by the Pope.
In the alternate timelines where the Anglo-Saxons won at Hastings, I can see England remaining more oriented towards Scandinavia than the historic Frankish realms on the continent. Also, better relations with Constantinople for sure as in our timeline, there was clearly enough of an affinity between Constantinople and the Anglo-Saxons for the former to host the exiles in places like the Varangian Guard.
And even more so if Harold Hardrada had won.
It is debatable.
The Anglo Saxon church was conspicuous in its deference to Rome, particularly after the Synod of Whitby.
Equally, the idea of Romanitas was central to late Anglo Saxon ideas of legitimacy in Kingship in a way it never was in Scandinavia.
In Church and State the Anglo Saxon's craved Roman approval.
Really? Edward the Confessor was raised as a continental, but Sweyn Forkbeard and King Cnut were not.
Good points. But if Rome still rejected Harold Godwinson after a hypothetical victory of the Normans, where else would the Anglo-Saxon ruling class turn. Even if they stayed with Rome, as opposed to Constantinople, theologically, I can still see the subsequent England being more geopolitically oriented towards Scandinavia.
I was a massive Remainer who has grown disenchanted with the EU because it's a moral vision rather than a serious power bloc. If Trump has achieved anything with his antics it has been to expose that.
typo: essay
"Oswald Mosley was once Britain’s most passionate Europhile." He loved Europe so much he married his wife at the home of a German politician, with an Austrian present who went on to attempt to unite the continent!
What a popinjay he was! The fascists, starting in Italy, did envisage a united Europe, and drew heavily on the imagery of the Roman Empire: the salute, “Hail!”, the eagle and the standards, the militarism, etc
"Europeans felt a common bond when surrounded by alien peoples in dangerous environments, but their primary identity was always with their nations, regions or cities, and it took tens of millions of deaths in the 20th century for European leaders to finally abandon these murderous loyalties. "
The original idea behind the European Coal and Steel Community, which later became the European Economic Community and then the European Union, was by a Frenchman who, after three big wars between France and Germany over the previous century, didn't want the old halves of the Frankish Empire fighting again (particularly in a world where Marxism-Leninism now dominated half of the continent and much of the broader world):
"The Schuman Declaration had the stated aim of preventing further antagonism between France and Germany[5] and among other European states[6] by tackling the root cause of war through the establishment of common foundations for economic development.[7] Schuman proposed the formation of the ECSC primarily with France and Germany in mind: "The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries."[6] Portraying the coal and steel industries as integral to the production of munitions,[8] Schuman proposed that uniting these two industries across France and Germany under an innovative supranational system (that also included a European anti-cartel agency) would "make war between France and Germany [...] not only unthinkable but materially impossible""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Community
"It could never be done politically, but that never stopped a sense of common identity that first united around the idea of ‘Christendom’, possibly the first English word to achieve international dominance - crīstendōm originating in Wessex sometime in the ninth century. Later, and with the age of discovery and then the Enlightenment, this idea of a civilisation came to be called ‘the West’."
Wow, I didn't know that about the origin of "Christendom". I did know about how Carolingian miniscule was developed by Alcuin of York in terms of Dark Age English inventions.
Very interesting piece.
I was a strong supporter of the EU till the day (in 2004 I think) I started to think about the latest initiative to introduce majority voting and I realised the EU cannot be a democracy because it isn't a Demos. (I later realised that, even if it were a Demos, the unelected pygmies of the Commission hold sway - getting rid of them is presumably the improvement that could be made if enough people willed it).
Joining a United States of Europe to protect our democracy from the Russians and Chinese would therefore seems a somewhat pointless gesture.
"with Ivy League universities being the Wuhan lab of woke ideas"
Why I read Ed.
Stupid American here. Nothing exemplifies the American Disease like how Europe responded to the George Floyd madness. It was then that I realized how rotten American institutions had become and that our cultural exports were just as rotten.
A right of center, unified Europe with sensible immigration policies sounds like a marvelous tonic. If it happens, maybe the Old World, with all its intellectual traditions, can come forth to the rescue of the New.
The EU are more left progressive than the US Dems and a horrendous blight on Europe in their bloated, mad, technocratic, anti democratic form. In comparison to Trump their representatives sound superficially more reasonable but that patina makes their self destructive, impenetrable policies worse somehow.
I think the way the word 'Europe' is used is the key.
For my part, I have always been careful to observe the distinction between Europe and 'Europe®'. The first Europe is a thing of inescapable rapture and sempiternal longing most particularly to us Germanics ('Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn') while the latter is a late-stage managerialist greyscape.
I have long noticed that the term Europe® is used by Eurocrats in the same cajoling and exclusionary way that 'The Church' has historically been used by Roman Catholics.
And we who do not subscribe to the preposterous Claims of Supremacy of either organisation resent being told we are outside the communion.
That said, if at any point the Brussels commissars did decide to vote to abolish themselves and reinstate the Holy Roman Empire, with Charles III (&VI) assuming the Reichskrone at the hands of the Pope in St Peter's Basilica and enthroned at Aachen and Frankfort in the presence of the assmbled Imperial Diet and Electors - my enthusiasm for the 'European Project' could as good as be guaranteed.
This is why I liked the idea of a via media, an associate membership of the EU, the Anglican position of being neither entirely one thing nor the other.
It is a clever idea but I would argue that one cannot be an 'associate member' of organisation claiming what either the Roman Church or the European Union claim about themselves.
It is simply a false starting point.
As with 'Anglo-Catholicism' and Rome, it eventually dawns on the High Churchmen that the Vatican doesn't 'do' complementarianism.
Similarly, for Britain to seek 'associate' status with Brussels is to misunderstand what the EU claims, fundamentally and axiomatically, for and of itself.
In her eyes our claims to European-ness are "absolutely null and utterly void" until and unless we accept the moral and legal Supremacy of the EU 'ab initio'.
EITHER the Papacy is Supreme
OR Christianity is a debating club with no clear idea of its own doctrines.
The most preposterous thing of all is believing that no Supremacy exists - ie that Jesus was as much a complete idiot as modern Christians and didn't want a Supremacy to exist.
Obviously He did. Since No Head of State = No State. The Church needs a Head as much as the human body does.
Besides, Anglicans are the galactic grandmasters of the Preposterous.
With respect I believe your opening gambit is known, in the trade, as a ‘false dilemma’ - with bells on.
Only the Papacy has any real claim to Supremacy..
Who else has ?
And yes, in the absence of a Head, all that's left of the Christian Church is a debating club.
So you''re stuck with a true dilemma.
As the old hymn goes…
“And there's another country, I've heard of long ago,
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace”
And what are the beliefs of the citizens of this country ?
For example, on Holy Communion ?
Or are they as mindless as they are saintly ?
Friend, no doubt you know the case against, as I know the case for the various aspects of Romanism. I have no doubt of your sincerity or your intelligence.
The hour is very late in the West for disputes of this sort.
We will all have to answer at a Greater Tribunal for the manner in which we usd our time on earth. I would like to say I spent mine, living in peace and goodwill with all who profess "one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all."
You have my sincere prayers.
"The early sense of Christian identity noted by Fulcher arose because the new European civilisation, born on the borderlands between Latin and Germanic speakers not far from where today’s EU capital is based, was weak and vulnerable compared to the far more sophisticated Islamic civilisation which controlled the Mediterranean."
I recently finished a fascinating book I received for Christmas about the largely forgotten theological conflict of Late Antiquity between Monophysites and "Two Natures" Christians. The author details how the contingent triumph of the latter played a key role as to why Christianity's ancient heartlands of Egypt and the Levant were lost to the Persians and later the Muslim Arabs in the 7th Century. He speculates that had the Monophysites been victorious, with the lack of premature death of one emperor (Theodosius II), the Christian world would likely have remained centered on the South and (especially) East of the Mediterranean and what we would call the heartland of "Europe" would have remained peripheral and possibly even largely Arian!
https://www.amazon.ca/Jesus-Wars-Patriarchs-Emperors-Christians/dp/0061768936
Doubtful, because Catholic-Orthodox Christianity has the immeasurable advantage over Arianism and Monophysitism of being true, rather than tosh.
England has had a historic ambivalent ambiguous relationship with Europe, and continues to do so. Russia has also had an ambiguous ambivalent relationship with “Europe” and the dividing line has been contested for centuries, and is still being currently contested.
Trump is doing “Europe” a great favor(either purposefully or not, always difficult to tell with Trump) putting them through a Foreign policy “boot camp”. They need to extensively “toughen up” in a myriad of areas.
I think that he maybe, although his main impact is to drive European voters towards the mainstream parties who are least likely to do anything about it.
Right-wing Europeanism is an oxymoron. A United States of Europe means no sovereignty for nations. Most right wing British people would be happy to see Marine Le Pen ruling France, but they wouldn't want her, or any other foreigner, making our laws.
I'd say the 2020 hysteria had a deeper impact in Europe than in the US. Certainly I don't think any Americans have been jailed for making George Floyd jokes.
It's worth noting that the ultra-Remainer, belligerently progressive newspaper the New European has changed its name to 'The New World'. They may have thought that, what with the Overton window shift on immigration, 'European' now had an identitarian ring to it.
The fundamental problem with nationalists, as we've seen with Trump, is that they tend to not be able to coordinate. They are too self-centred.
There are lots of examples in history -- Italy was opposed to Nazi Austria, Nazi Germany opposed to right-wing Poland. Left-nationalist Vietnam and the Soviet Union opposed to left-nationalist China.
Once you gin up your own people on nationalism, then the targets of that nationalism tend to be rival nationalists.
Internationalists have many weaknesses, one of which is that few people want to die for them, but they seem to be pretty good at coordinating (scheming) and policing themselves.
Personally, I would rather not have to be a nationalist -- I am liberal by temperament, if not ideology -- but I feel increasingly pushed in the direction of nationalism as a matter of existential self-defence, because I fear the future for my culture, people and (hopeful) descendants without it.
I suppose that is the kind of soft shared "international" nationalism Ed is getting at, but am not sure whether it can triumph over the "hard" self-centred nationalism that motivates people to sacrifice, fight and die for their countries
I also love Europe. I moved to Germany when I was 19 and lived in Spain for 7 years and Poland for one. But Europe and the EU are two separate things and while the former is populated by ordinary people the latter is staffed exclusively by progressive liberals. Why would anyone on the right want closer relations with THEM?
But yes, turf them out and I think many, perhaps even most Brits would like a closer relationship with Europeans. And in many ways we ARE closer to them than to Americans. I have just been exchanging favourite pop songs online with someone and while her list is full of American power ballads and songs with electric guitar solos, mine isn't. I think we Europeans generally frown at such things, just as we used to scoff at the razzmatazz of American politics with their politicians who always have perfectly even white teeth and wholesome families.
Isn’t this all but wishful thinking as long as the EU is led and staffed (which is probably more important) by committed progressives?