Any lingering reputation the British had in Europe for being understated or reserved was destroyed last week at the first meeting of the new European Parliament. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party has the greatest number of British Members of the European Parliament. When the EU anthem, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was played to open the session, they theatrically turned their backs. The second-largest bloc are the Euro-fanatical Liberal Democrats. They arrived wearing yellow T-shirts emblazoned with “Bollocks to Brexit.”
To be honest, I have always thought my country’s reputation for politeness overblown. We British are an earthy and Hogarthian race, readier than our American cousins to drink, fight, and swear. Even by our standards, though, this was coarse and unpleasant.
Human nature being what it is, people tended to focus only on the bad behavior of the other side. Those who thought the back-turning was fair enough were histrionically outraged by the shirts, while those who saw the shirts as a jolly jape fainted like affronted spinsters at the idea of insulting an anthem.
Perhaps I am displaying my own bias here, but I don’t see how any case can be made for the shirts, which marked a vulgarity that would recently have been unthinkable in a party that descended from that high-minded Victorian titan, William Gladstone. The anthem is more interesting, because it goes to the heart of the EU debate.
If the EU were simply a trade association, it wouldn’t need a national anthem. Nor would it need a flag, passport, currency, parliament, supreme court, or president. The anthem matters a great deal to those who want the EU to become a single country. Such people are rare in Europe at large (except, perhaps, in Germany), but they dominate Brussels. For example, the nominee to be the new president of the European Commission, the current German defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, says “My aim is a United States of Europe on the model of federal states such as Germany and the U.S.”
American readers will spot the problem. Germans are a single people, whose sense of shared nationality long predated their unification in the 19th century. The same is true of Americans. During the debates on federation in the 1780s, almost everyone used “nation” to refer to America as a whole (though they often used “country” to refer to their own state). The 13 states were already united by language, culture, law, and religion. Indeed, the idea that independence might lead to interstate fighting was treated as something of a joke.
In Virginia, the Anti-Federalist William Grayson mocked the Federalist claim that only a strong central government could prevent the states from quarreling: “Pennsylvania and Maryland are to fall upon us from the north like the Goths and Vandals of old … and the Carolinians, from the south, (mounted on alligators, I presume) are to come and destroy our cornfields, and eat up our little children!”
Europe, by contrast, is not a single nation. It does not have a common language or a shared culture. Hardly anyone identifies as European in the sense that someone might identify as Portuguese, Hungarian, or Swedish. The EU is thus left with the institutions of statehood — the president, the embassies, the civil service, etc. — but without any sustaining sense of nationhood.
So you can see why the anthem, despite its transcendental quality, is controversial. Lovely music can serve ugly causes. The grandeur of Beethoven’s Ninth appealed to China’s revolutionaries and to the Nazis. The symphony was the national anthem of the breakaway white minority government in Rhodesia.
In Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange, it is played during aversion therapy, with the result that the protagonist, Alex, until then an ecstatic Beethoven fan, can never again listen to it. There are times, watching the fatuous expressions of Euro-officials as they stand solemnly to attention, when I sympathize with Alex.
During my 20 years as an MEP, I have remained seated during the music. I don’t recognize it as an anthem (and, in strict legal terms, it isn’t), but I don’t want to be disrespectful to the performers. So I sit and enjoy it as if at a concert.
I fear my attitude meant that the Brexit Party had to up the ante. If Tory euroskeptics were refusing to stand, they had to go one better and turn their backs. Which led, in turn, to an even sillier reaction from their opponents, who pointed hysterically at an occasion when Nazi deputies had done the same in the Reichstag.
This culture war is truly becoming as exhausting as it is malicious. The quicker Brexit is done, the better for everyone’s sanity.
