Dante's Inferno, Seumas Milne & Europe

by Brian Bamford 

'I've been wondering what that special place
in hell looks like, for those who promoted
Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how
to carry it out safely.'  
                                      Donald Tusk.
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IN his book 'Movements in European History' [1921] D.H. Lawrence commenting on Dante and the Renaissance, wrote that in the time of Dante in the fifteenth century:
'Europe then was not like Europe now.  If a man were a Christian, all countries were his, for everywhere was the one Church of which he was a son.... What did it matter if a man were English or French or Spanish?  He was a European, a member of Christendom.  He travelled along the roads where all travelled, and on the full high-road every European was at home.... So the student leaving Italy would calmly take the great north road, to come home through the Alps to Germany, walking often on foot without any fears....  Nobody asked if he were English or Irish or German or Italian.  He spoke in Latin to the monks and was received as one of themselves.'

Similarly, A.J.P. Taylor began his book 'English History 1914-19145':
'UNTIL August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.  He could  live where he liked and as he liked... He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission.'  

 

Dante et Virgile  Capocchio, an alchemist, attacked by Gianni Schicchi, 

who impersonated the dead Buoso Donati to claim his inheritance, 

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In a way the European Union in the 20th century was an attempt to recover this lost world of the yesterday.  Perhaps it was a vain expectation given that since the First World War and the horrors that followed it, so many of us have now become hooked on the nation state.  There is not that many men like Dante knocking around these days or even a George Orwell, who may yearn to understand the bigger picture with a geo-political vision.

Instead today we're blessed with the likes of Chris Draper and Seamus Milne.  This week in Private Eye 'Ratbiter' pointed out that 'Any young supporter who voted Labour in the belief that the party was pro-European should have watched as their leader Jeremy Corbyn took his strategy and communications director Seumas Milne to an emergency Brexit meeting with Theresa May last week.'

Comrade Milne it turns out  'has opposed the EU as intensely as Tory Brexiteers Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson-but for much longer'.  As a schoolboy Comrade Milne wrote a manifesto as a Maoist candidate in a mock election at Winchester College in 1974:  'We would withdraw from NATO and the EEC; that was a year after the UK joined the European Economic Community, as it was then called.'

'Ratbiter' in Private Eye claims that the schoolboy Comrade Milne of 1974 soon swapped his loyalties from Mao to Stalin, and when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Seamus switched his passions from Soviet communism to what 'Ratbiter' now calls 'the Russian gangster regime that succeeded it'.  Private Eye notes that Jeremy Corbyn took this public schoolboy Comrade Milne to meet with Theresa May rather than his Brexit Secretary, Keir Starmer. 

D.H. Lawrence in his work 'Movements in European History' writes that '[p]erhaps the most wonderful century in all our Europe's two thousand years is the fifteenth century. .. Then lived the greatest painters, great poets, great architects, sculptors, scientists and men of learning, such had not been seen before.'

Following the First World War the nation state with its frontiers and tariffs came to dominate the culture of Europe with what Benedict Anderson has called 'Imagined Communities'.  Then came the glorification of the nation state which ended up with the Second World War and the Cold War.

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