Religion, nationalism, Europe, Brexit

 

Above is an interesting webinar hosted by Aristotle Papanikolaou of the Orthodox Christian Studies Centre of Fordham University regarding religion and nationalism. The guests are José Casanova, Elizabeth Prodromou and Eric Gregory.

In his opening remarks Casanova says religious nationalism, as he calls the intersection of religion and nationalism, is characteristic of all religions – Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and exists in all Christian denominations. A lot is made of how, where Orthodoxy prevails, it has developed into a religion that has come to define national identity but Casanova says this is nothing unusual or unique to Orthodoxy and in his country, Spain, under Franco, the ideological glue of the regime was National Catholicism.

Gregory makes some observations about how, despite the explicit tradition of separation of state and religion in the USA, religion has now come to pervade that country’s politics. Trumpism or Make America Great Again populism, Gregory argues, is a form of religious nationalism and is code for making America white and Christian again.

Ironically, all three scholars observe, Christian nationalism, whether in the form of Trumpism in the USA, Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in Holland or the AfD in Germany, has little to do with Christianity as a religious creed. Christian nationalist leaders and many of their followers are not devout and have no real interest in the faith. Rather they assert Christianity, its centrality to American and European identity, as a means to oppose non-Christian religions that are perceived as a threat to European and American culture and global interests.

There are many other interesting points that emerge from the discussion. One is Gregory’s claim that while the Orthodox Church sees itself as being the bulwark of a Christian nation, Protestants see nations as temporal constructs and assert that salvation only comes to individuals – grace not race. (Of course, the Byzantines saw the Roman people, and not any individual, as ‘chosen’ and the Roman nation as uniquely righteous and under the protection of God, the Virgin Mary and any number of saints, in which case the notion of individual salvation is both decadent and grotesquely vain).

Another interesting observation is Casanova’s that the EU was the result of 70 years of war between France and Germany, which started with the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, took on a second phase in the Great War and concluded in 1945 with the Second World War.

It was at a the end of this last war, Casanova argues, that Roman Catholic intellectuals in France and Germany began to consider how their two countries could put an end to this internecine bloodshed and establish a new Europe. The result of this Roman Catholic or Christian Democrat initiative was first the Treaty of Paris (1951), which created the European Coal and Steel Community, then the Treaty of Rome (1957), in which France and Germany joined by Holland, Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg – all overwhelming Roman Catholic countries or countries where at least half the population were Roman Catholic, formed the European Economic Community, which morphed into the European Union following the Maastricht Treaty of 1992.

These cultural and historical foundations of the EU are always useful to remember, particularly if we want to see why the UK was always an uncomfortable, then a semi-detached and ultimately a fully alienated member-state, deciding to abandon the whole project in 2016.

Since Brexit, a cottage industry has developed trying to explain why Britain has, for better or worse, ended up where it is.

Many have attributed the vote to leave the EU, and the recalibration of politics it represents, the fall of the Red Wall to Boris Johnson in the 2019 general election, to English nationalism. Some have argued that this English nationalism is rooted in hostility to immigration – though for former PM Tony Blair this has less to do with European immigration and the EU’s policy of Freedom of Movement, and more to do with non-European immigration to the country:

‘For many people, the core of the immigration question – and one which I fully accept is a substantial issue – is immigration from non-European countries especially when from different cultures in which assimilation and potential security threats can be an issue.’

This hostility to immigration is often linked to imperial nostalgia. During the vote leave campaign there was much talk of Britain, having shown in the past that it can thrive and triumph globally, striking out again into the wider world, leaving behind the narrow confines of Europe and the shackles of Brussels. Moreover, given its unique imperial history, Britain, it was argued, has greater cultural, historical and ethnic ties to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA – the so-called Anglosphere – than the countries of the European continent.

Gary Younge put the imperial-nostalgia-prompted-Brexit thesis like this:

‘Our colonial past, and the inability to come to terms with its demise, gave many the impression that we are far bigger, stronger and more influential than we really are. At some point they convinced themselves that the reason we are at the centre of most world maps is because the Earth revolves around us, not because it was us who drew the maps.’

Others have argued that rather than imperial nostalgia being behind Brexit, it’s the myths of the Second World War, with its notions of plucky, little Britain fighting to retain its freedom from malevolent forces in Europe that explain the country’s rejection of the EU.

Mike Finn writes that for the two leading Brexit campaigners, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson:

‘Britain is the nation who stood alone in 1940, a great nation, heir to Anglo-Saxon culture and “first in the world for soft power”, owing to Britain’s supposed invention of representative democracy. For Johnson, Churchill was a man of “vast and almost reckless moral courage”, the encapsulation of all that is good about Britain, not least British pluck. As Gove puts it, those who believe that the prospect of Brexit is a terrible idea are actually arguing that Britain is “too small and too weak…to succeed without Jean-Claude Juncker looking after us.” Johnson went further, comparing the European project to Hitler's attempt at territorial domination. Both agree that, as in 1940, Britain can, and should, stand alone.’

Tony Blair also invokes the dominance of Second World War myths in British national ideology as a cause of Brexit.

‘On the one side are those who feel Britain as they know it, is being cast aside, the things they like about Britain disappearing, and in their place, petty political correctness, bureaucratic obsessions, magnified and exemplified by Europe, and, above all, obedience to the god of multi-culturalism at the expense of our own culture. 

‘This part of Britain imagines a parallel with the Second World War, a period of our history which, rightly, makes us proud. Read the speeches of the Brexiteers and they are replete with references to this feat of glory.

‘But it casts a long shadow over the British psyche. It creates a longing to live the moment again, to see each new circumstance through the lens of its narrative, a life and death struggle between us and those who would harm us, where against all odds we triumph, a series of Darkest Hours from which we emerge to the sunlit uplands.’

Imperial nostalgia and Second World War myths aren’t mutually exclusive. Even if the first evokes feelings of global supremacy and significance while the second celebrates the virtues of the underdog and isolation, you can believe in both and Brexit can be explained by both.

Also worth noting are the arguments of historian Linda Colley on the origins of British national identity and how this might have contributed to Brexit

In Britons: Forging the Nation, Colley argues that the British nation was formed between 1707 and 1837, i.e. between the Acts of Union between Scotland and England and the beginning of the Victorian era. The principal ideological adhesive that bonded England, Scotland and Wales, Colley argues, was Britain as a Protestant state standing against a largely Roman Catholic Europe.

Even if these foundations of British national identity have, since the Second World War, faded, with empire gone and religion a peripheral and derided endeavour, what hasn’t faded is the notion, however vaguely understood, that Europe is other, foreign and not only not part of British – or, now, English – identity but inimical to it.

Odysseas Elytis: on Greece’s place in Europe

Above is an interview from Greek TV (circa late 1980s, I’d say) with Odysseas Elytis, in which the great poet discusses Greece’s place in Europe, and whether it would be better for Greece to insulate itself from European trends and rely on its own cultural resources or use these resources to shape Europe, which Elytis characterises as decrepit and in decline. Again, like Georgios Babiniotis and Eleni Glykatzi-Ahrweiller in my previous two posts, Elytis stresses that the only way Greece can negotiate a position for itself, one way or the other, is on the basis of paideia. My translation of the interview is below. (Video first seen here).

At some point, Europe is going to have to come to terms with its roots. It can’t carry on believing it’s some autonomous unit, without theoretical foundations. And there will also come a point when Greece will have to decide if it wants to remain isolated and stick to its own values or if it will enter some wider collective with, undoubtedly, some benefits of a practical nature, but with the danger that it will distort its true character.

From this point of view, I admit that I am an isolationist. All my life I have fought for that which we call Greekness (Ελληνικότητα), which is nothing other than a way of observing and feeling things, whether on a large or humble scale, on the level of the Parthenon or a pebble. It’s all about nobility and quality as opposed to size and quantity, which is what characterises the West. This is where the difference lies between Greece and the West.

The West drew on Greek values to create the Renaissance, but their Renaissance is very different to the one we would have created, if we hadn’t been stopped by the Turkish occupation.

We get a glimpse of what might have been when we consider the courtyard of an island home or the grounds of a monastery, which are much closer to the spirit that created the Parthenon than all the columns and metopes that adorn the royal palaces of Europe.

Which means that if Greek sensitivity was preserved, then it was exclusively down to our folk civilisation, which today is under threat. The Greek bourgeoisie (with the occasional exception) imitated the Europeans and their pretend version of Greece, and now the rest of the Greek people are imitating the Greek bourgeoisie imitating Europeans.

To the point where one asks oneself what good would isolation do, what will it actually protect?

And at risk of contradicting myself, I'm drawn to the other extreme, by suggesting that wouldn’t it be wiser if we joined the course of history, if we adopted a different strategy that would enable us to stand out by going down another path?

Hellenism has always had an amazing ability to adapt and become active in foreign societies. There are any number of Greeks who distinguished themselves in the Diaspora era, in the great cities of Europe and the East. And this in a period when Europe was at its peak and states were powerful and harsh, unlike today where they are decrepit and in decline, and in need of the vigour of new ideas.

This helps to reassure the sentimental Greek that hides inside me and makes me think that wouldn’t it be better if we went forward, without fearing conflict and rivalry [with Europe]? Though, naturally, we should always do so on the basis of quality, which means on the basis of the spirit. This is why I insist so much on paideia. We need serious and far-reaching paideia – not this technical type of education we have today – because only with this paideia can we stand out and chart a a new course, while preserving the special elements that comprise Greek style and character.

Eleftherios Venizelos and Greece In Her True Light

Greece In Her True Light is an interesting document published (in English) in 1916, which consists of several memoranda and speeches by Eleftherios Venizelos putting forward the case for Greece’s entry into WW1 on the side of the Allies. It describes the deals Venizelos was prepared to make to secure the maximum advantage to Greece’s national interests, which in this case meant the expansion of the Greek state into Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace and Cyprus. Venizelos’ policy of supporting Britain and France as a means to secure Greek expansion was opposed by King Constantine and other rightist forces in Greece, led by Dimitrios Gounaris.

Just a few points going through the document, which can be read here.

Initially, at the outbreak of WW1, Venizelos’ concern is to prevent Bulgaria – which had never accepted the treaties that ended the Balkan wars in 1912-13 – from joining the German and Turkish axis and threatening first Serbia and then Greece. In order to secure either Bulgarian neutrality or, better still, Bulgarian support in attacking Turkey, Venizelos was prepared to offer, in exchange for Allied backing for Greek demands in Asia Minor, the handing over to Bulgaria of Kavala and Drama in Eastern Macedonia.

Venizelos makes clear that Greek expansion into Asia Minor is not just a matter of creating a Greater Greece, but also protecting the lives of Ottoman Greeks who are already being targetted in a campaign of extermination, similar to the one already suffered by the Armenians. Venizelos adds that the policy of genocide is one the Turks are being encouraged to adopt by Germany.

Venizelos argues that if Greece had participated in the Gallipoli campaign, as requested by the Allies, then that campaign, to capture Constantinople, would have succeeded. He makes clear that Russian objections to Greece participating in the capture of Constantinople – Russia regarded Greece as a rival to claims on Constantinople – would have been overcome by France and Britain.

Venizelos accuses the obstructionist King Constantine of not only admiring Germany, but of desiring German victory in Europe, which would allow the king to sweep away the parliamentary system in Greece and establish a more monarchical system of government.

Venizelos mentions the British offer to cede Cyprus to Greece. Anti-Venizelists argued that such a concession was trifling and not worth Greece entering the war on the side of the British; but Venizelos insists that the addition of Cyprus to Greece would be a significant advance of Hellenism, especially in conjunction with other acquisitions in Thrace and Asia Minor.

It’s worth pointing out that the publication of the document – in English – was intended to convince Allied audiences that Venizelos, not Constantine, represented the ‘true’ Greece. Constantine’s pro-German neutrality was, of course, an outrage to the Allies and, indeed, in Canada and Australia, there were anti-Greek riots (aimed at Greek immigrants). 

Wikileaks: Chris Patten says Cyprus ‘foisted’ on EU

Dribs and drabs are coming from Wikileaks relating to Cyprus. There’s been some remarks by Chris Patten, formerly the EU’s External Relations Commissioner, made to a US official in Brussels, on 28 April 2004, shortly after Cyprus entered the EU having rejected the Annan plan. Patten was a senior Tory politician and government minister in the 1980s and 1990s and was, indeed, the last British governor of Hong Kong. He is currently the chancellor of Oxford University. His remarks regarding Cyprus and Tassos Papadopoulos are not surprising, but here they are:

Next Steps On Cyprus/Papadopolous’ Dubious Character...
3. (C) The next steps for the Commission are figuring out how to spend money in Northern Cyprus. Patten expects the EC to open an office to oversee their assistance. While there will be legal hurdles to managing the process, he was confident the Commission would find a way. Patten doubted the Greek Cypriots would openly oppose any efforts, noting that they were “on their heels” diplomatically after their blatant efforts to stifle opposing views on the referendum. This incident, Patten said, was a sad reflection on the realities of EU enlargement: Some of the new members were people you would “only want to dine with if you have a very long spoon”. Not that the EU should have been surprised by Papadopolous’ behavior, Patten said, since they knew well who they were dealing with: Milosevic's lawyer.XXXXXXXXXXXX...  
And on Turkey

4. (C) Patten noted that he was the biggest proponent in the Commission for Turkey’s admission. In his view, based on the technical merits alone, the Commission has no other option but to give a positive avis to begin accession negotiations. Still, he said the political climate in Europe is not receptive to Turkey’s candidacy. The problem, in his view, was not Chirac in France, since “he can change his policies on a whim”. Patten considered the opposition of conservative parties in Germany and Spain the most serious obstacles to Turkish admission.

On the Difference Between a Union and an Alliance
5. (C) Patten also said he felt at times the US does not fully appreciate the difference between expanding an alliance like NATO, and a Union like the EU. When a country joins an alliance, it becomes a distinct member of a group committed to a common cause – but nothing more. When countries join the EU, they become part of the whole, formally and practically indistinct in many areas of EU competence. “We have to be ready to trust their food and sanitation standards, for instance.” In this regard, he noted that some of the accession countries were foisted on the EU as part of a larger bargain. Cyprus, for instance, probably should not have been admitted (as Papadapolous’ behavior prior to the referendum indicated), but the Greeks insisted on Cypriot admission as the price of agreeing to some of the northern European candidates. Croatia, Patten said, is probably far more prepared for EU membership than either Bulgaria or Romania, who will likely enter the Union earlier. Romania, in particular, was a “feral nation.”

On Steven Runciman’s 1453: The Fall of Constantinople

1453: The Fall of Constantinople, by Steven Runciman (ISBN: 9781107604698). Paperback: £10.99.

I’m not sure if there’s much consolation in being a tragic hero – better to prevail than be transfigured – but tragic heroes is precisely how Steven Runciman describes the Greeks in his essential account of the siege and fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, which has recently been reissued by Canto Classics.

Beleaguered, outnumbered 10 to one, waiting in vain for the Western aid they had been promised for agreeing to church union, the Greek defenders (and a small group of Genoan and Venetian confederates) refused the besieging sultan’s offer to surrender Constantinople or convert to Islam, and chose instead to trust in their own bravery, the righteousness of their cause and divine intervention to preserve one of the last vestiges of Greek liberty.

But after two months of relentless siege and assault, the Turkish

warlord, Sultan Mehmet, frustrated by the resistance of the Greeks, ignoring the advice of some of his commanders to lift the siege and avert further humiliation, decided to make one, final overwhelming attack to take the city.

The speeches made by the Greek and Turkish leaders on the eve of the decisive assault reveal what the two sides believed they were fighting for.

The Byzantine emperor Constantine Palaiologos tells his soldiers that a man should always be prepared to die for his faith or country, his family or sovereign; but now, he says, we are being asked to give up our lives for all four; while Mehmet’s words to his forces are in stark contrast to the heroism and dignity of the Greek emperor. Mehmet urges his troops on by reminding them of the three days of looting they will be allowed should they capture the city, and he inspires his commanders not only with the promise of booty, but also by stressing their sacred duty as Muslims to vanquish this famous Christian capital.

And indeed, once Constantinople is taken, the story of the city becomes one of plunder and depredation.

Runciman describes the pillaging of private homes, churches, businesses; the massacres of men, women and children, the ‘rivers of blood running down the streets’; a slaughter that only abated when the Turkish soldiers realised that keeping the Christians alive and selling them as slaves was a better idea, not that this spared the elderly, infirm and infants who could bring no profit, and were consequently killed on the spot.

As commander in chief, Mehmet was entitled to the greatest share of the loot, which he had paraded before him so he could decide precisely what he wanted. Then the sultan selected 1200 Greek children to be sent as slaves, 400 each, to the three most important Muslim rulers of the time, the sultan of Egypt, the king of Tunis and the king of Grenada; while, from the most prominent Byzantine families, Mehmet had his pick of youths, girls and boys, for his personal seraglio, with those resisting a life of sexual slavery being put to death, as Runciman illustrates with the case of the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras and his son and son-in-law:

‘Five days after the fall of the city [Mehmet] gave a banquet. In the course of it, when he was well flushed with wine, someone whispered to him that Notaras’s fourteen-year-old son was a boy of exceptional beauty. The Sultan at once sent a eunuch to the house of the [Grand Duke] to demand that the boy be sent to him for his pleasure. Notaras, whose elder sons had been killed fighting, refused to sacrifice the boy to such a fate. Police were then sent to bring Notaras with his son and his young son-in-law, the son of the Grand Domestic Andronicus Cantacuzenus, into the Sultan’s presence. When Notaras still defied the Sultan, orders were given for him and the two boys to be decapitated on the spot. Notaras merely asked that they should be slain before him, lest the sight of his death should make them waver. When they had both perished he bared his neck to the executioner. The following day, nine other Greek notables were arrested and sent to the scaffold.’

But even if Runciman does not flinch from describing the Turkish capture of Constantinople as being a ‘ghastly story of pillage’ and is not prepared to cover up Mehmet’s ‘savageries’; he is not a crude Orientalist, out to demonise the Turks and Islam and portray Byzantium’s demise in terms of a heroic West versus a barbaric East.

For not only would associating Byzantium with the West be problematic, but it is also clear that, for Runciman, the external agents most responsible for the downfall of Byzantium were not the Turks, but the Franks and Latins, with the disaster of 1453 overshadowed by the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, during which Western Crusaders seized and devastated Constantinople and dismembered and irreparably weakened the Greek empire.

In the third volume of his history of the Crusades, Runciman famously says that ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’, and describes the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 as an act of ‘barbarous brutality’, ‘unparalleled in history’, committed by ‘Frenchmen and Flemings… filled with a lust for destruction’.

Thus, the powerful, wealthy and magnificent city seized and sacked by Crusaders in 1204 (and which the West held until 1261, before Greek restoration), was not the city the Turks captured in 1453, which Runciman describes as dying and melancholy, poverty-stricken and sparsely populated.

For Runciman, the Turkish seizure of Constantinople in 1453 did not destroy Byzantium, it merely provided the coup de grâce to a doomed city.

Indeed, memories of 1204 and experience of repressive Western rule in places like Crete, Cyprus and the Peloponnese, provided evidence to many Greeks that the pursuit of church union with Rome in exchange for military support to fight the Turks was both a religious abomination and politically misguided. Not only was there no difference in terms of brutality between Western and Muslim rule – indeed, many Greeks believed the Franks and Latins to be less civilised than the Turks and Muslims; and not only did the policy of church union overestimate the ability and willingness of the West to aid Byzantium against an assertive and powerful Turkish empire; but there was also a case for maintaining the integrity of the Greek church and Greek culture, avoiding the bitter division bound to follow any attempt to enforce religious subordination to Rome, and accepting a period of Turkish subjugation as the most effective way of preserving the Greek nation and offering the best chance for its long-term revival.

Nevertheless, Runciman’s reluctance to demonise the Turks does, in places, lead him to express an undeservedly generous assessment of their ascent to power and rule, which is matched by an excessive willingness to pin the blame for Byzantium’s tragedy on the West.

Thus, after Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), Runciman is keen to stress the ‘orderly and tolerant state’ established in Anatolia and Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks. He describes their government as ‘wise and able’ and argues that ‘the transition of Anatolia from a mainly Christian to a mainly Moslem country was achieved so smoothly that no one troubled to record the details’. Similarly, Runciman praises Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, as a ‘leader of genius’, while his son, Orhan, is described as a ‘great ruler’, whose administration was so reasonable that many of his Christian subjects preferred it to that of the Byzantines. There were no forced conversions, Runciman declares, and apostasy only occurred when Christians followed a natural inclination to join the religion of the ruling class. As for Mehmet, Runciman says, despite his savageries and the destruction in the immediate aftermath of conquest, under his rule, Constantinople was rebuilt and soon became a thriving city of commerce and finance. ‘Long before his death in 1481,’ Runciman writes:

‘Sultan Mehmet could look with pride on the new Constantinople… Since the conquest its population [of Turks, Greeks, Jews and Armenians] had increased fourfold; within a century it would number more than half a million. He had destroyed the old crumbling metropolis of the Byzantine Emperors, and in its place he had created a new and splendid metropolis in which he intended his subjects of all creeds and all races to live together in order, prosperity and peace.’

However, the ‘details’ that Runciman said do not exist to record the Islamisation of Anatolia and Asia Minor are, in fact, painstakingly chronicled by Spyros Vryonis in his The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, in which the author describes a period of savage conquest, a succession of raids and annexations characterised by pillaging, massacre, enslavement and forced conversion of the Byzantine population. Thus the four centuries it took the Turks, from 1071 to 1453, to subjugate Anatolia, Asia Minor and Thrace, did not involve, as Runciman suggests, a ‘smooth’ evolution but was accomplished in a way that amounted to a holocaust for the vanquished.

As for Mehmet’s alleged vision of a tolerant, harmonious empire, this never materialised and could never materialise, given the nature of the Ottoman state, in which religious discrimination and persecution were ingrained. Order was maintained through terror and repression and peace dependent on the whims of the sultan or his pashas or beys who, at any moment, could decide that their Christian subjects, their culture, shrines and very lives, were an affront to Muslim ascendancy and should be suppressed if not extinguished.

Moreover, just as there were Greeks who believed, prior to the fall of Constantinople, ‘better the sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat’*, many others, from the political and intellectual elite, admired the West and believed church union would bring about a rich fusion of Greek and particularly Italian humanist culture. Indeed, something of this fusion occurred in Crete and the Ionian islands, on the periphery of the Greek world, where Turkish rule was delayed or never penetrated, with Venetian sway eventually contributing to a cultural breathing space and even flowering for Greeks that was never possible under the Turks. As Runciman himself acknowledges, the Ottomans’ narrow-mindedness, informed by fear and loathing of their Christian subjects, ensured that Greek learning, art and letters were discouraged and ceased to exist for the duration of the Turkish empire.

* Ironically, this statement is attributed to Lucas Notaras, who, as noted above, was executed for refusing to give up his son to become the sultan’s sexual slave.

Western duress and Greek self-preservation: thoughts on Steven Runciman’s The Sicilian Vespers

The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century, by Steven Runciman (ISBN-13: 9781107604742). Paperback: £12.99

Canto Classics has recently reprinted Steven Runciman’s The Sicilian Vespers, which expertly guides us through the murky world of 13th century European high politics, its twists and turns, sudden shifts in fortune, alliance, tactics and strategy; and compellingly depicts the brigand-dynasts of the West vying for each other’s thrones and fiefdoms, conspiring, plotting and murdering their way in vain pursuit of power and wealth.

A tumultuous period crescendoed in Sicily at Easter Vespers, 1282, when the local population – as the spearhead of a conspiracy organised by the Byzantine emperor Michael Palaiologos and drawing in King Peter of Aragon and disgruntled supporters of the erstwhile king of Sicily Manfred Hohenstaufen – rose up against the loathed French dynast Charles of Anjou, massacred 8,000 French colonists and liberated the island from his regime.

Central to the history of the Sicilian Vespers is the fate of the Byzantine Empire and the efforts of its emperor, Michael Palaiologos, to consolidate his hold of Constantinople, which he had, in 1261, taken back for the Greeks after 57 years of Latin rule.

The Palaiologan re-conquest was met with shock and dismay in the West, and the ousted Baldwin was sympathetically received in various courts and particularly by the pope and Manfred Hohenstaufen, the king of Sicily, who both vowed to help him recover his throne in Constantinople.

However, for Baldwin’s hopes to be realised there would have to be a reconciliation between the papacy and Manfred. Because even if Manfred believed that nothing would be more pleasing to the papacy than if he were to help restore the Latin Empire of Constantinople and bring to heel the schismatic Greeks; for the papacy, the Hohenstaufens remained German usurpers who had illegitimately wrested Sicily and southern Italy from papal control and were now threatening to create an Italo-German empire that would diminish the papacy’s political role on the continent even further.

Thus, increasingly tormented by the gains of Manfred in central and northern Italy, successive popes scoured Europe in search of a potentate who would end the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Sicily.

After courtship of various English royals had floundered, in 1263 the Sicilian throne was offerred by Pope Urban to Charles of Anjou, the ambitious and underemployed brother of the French king. In June 1265, Pope Clement had Charles anointed king of Sicily, and within a year, Angevin and French forces had invaded Italy and, at the Battle of Benevento, succeeded in killing Manfred, routing his troops and paving the way for Charles to take full possession of his kingdom.

For the Greeks, Charles’ accession to the throne of Sicily significantly increased the danger to Constantinople. Not only had Charles inherited Manfred’s desire to see the Latin Empire in Constantinople restored – with Charles able to extract from the ‘exiled’ Baldwin far more generous terms on how to divide Greek spoils in the event of Charles’ armies expediting restoration; but also, with the Hohenstaufen issue settled to the papacy’s satisfaction, there was now nothing to stop the pope from pursuing his enmity towards the Byzantines.

Michael’s response to the threat from Charles was twofold.

First, to appease the papacy, Michael agreed, at the Council of Lyons in 1274, to the Union of the Churches. By doing so, Michael expected the pope to act as a restraining influence on Charles, which would free the Byzantines to deal with rival Greek kingdoms; hostile Serbs and Bulgarians in the Balkans; and Turks in Anatolia and Asia Minor, where Michael was lobbying the pope to organise a Crusade.

However, it was one thing for Michael to put his name to a document accepting subordination of the Greek church to Rome, but another convincing the clergy and ordinary Greeks to accept the West’s terms, meaning that Michael, to stave off the restless Charles, was having to continuously placate increasingly skeptical papal delegates that he was doing all he could to implement the agreement on church union.

For the Westerners, it was becoming clear that, despite Michael’s reassurances, the Greeks were ‘unflinchingly’ opposed to church union and that Michael could do little to quell the dissent and riots over the issue. Indeed, either to test Michael’s commitment to the terms of union or, as Runciman says, because the pope was ‘deliberately trying to wreck the union’, the West’s conditions for unity became increasingly onerous and more humiliating to the Greeks.

In 1281, Pope Nicholas finally declared that the Greeks were not fulfilling the conditions they’d agreed to, that Michael was a ‘heretic and fosterer of heresy’ and that he was to surrender his empire (by 1 May 1282) to the pope or be overthrown. The way was now open for Charles to oust the Greeks from Constantinople, and he immediately began amassing money, troops and a fleet in preparation for the enterprise.

For Michael, with his policy of preserving his empire (by promising church union in exchange for the papacy restraining Charles) now falling apart, it was time to advance the second strand of his strategy, which was to depose Charles before Charles could depose him.

Thus, Michael not only fomented and financed rebellion in Sicily, where locals were bristling under Charles’ repressive rule and where a large Greek-speaking population still (according to Runciman) felt affinity with the Greek emperor in Constantionople; but he also funded and organised Manfred and Hohenstaufen stalwarts out for revenge against Charles; and persuaded King Peter of Aragon, who ruled Western Spain (including Catalonia), to pursue his claim to the Sicilian throne, which was based on Peter’s Norman ancestry (the Normans had ruled Sicily from 1072 to 1194) and the fact that his wife, Constance, was Manfred’s daughter.

With Byzantine gold and diplomatic craft, then, Charles was pre-empted. Before he had the chance to launch his campaign against Byzantium, which was planned for the spring of 1282, Sicily, after initial violence at Easter Vespers on 30 March outside the Church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo, erupted in a wave of anti-Angevin fervour and bloodletting that drove the French from the island. The rebels initially established Communes on the northern Italian model, but papal disapproval and Angevin counterattack soon had the Sicilians turning to King Peter of Aragon for protection, who accepted the island’s throne in September 1282, and from which, with more gold from Constantinople, he was able to dispose of the remnants of Charles’ forces in Calabria.

Michael Palaiologos died in December 1282 feeling, Runciman says, his life’s work complete. He had restored the empire and thwarted a counterattack from the West.

‘Should I dare to claim that I was God’s instrument in bringing freedom to the Sicilians, then I would only be stating the truth’, was Michael’s valedictory boast.

However, in the event, Michael’s triumphs were illusory and the respite for the Byzantine empire short-lived. For it soon became apparent that all the Sicilian Vespers had achieved was to replace a French king with ambitions to create a Mediterranean empire with a Spanish equivalent.

In 1303, Catalan mercenaries, surplus to requirements at the Aragonese courts in Sicily and Spain, offerred their services to Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos, to aid his wars against the Turks in Anatolia and Asia Minor. The Catalan Company’s initial successes against the Turks only encouraged its avarice and ambitions and the Catalans soon became another threat to Byzantine integrity and legitimacy. In 1305, the Catalans devastated Thrace and Macedonia, including Mt Athos, while in 1311, the company conquered the duchies of Athens and Neopatria, which remained part of the Aragonese crown until 1388-1390, before the Navarrese Company and then the Ottoman Turks intervened, the latter for a more enduring period.

Still, the legacy of the Aragonese interlude in Greece continues, with Spanish kings to this day including ‘Duke of Athens and Neopatria’ among their titles, while, in 2005, the government of Catalonia decided, 700 years after the Aragonese/Catalan invasion and occupation of Greece, to make amends for its ancestors’ pillaging of Mt Athos (on which, all these years, Catalans had been banned from setting foot) by contributing 200,000 euros to restoration works for Vatopedi monastery.

Albert Camus: The New Mediterranean Culture

Below is the text of a lecture Albert Camus gave on Mediterranean culture at the Maison de la Culture in 1937, and indeed the reflections are very much of their time, with concerns over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish civil war and the rise of Nazi Germany. They are also, of course, the product of a Pied-Noir, a European born and raised in French colonial Algeria. The lecture is not so much interesting for its commitment to internationalism and collectivism; but for its attempt to describe a distinct Mediterranean culture and physical way of life, under threat from joyless northern Europeans, ‘buttoned right up to the neck’. Camus is, of course, one of the twentieth century's great exponents of Greek civilisation and there are many observations he makes here and elsewhere that remind us of the poet Odysseas Elytis and his Hellenism. Indeed, Elytis could have come up with the phrase 'nationalism of the sun' to describe his own aesthetics, which Camus invents to stress the unique humanism of Mediterranean culture. Also, Camus' thoughts on the ontological differences separating the Mediterranean from northern Europe seem pertinent given the small cultural war that has resurfaced between Germany and Greece in which the economic crisis afflicting Greece has been portrayed by Germans as a consequence of southern European 'laziness and propensity to corruption and thievery'; while Greeks have responded to the hostility by depicting Germans as soulless bullies and mass murderers.

The New Mediterranean CultureI. The aim of the Maison de la Culture, which is celebrating its opening today, is to serve the culture of the Mediterranean. Faithful to the general directions governing institutions of its type, it seeks within a regional framework to encourage the development of a culture whose existence and greatness need no proof. Perhaps there is something surprising in the fact that left-wing intellectuals can put themselves to work for a culture that seems irrelevant to their cause, and that can even, as has happened in the case of Maurras, be monopolized by politicians of the Right.

It may indeed seem that serving the cause of Mediterranean regionalism is tantamount to restoring traditionalism with no future, celebrating the superiority of one culture over another, or, again, adopting an inverted form of fascism and inciting the Latin against the Nordic peoples. This is a perpetual source of misunderstandings. The aim of this lecture is to try to dispel them.

The whole error lies in the confusion between Mediterranean and Latin, and in attributing to Rome what began in Athens. To us it is obvious that our only claim is to a kind of nationalism of the sun. We could never be slaves to traditions or bind our living future to exploits already dead. A tradition is a past that distorts the present. But the Mediterranean land about us is a lively one, full of games and joy. Moreover, nationalism has condemned itself. Nationalisms always make their appearance in history as signs of decadence. When the vast edifice of the Roman empire collapsed, when its spiritual unity, from which so many different regions drew their justification, fell apart, then and only then, at a time of decadence, did nationalisms appear.

The West has never rediscovered unity since. At the present time, internationalism is trying to give the West a real meaning and a vocation. However, this internationalism is no longer inspired by a Christian principle, by the Papal Rome of the Holy Roman Empire. The principle inspiring it is man. Its unity no longer lies in faith but in hope. A civilization can endure only insofar as its unity and greatness, once all nations are abolished, stem from a spiritual principle. India, almost as large as Europe, with no nations, no sovereignty, has kept its own particular character even after two centuries of English rule.

This is why, before any other consideration, we reject the principle of a Mediterranean nationalism. In any case, it would never be possible to speak of the superiority of Mediterranean culture. Men express themselves in harmony with their land. And superiority, as far as culture is concerned, lies in this harmony and in nothing else. There are no higher or lower cultures. There are cultures that are more or less true. All we want to do is help a country to express itself. Locally. Nothing more. The real question is this: is a new Mediterranean civilization within our grasp?

II. Obvious facts, (a) There is a Mediterranean sea, a basin linking about ten different countries. Those whose voices boom in the singing cafes of Spain, who wander in the port of Genoa, along the docks in Marseilles, the strange, strong race that lives along our coasts, all belong to the same family. When you travel in Europe, and go down toward Italy or Provence, you breathe a sigh of relief as you rediscover these casually dressed men, this violent, colorful life we all know. I spent two months in central Europe, from Austria to Germany, wondering where that strange discomfort weighing me down, the muffled anxiety I felt in my bones, came from. A little while ago, I understood. These people were always buttoned right up to the neck. They did not know how to relax. They did not know what joy was like, joy which is so different from laughter. Yet it is details like this that give a valid meaning to the word 'Country.' Our Country is not the abstraction that sends men off to be massacred, but a certain way of appreciating life which is shared by certain people, through which we can feel ourselves closer to someone from Genoa or Majorca than to someone from Normandy or Alsace. This is what the Mediterranean is – a certain smell or scent that we do not need to express: we all feel it through our skin.

(b) There are other, historical, facts. Each time a doctrine has reached the Mediterranean basin, in the resulting clash of ideas the Mediterranean has always remained intact, the land has overcome the doctrine. In the beginning Christianity was an inspiring doctrine, but a closed one, essentially Judaic, incapable of concessions, harsh, exclusive, and admirable. From its encounter with the Mediterranean, a new doctrine emerged: Catholicism. A philosophical doctrine was added to the initial store of emotional aspirations. The monument then reached its highest and most beautiful form – adapting itself to man. Thanks to the Mediterranean, Christianity was able to enter the world and embark on the miraculous career it has since enjoyed.

Once again it was someone from the Mediterranean, Francis of Assisi, who transformed Christianity from an inward-looking, tormented religion into a hymn to nature and simple joy. The only effort to separate Christianity from the world was made by a northerner, Luther. Protestantism is, actually, Catholicism wrenched from the Mediterranean, and from the simultaneously pernicious and inspiring influence of this sea.

Let us look even closer. For anyone who has lived both in Germany and in Italy, it is obvious that fascism does not take the same form in both countries. You can feel it everywhere you go in Germany, on people's faces, in the city streets. Dresden, a garrison town, is almost smothered by an invisible enemy. What you feel first of all in Italy is the land itself. What you see first of all in a German is the Hitlerite who greets you with 'Heil Hitler'; in an Italian, the cheerful and gay human being. Here again, the doctrine seems to have yielded to the country – and it is a miracle wrought by the Mediterranean that enables men who think humanly to live unoppressed in a country of inhuman laws.

III. But this living reality, the Mediterranean, is not something new to us. And its culture seems the very image of the Latin antiquity the Renaissance tried to rediscover across the Middle Ages. This is the Latinity Maurras and his friends try to annex. It was in the name of this Latin order on the occasion of the war against Ethiopia that twenty-four Western intellectuals signed a degrading manifesto celebrating the 'civilizing mission of Italy in barbarous Ethiopia.'

But no. This is not the Mediterranean our Maison de la Culture lays claim to. For this is not the true Mediterranean. It is the abstract and conventional Mediterranean represented by Rome and the Romans. These imitative and unimaginative people had nevertheless the imagination to substitute for the artistic genius and feeling for life they lacked a genius for war. And this order whose praises we so often hear sung was one imposed by force and not one created by the mind. Even when they copied, the Romans lost the savor of the original. And it was not even the essential genius of Greece they imitated, but rather the fruits of its decadence and its mistakes. Not the strong, vigourous Greece of the great tragic and comic writers, but the prettiness and affected grace of the last centuries. It was not life that Rome took from Greece, but puerile, over-intellectualized abstractions. The Mediterranean lies elsewhere. It is the very denial of Rome and Latin genius. It is alive, and wants no truck with abstractions. And it is easy to acknowledge Mussolini as the worthy descendant of the Caesars and Augustus of Imperial Rome, if we mean by this that he, like them, sacrifices truth and greatness to a violence that has no soul.

What we claim as Mediterranean is not a liking for reasoning and abstractions, but its physical life – the courtyards, the cypresses, the strings of pimientos. We claim Aeschylus and not Euripides, the Doric Apollos and not the copies in the Vatican; Spain, with its strength and its pessimism, and not the bluster and swagger of Rome, landscapes crushed with sunlight and not the theatrical settings in which a dictator drunk with his own verbosity enslaves the crowds. What we seek is not the lie that triumphed in Ethiopia but the truth that is being murdered in Spain.

IV. The Mediterranean, an international basin traversed by every current, is perhaps the only land linked to the great ideas from the East. For it is not classical and well ordered, but diffuse and turbulent, like the Arab districts in our towns or the Genoan and Tunisian harbors. The triumphant taste for life, the sense of boredom and the weight of the sun, the empty squares at noon in Spain, the siesta, this is the true Mediterranean, and it is to the East that it is closest. Not to the Latin West. North Africa is one of the few countries where East and West live close together. And there is, at this junction, little difference between the way a Spaniard or an Italian lives on the quays of Algiers, and the way Arabs live around them. The most basic aspect of Mediterranean genius springs perhaps from this historically and geographically unique encounter between East and West. (On this question I can only refer you to Audisio).

This culture, this Mediterranean truth, exists and shows itself all along the line: (1) In linguistic unity – the ease with which a Latin language can be learned when another is already known; (2) Unity of origin – the prodigious collectivism of the Middle Ages – chivalric order, religious order, feudal orders, etc., etc. On all these points, the Mediterranean gives us the picture of a living, highly colored, concrete civilization, which changes doctrines into its own likeness – and receives ideas without changing its own nature.
But then, you may say, why go any further?

V. Because the very land that transformed so many doctrines must transform the doctrines of the present day. A Mediterranean collectivism will be different from a Russian collectivism, properly so-called. The issue of collectivism is not being fought in Russia: it is being fought in the Mediterranean basin and in Spain, at this very moment. Of course, man's fate has been at stake for a long time now, but it is perhaps here that the struggle reaches its tragic height, with so many trump cards placed in our hands. There are, before our eyes, realities stronger than we ourselves are. Our ideas will bend and become adapted to them. This is why our opponents are mistaken in all their objections. No one has the right to prejudge the fate of a doctrine, and to judge our future in the name of a past, even if the past is Russia's.

Our task here is to rehabilitate the Mediterranean, to take it back from those who claim it unjustly for themselves, and to make it ready for the economic organistation awaiting it. Our task is to discover what is concrete and alive in it, and, on every occasion, to encourage the different forms which this culture takes. We are all the more prepared for the task in that we are in immediate contact with the Orient, which can teach us so much in this respect. We are, here, on the side of the Mediterranean against Rome. And the essential role that towns like Algiers and Barcelona can play is to serve, in their own small way, that aspect of Mediterranean culture which favors man instead of crushing him.

VI. The intellectual's role is a difficult one in our time. It is not his task to modify history. Whatever people may say, revolutions come first and ideas afterward. Consequently, it takes great courage today to proclaim oneself faithful to the things of the mind. But at least this courage is not useless. The term 'intellectual' is pronounced with so much scorn and disapproval because it is associated in people's minds with the idea of someone who talks in abstractions, who is unable to come into contact with life, and who prefers his own personality to the rest of the world. But for those who do not want avoid their responsibilities, the essential task is to rehabilitate intelligence by regenerating the subject matter it treats, to give back all its true meaning to the mind by restoring to culture its true visage of health and sunlight.

I was saying that this courage was not useless. For if it is not indeed the task of intelligence to modify history, its real task will nevertheless be to act upon man, for it is man who makes history. We have a contribution to make to this task. We want to link culture with life. The Mediterranean, which surrounds us with smiles, sea, and sunlight, teaches us how it is to be done. Xenophon tells us in The Persian Expedition that when the Greek soldiers who had ventured into Asia were coming back to their own country, dying of hunger and thirst, cast into despair by so many failures and humiliations, they reached the top of a mountain from which they could see the sea. Then they began to dance, forgetting their weariness and their disgust at the spectacle of their lives. In the same way we do not wish to cut ourselves off from the world. There is only one culture. Not the one that feeds off abstractions and capital letters. Not the one that condemns. Not the one that justifies the excesses and the deaths in Ethiopia and defends the thirst for brutal conquests. We know that one very well, and want nothing to do with it. What we seek is the culture that finds life in the trees, the hills, and in mankind.

This is why men of the Left are here with you today, to serve a cause that at first sight had nothing to do with their own opinions. I would be happy if, like us, you were now convinced that this cause is indeed ours. Everything that is alive is ours. Politics are made for men, and not men for politics. We do not want to live on fables. In the world of violence and death around us, there is no place for hope. But perhaps there is room for civilization, for real civilization, which puts truth before fables and life before dreams. And this civilization has nothing to do with hope. In it man lives on his truths.

It is to this whole effort that men of the West must bind themselves. Within the framework of internationalism, the thing can be achieved. If each one of us within his own sphere, his country, his province agrees to work modestly, success is not far away. As far as we are concerned, we know our aim, our limitations, and our possibilities. We only need open our eyes to make men realize that culture cannot be understood unless it is put to the service of life, that the mind need not be man's enemy. Just as the Mediterranean sun is the same for all men, the effort of man's intelligence should be a common inheritance and not a source of conflict and murder.

Can we achieve a new Mediterranean culture that can be reconciled with our social idea? Yes. But both we and you must help to bring it about.

Jack Straw: first-class passenger on the Turkey gravy train

A little more on Jack Straw, UK foreign secretary from 2001-2006 in Tony Blair’s Labour government, who has since become a prominent lobbyist for the Turkish government, especially when it comes to arguing its case for joining the EU and denouncing those, particularly the Republic of Cyprus, he deems impeding Ankara’s inalienable European aspirations. Previously, regarding Cyprus, I’ve written about how Straw has advocated the formal partitioning of the island – which is something not even Turkey dares to demand of the international community, nor in fact is it sure it really wants, since Turkey’s optimal plan is to control the whole of Cyprus not just 37% of it – and I’ve associated Straw’s outbursts with the remuneration and other benefits he receives from the Turkish government.

In a post earlier this month, I further detailed how Jack Straw has appeared in a propaganda video put together by Turkey’s Ministry for EU affairs and Turkish state broadcaster TRT that seeks to attribute Turkey’s stalled EU accession to the obstructionist tactics deployed by the Greek Cypriots and who, Straw argues, should never have been allowed to join the EU in the first place.

And now I note that Straw has given an interview to Today’s Zaman, a pro-government English-language Turkish daily, in which the former foreign secretary reiterates his view that it was a ‘huge mistake’ to allow Cyprus to join the EU in 2004 and argues, with some vehemence, for the recognition of Turkey’s puppet state on the island, the so-called ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’.

In the interview, Straw describes himself as ‘sad and very angry’ at Turkey’s faltering EU accession negotiations and squarely puts the blame for this on ‘petty politics by the Greek Cypriots’ who, Straw says, large EU countries, for the sake of Turkey, should now ‘get tough’ with, especially in light of ‘the true nature of the financial shambles of Greek Cyprus and its huge indebtedness to Russia and many other problems’.

Straw adds that if the Greek Cypriots continue to obstruct Turkey’s EU accession, then they must be forced to ‘understand what the consequences of their actions are’ and he proposes to do this by recognising the Turkish pseudo-state on Cyprus and formalising the island’s partition.

‘Part of the difficulty at the moment,’ Straw says, ‘is that you've got a de facto partition, anyway, as for the Greek Cypriots there is little or no incentive for them for a compromise because they've got all the benefits of a partition without any of the disadvantages. So in time we may have to get there [i.e. recognition of the ‘TRNC’], and it's not the end of the world; after all some of the former provinces of Yugoslavia were separated and partitioned.’

Straw then goes on to express his ‘anger’ at the plight of the Turkish Cypriots, who he agrees with his interviewer were ‘left out in the cold’ by the EU, despite voting in favour of the Annan plan in 2004.

Over the last decade, Straw concludes: ‘I have moved… from a position of relative neutrality between the position of the Greek Cypriot government and that of the Turkish Cypriots to one where I believe that a great injustice has been done to the Turkish Cypriot community, and this has nothing to do with the feelings for the Greek Cypriot population who I feel great affection for, but it is about their system.’

(You can read the whole interview here, in which Straw also describes former Greek prime minister Giorgos Papandreou as a ‘great man’ for persuading, in 2005, the Republic of Cyprus to agree to the launching of Turkey’s accession negotiations).

Straw’s motives
Since Cyprus is not the reason Turkey’s EU accession negotiations have ground to a halt – France is also blocking the opening of a number of chapters Turkey is obliged to complete before joining the EU, while Turkey itself has consistently failed to pass the necessary reforms to make it a viable EU candidate country – and since recognition of the ‘TRNC’ would not re-ignite Turkey’s EU process but end it altogether, with Cyprus losing any incentive to acquiesce to Turkey’s EU aspirations, then, unless Straw is a complete idiot, which is a possibility, it’s hard to attribute anything other than malice and selfish interest to Straw’s anti-Cyprus rants.

Regarding Straw’s selfish interests, it’s worth pointing out the following:

I checked the most recent Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which describes the interests of UK MPs that might influence their ‘actions, speeches or votes’, and although I couldn’t find any recent payments Straw has received from the Turkish government (the last registered payments from Turkey to Straw were in April 2011); he did earn, from February 2012 to February 2013, on top of his MP’s salary and cabinet minister pension, £3065 for articles written for UK national newspapers; £52,000 for speaking engagements to do with security and foreign affairs; £60,000 for security consultancy work; and £92,250 in advance for the publication of his political memoirs. Obviously, it remains in Straw’s financial interests to remain in the public eye, particularly through the espousal of controversial views and self-depiction as a security and foreign affairs guru.

However, if we are looking for more direct links that would explain Straw’s shameless pandering to the Turkish government, then it’s worth drawing attention to this article from the Lancashire Telegraph, a daily newspaper covering Straw’s parliamentary constituency of Blackburn, a town in north-west England, which, it’s relevant to point out, has a Muslim population of 25 percent, mostly originating from Pakistan.

The article is from 23 October 2012 and refers to an award Straw received from the Turkish government for his contributions to multiculturalism and British-Turkish friendship. Like Straw’s views on Cyprus, the sentiments expressed by Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, are so outrageous as to be almost comical. Below is the article in full. (I don’t know why Straw’s trip to Ankara to pick up his prize, which must have involved flights and accommodation, presumably paid for by Straw’s Turkish hosts, was not mentioned in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests).

Blackburn MP Jack Straw is honoured by the Turkish government
Jack Straw has been given one of Turkey’s highest awards for being ‘a politician who approaches the Islamic world and Muslim societies with sincerity and friendship’.

He flew to Turkish capital Ankara to receive the country’s highest order available to individuals who are not heads of state.

The citation for the Order of the Republic or Turkey made by President Abdullah Gul highlights the Blackburn MP and former Foreign Secretary’s commitment to multiculturalism.

He praised Mr Straw for his role in issues such as the British military’s position in Iraq and Afghanistan, highly controversial issues in the Islamic world.

President Gul said he hoped the award would be a ‘strong symbol of the longstanding friendship’ between Britain and Turkey and its peoples.

Mr Straw said: ‘I am delighted and honoured to receive this award. Turkey is a vital country to Europe and the modern world.’

Giving Mr Straw the award, President Gul said: ‘I am especially honoured to present to my very close friend Jack, the Order of the Republic which is the highest order presented to persons other than heads of state.

‘In our generation, Jack Straw is one of those few politicians who embodies the qualities of a statesman.

‘He has valued multiculturalism throughout his political career and is a politicians who approaches the Islamic world and Muslim societies with sincerity and friendship.

‘The key to his popularity in his constituency of Blackburn lies in these very qualities.

‘Jack is a democrat with a conscience of the kind greatly and collectively needed in Europe in order to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.’

President Gul praised Mr Straw as being a ‘friend to Turkey and the Turkish people’ and highlighted his efforts to bring Turkey into the European Union and supporting the case of the Turkish Cypriots.

Jack Straw, the Annan plan and the dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus

Apparently, Turkey’s Ministry for EU Affairs and Turkish state broadcaster TRT are preparing a propaganda video for release this summer that seeks to portray the EU’s acceptance of Cyprus as a member in 2004 as a mistake.

According to this report (in Greek), to back up Turkey’s narrative, the video will contain contributions from some leading European politicians from the 2004 EU accession era, including former chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder; former UK prime minister, Tony Blair; Blair’s foreign secretary, Jack Straw; and Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt (in other words, the usual Turkey apologists and lobbyists). The above clip has excerpts from interviews with Straw and Schröder.

What does Turkey want to achieve in this campaign to prove that the EU’s decision, almost 10 years ago, to accept the Republic of Cyprus as a member was an error?

Obviously, it wants to undermine the Republic of Cyprus, dispute its membership of the EU and encourage other EU member states to override Cyprus’ objections when it comes to Turkey-EU and Turkish Cypriot-EU relations.

Also, by dwelling on the Greek Cypriot rejection of the Annan plan (which Turkey suggests Greek Cypriots were obliged to approve as part of a package that would see Cyprus enter the EU) Turkey wants to portray itself as blameless in the continuing partition of the island and depict the Greek Cypriots as the real obstacle to reunification. Such a scenario allows Turkey to carry on with its genuine Cyprus policy, which aims at the upgrading of the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’ and the incorporation of that entity into an Annan-style confederal Cyprus. What Turkey wants is to have full control in northern Cyprus and, at the same time, through partnership at the federal level between a Turkish Cypriot constituent state (essentially, the ‘TRNC’) with the Greek Cypriot constituent state, a large say in matters pertaining to island as a whole. The delegitimisation and dissolution of the Republic of Cyprus is, therefore, fundamental to Turkey’s ambition of bringing the whole of Cyprus under its sway; an ambition it would have gone a long way to achieving with the Annan plan.

This view of the Annan plan as providing for the dismantling of the Republic of Cyprus in order to satisfy Turkey’s aspirations is supported by the comments Jack Straw makes in the video, who admits that after the Greek Cypriots rejected the Annan plan, the UK government looked at ways that would have put a stop to the Republic of Cyprus joining the EU.

Now, although Cyprus passed all the technical and legal requirements for joining the EU with flying colours, being the first of the 10 members that joined in 2004 to complete compliance with the acquis communautaire; that to have tried to stop Cyprus joining in 2004 would have been legally and politically impossible – for example, EU states had agreed in 1995 that a resolution to the Cyprus problem was not a condition for the Republic of Cyprus joining the EU, and any last minute scuppering of Cyprus’ accession would have scuppered the accession of the other nine candidates as well; and we can, to a large extent, attribute Straw’s comments to his desire to say what his Turkish paymasters want to hear (I’ve written previously about how Jack Straw has, effectively, become a paid lobbyist for the Turkish government); it is still interesting that Straw admits how anxious the UK government and other allies of Turkey were to keep the Republic of Cyprus out of the EU in 2004. What such an anxiety reveals, unambiguously, is the inspiration and intentions behind the Annan plan, which had nothing to do with reunifying Cyprus and concerned instead the negation of the Republic of Cyprus and the denial to Greek Cypriots of the authority and legitimacy, emanating from their state, to impede Turkey joining the EU.

Greek Cypriots urged to commit suicide

After Jack Straw’s intervention aimed at trying to scare the Greek Cypriots into submission by threatening partition; we have had this week all sorts of other Britons and Americans coming out of the woodwork demanding Greek Cypriots sacrifice themselves for the sake of Turkey’s EU accession process and the alleged wider interests of the Western world.

It started with this ignorant op-ed in the Financial Times again threatening Greek Cypriots with partition, which led to this letter from former US ambassador to Greece, Thomas Niles, and this one from former UK high commissioner to Cyprus, Edward Clay, both blaming Greek Cypriots for not gladly handing over their island to Turkey; letters that prompted this response from Cyprus’ high commissioner in London, Alexandros Zenon; which, in turn, awoke from his slumber Lord David Hannay, the UK’s special representative to Cyprus from 1996-2003 and the architect of the disastrous and shameful Annan plan, who wrote in his letter to the FT that Cyprus has no right to resist what Turkey, Britain and all the rest have in store for it. Hannay even appeared this week on Al Jazeera TV (see video above) to assert the merits of the Annan plan and berate Greek Cypriots for not committing suicide.