I’m afraid I’m missing the entire point of this story. How has Brexit increased the control that Greece has over British behaviour? “Now that you’ve left the EU, hand back the Elgin Marbles or we’ll…” … what, exactly?
What is Greece free to do now that they were not free to do last year? Assault London with the mighty Greek navy? Prevail upon Germany and France to make trade sacrifices for Greek pride?
France and German predator/creditors were the main bad guys at exploiting Greek weakness to the utmost to put them in debt slavery until there was nearrrrrly Grexit just a few years ago. They lightened the terms until the Greeks barely stayed, but they remain a very weak and divided nation, totally under the financial thumb of larger powers who wouldn’t sacrifice the British market for paper clips to please Greece.
I’m not sure I follow. Are the relics I mentioned above, antiquities taken from Greece and Egypt to display in the Hippodrome as a sign of the might of Byzantium, different than the statues being discussed here because they are displayed in open air rather than a museum?
And I’m not intending that any of this excuses the UK or makes what they did as an empire any less brutal. But I am making the point that their actions as an empire were the norm, not the deviation from how all empires through history acted.
Not for nothing, but that’s a part of the point I was trying to make. This behavior is ingrained in the bones of literally every empire, ever, to its very core.
(and originally in response to @ DrNobelDynamite although in that context, I think it may be a non-sequitur)
FWIW: The UK apparently still has hundreds of Ethiopian religious artifacts they took following the defeat of Tewodros II (see AFROMET). Italy returned the Stele of Axum to Ethiopia after 2005.
I despise it without context (the aforementioned giant tall room at the V&A, randomly filled with reproductions of big pieces of classical architecture, gave me the creeps in a physical way).
To avoid fights over A Thing, maybe we need to adopt the cultural attitude of the Chinese. As I understand it, they don’t feel attached to the substance. Their cultural heritage places just keep getting repaired (replacing stuff as needed), until they may no longer contain any original material. But they are still valued as heritage.
tl/dr The whole worship of original material is one of those unquestioned assumptions. Question it.
Well the Pierpont Morgan library decided to rename what was heretofore known as the “Maciejowski Bible” as the “Morgan Picture Bible.” Of course Cardinal Bernard Maciejowski was just somebody that owned it in the 16th century, several hundred years after it was produced.
The latter. I’m sure you know how much France loves England, and I’d imagine France, Germany, and many other EU members would stick it to England just on principle.
This may be the case for much of the stuff in the British Museum but as far as the Parthenon marbles are concerned this is not actually how it went down. The 7th Earl of Elgin removed those from the Acropolis in the early 19th century under circumstances that were quite controversial even in Britain at the time, with a view to adding them to his private collection (he had an official-looking document from the Ottoman government in Istanbul that Entitled Him To Do Stuff but whether that was entirely legit and whether it covered the stuff that he actually did is not quite clear). For a number of reasons this didn’t pan out, Elgin had to sell the statues to the British government, which didn’t really want them, at a huge loss to cover some other debts, and the government then passed them on to the British Museum. The Greeks have wanted them back with varying degrees of urgency basically ever since Greece became an independent country in the 1830s.
Some of the Parthenon marbles got damaged by a misguided cleaning effort in the 1930s, but that, too, wasn’t done under the auspices of the British Museum; it happened on the behest of Lord Duveen, who bankrolled the building of the dedicated gallery where the marbles are displayed today, and he apparently brought in his own workers to get them “cleaned”. When the Museum’s curators found out about the damage after the fact they were livid.
The British Museum is not planning to give them back anytime soon because they believe that by now they are part of everyone’s (and certainly the Brits’, who have had them for 200 years now) cultural heritage, not just the Greeks’, and that they are as well placed in a museum in London as they would be in a museum in Athens (nobody is proposing to put them back on the actual Parthenon). The Greeks, who have the other half of the frieze in their museum in Athens (with casts of the bits which are in London) disagree. This has been going on for a long time and it’s highly unlikely that it will be sorted out by way of a free-trade deal between the UK and the EU.
I mean, the “what’s changed” is pretty simple. 27 members have to agree on the same agreement. And for any member who has a cause célèbre which they feel ranks higher than that member’s trade interests in the agreement, is going to put that as their contribution.
Because everyone does actually want an EU-UK aagreement to work, Greece feels that its ability to put a spanner in the works is a bargaining chip it didn’t have previously.
It’s a weird one though, because it’s not really EU vs UK. The EU overall would benefit from a good agreement too. Both sides essentially want “it” to work, we just don’t seem to have complete agreement on how “it” works, or what “it” is. But we all want it, and it’s more than a little awkward having minority stakeholders using it as their soapbox. It does make funny headlines, but you can bet Merkel isn’t sitting there thinking “yeah, you tell 'em, Greece!”.
They can certainly try, but it’s not as if Boris Johnson could ring up the British Museum and tell them to ship the Parthenon marbles back to Greece just so he can get his trade agreement passed.
In addition, there are enough very influential EU members with valuable stuff from abroad in their own museums who will tell the Greeks to pipe down, simply because sending the Elgin marbles back to Greece would, for example, give the Egyptians ideas about that pharaoh’s wife’s bust sitting in the Neues Museum in Berlin that they would like back, thank you. There are probably subtle rearrangements that can be made to the EU’s budgets, new Euros being something the Greeks need a lot more urgently than old bits of marble, in order to encourage the Greeks to reprioritise.
Wasn’t the big idea behind Brexit to avoid letting the EU make demands of the British? Is the British government just going to say “no” and stop listening?
This is why I hope to appropriate Stonehenge, and put it into my private collection for public display. And I will keep the raping and burning of the UK to a minimum in the process!
That’s magnanimous of you! Elgin certainly had no such plans with the Parthenon marbles. If things had gone according to what he had had in mind, he would have had them on his estate for himself and his friends to enjoy. The problem was that he didn’t have the requisite money, his wife’s family did – but his wife managed to divorce him before he could inherit, and he was on the hook for most of what it had cost to bring the Parthenon marbles back from Greece to the UK in the first place. He had to sell them to the government for much less than what he had paid to acquire them, simply to repay part of that debt.
Well, for one, I’m pointing out that taking the precious objects of the conquered is par for the course for all empires, and is no way unique to Britain. It’s woven into the bones of the world.
I’m also asking you why it makes a difference whether those objects are displayed in a museum with a roof or outdoors in a hippodrome? Seems to be the the same thing, doesn’t it?
An EU representative has said, in effect, that those words are not about the Elgin Marbles but about ensuring members, together with the now non-member UK, will take measures to ensure that artefact smuggling-prevention measures continue to be agreed and enforced in common.
Can’t find the article right now but it was likely BBC or the Guardian.
And, yes, I let out a hollow laugh when I read it, too.
But it pales into insignificance compared to the shitshow that will likely erupt when Spain gets going on Gibraltar.
Why on Earth would we want to “stick it to England”? We can save ourselves the hassle and the bad PR. The English are already sticking it to England much better than we ever could, even if we wanted to.
