The Crusades and the Far-Right in the Twenty-First Century: Engaging the Crusades, Volume Nine by The Crusades & the Far-Right in the Twenty-First Century. Engaging the Crusaders Vol. 9 (2025)

Author:The Crusades & the Far-Right in the Twenty-First Century. Engaging the Crusaders, Vol. 9 (2025)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2024-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Brexit and Medievalism

In all of these competing (and often contradictory) crusades, what is clear is the extent to which the crusader – a banal medievalism in its invocation – becomes slowly and inexorably bound up within a complex network of meanings and competing subtexts according to their specific national, cultural and political contexts. As Mike Horswell argues in his study of crusading mentalities after the First World War, the revival of medievalism to map onto modernity renders both into a third element produced by the act of remembering: ‘both were reimagined as they were revived’.22

With regard to medievalism, what does emerge clearly is how – and how easily – the medieval past signalled through the crusader becomes intertwined with an emerging rhetoric which strikes out in defiance of increasing European integration on the one hand and globalising rhetoric on the other. Beaverbrook’s return to ‘crusader medievalism’ can be situated as his response to a perceived threat posed by a series of trade laws over which the UK seemed increasingly less in touch and less in control. As such, the connection between the Imperial Crusade and Beaverbrook as a British Establishment figure mirrors that of the EU and Brexit: in both circumstances, crusader medievalism becomes a banal medievalism stretched over the bones of the British Empire, as an indexical balm to sooth the furrowed brow of a pervasive nostalgia across a certain generation and political group.

Indeed, the rhetoric in the Houses of Parliament reflects precisely the fear which crusader medievalism assuages. In the four years since the EU referendum, the backbenches of the Conservative Party have been responsible for any number of rather interesting instances of banal medievalism in the invocation of a historical past to suggest a path for Britain’s future.

Jacob Rees-Mogg could be found grasping at a series of historical straws to support his case for leaving the EU, such as his description of Alfred the Great as ‘Britain’s first Eurosceptic’, and the description of Brexit as ‘Magna Carta’. Many of his references require some rather simplified history in order to work, such as his classification of the Vikings as the European Union which then allowed him to introduce Kipling’s line that ‘if once you have paid him the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane’.23

Among the backbenchers, we are also able to find Daniel Hannan, who unflinchingly describes of the Battle of Hastings as England’s Nakba (the Palestinian Exodus of 1948), a term which calamitously combines the medieval (Hastings) with the late twentieth century. It is also a sensitive reference, given the long-standing Israel-Palestine tensions, particularly since it is rooted in a subtle invocation of the kind of oppression involved in colonisation, a colonisation rooted in Sykes-Picot of 1916 and led, in part, by the British Empire itself. Amid Hannan’s confusion, UKIP’s then-leader Nigel Farage rode to the rescue, wearing a Bayeux Tapestry tie (Mail Online, 18 September 2018) in order to talk about ‘England’s’ history of self-determination. For the confused, his reference to the Bayeux Tapestry

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.