France and Britain have to work hard to make sense of each another, because in the manner of quarrelsome siblings, they are so different and yet so similar. They inherit roughly the same strategic cards — a modest nuclear arsenal; highly professional military forces, globally deployed, which are small in relation to the emerging Asian powers; and a Security Council seat which reflects the strategic realities of yesteryear. Sometimes these assets have been used for a common purpose, but often (as in the Gulf War of 2003) the strategic choices have been utterly different. Anyway, behind this week’s glitter and repartee, there is a quiet, anxious conviction shared by Downing Street and the Élysée. The ability to understand one another — which is the literal meaning of Entente — could once again, in the near future, become a matter of life and death for both countries. At least since the fall of communism, the probability of France and Britain fighting together in a hot war has never looked so high — so both governments have said. And even in scenarios well short of Armageddon, the two countries — as Western Europe’s principal military players — could well find themselves co-policing a fragile ceasefire on the eastern edge of Europe. 

As in 1904, France and Britain see an imperative to transcend their many differences because of the emergence in Europe of an expansionist power whose appetite for territory and strategic might seems to be growing by the month. In the early 20th century, the pair were often in competition over far-flung colonies. Since 1945, the biggest single irritant has been contrasting attitudes to the United States, with Britain eagerly cultivating its special American friendship, and France striking a pose, at least, of championing European independence. In recent months, Donald Trump’s behavior has removed that problem; like teenagers abandoned by a once-generous parent, officials in London and Paris are now united in their horror at possibly having to guard Europe’s peace without an American guarantee. 

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How, then, could France and Britain — and in particular their militaries — learn to understand each other better? Perhaps the first thing French and British defense chiefs might do is have a hard look at the most recent occasion when their forces found themselves side-by-side in the heart of a bloody European war. That was not in 1944 or in 1914 — but in the Bosnian conflict of 1992-95. The need for a solemn exercise in self-examination is particularly acute on this day, the 30th anniversary of the most horrific act of mass slaughter perpetrated on European soil since the war against Hitler. The massacre of 8,000 or more Muslim men and boys from the enclave of Srebrenica began on 11 July 1995 and unfolded over the following four of five days. This orgy of killing by Bosnian Serb forces has been recognized judicially as an act of genocide. It also marked the end — morally and strategically — of a UN peacekeeping effort of which Britain and France were the joint leaders. 

There are complacent and self-congratulatory stories that British and French officials, along with American counterparts, can tell one another about Srebrenica and its aftermath. They go something like this. Shocked and surprised by the brutal actions of the Bosnian Serbs, the leaders of all Western countries concluded that it was time for an abrupt change of policy. Instead of pig-in-the-middle peacekeeping, the powers involved in Bosnia should wage a short, sharp war against the Serb forces which (apart from their misdeeds in Srebrenica) had occupied and ethnically cleansed two-thirds of Bosnia and were keeping its capital, Sarajevo, in a cruel stranglehold. This duly happened; the multinational contingent in the war zone, led by the British and French, reconfigured itself as a rapid reaction force which turned its guns on Serb positions in Sarajevo and elsewhere, while Nato (led by American bombers, but with plenty of help from the British, French and other Europeans) strafed Serb military assets from the air. There was an upsurge of fighting and battle-lines were redrawn — with the result that the Serb-controlled share of Bosnian territory was cut to barely half, and a realistic basis existed for a peace settlement which Nato’s forces could police. All that unfolded over the final months of 1995 until the Bosnians found themselves under international tutelage and at peace; people in Sarajevo could go about their lives without fear of snipers or shells. 

This happy version of the Srebrenica story — stressing what happened afterwards, not what went before — will be rehearsed in Western countries today — especially in Britain which has stood out in its determination to have the massacre remembered and recognized as genocide.

Yet, even 30 years on, there are pressing questions about what led up to the Srebrenica massacre — questions for all the countries that were involved in Bosnia over the preceding three years, Britain and France in particular. If there is one country which has taken a hard look at its responsibilities in Srebrenica, it is the Netherlands, whose lightly armed contingent of less than 400 blue-helmets were tasked with protecting the enclave and manifestly failed. Judicial proceedings and government-sponsored investigations have pored over every detail of the Dutch contingent’s activities, and its failure to understand, in time, that the Serb forces were bent not only on seizing the enclave but on slaughtering its male population.

But excessive preoccupation with the Dutch responsibility only serves to obscure the role played by more powerful countries — above all, America, Britain and France. It is a story whose origins predate the massacre by more than two years. In March 1993, it was a French general and UN commander, Philippe Morillon, who took a personal initiative and promised the 40,000 people, mostly Muslim, who were holed up in Srebrenica that they would be safe from the Serb forces which dominated the surrounding territory. “You are now under the protection of the UN forces… I will never abandon you,” he declared, in one of the war’s most famous sound-bites.

Dutch officials insist that they accepted responsibility for guarding the enclave after receiving an absolute guarantee from the United Nations that in the event of a major Serb attack, air power would be called in to stem the advance. On 10 July 1995, Dutch commanders did call in air power — even though its use might have cost the lives of their soldiers who were being held as hostages. After a complex and still-murky set of international deliberations, it was decided not to use air power. Who exercised that veto is still not clear, but an important place in the decision-making chain was held by General Bernard Janvier, a Frenchman who was commander of UN forces in the region.

Over the preceding months, tension had been building between General Janvier and Britain’s General Rupert Smith, who had taken command of UN forces in Bosnia. Janvier generally hewed to the cautious, peace-keeping line which had been common currency between Britain and France as of the previous year. But Smith came to the view that the UN contingent’s mission of guarding a ceasefire line was untenable and destined to fail; Western forces, if they had any role to play at all, should go onto a war footing and be prepared to confront the Serbs.

One of the reasons why Smith was so convinced that war, rather than sputtering peace, lay ahead was that the Serbs themselves were telling him so. Their commander Ratko Mladic — later convicted of genocide in Srebrenica — had made clear his determination to overrun the UN-protected enclaves; in particular Srebrenica, where local Bosnian fighters were — so he grumbled — taking advantage of UN protection to make hit-and-run attacks on the surrounding Serbs.

As events in late May 1995 would demonstrate, both Janvier and Smith were right in their different ways. Janvier was right to say that the blue-helmets could not change their military posture (from peacekeeping to war) without putting themselves in deadly danger. Smith was right to see that renewed war was probably coming anyway. He called in air strikes against the Serbs to punish some egregious acts of misbehavior; the Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of UN peacekeepers hostage and sharing pictures of them shackled to posts. The clear message was: bomb us any more, and your peacekeepers will be killed.

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What happened then is still a shady business. The documentary evidence suggests that the Americans, British and French cut an informal agreement to “pause” air strikes in return for the release of the hostages. American officials leaked to the press that General Janvier had played a leading role in parleying with Ratko Mladic and assuring him that air strikes would cease. Whoever gave those assurances, the three leading powers in Bosnia were clearly co-responsible for them; the one party which was not informed was the Dutch, who were still in the hapless role of defending an indefensible haven for tens of thousands of human beings. That bargain, whatever its precise terms, paved the way for the Srebrenica tragedy.

Questions about the Srebrenica massacre fall into at least three categories. Was it generally known that the Serbs were planning an attack on the eastern enclaves which were under notional UN protection — and were the Serbs given some encouragement to think such an attack could proceed with impunity? Second, could more have been done to stop the Serb advance immediately after its forces crossed the boundary of the enclave on 6 July? Thirdly, during the crucial days of 11-15 July, when the Serb forces machine-gunned almost all the men and boys under their control, could something have been done, even at that late stage, to interrupt the massacre? It is fair to assume that the two countries which were best informed, in real time, about what was happening were the United States and Britain — given the former’s uniquely powerful satellite and human intelligence and Britain’s privileged access to that information. So it might be said that France bears a particular responsibility because of Janvier’s doveish line; while Britain faces hard questions about what it knew and when.

Hundreds of documents relating to the Srebrenica massacre have been released, but many remain classified. Some of those documents — especially pertaining to the question of when exactly full details of the horror emerged — are to be found in very secret places in London and Paris, as well as Washington DC.

It would have been rude to raise this matter at a glittering banquet in Windsor Castle, but as part of their general rapprochement, shouldn’t British and French officials be making a renewed effort to understand why their cooperation in Bosnia initially went rather well — and then failed so tragically?

Yesterday, in the final hours of Macron’s visit, he and Starmer held a video conference at a British military base with other possible participants in a “coalition of the willing”, led by Britain and France, whose job would be to shore up a Ukrainian ceasefire. London and Paris have been talking about this project since last November, and they believe at least 30 countries could take part. But in a throwback to the Franco-British force in Bosnia, there are many unanswered questions about the new mission’s exact mission and rules of engagement. As of now, its very existence is hypothetical. Whatever happens, the French and British commanders will, in the end, be answerable to their national capitals, not to any multinational structure. Huge potential exists for tragic misunderstanding. That’s why a refresher course in Balkan history is well overdue.

That isn’t, of course, meant to be a rude generalization about the individuals who practice art scholarship in London, Amsterdam or Antwerp. Rather it’s a statement about the contrasting house cultures in the three countries — a contrast that has grown even starker this summer as one of the hottest arguments in Old Master history reignites. It concerns a painting that is presented by London’s National Gallery as the original depiction by Rubens of a steamy Old Testament love-scene, featuring Samson and Delilah. It was auctioned by Christie’s in 1980, shortly after emerging from the vaults of a Belgian bank. Supporters call the painting a work of seductive genius; critics call it a sloppy copy of a canvas that was undoubtedly created in 1609 but was probably lost after its owner, the mayor of Antwerp, died in 1640.

Before surrendering to Delilah’s wiles, consider the commendable lesson in open-mindedness that is now being set by curators in the Netherlands. The Mauritshuis in The Hague is one of the finest small art museums in the world — and in a show running till mid-July, it invites visitors to view three famous paintings which were formerly thought to be works of Rembrandt; and then to read a detailed explanation of why two of them probably aren’t by the master and the third is borderline. The process of perpetual re-examination will go on, the curators stress. Rembrandt research never ends. In a similar spirit, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam recently invited the public to follow in real time as it subjected its most famous painting, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, to a lengthy scientific examination.

When Ernst van de Wetering, the world’s best-known scholar of Rembrandt, died in 2021, obituarists noted that in the Dutchman’s lifetime, and in some measure thanks to him, the number of authenticated Rembrandt paintings had fallen from nearly 624 to just 340. He wasn’t merely a nay-sayer; he upgraded some paintings while downgrading others. And the Dutchman never worked alone, he was a member of, and eventually chaired, a Rembrandt Research Project in which scholarly devotees of the master perpetually compared notes, and argued loudly, about the scope of the oeuvre. Some see this Dutch spirit of creative contention as a legacy of the Nazi occupation, and the subsequent, agonized arguments over who had collaborated; the national psyche somehow absorbed the idea that supposedly eminent figures could make terrible mistakes, and that no individual should be seen as infallible.

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Unfortunately, this glasnost and humility is less evident in Belgium, the homeland of Peter Paul Rubens. Ask Katarzyna Krzyzagorska-Pisarek, a Polish-British scholar who knows the Low Countries. In her doctoral research, she compared the Rembrandt Research Project with the nearest Belgian equivalent: an ongoing effort by the Centrum Rubenianum, a research centre in Antwerp, to assemble a definitive catalogue of Rubens’ work. The catalogue is known as the Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard — in deference to a German who was the most famous, if not the most reliable, Rubens scholar of the mid-20th century. The Dutch project was vastly broader in the range of evidence it considered, Pisarek found. More important, she identified at least 75 instances of works credited to Rubens by Burchard which had proved to be mistakes, sometimes glaring ones. The Belgian authority had very quietly acknowledged these mistakes, but it did nothing to draw this fact to the world’s attention, and it persists in revering Burchard’s legacy. Pisarek found the Rubenianum equally unreceptive to public dialogue when she urged them, citing a huge body of evidence, to rehabilitate a couple of important paintings which in her view had been wrongly degraded.

How does all this relate to the re-emerging dispute over Samson and Delilah, a work acquired by the National Gallery in 1980 for £2.5 million, the biggest amount that a UK public collection had paid for a single canvas? Well, it was Burchard who identified the now-contested painting, which emerged in 1929 in a studio in Paris, as a very-long-lost Rubens; and on that matter, Belgium’s art authorities insist that Burchard was right.

So the London Gallery, faced with a crescendo of challenging voices — raising issues of provenance, palette, composition and the painting’s physical structure — has confidently relied on the Rubenianum to shout down people who contest its 1980 purchase. And indeed, the Belgian art authorities have obligingly done so with a rudeness that outdoes the bitchiest of British art critics. People who question the painting are simply “a small group of flat earth-minded conspiracy theorists who make their money by denying all the facts”, declared the Rubenianum’s (German-born) chairman Nils Buttner when I consulted him about the issue. Bert Watteeuw, director of Antwerp’s Rubenshuis museum, responded with a petulant ad hominem (or ad feminam) outburst when asked by a Belgian reporter about a new book by Euphrosyne Doxiadis, an art historian of Greek and Flemish descent, which carefully lays out the skeptical case. “Who is this woman to say those things?” (In fact, Doxiadis has been in vigorous and contentious interaction with the Rubenianum. almost from the year, 1981, when Watteeuw was born.)

On 9 May, the National Gallery suddenly seemed to be taking at least a step in a more emollient, indeed Dutchward, direction when it quietly e-published, for those who knew where to look, a multi-authored 25,000-word pronouncement on the disputed painting. It still affirmed the work’s authenticity but implicitly acknowledged that the skeptics had raised some serious points, including the painting’s poor provenance chain and highly idiosyncratic color scheme. Amidst all the verbiage, many issues were only partially addressed, as Pisarek points out: for example, the problem posed by contemporary copies of Rubens’ original work which differ from the Gallery’s acquisition. Still, the huge outpouring amounted to a big and welcome change of presentational tactics from the previous stance of Sphinx-like silence or “ask the Belgians”.

On one matter, though, the Gallery seems to be digging in its heels. One of the disputed work’s oddest features is that (as all agree) the artwork itself has been planed down to a few millimeters and then stuck onto a cheapish pink blockboard. The Gallery’s curators have always insisted (and they emphatically repeat in their latest pronouncement) that the tawdry blockboard was slammed on well before the work arrived in Trafalgar Square in mid-summer 1980. Yet an ever-growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests that the painting was still resting on a much thicker, older wooden panel when it left Belgium; and its short stay at Christie’s would hardly have sufficed for this massive modification.

In an article for The Guardian published on 15 June, Dalya Alberge quotes an eminent curator as initially admitting and then denying that the blockboard was added at the Gallery. The curator, Christopher Brown, ought to know what he is talking about. As he has recalled in a public lecture, he was put in charge of the Gallery’s Dutch and Flemish treasures in 1971, when he was just 23. Young Brown then had to bite his lip while his boss, the Gallery director Sir Michael Levey, made a terrible mistake by failing to recognize an authentic Rembrandt which a British peer was trying to dispose of. So if anyone remembers what was going in the Gallery in 1980, it should be Brown. Meanwhile a veteran of art investigation, Michael Daley, published online a 16-page essay which meticulously lays out all the evidence that the older back was intact when the work arrived in London.

Why does this blockboard issue matter so much? First because if it emerges that the Gallery has been less than frank with the public about the timing of this draconian intervention, then everything else the Gallery says about the contested painting will lose credibility. Second, as Daley suggests, hard questions arise about the motives for the intervention. The older wooden back would certainly have contained invaluable clues about the dating, and treatment over the years, of the contested work. With the discarding of the older back, important evidence was lost. Might those facts be connected?

As it happens, one of the whistle-blowers on this sensitive point was a Belgian banker, Jan Bosselaers — a director of the defunct Kredietbank in whose vaults the painting was stored. He provided Doxiadis with written and photographic testimony to the effect that the painting’s old back was still in place when it left Belgium: this evidence was only authorized for release after his death. (This was not Bosselaers’ only end-of-life bombshell: he also revealed, very shortly before passing away in 2015, that the bank had once been in negotiation with the possessors of the country’s greatest missing art treasure: a section of a 14th-century altar-piece which was stolen in 1934.)

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If bankers in secretive Belgium can become truth-tellers, at least on their death-beds, might members of Britain’s cliquey art establishment who know about this affair clear their consciences while they still have the chance? One thing emerges clearly from the latest revelations by Daley and Alberge. Individuals who had sight and knowledge of the Gallery’s contested painting, after its arrival in London, have not yet told the full story. We can affirm that with confidence because the various things those individuals did say, back in the Eighties and even very recently, are utterly confused and contradictory. Those multiple confusions and contradictions are laid out in intricate detail by Daley’s latest posting.

As for the Gallery’s recent long pronouncement, its flaws would be forgivable if it had been offered, in good faith, as the start of a constructive and open-ended debate. In fact the Gallery still shows little appetite for debate, or any sort of give-and-take, with the public. When I asked, very courteously, for a comment on how scientific knowledge about the contested painting had moved on as a result of recent investigations, I received no reply. The good thing is that a debate is starting anyway. Art critic Jonathan Jones has stepped in with a passionate defense of the contested painting on aesthetic grounds, as though the skeptics’ case rested on aesthetics rather than hard-and-fast facts about events and testimonies in the late 20th century. He entirely misses the skeptics’ point — but at least a conversation has begun.

Let’s hope it is a Dutch-style discussion, worthy of the land of Erasmus and Spinoza, because British art is long overdue for a puff of fresh Netherlandish air. At the time the contested picture was acquired in 1980, London’s art establishment was even smaller, more introverted and less accountable for its mistakes than it is now: perhaps unintentionally, Brown’s lecture offered a glimpse of that world. Partly because of that defect, London has lost some ground to other cities like New York and Paris as a hub for art expertise and commerce. However late in the day, a bit more openness about that mysterious canvas in Trafalgar Square might do wonders to shore up London’s reputation.

For one thing, Donald Trump has brought to the ascendant a general suspicion of the humanities and liberal arts as a preserve of decadent elites. Among the wilder fringes of his supporters, there are loud-mouthed admirers of Sparta’s warriors. But that hardly amounts to serious engagement with the past, and it risks tainting the entire legacy of ancient Greece.

America does, of course, have a distinguished cohort of traditionalist, classics-minded intellectuals and they have sought to protect the discipline from passing intellectual currents behind the high walls of private schools and colleges. But that too makes the subject ideologically charged.

On the cultural Left, meanwhile, there has been a searching of soul: is America’s tradition of classical learning, so beloved by the Founding Fathers, irredeemably tainted by association with white hegemony and colonialism? Such a view has found an eloquent exponent in the Princeton professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta who is not sure whether the discipline deserves to survive at all.

To those who fear that the diligent study of Mediterranean antiquity may now disappear in a cloud of ideological contention, help seems to be on its way — from an unlikely quarter, namely China. Even while Xi celebrated an anti-Western alliance when he fraternized with Putin in Moscow last week, the Chinese leader is busy appropriating what we think of one of the foundation stones of Western culture.

The enthusiasm of that country’s intellectual and political leaders for the study of Europe’s ancient world seems to grow by the month, as several recent developments show.

In November, the authorities in Beijing hosted a World Classics Conference, where hundreds of scholars from all over the world were lavishly accommodated and invited to give short papers. Tim Whitmarsh, a Cambridge professor of Greek history, wrote afterwards that the gathering was on a scale he had never experienced. President Xi Jinping sent his warm blessings, and there were rumors he might appear.

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At that event, it was announced that China would imminently open a research center for the Hellenic past in Athens — joining the 19 existing schools from Western countries, including the American School of Classical Studies which is probably the US academy’s most important offshore research institution in the liberal arts.

China has its Latin scholars (it organized a conference on the Roman poet Ovid in 2017) but recently the country’s cultural and intellectual diplomacy has put a particular focus on Greece: both the ancient Hellenic heritage and the modern state of Greece, which was invited to co-host the gathering in Beijing.

Academic synergy between Greece and China is burgeoning on many fronts, albeit from a low base. Four Greek universities are committed to a formal partnership with four Chinese ones: this makes possible joint research projects, seminars, exchanges of scholars and jointly administered qualifications. The Greek philosophy professor who has co-directed this cooperation effort, Stelios Virvidakis, was gratefully amazed to receive a personal letter from President Xi — and then multiple inquiries from China’s state media, inviting him to say how he felt about getting such a missive.

As Virvidakis has discovered, one Sino-Hellenic pairing which his Chinese partners especially like has involved Confucius as the father of Asian thought, and Aristotle as the progenitor of European philosophy. There have been three recent symposia on that wise duo: two in Greece and one in China. The Chinese also enjoy comparing their most famous sage with Plato and his pupil Socrates. People who visit the Athenian Agora may observe that this sacred, US-funded archaeological space is now adorned by a brash pair of Chinese-funded statues of Confucius and Socrates.

It feels as though a new chapter in educational history is being written. The huge American investment in the study of ancient Athens, especially noticeable in the cold-war fervor of the Fifties, had an obvious connection with the global contest between communism and what was then called the Free World. By showcasing the story of the world’s first democracy, American scholars were — consciously or otherwise — fighting the good fight against Soviet totalitarianism. The new Chinese zest for Greece also has a certain strategic dimension, given that the port of Piraeus is now controlled by Chinese interests and has flourished under its new bosses.

Commerce and economics aside, to what purposes are the Chinese now promoting the study of golden-age Hellas? The answer is both complex and surprising, according to Shadi Bartsch, an American classics professor at the University of Chicago.

As she shows in her book Plato goes to China, Greek philosophy (briefly introduced to China by Jesuits in the 16th century) has been put to many ideological uses over the past century. In 1912 the Chinese Republic saw a burst of enthusiasm for ostensibly pro-democratic texts from ancient Athens. Those texts were largely forgotten amidst the cultural revolution — but then rediscovered during the political spring that preceded the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989.

What happened next, as Bartsch describes it, is a spectacular piece of intellectual legerdemain. Chinese scholars have continued to read Plato, Aristotle and Thucydides — but much of their enthusiasm focuses on passages which deplore democracy and its tendency to degenerate into demagoguery.

For liberal lovers of Plato, one of his troubling ideas is the “golden lie” — his idea that states need a false but legitimating ideology which helps to underpin social order and a stable class system. Since Tiananmen, Chinese readers of Plato have warmed to that gilded falsehood, or at least to the idea that statecraft and philosophical integrity may be in conflict.

Among the Chinese political philosophers who have gained attention in the West is Tongdong Bai — a professor at Fudan University who is also a member of the Pontifical Academy in Rome. His book Against Political Equality carefully distills Plato and Confucius and their ideas for reconciling private and family concerns with the public interest. Confucius fares better — partially because he respects the family — but Plato is given a very fair hearing. Albeit in a moderate form, Bai’s whole approach reflects the idea that worthy elites can deliver better political and social outcomes than the voice of the mob.

As Bartsch demonstrates, the current Chinese reading of ancient Hellas is far from monolithic: there are those who study Greece, and its influence on the modern West, simply in a spirit of “know the enemy” while others see great wisdom in ancient Greek thought but regard the contemporary West as a poor successor.

At least one Chinese scholar has put forward the surreal notion that the medieval West simply invented the classical heritage as a fiendish trick; and in October 2023 a well-connected pundit on US-China relations, Jin Canrong, opined that Aristotle could not have produced such a vast oeuvre before the advent of paper.

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For the time being at least, there is a striking contrast between the rather formal, stiff and cautious rhetoric which has been heard in set-piece interactions between Chinese and Greek officialdom, and the variety of views aired in Chinese academia.

In state-to-state cultural diplomacy, a very simple picture is often presented. It feels as though 19th-century nationalism is being revived, with a clear emphasis on undifferentiated historical continuity: Greece has always been Greek, just as China has always been Chinese. As Whitmarsh wrote after attending the Beijing shindig, this is a proposal for dialogue between (stereotypically defined) nations, but not within them. Its tone is almost at the opposite extreme from the internal turmoil of the American academy.

That siloed vision is a pity, because despite all the ideological pressures, China’s intellectual response to the European past and present — as described by Bartsch and others who know the scene — seems to have retained a measure of diversity.

For example, there is Chinese interest in Leo Strauss, the German-born philosopher who is also revered by American neo-cons. Strauss found much to admire in ancient Greek thought and much to criticize in liberal modernity; that could help to explain why his face fits in contemporary China. But what of the fact that the leading Chinese follower of Strauss, Liu Xiaofeng, is a self-described cultural Christian who wrote a doctorate on Christian theology in Switzerland? That fits no pattern.

Long may that relative diversity last. To put it mildly, today’s China is not a land of intellectual freedom. To quote the civil-liberty watchdog Freedom House, it is a place where “following a multi-year crackdown on political dissent, independent NGOs and human rights defenders… civil society has been largely decimated”.

In the officially encouraged romance between China and Greece, it is too early to tell what ideological constraints might be imposed. But if China replaces the West as the most generous sponsor of research into Greek history and thought, there is good reason to fear that such investigations will take place within narrower confines than was the case at least in pre-Trump America. Idealistic belief in democracy may well lie outside those confines, to judge by the zeitgeist of today’s China.

Veterans of Classical studies are watching with mixed feelings. If the new Sino-Hellenic moment really helps to save the serious study of classics from becoming collateral damage in America’s culture wars, that might be a blessing. But only if the global conversation about Ancient Greece and its meaning for today can still be pursued with intellectual freedom and parrhesia — the right to shock and offend. It is that sort of freedom which is exuberantly exercised in America by mavericks like Princeton’s Padilla. Let’s hope this does not become an exception.

So far, so charming. The conversation then took a tougher turn when the black-robed figure began holding forth proudly on the vast sums of money which had been spent on the monastery at the behest of Vladimir Putin — turning the island into a place where the president and his elite guests could make comfortable and high-profile visits. Ash couldn’t help asking her companion whether he considered the president a holy man. “Only God knows that,” was the artful reply. But the results of this high-level patronage were visibly impressive. As Ash notes, it has been calculated that $700,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spent on the island for every member of a brotherhood supposedly devoted to asceticism and prayer; and Russia’s federal grid has supplied the 200-strong community with enough power capacity to meet the needs of a small country.

The post-communist transformation of Valaam island — from a harsh, romantic outpost into a slick and ruthlessly administered showpiece of state largesse — is one of many arresting stories told by Ash in The Baton and the Cross about the trajectory of Russian Orthodoxy since the fall of the atheist regime. Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the resurrection of Christianity felt to its participants like a valiant and counter-cultural enterprise. But with every passing year, a de facto partnership between the Patriarchate of Moscow and Russia’s earthly powers became more evident — especially after 2012 when Patriarch Kirill, having initially kept a little distance from the Kremlin, emphatically swung behind Putin and helped to ensure his re-election. In return, hundreds of millions of roubles were made available for the construction of churches and other projects that burnished the Patriarchate’s prestige and property empire.

As Ash argues, Patriarch Kirill’s strident support for the war in Ukraine — and the harsh disciplinary measures applied to priests who question this line — are only the logical culmination of an ever-tightening relationship between Church and State. Church-state interconnections in the land of the eastern Slavs have taken a bewilderingly wide variety of forms, but there is a common theme. In every era of Russia’s evolution, not excluding the Soviet one, ways have been found for earthly rulers to turn the soft power of religion to their own advantage.

Ash is not, of course, alone in making that observation. The great Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  remarked that his country’s history would have been “incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries… if the church had not surrendered its independence and [had] made its voice heard among the people as it does, for example, in Poland”.

And yet, as a careful reading of her account will also make clear, Russian Orthodoxy does not — even today — begin or end with its use as a tool of state power. There is more to the story than that.

To put matters at their very broadest, any religion, passionately embraced, gives people a motive to sacrifice personal interests and even their lives; that is one reason why earthly rulers find religion’s use so attractive. But faith also gives people the courage to oppose state power, at vast personal cost, in ways that send a dazzling moral signal. As it happens, Orthodox Christianity has inspired not only the most pliant servants of Vladimir Putin but also his most doughty opponents.

Take one well-known example: during his trial in 2021, Alexei Navalny made clear that a vital part of his own personal story was evolution from the militant atheism of his youth into a morally and politically engaged understanding of his country’s historic faith. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness”, was one of the Biblical maxims which inspired the awesomely brave corruption fighter who died in an Arctic prison in February 2024.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an equally courageous challenger of the Putin order, had good reason to anticipate a similar fate when, in a letter from prison in November 2023, he lamented Patriarch Kirill’s moral support for the invasion of Ukraine. The dissident couched his argument in spiritual terms. “As an Orthodox Christian, this brings me only pain, grief, and deep sorrow,” he wrote. At the heart of Christianity, he added, was the rejection of murder and violence: this made it all the more deplorable that Church hierarchs “had placed the authority of Caesar over the foundations of the Christian faith”. Kara-Murza was one of 16 prisoners released to the West in a prisoner swap in August; until his liberation he was preparing himself for imminent death in jail.

Looking way back through history, it turns out there are some striking examples of tsars who thought they could turn the Church into an efficient instrument of their own power but found that the results were quite unexpected. Start with Ivan the Terrible, who held sway from 1547 to 1584 and was admired by Stalin for his savage purges and persecutions. If anyone stood up to Ivan’s murderous rampages, it was a turbulent cleric, Metropolitan Philip, who was duly imprisoned and strangled. But Philip lives on in Church history as a saint and martyr while only a lunatic fringe of religious ultra-nationalists (who do exist, unfortunately) unconditionally revere his sadistic tormentor.

Then in the 18th century, modernising emperors like Peter and Catherine imagined they could curb Orthodoxy’s mystical and monastic tradition and turn the church into a Protestant-style enforcer of morals and state loyalty. But these efforts — like the vain attempt to cure Father Iosif — were unsuccessful. Instead, there was a strange countervailing reaction. In various remote outposts of the empire there was a kind of mystical resurgence, featuring saintly ascetics and monastics with prophetic gifts — a phenomenon which inspired writers like Dostoyevsky and hence gained an unlikely place in the history of world literature.

Those three tsars — Ivan, Peter and Catherine — are worth mentioning because they are the Russian rulers Putin most admires, according to his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and hence took as his lodestars when invading Ukraine. Putin may imagine those monarchs as people who successfully and seamlessly harnessed Russia’s spiritual heritage — but if so, he is misinformed.

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The barbarians are laughing at us

By Bruce Clark

Another unexpected twist in Russian spiritual history occurred during the death-throes of the tsarist era with the maelstrom of the Revolution and civil war. This febrile climate had an extraordinary effect on Russian religious thought, generating the so-called Silver Age whose intellectual protagonists creatively synthesised their faith with socialist atheism. That movement would, in turn, make a powerful contribution to intellectual life outside Russia.

Driven westwards by the Bolsheviks, that diaspora’s brainy, quarrelsome thinkers went on to electrify the tired worlds of French Catholicism and Anglican academia. Take the philosopher and theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov stands out among the thinkers who on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution abandoned secular socialism and then looked for ways to link their spiritual heritage with a practical concern for human welfare. He co-founded the Anglican-Orthodox fellowship which led to a surge of overblown excitement about a possible rapprochement or even reunion between two major segments of Christendom and had a profound impact on former leader of global Anglicanism, Rowan Williams. Amidst huge controversy, Bulgakov also foreshadowed feminist theology by reflecting on “holy wisdom” as a distinctly female form of divine power, which features rather mysteriously in Orthodox iconography and liturgical poetry. And for French thinkers like Jacques Maritain, nurtured on the medieval worldview of Thomas Aquinas, the Russian sages arriving in Paris were an exciting mixture of tradition and creativity.

Of course, not all Russia’s religious philosophers managed to escape the Bolsheviks — some, like Pavel Florensky, were among the millions of souls, including tens of thousands of priests and bishops, who perished in successive waves of repression. But those victims had a posthumous moral influence on religious thought in freer places.

In the story of Bulgakov’s friend Mother Maria Skobtsova, Russian Orthodoxy can also offer an anti-Nazi morality tale. An unconventional nun, she ran a shelter and soup-kitchen for the homeless. Having experienced the civil war in southern Russia and then a series of personal tragedies, Mother Maria had an ocean of empathy for the vulnerable and suffering — and responded positively when Jews came to her Parisian shelter asking for false documents that would help them to escape Nazi round-ups. It was for these acts of compassion that she, her son and two other associates paid with their lives. She was deported to the Ravensbrück death camp where she was executed on Easter Saturday of 1945. Among her legacies was a devastatingly accurate observation of various forms of misguided piety that she observed in her compatriots — from militaristic forms of faith to excessively ascetic and other-worldly varieties.

In short, the Russian Orthodox tradition should, from its own treasure chest, be able to offer a rich and powerful critique of the compact Putin has fashioned with an apparently docile church. It is too early to tell what opposing trends might be triggered by the present cosy and calculating relationship between an ostentatiously pious war leader and his clerical cheerleaders. But history gives us plenty of reason to suggest that Patriarch Kirill’s proclamation of Vladimir Putin as “a miracle of God” will not be the last act of the current drama. If anything can heal the pathologies now afflicting Russian Orthodoxy, it might just be the spirit of Saint Philip or Mother Maria.

In Beijing, President Xi Jinping has ramped up his appeals for the creation of a “new form of human civilisation” based on a fusion of communist ideology with his own country’s ancient traditions. Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has for at least five years been urging compatriots to develop a “new Islamic-Iranian civilisation” that would integrate at a higher level the Muslim revelation and the older traditions of Persia.

What unites all these projects is a message that is at once defensive and breezily assertive. All aspire to be counterweights to the horrible hegemony of a cynical, mercantilist West, whose masters allegedly seek to iron out all forms of distinctiveness, everything that gives meaning to human life. And all exude confidence that tomorrow belongs to them.

So what, if anything, does Western civilisation have to say in its own defence? Until recently, discussions about such broad ideological questions have been rather introverted. If people argued over the usefulness, or the virtue, of “the West” as a cultural signifier, it was often in the context of narrow debates over the curriculum — or how the past should be presented through museums and monuments. Douglas Murray’s bestselling The War on the West refers more to domestic culture wars than to any global ideological contest — though he does elaborate the argument that the transgressions of the West, including colonialism and racism, have never been Western monopolies.

Given the hitherto confined nature of this debate, perhaps we should welcome an astonishing new contribution — How the World made the West — by Josephine Quinn, who has just been appointed to an ancient history chair at Cambridge. Amid an ocean of fascinating detail about little-known trading links and technological breakthroughs, she makes the impertinent argument that there is really no such thing as a civilisation, or even a distinct culture, and so there cannot be such a thing as a Western one. In her view of history, all the categories by which people have tried to organise the past melt away; there are no transmissions between cultures, but rather endless micro-transactions between individual traders, raiders and people struggling randomly to survive.

Paradoxically, her argument would be read in Beijing, Tehran or Moscow as an expression of a characteristically Western, capitalist pathology. It would be denounced as a typically arrogant effort to steamroller all difference, all the religions, traditions, proud collective memories that give sense to human communities, and to reduce humanity to an amorphous mass of pliant consumers. (To those of us who lived in Russia in the Nineties, it now feels as though the wackiest forms of anti-Western nativism and Russian Messianism — incubated, ironically, by the rollicking free speech of the Yeltsin years — have become the Muscovite mainstream.)

The author’s keenest interest is in material culture and trade, as evidenced by archaeology. She is interested in the written word not as an expression of the human spirit but as evidence for what crops were grown, what metals were smelted and what goods were traded. In the final third of the book, the emphasis switches to the transmission of ideas and inventions — stressing the contribution of brainy Muslim and Asian thinkers and mathematicians to Western Europe’s development. All good stuff.

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Why the West will refuse to fight

By Malcom Kyeyune

She reserves, however, a disproportionate opprobrium for romantic British philhellenism, for example the claim of John Stuart Mill that the battle of Marathon, in which democratic Athens triumphed over the Persians, mattered more to the story of England than did the clash at Hastings. In truth, she provocatively argues, that Greek battle could be regarded as a minor skirmish in a punitive expedition by the Persians in which many Greeks took the Persian side. And modern readers, she suggests, should find as much to admire in Persian society as among the slave-owning, sexist Athenians.

The book is presented, in part, as a critique of the “reception” of Hellenism by the post-enlightenment world. It argues that the facts of east Mediterranean history were cynically distorted by imperial Britain. Part of the distortion, she insists, lay in isolating Greece and its golden age from all the cultures with which the Greeks interacted, like the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. Or indeed from the Persians, with whom the Greek relationship — as she notes — was ambivalent not unremittingly hostile.

She is right to say that Western ideologues of the imperial and Cold-War eras reread Greek history and literature in ways that suited them. So did every other consumer of that brilliant canon. Yet over and above her provocative generalisations, there is a real question. Once you remove the liberal-imperialist lens through which Victorian Britain, and indeed Cold-War America, viewed ancient Athens, what remains of the idea of a Greek-influenced West?

Perhaps the first point to make is that golden-age Hellenism is not a monolithic phenomenon. It is a vast range of superbly expressed feelings and opinions. The elitist idealism of Plato differs from the empirical rationalism of Aristotle. The formal Athenian patriotism of Aeschylus (which does not exclude a human empathy for the Persian dead) is different from the mischievous scepticism of fellow dramatist Euripides. The variety of worldviews is enormous.

Professor Quinn writes with compelling passion about the way in which coastal communities — for example on Crete — “picked and chose” from the products and technology, and the religious and cultural practices, offered by trading partners across the sea. It is equally the case that modern Westerners — like everybody else — have picked and chosen from the cultural and metaphysical resources offered by the classical world, and Greece in particular. But the availability of that treasure-chest mattered; it was not trivial.

Nor, it should be said, did the Anglo-Saxon reception of Greek history begin or end with Mill. It was in 1628 that Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides, delivering a landmark in English prose and political thought. In the 20th century, the Irish-born leftist E.R. Dodds offered a counterblast to conservative philhellenism in The Greeks and the Irrational. Elsewhere in Western Europe, leading interpreters of ancient Athens have included French Marxists who adored Plato.

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The West has a deviancy problem

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Distilling all this, there is surely one feature of ancient Athens whose influence on the modern West remains palpable and worth defending against its many enemies, including those who counter-propose one or other form of authoritarianism. That feature is the ability of a highly sophisticated society to question and laugh at itself; to subject powerful individuals to public scrutiny, accountability and ridicule; to engage in robust public debate in the hope that good information will drive out bad. The British Victorians only partly understood this; they read the comedies of Aristophanes with the naughtier bits excised.

The collective West is of course guilty of many historic sins, but it differs from totalitarian societies and resembles democratic Athens in the way it still (just about) retains the capacity for self-scrutiny, self-correction and no-holds-barred discussion. It is unlikely that a history professor in Russia, China or Iran would remain in place long after publishing a book arguing that their country’s civilisation was actually an illusion. Perhaps there is something magnificent about the fact that a book so wildly iconoclastic as Quinn’s can be published, and taken seriously: a perverse proof that the Periclean West is alive, so much so that people can deny its existence with cheerful impunity.

Still, the book’s relatively uncritical reception, hailing its boldest claims as well as its incontestable virtues, risks persuading some of the world’s authoritarians that the defence of liberal democracy is now a spent force. The Guardian’s reviewer, for example, hails the book as a “brilliant and learned challenge to modern western chauvinism”. Brilliant and learned some of its insights assuredly are, but is “western chauvinism” still such a terrible, untamed beast that it needs to be attacked in long and learned polemics? That need was more evident in 1969, when Kenneth Clark launched his purring televised perorations on art history from the banks of the Seine. Or even in 1990, when the Cold War’s outcome triggered an unhealthy hubris, as the Greeks would have said. Now, maybe not so much.

So what then will be the reaction to the book and its reception from the geopolitical enemies of Western civilisation, who think it exists and want to destroy it — not just intellectually but physically?

To them, it may now seem as though today’s Western commentariat resembles the late Roman community so vividly described by the poet Cavafy: people jaded with cultural and political sophistication who are waiting, rather eagerly, for barbarians who offer “some kind of a solution” to life’s tedium.