Richard Wagner and the European Union

In the hysteria that the mere mention of his name causes, people have largely forgotten that Richard Wagner in his later years became an ardent supporter of a theoretical forerunner of the European Union in the form of the Young Hegelian thinker, Constantin Frantz, and his views on European Federalism.

We explored Wagner's later support for Frantz in a previous study. 

In his Open Letter to Richard Wagner published in the Bayreuther Blätter, Frantz also makes mention of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. It can be argued that Fichte is one of the original early theorists of European Unionism. What is of interest is what drove Fichte to theorise the need for Unionism. That decisive event was the Napoleonic War. Fichte thought that unless European nations formed some sort of federation, wars like the Napoleonic War would merely recur and lay devastation to Europe. 

Francisco de Goya depicts the bloody inhumanities of the Napoleonic War,
while Byron warned that one day "a new Napoleon might arise, to shame the world again"

Frantz, by way of contrast to Fichte, was writing in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Wagner supported Frantz because Wagner came to dislike the idea of a Germany united under the "pointy tip of the Prussian sabre". Before that, like most political liberals, Wagner did support German unification under the cause of democratic political union that would sweep away all of the little autocratic ancient regimes into which the German states were split up. However, once national unity started to become a right-wing cause under Bismarck after the Franco-Prussian war, Wagner's pacifism, his opposition to Prussian militarism, and his intense dislike of Bismarckian Realpolitik drove him to support Constantin Frantz with his opposition to strong German unity under Prussia. 

The point was that Europe had a great deal of ethnic and linguistic diversity that had to be respected. The only way this diversity would not result in endless war and destruction like that of the Napoleonic War or Thirty Year War that lay waste to Europe, was if independent states were allowed to participate in a wider European Federation governed, in the model proposed by Frantz, by a European Constitution based loosely on the American Constitution. 

What there must not be, according to Frantz and Wagner, was an enforced imperialist union of European nations, which made claims to a Pax Romana or a Napoleonic Pax Gallia (l'empire c'est la paix), let alone a Prussian Pax Germania. Wagner and Frantz even argued against German national union. Instead, the idea was that states like Saxony and Bavaria be allowed to maintain independence rather than being swallowed up by Prussia (sardonically referred to as a "Borussification" by Frantz, based, not on a certain contemporary British politician's name, but on the Latin name for Prussia—Borussia). The difference in dialect between Saxony and Bavaria would have been much more marked than we see today in an age where everyone learns to speak High German, a dialect that was originally Prussian dialect. Wagner himself grew up speaking Saxon dialect since he was born in Leipzig. 

In light of this, you can see what Wagner and Frantz would have had to say about the Brexit debate today. They would support Scottish independence along with Catalan, or even Venetian-Northern Italian independence, as long as this independence would constitute part of wider participation in European Federalism.

At the end of his Open Letter, Frantz warns that unless such a European Union were formed, catastrophe would soon ensue. Wagner and Frantz are not shy to remind us of the bloody wars that laid devastation to Europe in the Thirty Year War and the Napoleonic War, a devastation that would recur in an ever more mechanised world. It was a warning that was utterly prophetic. Only in the wake of the mass industrialised warfare of a new Thirty Year War in the form of the two World Wars did the idea of European Federalism emerge again, a conflict that saw the rise of a Germanic Napoleon, one foreseen by Byron when he wrote that one day "a new Napoleon might arise to shame the world again". Even Winston Churchill emerged after the war as an ardent supporter of the European Union as a means of averting future wars, making the misuse of Churchill's name by Brexit advocates like Boris Johnson every bit as perverse as Hitler's misuse of Wagner's name.

Felix Klos puts it well when he writes:

In using Churchill to justify his Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson paints a barbarically simplified and ill-informed picture of what Churchill stood for. 

The unity in Europe, now in the form of the imperfect European Union, is to a great extent the evolved and still organically developing legacy of Winston Churchill. That is the inheritance which Johnson is asking the British people to turn their backs on.

It is an inconvenient history for Johnson and his campaign. And, indeed, one man can make history. That is the Churchill Factor. But to alter history as you see fit is wholly unacceptable. Boris or not. 

As with with Hitler and Wagner, with Boris and Churchill, we once again see how demagogues operate in rewriting history to suit their propagandist needs.

One simply must be left wondering by those who support the dismantling of the European Union if the lessons of history have not merely been overwritten but outright forgotten.