After Sir Keir Starmer’s spectacular announcement that the UK would renounce its sovereignty of the Chagos Islands in an agreement with Mauritus, it was only a matter of time before the vultures started circling overhead, each one eyeing a piece of valuable British possession they would like to acquire.

The latest addition to the kettle is Margaritis Schinas, European commissioner who told the Telegraph that Sir Keir should think about giving up the Elgin Marbles to prove “Britain’s commitment to strengthening ties and turning the page on recent divisions’. Not only that, but the UK should send the sculptures to Athens before the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s heroic death for the Greeks in Missolonghi is over. It is not the first time Mr Schinas, himself a Greek, tries to push for the transfer of the sculptures lawfully acquired by Lord Elgin from the Ottomans in 1801 and bought by the British Nation in 1816. In a tweet three years ago, in the middle of fierce post-Brexit negotiations, he stated: “The marbles belong in the Parthenon. In these difficult times, universal cultural heritage should uplift humanity, not divide it.”

There is little doubt that, were his hands not tied, Sir Keir would already have served the Marbles to the Greeks as a Christmas present. His commitment “not to stand in the way” of a deal between the Greek government and the British Museum has been expressed more than once. Fortunately, as his Labour predecessor Sir Tony Blair found out at the time of the Greek Olympics in 2004, things are a bit more complicated than that, and only amending the British Museum Act 1963 in Parliament to lift the restrictions preventing deaccession of items would enable the transfer. But even if it was less complicated, and the items could be shipped away freely, should they?

Having been monitoring the evolution of this debate on social media for the last few years, I instinctively notice how the group of those who advocate for the restitution of the Elgin Marbles and those who find Brexit objectionable tend to overlap significantly. I cannot give you the percentages, but my gut feeling is pretty strong here, and casually trawling through online comments will allow everyone to verify what I am saying. The main line of the argument is that we should be friends with the EU countries, and one way of removing obstacles to this friendship is to give the Greeks what they have been requesting for ages. Conversely, it is easier to find supporters of retention amongst Brexit advocates. This is, of course, not an iron law and inversions and mix-ups are always possible.

We should look at the Marbles like two halves of a heart pendant

At the time of the Brexit referendum, I remember how many Leavers emphasised that leaving the EU did not mean leaving Europe. And they were right. No matter how hard this government may try to eradicate the heritage of our Christian values and erase the bedrock of the legacy of Greek and Roman civilisation from the curriculum, we remain quintessentially Europeans. This is not just because of how much we have borrowed, culturally, from Europe, but also because of our growing together, walking in the same cultural path. This is not a one-way street: many other European countries also bear the marks of their interaction with ideas, inventions, and experiences developed on “these sceptred isles”. German Romanticism draws on Shakespeare just as much as the Bard feeds on Greece and Italy, to make but one example.

One of the aspects where this constant cross-pollination is most visible is the mind-bending variety of exhibits in our museums, whose provenance counts every European nation. One-third of the 1.6 Million non-UK items in the online catalogue of the British Museum come from Europe, and I am sure it would be a greater share at the National Gallery or the British Library. Similarly, items originally produced in Britain are scattered in museums across the continent. These numbers prove not only that objects do not stay forever in the place they were born in but also that the treasure of inspiration and training used century after century by artists who visited those collections in their formative years and beyond is not monolithic and mono-cultural, but a mosaic whose tesserae are sourced well outside the borders of their nation.

The extent of this cultural spread, far from being a sign of poor control over national production, is a measure of the strength and extent of a nation’s cultural influence and sometimes even intentional dominance. On the receiving side, the more diverse the provenance of the items of a collection, the more this acts as an essential fertilisation of imagination and creativity, presenting kaleidoscopic new ways of tackling familiar problems and distracting us from the monotony of what we are used to. This constant training in the idea of diversity is what really brings us to overcome the fear of the other, strengthening ties and bridging divisions.

The opposite of this is cultural protectionism, where every country demands the repatriation of what they perceive — rightly or wrongly — as “their” cultural creations. Whilst this attitude satisfies the ever-present compulsion to understand who we are by putting together as many pieces of our historical and cultural jigsaw as possible, it dramatically downplays the “foreign” nature of some of these jigsaw pieces, exalting instead the autochthonous character of that heritage. It is a form of cultural nationalism that often serves as the foundation and justification for more political nationalistic sentiments, as observed in so many 20th-century dictatorships. Mussolini revelled in the revival of the concept of Roman-ness in Fascist Italy, much in the same way that the Metaxas regime glorified Greekness in the Aegean.

This is why Mr Schinas’ renewed call to send the Elgin Marbles to Athens must be rejected. The Greeks refuse to recognise the cultural function of ancient Greek art being preserved outside modern Greece and insist instead on their self-appointed role as chief wardens of this Classical legacy. On the one hand, they proclaim the foundational contribution provided by ancient Greece to European identity and the “Classical debt” owed by every European to Greece, and on the other, they dismiss the fact that the physical manifestation of the importance of this contribution is precisely the presence of Greek artefacts in our museums. How else could we justify the colossal effort put in place by British travellers and antiquarians to save, study and preserve as many traces of a revered and fading antiquity as possible, if not by recognising that they mattered to them, both as elements of their own quest of self-discovery and as objects of interest in so far as they were documents of a world that was different from theirs?

If Mr Schinas wants to overcome divisions, I would suggest that cultural nationalism is not the answer he’s looking for. And if Sir Keir Starmer wants to get closer to the EU, I would caution him that giving away every evidence of our past closeness is not the way. Instead, let’s work together to explore the remarkable story that unified our two peoples also — paradoxically — through the division of the sculptures of the Parthenon. 

Instead of referring to them as objects of division, we should look at them like the two halves of a heart pendant, the one that binds together two lovers who are often separated by some distance.