LONDON – In 1984, Neil Kinnock, the then leader of Britain’s opposition Labor Party, did something few politicians would dare: pledge to return the Parthenon Marbles.
Kinnock told reporters during a visit to Athens that those classic sculptures, often called the Elgin Marbles after the British aristocrat who removed them from the Parthenon in the early 19th century and moved them to London, were a “moral issue”. “A Parthenon without the balls is like a smile with a missing molar,” he said.
Kinnock’s comments made headlines at the time, but when he returned to London he found that few members of his party shared his views, let alone Conservative members of Margaret Thatcher’s government. He didn’t push the idea.
Most of his successors, including Tony Blair, insisted that the marble should remain in the British Museum, as one of its most notable features.
Last week, the sculptures returned to public view after a prolonged closure of the museum’s Greek galleries due to the coronavirus pandemic and maintenance work. They have re-emerged as activists across Europe demand a rectification of perceived historical grievances, yet the idea of returning the marbles to Athens does not seem to have the political support here as it did in the days of Kinnock.
The official position of the British government is that it is not responsible for the fate of the marbles: this, she says, is a matter for the trustees of the British Museum, a collection largely appointed by the Prime Minister and which has repeatedly said sculptures are an integral part of the museum. The task of telling world history.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson – a graduate of Oxford classics who loves to cite ancient Greek – has said for years that marble belongs in London. In 2012, when he was mayor of London, he wrote to a Greek official saying he had “thought deeply over many years” about the sculptures, and as much as he sympathized with the Greek cause, it would be a “huge and irreparable loss”. “If they leave the British Museum.
When Johnson met Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last month, he reiterated the government’s position that anything to do with marble is a question for the curators of the British Museum, not for him.
Throughout 2021, as other European governments announced refund policies and brought back some items, Britain’s abandonment of the balls increasingly seemed a long way off.
However, in Britain, a former colonial and trading power whose museums are filled with treasures of its former possessions, redemption is not on the political agenda. Neither the government nor the opposition Labor Party issued a political statement on the matter, and there was no debate on the matter in Parliament.
Current and former British MPs said there were a range of reasons for not taking action. Kinnock, 79, said in an email that the government, and much of the British public, tend to “cling to (or even yearning for) a real or imagined past”.
Kinnock added that the return of the artifacts will be seen as “waking up”, and the government is treating it “as vampires treat sunlight.”
John Hayes, a Conservative Party lawmaker and head of an influential right-wing group in Parliament called Common Sense, said Belgium, France and Germany are returning materials to their former colonies to improve relations, but Britain has much better relations with its former empire. Properties.
By doing nothing about restitution, he said, British legislators had become “more rational” than their Continental counterparts, adding that the belief that all items should be returned to their countries of origin was an “unreasonable position”, with no logical conclusion.
By tradition, the British government does not interfere in the day-to-day management of the museums it funds. But the current government has been lobbying recently to shape its policies. Last year, Oliver Dowden, the country’s culture minister at the time, wrote to museum leaders, asking them to “preserve and explain” disputed antiquities, such as statues of slave owners, rather than removing them from view.
Dowden also made his own views on the redemption clear, telling a British television station in September that the Benin Bronzes at the British Museum were “properly staying” in the collection.
Activists say the government could take action on the Parthenon Marbles if it wanted to. Since the British government sets the rules for major museums and often appoints their curators, they must participate, said Artemis Papathanasiou, a member of a Greek Culture Ministry committee working to reunite the Parthenon Marbles. “They just don’t want to take responsibility,” she said.
In September, a UNESCO panel on the return of disputed artifacts said the marble dispute “has an intergovernmental character, and therefore, the obligation to return the Parthenon sculptures rests squarely with the UK government”.
However, lawmakers insist the matter is out of their hands, even though under the 1963 law governing the British Museum, custodians can remove items from the collection only if they are “unfit for retention” and “can be disposed of without harming students’ interests.” “.
Samantha Knights, an attorney working on restitution cases, said the law was so vague that it would likely give trustees some freedom. When Elgin took the balls, Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire; He had permission to do excavations at the Parthenon, although it is unclear if he had permission to remove anything. Knights said the trustees “can decide that, given the history of the way the Parthenon marbles were obtained, and the very strong arguments made by the Greek government for their return, they are now ‘unqualified to keep them,'” she said.
“But whether the trustees are willing to come to that conclusion is another question,” Knights added.
The trustees of the British Museum are in no mood to return the favor.
Since September, the board has been chaired by George Osborne, a former Tory lawmaker who was Britain’s chief financial officer from 2010 to 2016. Osborne did not respond to numerous interview requests for this article, but in an opinion piece previously published in the Times of London. . In the month, he said the museum is “open to loaning artifacts to any place that can take good care of them and ensure their safe return,” including Greece. The Greek government had previously rejected offers to borrow the Parthenon Marble, and stuck to its permanent return.
Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum, also declined to be interviewed, but said in an emailed statement that the glass globes helped visitors “gain insight into the world’s cultures and how they interrelate over time”. The museum’s website states that the sculptures “transmit influences between Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman civilizations,” and argues that they are best presented in this context.
Janet Susman, actress and chair of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, said she hopes to change attitudes around the world as to where African artifacts belong to influence views on marble. In November, a poll by polling organization YouGov reported, 59 per cent of the British public believed stone balls belonged to Greece.
Susman said Osborne’s appointment made her “less optimistic” about the case. She said, “No one is appointed to the British Museum unless you swear on your mother’s grave that you will not return anything.”
Kinnock, the former Labor leader, said he felt “a bit miserable” when he thought about the chances of returning the pellets. Other European governments, he said, had their own reasons for returning the contested items: Germany, for example, had a “clearly different” attitude toward Reconquista, and might have been influenced by national reflections on its roles in World War II and the “comparative brevity” of Empire.
He said that change in Britain “will only come with a different government seeking, in different ways, to improve the United Kingdom’s perception of its history”. He added: “Then there will be a strong possibility that Great Britain will be our wonderful country in the terms of the twenty-first century.”