A few years ago vehement opposition to the idea of further European cooperation and integration came from an unusual quarter. The Moderator of the Free Church General Assembly used the occasion of his moderatorial address to warn of the dangers to Protestantism posed by the existence of the European Economic Community. He was particularly concerned to warn the church that the Roman Catholic Communion was perhaps more dangerous to the Protestant polity at that time than at any other point in recent European history. In his view the Common Market was nothing more or less than the foreign policy of an imperialist papacy. He pointed out that, at that time, Catholicism was the religion professed, at least nominally, by the majority of inhabitants of the Community, that the founding document was the Treaty of Rome and that large numbers of the Community’s officers were associated with Christian Democratic parties which were closely linked with the Catholic Church.

The speech caused some embarrassment to his co-religionists and was widely reported in the press. Many people immediately assumed it was nothing other than the theocratic ravings of a small and paranoid body and dismissed it out of hand. However, it cannot be denied that many of the founding fathers of the pan-European movement were clearly influenced by Catholic social teaching and motivated by a strong desire to ensure not only the prevention of another European war but also the promotion of reconciliation amongst former enemies. The vocabulary of European integration was often theological in tone and conveyed the resonance of Roman juridical formulae.

The feelings of trepidation and resentment aroused in Britain by the imminent unification of East and West Germany, and too accurately voiced in July by Mr Nicholas Ridley, derived as much from the disturbance of illusions about ourselves as from any rational insight into the affairs of our most powerful and important neighbour. ‘Don’t mention the War’ was a good joke because it precisely identified a British obsession: since 1945 a mythologized version of the Second World War (‘the War’) has stood in as the image of a national identity which neither the twilight of Empire nor our ever shabbier political institutions, let alone our industries or our culture, could provide. Mr Ridley’s outburst expressed the fear that soon we should not be able to tell the joke any more. We may even, in the Europe of tomorrow, be forced to face the truth about those forgotten, untried, unpunished, uninvestigated war- crimes: not just a few wicked old collaborators who escaped to Britain rather than Latin America, but the collusion of an entire supposedly civilised ruling-class in the deliberate and systematic burning, machinegunning, dismembering, and burying alive of hundreds of thousands of women and children in what until a few months ago were regularly and not incorrectly referred to in GDR official publications as ‘the Anglo- American terror-raids’ on German cities. ‘Murder is murder’ are words that we must hope will return to haunt the British popular conscience.

Yet, at the same time as the Ridley affair, the revelations about the Chequers seminar on Germany showed that even at the highest level at which in modern Britain the political and intellectual worlds can interact (and quite evidently not all of the seminar was conducted at that level) the subject of Germany is peculiarly beset by illusions.

Easter, 1990, was the first time that the greatest Christian festival could be openly celebrated in Romania for forty years. The coincidence of the Orthodox and Western calendars gave especial significance to the celebrations of the Easter Vigil in both Patriarchal and Catholic cathedrals in Bucharest and in churches throughout the capital and elsewhere. Romanian television celebrated the feast as it had Christmas, treating viewers to the incongruous sight of the presenters, all familiar faces from the past, surrounded by Easter eggs, intoning throughout the weekend, even before the weather forecast: ‘Hristos invitat’ (Christ is risen).

Although the joy of the crowds of worshippers able to process freely for the first time at midnight was common to all denominations, disputes about the relationship between Church and State under the Communist regime bedevilled the atmosphere. Shortly before Easter, more than forty leading intellectuals issued a petition calling upon the Patriarch Teoctist to abstain from celebrating the Easter liturgy. Teoctist had already abdicated once before in January after fierce criticisms of his compliant behaviour under Ceausescu and most particularly for his public congratulations to the Conducator for his stern measures to repress the ‘hooligans’ in Timiscara before Christmas. Teoctist’s abdication had placed the Orthodox Church in a dilemma, since his natural successor, the Metropolitan Antonius of Sibiu, had distinguished himself still more vigorously than the Patriarch when it came to rendering unto Ceausescu. For instance, Antonius was an indefatigable traveller to the West always ready to deny that the programme of ‘systemization’ had led to the demolition of churches and monasteries, insisting it had affected only ‘redundant’ buildings, of which there were apparently at least twenty-four, including some of the most ancient, in Bucharest—all concentrated in the area designated as the new Civic Centre containing Ceausescu’s Palace of the People.

There are many reasons why Remembrance Day has to be taken seriously, especially by those among us who are wholly opposed to war. If we feel that we cannot join in the play as it is staged, we need to appreciate why others do, and why departures from the script—white poppies, public figures wearing duffel-coats—may seem to them like a desecration.

One reason is that Remembrance Day is not simply an occasion for private grief. It is a ritual enactment of our national story about peace—how it was won at immense cost by a whole generation of young men in 1914-18; how it was snatched from the jaws of defeat in 1940 by the bravery of the few. It recalls the sacrifice of two generations of youth who gave their lives so that we could live in safety, especially the women and children. It is meant to recall the story of our salvation as a people, in the sense of our national liberation from tyranny and fear. It is meant to acknowledge the sacrifices that ensured it. It gives meaning to the bloodshed. Remembrance makes private grief tolerable by connecting it with national salvation.

If war itself usually creates strong feelings of solidarity, the aftermath of wars is always a time of doubt and division. The Remembrance ceremony has been part of the apparatus for coping with this. After the Great War the nation was seriously divided, especially as between those who had experienced life in the trenches and those who had not.