Last month I visited Antwerp. I left my house early in the morning, and took a taxi to St Pancras station, to catch the train to Brussels. After passing through the automatic ticket barrier and the security check, where my bag and coat were scanned, I queued to “exit” the United Kingdom by showing my passport to an employee of the UK Border Agency. Immediately afterwards, I queued to “enter” France, showing my passport once again, to be stamped by an employee of the French Direction centrale de la police aux frontières. Although my train was going to Belgium, it passes through France first, so my entry into the EU was controlled by the French border force. Since France is a member of the Schengen Area, I was able to travel from France to Belgium without further identity checks. It is a curious fact that entry into the Eurostar departure lounge at St Pancras station in London requires the permission of the French government. Unfortunately, the quality and the price of the coffee available remains decidedly mainstream British.
A few days later, I travelled to Co Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. I left my house early in the morning and took a train to Gatwick airport, to catch a flight to Belfast. After passing through the automatic ticket barrier and the security check, where my bag and coat were scanned, I treated myself to another over-priced and bland coffee, before heading to the gate. My ticket was checked again, however I was not asked to show any form of ID before I boarded the plane. After landing, I picked up a hire car and drove for just over an hour to Derry, after which the A2 becomes the N13 as I crossed the otherwise unmarked border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. For the second time in a week, I had exited the United Kingdom and entered the European Union, but in this case, I had not been asked to show my passport to anyone. Brexit has been enormously disruptive to life in Britain, but crossing the land border between the UK and the EU remains wholly unnoteworthy.
Antwerp was once the preeminent financial and commercial centre in Europe. In the sixteenth century, the Southern Netherlands (what is now Belgium) saw rapid growth of urban areas built around manufacturing industries, such as cloth (in particular, wool and linen), tapestries, sugar refining, and metal working. These industries were supported and supplied by the local port of Antwerp, which dominated the “rich trades” in textiles, spices, sugar, and metal. Up the coast, in the Northern Netherlands, ports such as Amsterdam were more focused on lower margin bulk goods (grain and timber) and herring fishing. Antwerp was also a centre of artistic production and exchange, which Albrecht Dürer had visited in 1520, and where Pieter Bruegel was based from 1555.
During this time, this territory was part of the Habsburg empire, Charles V having inherited the Netherlands when he became Duke of Burgundy in 1506. Later, he inherited Austria, Spain, and considerable lands in Italy too. Charles was born in Ghent and although he spent much of his adult life in Spain, he understood and had some sympathy for the Netherlanders, an affinity that his son, Philip II, lacked. When the states of the Netherlands revolted against Habsburg rule in 1572, Philip sent Spanish troops to restore his control, but he lacked the funds to pay them after his German bankers called in their loans. In November 1576, his unpaid troops went on a rampage in Antwerp, killing and raping the local citizens. The “Spanish Fury” increased both fear and resentment of the Habsburg empire, and in the following years many residents fled the city to the north, taking their skills and resources with them – Frans Hals and his family were one famous example – and over the next decades Amsterdam emerged as Europe’s premier trading port. When the Peace of Muster (1648) finally brought an end to a long succession of European wars, the disruption created by the Habsburg armies left the Netherlands broken into two, and the city of Antwerp entered a two-hundred-year period of stagnation.
Ireland is another country with a long and unhappy history of civilian massacres by foreign troops operating on behalf of an imperial power, which is now divided into separate nations that were characterised, historically at least, by their contrasting religious affiliations. In the past, the major cause of disruption in Ireland was British colonialism, although today, the chief sources of chaos are the Unionist political parties. Despite the majority in Northern Ireland voting to remain in the EU, the Unionist parties have been vocal champions of Brexit. I assume that this is because they believed (foolishly and falsely) that Brexit would cement the place of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom in perpetuity. In practice, the opposite has happened: establishing a hard border between the UK and the EU is not possible without destroying the economy on both sides of the border. Therefore, the UK and the EU have negotiated a deal that allows goods and people to move across the land border in Ireland as they always have done, but at the same time imposing checks and documentation on goods moving between the islands of Britain and Ireland. The customs frontier now runs down the Irish Sea.
What this means in substance – although neither side chooses to say that this is so – is that Northern Ireland is in the UK politically but in the EU economically. Over the medium term, the only way that this anomaly can sensibly be resolved is for the politics to follow the economics, since the alternate path is a road to ruin. The Unionists have belatedly discovered the folly of their earlier enthusiasm. To be fair to the Unionists, the then British Prime Minister lied to them about the deal that the UK would strike with the EU, to secure their support for him at Westminster. That said, since this Prime Minister was famous for his dishonesty, the Unionists should not now be surprised to discover that they were double-crossed. After two years of prevarication, they have at last given their agreement to a revised text that describes the new customs arrangements, a text that has changed nothing of substance in the original treaty. Whereas Philip II was willing to destroy the commercial centre of Antwerp to secure his political authority over half of the Netherlands, four-hundred-and-fifty years later, the Unionists have acceded (implicitly) to the authority of the EU over economic matters, to protect the commercial interests of their electors in Belfast. In Europe, we call this progress.
En route to Antwerp I stopped in Brussels and headed to the Wiels Gallery to see an exhibition by the Colombian artist, Oscar Murillo. The show included a group of oil paintings: six panels, each 2.8m long and 2.2m high, bolted together to form a crescent shape, and supported at the back by a temporary scaffold. This large and very impressive work is part of a long-term project, started in 2013, in which Murillo and his collaborators travel to schools around the world, fixing square pieces of canvas to desks in classrooms, and stipulating that they should remain in place for at least six months. Children aged 10 to 16 are invited to make marks on the canvas: letters, words, pictures, or scribbles. The canvas is then sent back to Murillo, and he stitches some of the pieces together to form much larger canvases, on which he paints.
The work on show in Brussels is called Disrupted Frequencies, and the composite canvas is covered by large gestural marks, in varying shades of blue, evoking the tidal waves of the sea, washing across the gallery. The physical form of the work is both disrupted (canvas rent apart) and unified (canvas sewn together), as fragments from around the world are made into a new whole. The overpainting is likewise equivocal: aggressive and violent, like a stormy ocean, but at the same time mark-making that is suggestive of continuity and integration. Murillo has spoken of the importance of friction in his work, to emphasise variety but also to signal the danger of cliché. He draws attention to distance and difference, at the same time as producing work that is integrated. There is harmony here, albeit a polyphonic harmony.
The global trade that once passed though Antwerp and Amsterdam – spices from the east, timber from the north, sugar from the west, cloth and artworks sent to the south – has continued to grow in scale and variety. The disruption of the Spanish Fury was temporary, a minor blip that did not make much difference overall to half-millennium of commercial activity. Brexit will also, no doubt, be of little long-term significance since the movement of people and ideas will continue, as global travel and intellectual exchange expands and deepens. Notwithstanding the irritations of passport control and bad coffee, Oscar Murillo’s work reassured me that the tidal flows of the sea will not be stopped, and the disruptions of politics are no match for the unifying appeal of art.