EU integration pushed on schoolchildren through 'invented' history lessons, warns academic
FURTHER European Union integration is being promoted to schoolchildren through skewed versions of history, one of Britain's leading historians has warned.
Professor David Abulafia, a Cambridge University don, described how school textbooks are favouring a misleading idea of citizenships to create a sense of historical European unity.
He said the push for EU integration was already prominent in Germany and France - but is now staring to "creep in" to Britain.
He told The Telegraph: "There is a soft push to create a sense of European citizenship which is based on frankly an invented common history because the history of Europe is to a large extent the history of division, not the history of unity.
"When it has been the history of unity, as we’ve seen under Napoleon and Hitler or under the Soviets in Eastern Europe, it has gone disastrously wrong. It is a papering over the discordant elements in European history to create this idealised event."
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There is a soft push to create a sense of European citizenship which is based on frankly an invented common history
Professor Abulafia has recently published an essay, to coincide with the launch of a campaign from 30 historians urging a dramatic rethinking of Britain's relationship within the EU, in which he argued that an "artificial notion of Europe distracts from the reality of the situation".
He also raised fears that children are being misled into believing that “European citizenship trumps national allegiance”.
"We are told that we are all members of a European ‘demos’, or people, yet there is little to no historical evidence that such a ‘demos’ actually exists or has ever done so," he wrote.
Other historians have previously compared attempts to achieve European unity to the tyranny of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Among the famous faces to sign up to the Historians for Britain campaign include TV historian David Starkey, Cambridge University dons Prof Robert Tombs and Richard Rex, and William Gladstone biographer Prof Richard Shannon.
Matthew Elliott, chief executive of Business for Britain – the campaign affiliated with Historians for Britain – said the idea of a single European identity was both “pervasive and dangerous”.
He told The Telegraph: "The EU’s official motto is 'United in diversity' – a laudable philosophy. Unfortunately, many of the EU’s policies seem intent on crushing that diversity, striving to replace Europe’s many historic identities with a single, artificial ‘European’ culture.”
Ukip deputy leader Paul Nuttall said: "The European Commission's multibillion-euro propaganda operation, helped by the thousands of British academics in the UK who are on the EU payroll through grants and academic chairs, have succeeded in getting propaganda-filled books into British schools.
"These EU cheerleaders are using lies about a non-existent 'common European culture' and distortions of the history of Europe to promote their project of 'a country called Europe'.
"This is an abuse of power by the European Union. The Brussels elite now feel they have the right to override our own national history and the history of the many nations across the Continent with a manufactured history that pretends all events lead inevitably to a United States of Europe."
