Recent books discussed in this article include Richard Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History (London: St. Martin’s Press and New York: Macmillan, 2000), 217 pp., Hb. ISBN 0 312 23523 2; Thomas Gallant, Modern Greece (London: Arnold, 2001), 320 pp., Pb. ISBN 0 340 76337 X; Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 272 pp., Pb. ISBN 0 691 08902; Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 352 pp., Pb. ISBN 0 691 05842 3; Robert Shannan Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 256 pp., Hb. ISBN 1 860 64641 7.

I woke up with this marble head in my hands;
it exhausts my elbows and I don’t know where to put it down.
It was falling into the dream as I was coming out of the dream
so our life became one and it will be very difficult
for it to disunite again.
George Seferis, “Mythistorima,” pt. 3.1

Modern Greece, the burden of the past and national consolidation

The poet, George Seferis (1900-1971), like many other modern Greek writers before and after him, was preoccupied with the idea--and burden--of the so-called ‘Hellenic Ideal’; that is, the belief that the modern Greeks are the direct successors to, and inheritors and guardians of, Greek classical tradition.2 The modern nation’s claim to be heir to the Athenian ancients posed vexing problems, which Seferis portrayed as akin to the weight of the disembodied head of a classical statue, the burden of which he found unbearable, but which he nevertheless could not let go. He wrote also of the insupportable heft of the dead past, a past which threatened to drag him down: “These stones sinking into time, how far will they drag me with them? . . . /I see the trees breathing the black serenity of the dead/and then the smiles, so static, of the statues.”3 Even at the moment of its birth--as the state, to use Seferis’ metaphor, “woke up”--Greece found itself already saturated with, even deadened by, the dream of the past and the weight of its own ancient history. Thus, the life of modern Greece is lived, particularly at the level of national discourse, as a palimpsest of imagined past and actual present, and it is, indeed, “very difficult” to untangle and “disunite” the one from the other.

The invocation of an ancient past--be it mythic or historical--in the discursive and political consolidation of modern nation-states is not, of course, unique to Greece. Israel has the Abrahamic covenant; Persian nationalists the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian past; Albanians the mythic tales of Scanderbeg. These are but a few examples among many. The case of Greece, however, is unique, both in the extent to which its own claims of national continuity with an ancient past are accepted by the rest of the world and in the degree to which the entirety of its modern history and culture have been suffused with the sense of the ongoing, living presence of the ancient past. Greece’s brief modern history has been shaped entirely by the socially-constructed belief that it enjoys an unbroken link with the classical past and its contemporary nationalist proponents understand Greece to be nothing less than the font of Western civilization as a whole. Arguably, it is Greece which, more than any other modern nation-state, is understood to be the resurrected form of an ancient polity, rather than a wholly new construct.

This notion is expressed in what, in Bakhtinian terms, would be called a ‘chronotope’4 --an intersection of spatial and chronological meaning. Ancient Greece, in modern Greek nationalist discourse, is both spatial and temporal; modern Greece is both a place on the map and a site on the timeline. That is to say, to speak of ‘Ancient Greece’ is not merely to speak of an historical moment--it is also a way, in the here and now, to discuss the modern state and, particularly, to present it as the unbroken successor to classical tradition. Greece, by definition, is always ‘ancient.’ The brochures of the Greek national tourist board, for instance, invite one not to visit so much a place, but a time: “Come visit an ancient world,” they trumpet, “Come back to the past.” “The past lives in Greece.” This mode of expression, of course, has generated much gain for Greece: the state likely would not have been founded without the assistance of European outsiders who bought into the Hellenic Ideal, the current tourism-based economy of the country depends upon it, and even the fact that Greece, an EU country, has never been urged to adopt the Latin alphabet of the other European nations is due, in part, to the Greek alphabet’s special status as the supposedly enshrining form of the Periklean past.5

Robert Shannan Peckham’s new book, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece, attempts the difficult task of tracing the multifarious ways in which Greece’s classical past and modern present have become so closely woven together over the past three centuries. Peckham’s methodology is fundamentally twofold: on the one hand, he seeks to probe the relationship between place and “geographical imagination”6 in the process of nation formation; and, on the other, he is particularly attentive to “the tension between a local consciousness, or [in Greek] topikismos, and larger administrative structures promoted by the nation-state.”7 In other words, Peckham is interested both in what appears to be a process of homogenization and consolidation, and in a potentially countervailing process of fragmentation, localization and disintegration.

The incipient tension between these two and the multiple ways in which that tension has been both manifested and reconciled in the modern Greek context is the core interest of National Histories, Natural States. Peckham finds a potent image with which to convey this doubly-textured problematic in George Theotokas’ Free Spirit. Here, Theotokas, a Constantinopolitan Greek who served as legal advisor to Greece at Lausanne in 1923 and who helped craft the subsequent treaty on the Greco-Turkish population exchanges, writes of the difference between the way countries appear on maps and the way they appear, in all their minute and infinite internal difference, from the vantage-point of an airplane:

When after a journey we unfold a map of Europe, we relive easily the feeling of deep change that we experienced crossing the borders: Italy is blue, France red, Britain yellow, Germany green. Each country is separated from its neighbours, its particular shape distinguished by its artless outline. However, when we look at this map through a microscope we see that the differentiation is endless. Within each country of Europe there are many small countries each with its distinct personality which differs clearly from that of its neighbour.8

National Histories, Natural States is as much a work of literary criticism and theory as it is a history and Peckham demonstrates effectively the dramatic extent to which Greece’s national history has been shaped by its literature, particularly during the nineteenth century. Here, again, Greece is simultaneously characteristic of an array of modern nation-states and noteworthy in the extent to which, in its case, mechanisms of nationalism--which are typical of many countries, Eastern and Western--have been developed and elaborated.

One of the strongest parts of Peckham’s book deals with the relationship between folklore--which is, by definition, a “celebrat[ion of] the local”--and the production of a national history. Folklore (laographia) as a discipline was fathered in Greece by Nikolaos Politis, a German-trained scholar who, following the approach of Friedrich Max Müller, had as one of his main aims to demonstrate that regional dialects were “survivals from the nation’s uncorrupted prehistory.”9 The conviction that the Greek countryside preserved pockets of uncontaminated, unbroken classicism led, as Peckham recounts, to a literary preoccupation with rural landscapes and to the creation of a national literature which, paradoxically, was based both upon regional difference and upon the need to do away with it. Observing that such “ambivalence informs the nation-building project itself,”10 Peckham provides, in the case of the literary tension between regionalism and nationalism, a very good anatomy of that ambivalence at work in the modern Greek instance.

The tensions of nationalism, good and evil

“On the one hand, silence, denial, repudiation; on the other, the elaboration of ceremonies, parades, and myths. Destroyed, abandoned, or lost communities on the one side; constructed, reinforced, or reshaped communities on the other.”11 So writes Mark Mazower of Greece in the post-war period in his editor’s introduction to After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960.

These words, however, would serve just as well to describe the mechanisms and products of nationalism as a whole in the modern era and aptly describe another facet of its double-edged nature. In the past ten years, nationalism, particularly in its so-called ‘ethnic’ (as opposed to ‘civic’) form,12 has been near universally condemned: an ever-growing body of scholarship has exposed its premises to be lies, its claims to be little more than thinly-veiled chauvinism and its outcomes to be, oftentimes, nothing short of murderous.

One painfully well-rehearsed outcome of nationalism during the past half-century--the destruction, abandonment and loss of various communities--has been copiously documented. Less attention, however, has been given to the other side of the equation: the power of nationalism to serve, in Mazower’s words, as a basis for the construction and reinforcement of other groups. The little that has been written about these aspects of nationalism’s workings has seen them as no less devilish: the nationalist construction, consolidation and redefinition of some communities has been understood as coming, inevitably, at the expense of others that are less fortunate and powerful. The tension between nationalism’s simultaneously divisive and consolidating tendencies, in which Peckham is so interested, is described by most theorists as one that invariably leads to violence, trauma and exclusion.

In such a context, the recent appearance of a handful of works that cast a less jaundiced eye upon nationalism is a bit of a surprise and the publication of one that actually claims to defend it is a virtual shock.13 Yet, Gregory Jusdanis’ The Necessary Nation, published last spring by Princeton University Press, makes precisely such a claim and, while it is clear that the book is intentionally provocative, it is not gratuitously so: the work is carefully documented, well considered and balanced, even as it makes its unorthodox (and, indeed, politically incorrect) point of view clear.

The close tie between literature and the construction of national culture has, in the case of Greece, been fairly amply documented, perhaps most capably and systematically in Jusdanis’ 1991 publication, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature.14 Jusdanis’ new book, The Necessary Nation, stands alongside Peckham’s National Histories, Natural States as the start of what one hopes might be a wave of new works of historiography and literary criticism recognizing the unique contribution that the case of modern Greece can make to our understanding of the complexities and ambivalences of nationalism.

The Necessary Nation, from the outset, is explicit in stating its view:

[The] vilification of nationalism is shortsighted, to say the least. That most of the world’s nationalist struggles resounded with the call for freedom from foreign rule rather than for freedom of speech, women’s rights, or protection for minorities is no reason to denounce the whole enterprise. Was it not noble to end colonial domination, establish a republic, and set up a society of citizens? Those critics who identify the nation with oppression forget that nationalism has inspired people over the past two centuries to fight collectively against the illegitimacy of foreign occupation.15

One of the bases for Jusdanis’ claim is his rejection of the dual civic/ethnic model of nationalism or, at least, of the model’s implication that there is one sort of nationalism that is ‘good’ and another that is ‘bad’; that “[t]here is one which tends to construct a state or a community and the one which tends to subjugate, to destroy; the one which refers to right and the one which refers to might.”16 This dichotomized view, as Jusdanis points out, is hopelessly naive.17 No polity, Jusdanis argues, even the most civic-oriented, has not, in some sense, been founded at the expense of other peoples. His view, instead, is that of Tom Nairn, who wrote that nationalism is always “morally, politically, humanly ambiguous.”18

Having cleared a centre ground in which nationalism, in all its forms, is understood as an ambiguous force that can work for either good or ill--and often for both at the same time--Jusdanis lays the foundations for his argument that, despite recent negative historiographic perceptions, nationalism can act as a powerful catalyst for modernization and as the protector of cultural identity.

The Necessary Nation uses as one of its pivotal case-studies Greece, a country that both is and is not Balkan, that both is and is not ‘really’ part of the European West19 and that has gone from being, over the course of the twentieth century, one of Europe’s most ethnically and culturally heterogeneous nations to being, perhaps, its most homogeneous one. The two most critical events in this developmental trajectory were the population exchanges of 1923, agreed to under a convention following the Treaty of Lausanne, and the extermination of virtually all of Greece’s Jewish population in the final years of the Second World War, during which Greece was under joint Italian and German occupation.

The first of these two events, the population exchanges that followed the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, has been well chronicled from the standpoint of ethnic nationalism. In many ways, Lausanne may be regarded as the consummate triumph of the post-World War I theory that different ‘ethnic’ groups ought to occupy discrete and nationally-demarcated geographic territories. In the case of Lausanne, the definitive marker of ethnic identity was religion: Greek Orthodox residents of Turkey, despite their ancient presence in Turkish-speaking lands, their use of the Turkish language and, in some instances, their self-identification as Turks, were, by the terms of the treaty, regarded as essentially ‘Greek.’ Similarly, Muslims resident in Greece, particularly those of Crete, who spoke Greek and were almost culturally indistinguishable from their Greek Orthodox neighbors, were defined as essentially ‘Turkish.’ (Most of Crete’s Muslims were, in fact, the descendants of Greek Orthodox Christians who had converted en masse to Islam in the seventeenth century, following the Ottoman conquest of the island.) Under the terms of the convention, some 1,100,000 refugees left Turkey for Greece, while some 380,000 Muslims were forced to leave Greece for Turkey.20

The population exchanges of 1923 would seem to provide one clear-cut example of ethnic nationalism at work and of its dramatic impact in shaping Greece as an ethnically homogeneous nation. On the surface-- from the perspective of Theotokas’ conjectural map, for instance--the exchanges radically reduced the heterogeneity of the populations of both Greece and Turkey. But from the perspective of Theotokas’ airplane, the exchanges had, at the local level, the contrary effect of introducing yet more microscopic regional complexity and difference on the ground, within the borders of the two countries. Greece’s urban areas, for instance, had to accommodate the arrival of hundreds of thousands of non-Greek speakers who brought with them the customs of Anatolia. What appears to be a clearcut example of nationalism’s homogenizing tendencies at work is, in light of Peckham’s work, not so clear after all.

The case of the extermination of Greece’s Jews during the Nazi occupation is a still more complicated instantiation of the mechanisms of nationalism. While the events of 1923 and their aftermath have been fairly thoroughly digested by scholars of Greece,21 the experience of Greece’s Jewish community as a whole has yet to receive extensive sustained attention. The vast bulk of Greece’s Jews had been incorporated into the state only after 1912, following the Greek national army’s conquest of the city of Salonica, which only very narrowly missed passing not into Greek, but Bulgarian, hands.22 During 1913, the northwestern city of Ioannina and its surrounding regions also became part of Greece, as did the island of Crete. These additions increased Greece’s Jewish population tenfold: at the end of the nineteenth century, it stood at around 12,000; at the end of the 1912-1913 Balkan War, Greece was home to at least 100,000 Jews.23

The decline of Greece’s Jewish population some thirty years later was more abrupt and precipitous, and caused by factors less benign than national expansion and the redrawing of the Greek map. In Greece, the Nazi exterminations of Jews were virtually comprehensive. In Salonica, for example, there were 56,000 Jews in 1943. In 1945, the next year for which population figures are available, there were 1,950.24 Other regions of Greece saw still more dramatic declines and, whereas in other European countries there has been some gradual rebuilding of Jewish communities in the postwar era, in Greece the Jewish communities have gone on dwindling to the point that today there are estimated to be less than 5,000 Jews in the entire country, most of whom are highly secularized and/or assimilated.

While catalyzed and most dramatically first effected by the Holocaust, this ongoing process has been the product of the increasing consolidation of nationalism, both in a Greek form, which understands Greece to be a fundamentally Orthodox Christian country, and in a modernist Zionist form, which understands all Jews to be, first and foremost, national citizens of Israel--a position with which European countries (Greece is notable among them) found it most convenient to concur in the 1950s.25

The question of how Greece’s Jews understood themselves as a community in the immediate aftermath of World War II is one of the many topics touched upon in After the War Was Over, the collection edited by Mark Mazower referred to above. One contributor, Bea Lewkowicz, explicitly addresses the conundrum of being both Greek and Jewish during this time, in a paper entitled, “‘After the War We Were All Together’: Jewish Memories of Postwar Thessaloniki.” However, the majority of the many conflictual identities that characterized the Greek nation in the 1940s and 1950s were political, as is indicated by other contributions also looking at Greece’s national and social reconstruction at that time.

An essay by Polymeris Voglis, “Between Negation and Self-Negation: Political Prisoners in Greece, 1945-1950,” traces the emergence of the social category of the political prisoner and shows how that category was itself subdivided between those prisoners who signed declarations of repentance and those who refused to do so and received a sentence of death. Other contributions show the countless other rifts that divided the nation after the war: traitors and collaborators versus resisters; communists versus royalists; Slavic-speakers versus ‘true’ Greeks. Together, all of these essays suggest that the contours of nationalism and the divisions in Greek society in the modern period are not sufficiently nuanced if described only in the language of ethnicity and race. Different political visions also divided Greece into a land of many sub-nations and the tension Peckham, following Theotokas, ascribes to Greece’s geography emerges as being applicable to its body politic as well.

Greek historiography as nationalist enterprise

If both the premises of Greek nationalism and the modern history of Greece are undercut by tension and ambivalence, so too is its historiography. Modern Greek historiography during the twentieth century has been coloured by the tense interplay between national sentiments and historical narratives. The expectation that scholars of Greece will take a ‘sympathetic’ view of the country, its political policies and its history is one that endures to the present day. This situation arises from the fact that today, as in the past, the vast majority of academic positions earmarked specifically for scholars of modern Greece are funded, at least in part, by ‘Greek money’--that is, by foundations based in Greece, by charitable contributions made by members of the Greek diaspora community and, on occasion, by religious organizations linked to the Greek Orthodox Church.

One of the earliest self-conscious meditations on modern Greek historiography, particularly on its troubled relationship to the Greek nationalist agenda, was Richard Clogg’s 1986 publication, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair. Clogg’s meticulously--indeed, obsessively--documented account traces the unfortunate circumstances that arose when Arnold Toynbee took up the Koraes chair at the University of London’s King’s College.26 It is a topic so dear to Clogg’s heart that he returns to it in his new collection, Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History, the first third of which covers Toynbee-related matters that will be familiar to those who have read Clogg’s earlier work.

The chair, named for the Greek doctor, author, journalist and philologist, Adamantios Korais (1748-1833), was established largely through the active assistance of Eleftherios Venizelos, the most famous Greek statesman of the early twentieth century, and there was a clear expectation that the chairholder would, in disseminating and propagating knowledge of Greek history and culture, also present a philhellenic view of Greece and implicitly support Greece in its desired political trajectory. That trajectory was, for most of the nineteenth century, based upon the ‘Great Idea’ (megali idea), an ambitious expansionist program that called for the conceptual, if not territorial, reconstruction of the Byzantine Empire.27

Toynbee, however, as Clogg amply demonstrates, was perhaps not the wisest choice for the job. For while his academic knowledge of Greece was vast and, as the later development of the discipline has shown, his status as a historian beyond reproach, his credentials as a philhellene were, unbeknownst to those who awarded him the position, of a more dubious sort. Some ten years earlier, Toynbee had spent a year on his version of the Grand Tour, wandering about Greece and being simultaneously astonished by the beauty of its countryside and disgusted by what he viewed as the indolence, pretentiousness and parasitical nature of its inhabitants. Toynbee’s views on these matters were committed to paper in the copious letters he wrote to his mother back home in England and it is perhaps because of them that he himself had commented, prior to pursuing the post at King’s, that the chair might best be held by “more of an active Philhellene” than he.28

Upon reading what Clogg turned up in Toynbee’s letters, this sentiment seems a drastic understatement. Toynbee had written, variously, of the Greeks’ poor personal hygiene, of their ignorance and of their degeneracy. He stated that the Greeks were the “hangers-on of Europe, and come to us for their models in everything--and their best is always a second rate imitation of our second best.” He ranted about Greek laziness, describing the typical Greek village scene as one with “all the men in a village sitting in front of the café doing nothing.” Of the Cretans and their periodic agitations for liberation from Ottoman rule, he wrote: “Why not hang them? Their existence is utterly pointless.” Greek men were “dirty” and “unshaven,” their nation “a dago country” full of rude and petty ignoramuses. Of the “dago” as a racial type, Toynbee declaimed: “Unlike the barbarian, he is a parasite--he can grow only under the shadow of a vigorous civilisation--his nature is unsuccessful imitation.”29

Needless to say, Toynbee’s Greek and philhellenic benefactors knew nothing of these private writings. His more public stance, however, also grew increasingly critical. What brought about his ultimate downfall as holder of the Koraes Chair was his 1922 publication of The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations,30 which gave his (largely negative) observations on the Greek campaigns in Asia Minor, condemned Greek attitudes toward Muslim subjects and articulated support for the Turkish nationalist cause. An index of the degree to which Toynbee had emerged as a philoturk, rather than philhellene, is the fact that upon his “involuntary resignation” from the Koraes Chair in 1924, he was promptly contacted by the Turkish ambassador in London and offered a chair at the University of Istanbul.31

The story of Toynbee’s imbroglio is indeed a colourful one and Clogg tells it well. Yet, by today’s standards, one scarcely need be a Greek nationalist to see Toynbee as a less than ideal candidate for a position designed to promulgate positive knowledge of Greek culture and history. Indeed, his observations today seem less politically objectionable than morally so: his vocabulary, his blanket generalizations and his superior Western stance--all seem the product less of a political position than of bigotry. Yet, within the context of the early twentieth-century British academy, such discursive modes were not problematic in and of themselves. After all, this was the heyday of British Empire, which had as its very bedrock the utter certitude of Western superiority. Rather, what was problematic in Toynbee’s case was that his ideas attached themselves to Greeks.

Not only did Toynbee’s manifest distaste for the Greeks undercut the aims behind the establishment of the Koraes chair, it also reflected the ambivalence felt not just by many British about the Greeks, but also by many Greeks about the British--an ambivalence that had its roots in the uncomfortably close relationship between the two countries both during the Greek War of Independence and throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, it is unlikely that the Greek state would ever have come into existence had it not been for the timely intervention of British philhellenes. (Those interested in the later phases of the longstanding Greek/British relationship will find four chapters in Anglo-Greek Attitudes devoted to the topic.) British assistance, however, rapidly became British intervention and the Greeks, while initially grateful for support in their battle against the Ottomans, would soon grow to chafe at the degree of British control maintained over their internal affairs for much of the modern period.

Fitting the ‘nation’ into the nation

During the first phases of the War of Independence, which broke out in the spring of 1821, it looked highly unlikely that the Greeks would be successful or that their cause would garner Great Power support, largely because the war as a whole was in violation of the principles articulated-- most strongly by Metternich--at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15). Along with other European representatives, Metternich had been the author of the policy that maintained that a weak Ottoman Empire (the so-called ‘Sick Man of Europe’) was better than no Ottoman Empire at all.

But while European ambitions supported the propagation of an easily- controllable Ottoman state, Greek ambitions far surpassed the desire to form an independent nation. The new Greece with which the revolutionaries were faced in the early 1830s bore little resemblance to what came to mind when they thought of ‘Hellas.’ To them, Greece’s destiny was to encompass almost all of the lands once held by Byzantium.32 Such plans were simultaneously symbolic and literal, and found their instantiation in the ‘Great Idea,’ which rested upon the premise that ‘Greek lands’ stretched from the Danube, in the west, to Anatolia, in the east.

Many Greek intellectuals of the nineteenth century were ardent supporters of this expansionist vision. Yannis Psiharis, for in

1929), wrote:

For a nation to become a nation, it needs two things: to expand its borders and to produce its own literature. . . . It must expand not only its physical borders but also its intellectual ones. It is for those borders that I now fight.33

The powers of Europe (and, again, particularly Metternich) were well aware, however, of the potentially dangerous implications of the Hellenic vision upon which the megali idea rested. In 1829, Metternich had asked the admonitory question:

What do we mean by the Greeks? Do we mean a people, a country, or a religion? If either of the first two, where are the dynastic and geographical boundaries? If the third, then upwards of fifty million men are Greeks: the Austrian Empire alone embraces five million of them. . . . The Emperor, our August Master, will never consent that the Greeks, his subjects, should consider themselves at the same time to be citizens of the new Greece. . . . Long experience has taught us to realize that in racial denominations there may lie elements of trouble between empires and bones of contention between people and governments. And what a powerful and ever hostile weapon such denominations become in the hands of those who overthrow, or seek to overthrow, the existing order!34

The fundamental conservatism of Metternich’s position should not blind us to the fact that his observations also point to one of the most basic and ongoing difficulties with the premises of modern-day nationalism: that not only should there be overlap between specific territories and the ‘nations,’ ‘ethnicities,’ or religious groups that inhabit them, but that there might also be peoples who, while not resident in a specific nation, could nevertheless claim membership in it. This is what is referred to, in contemporary parlance, as ‘transnationalism.’

Here is yet another of the paradoxes of nationalism: by definition, its aims must always outdistance its grasp. The moment of nationalism’s victory--the creation of a nation-state that matches ethnos to land--also marks its relinquishment of a larger, more grandiose vision. Prior to the creation of Greece in the 1830s, for instance, Greek nationalists envisioned ‘Hellas’ as a great sweeping entity, stretching from West to East, bridging the divide between Europe and Asia. After the new Greek kingdom came into being, however, Greek nationalists struggled, unsuccessfully, to reconcile themselves to a tiny nation that ‘left out’ much of what they considered ‘truly’ Greek. Only with the stunning Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897 did Greek nationalism begin to temper its rhetoric so as to fit the nation’s actual borders. Transnationalism--which maintains that the nation can somehow accommodate and include peoples who do not reside within its borders--is the ongoing response to the fact that, with the creation of the nation-state, the aspirations of nationalism become, of necessity, dramatically reduced.

Too many ethnicities, too few nations

The countless subtle paradoxes embedded in the nationalist project are easily occluded by its most disturbing and dominant contradiction--its simultaneous power to liberate and to oppress. And if the nineteenth century, in both its history and historiography, focused upon the former, in the twentieth and beyond attention has switched to the latter. As Michael Ignatieff wrote in Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, the “repressed has returned, and its name is nationalism.”35 Here, as Ignatieff explains, the culprit is specifically ethnic nationalism for, while civic nationalism has the power to unify diverse peoples under one political umbrella, ethnic nationalism, he cautions, may briefly liberate whatever group successfully affixes itself to it, but will ultimately do so only at the expense of less successful others. By now, of course, this is the more or less established position amongst scholars of nationalism. More apt, though, is Jusdanis’ trenchant observation that

[t]he future [of ethnic nationalism] portends instability because of a sobering truth: there are many fewer states than ethnic groups. Even though not all groups opt for political independence, statehood for all who desire it could be achieved only through more violence. Nationalism and its exalted dream of popular sovereignty can lead to separatism ad absurdum.36

The modern Greek nation, as Peckham, Mazower and Jusdanis show us, also contains within itself more different ‘nations’ than may be adequately--or at least comfortably--accommodated by it. In addition to the tensions of political affiliation, localism versus regionalism and macro- versus micro-histories, even the bedrock premise of contemporary Greek nationalist discourse--the Hellenic Ideal--was unable to triumph without conflict, debate and difficulty. While the classical era has ultimately won out as the illo tempus 37 to which the modern state may turn to find justification and definition for its existence, the Greek national narrative has long struggled to find a place for the other historical eras of its past.

The development of a specifically ‘modern’ Greek historiography first took place in Great Britain and Toynbee was one of the initial cadre of British scholars to focus upon the new Greek state. Along with Toynbee were others, such as William Miller,38 R. S. Dawkins,39 A. W. Gomme,40 A. J. B. Wace,41 F. W. Hasluck,42 J. C. Lawson43 and R. A. H. Bickford-Smith.44 Most of them had been considered, along with Toynbee, for possible appointment to the King’s College chair. All worked on classical Greece as well as the Byzantine and modern periods.

These first historiographers of modern Greece were essentially and by definition philhellenes. They had come to the study of modern Greece via the classics and most of them were largely interested in contemporary Greece because they hoped to find, in its customs and mores, ongoing lived traces of the classical past. This was an approach that found corroboration in the ‘survivals’ theory popularized by nineteenth-century anthropologists and folklorists. Traveller-historians of the period wandered the Greek countryside searching for the vestiges of classical tradition. Religious practices that seemed anomalous were credited as ‘pagan survivals’ of a pre-Christian age, the physiognomy of the Greeks compared to that of classical statues and the Greek language scoured for archaic grammatical forms and diction.

Yet, the classical period was only one of the models available for the creation of a modern national narrative. A potent alternative was provided by the Byzantine period and many early Greek nationalists argued that it was Christian Byzantium, rather than pagan Hellas, that was the most appropriate touchstone for the new nation. The conflict between the symbolism of the classical past and that of the Byzantine period resulted in a situation in which the roots of two opposed Greek identities emerged, one as ‘Hellenic’ that emphasized western values that derived from antiquity and that de- emphasized the importance of Orthodoxy, and the other as ‘Romioi,’ Roman, that emphasized the oriental characteristics and traced its roots to the Orthodox Byzantine Empire.45

This hybridity of identity is concisely and clearly described by Thomas Gallant in his new comprehensive history, Modern Greece, just published in Arnold’s “Brief Histories” series. Gallant’s book, the first complete history of Greece to be published since Richard Clogg’s A Short History of Modern Greece (1979), does an equally admirable job of historicizing the numerous paradoxes of nationalism pointed to, on a theoretical level, by Peckham and Jusdanis. Gallant’s success is attributable in large part to his fresh perspective as a social historian and anthropologist. His history benefits from its interdisciplinary approach and is able, because of it, to provide, as Gallant puts it, “an understanding of how and why Greece as it is today came to be,”46 rather than an uncritical historical narrative. The thematic and theoretical questions posed by Peckham and Jusdanis--and particularly the countless paradoxes inherent in the nationalist project--are nicely grounded in Gallant’s basic, but nevertheless insightful, history.

Of the modern Greeks, George Seferis asked if “wandering among broken stones, three or six thousand years/searching in collapsed buildings that might have been our homes/trying to remember dates and heroic deeds: will we be able? . . . will we be able to die properly?”47 In one sense, Seferis’ question was also this: Will Greek history ever be understood on its own terms? Will the past ever truly be the past? Seferis’ lament for a simpler, clearer, less burdened understanding of Greece and of what it means to be Greek was also, in many ways, a lament to be free from the complexities and difficulties of nationalism. Even as it had liberated the Greeks from the Turks, it had enslaved them to their past.

Modern Greek studies and especially Greek historiography have, until very recently, suffered from the same biases and assumptions that have coloured the national history of the Greek state. Increasingly, however, the field is coming into its own and maturing to a point at which it can be productively self-reflexive, as well as produce theoretical models that will illuminate fields that have no connection whatsoever to Greece. This latest crop of books on Greece’s modern history suggests that Greek historiography is becoming as sophisticated as that of other European countries and, at the same time, that Greece serves as a unique case-study of one of the most pressing theoretical questions of the modern era.

Notes

1) “Xypnisa me to marmarino touto kefali sta heria/pou mou exantlei tous akones kai den xero pou na t’akoumbiso. /Epefte sto oneiro kathos evyaina apo to oneiro/etsi enothike I zoi mas kai tha einai poly dyskolo na xanahorisei.” George Seferis, “Mythistorima,” pt. 3, in his Collected Poems, trans. and ed. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 6-7.

2) I follow David Constantine’s use of the term. See David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

3) “Aftes oi petres pou vouliazoun mesa sta hronia os pou tha me parasyroun?/ vlepo ta dentra pou anasainoun ti mavri galini ton pethamenon/ki’epeita ta hamoyela, pou den prohoroun, ton agalmaton." Seferis, “Mythistorima,” pt. 20, in Collected Poems, 50-51.

4) M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

5) For an example of the ways in which the Greek tourism industry promotes and rests on the idea that Greece’s history can be traced, unbroken and seamless, back to the classical period, see the website of the Greek National Tourist Board (EOT) at <http://www.gnto.gr/1/01/0104/ea0104000.html>.

6) Robert Shannan Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), ix.

7) Ibid., p. 83.

8) George Theotokas, Free Spirit, trans. S. G. Stavrou, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 2 (1986) : 155; cited in Peckham, National Histories, Natural States, 149.

9) Ibid., 69.

10) Ibid., 113.

11) Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 20-21.

12) See, for example, Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

13) Another recent and excellent publication that aims to deconstruct the bad reputation nationalism has gained in the past decades is Robert H. Weibe’s Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

14) Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, foreword by Jochen Schulte-Sasse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). For more on the link between literature and Greek national culture see also, inter alia, Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Dimitris Tziovas, Greek Modernism and Beyond (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).

15) Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.

16) Ibid., 200.

17) The view that ‘civic’ nationalism is better than other forms may itself be seen as a quasi-nationalist position, as it is, in most instances, based upon the supposed form of civic nationalism in the United States.

18) Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: NLB, 1977), 48; cited also in Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 197.

19) See Ibid., Chapter 4, “Progress and Belatedness,” especially 114-15.

20) Richard Clogg, A Short History of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

21) Not only have a number of historical and political science studies of the exchanges been undertaken, but some very important anthropological ones as well. See, in particular, Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

22) For a detailed portrait of the city just prior to its unification with Greece, see Meropi Anastassiadou, Salonique, 1830-1912: Une ville ottomane à l’âge des réformes (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

23) Rivka Cohen, Pinkhas hakehillot: Yavan (Encyclopaedia of Jewish communities: Greece) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998), 12.

24) Ibid., 194.

25) Between 1945 and 1951, approximately 2,000 Jews left Greece for Israel, a number of them on the condition that they relinquish their Greek citizenship. See Bea Lewkowicz, “‘After the War We Were All Together’: Jewish Memories of Postwar Thessaloniki,” in Mazower, After the War Was Over, 249.

26) Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London and Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass for the Centre of Contemporary Greek Studies, King’s College, London, 1986).

27) The best account by far of the megali idea as nationalist concept is Elli Skopetea’s, To ‘protypo vasileion’ kai i Megali Idea: Opsis tou ethnikou provlimatos stin Ellada, 1830-1880 (The ‘model kingdom’ and the Great Idea: A view of the national problem in Greece, 1830-1880) (Athens: Polytypo, 1997).

28) Richard Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes: Studies in History (London: St Martin’s Press and New York: Macmillan, 2000), 8.

29) Ibid., 9-11.

30) Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations, reprint of 1923 ed. (New York: H. Fertig, 1970).

31) Clogg, Anglo-Greek Attitudes, 25.

32) K. Dimaras, Ellinikos romantismos (Greek romanticism) (Athens: Ermis, 1985), 405ff.

33) Y. Psiharis, To taxidi mou (My journey) (Athens: Ermis, 1979), 37.

34) G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, Metternich and His Times (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1962), 35.

35) Ignatieff’s ‘repressed’ bears a double implication: it refers both to those ‘repressed’ peoples (particularly Ottoman subjects) who first found in nationalism a vocabulary with which to express aspirations of freedom and to those baser, more violent sentiments that are at the heart of much of the nationalist enterprise. See Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1993), 5; cited also in Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation, 3 and 199.

36) Ibid., 197.

37) See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; Or, Cosmos and History (New York: Pantheon, 1954).

38) Of the early scholars of modern Greece, by far and away the one whose legacy has been most lasting. The most famous of his works is still The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors, 1801-1927, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936).

39) Author of the seminal, Modern Greek in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916).

40) Arnold Wycombe Gomme, whose interest in Greece concentrated on the classical period and who wrote a number of books, among them a commentary upon Thucydides and an account of Athenian life in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

41) Alan John Bayard Wace, co-author, with M. S. Thompson, of Nomads of the Balkans: An Account of Life and Customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (London: Methuen, 1914).

42) Best known for the posthumously-published, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929).

43) Author of Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), a work that continues to set the tone for many anthropological studies of Greek folklore and religion, and that sought to establish folklore as an important link in Greek cultural continuity from classical times to modern.

44) Roandeau Albert Henry Bickford-Smith, author of Greece under King George (London: Richard Bentley, 1893).

45) Thomas W. Gallant, Modern Greece (London: Arnold, 2001), 68.

46) Ibid., xii-xiii.

47) Seferis, “Mythistorima,” pt. 22, in Collected Poems, 55.

<<<<Back to Journal (BRIIFS) main