Greece from Junta to Crisis

Modernization, Transition and Diversity

Dimitris Tziovas

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755617456
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2021 European Society of Modern Greek Studies Book Prize Shortlisted for the 2022 Runciman Award The recent economic crisis in Greece has triggered national self-reflection and prompted a re-examination of the political and cultural developments in the country since 1974. While many other books have investigated the politics and economics of this transition, this study turns its attention to the cultural aspects of post-dictatorship Greece. By problematizing the notion of modernization, it analyzes socio-cultural trends in the years between the fall of the junta and the economic crisis, highlighting the growing diversity and cultural ambivalence of Greek society. With its focus on issues such as identity, antiquity, religion, language, literature, media, cinema, youth, gender and sexuality, this study is one of the first to examine cultural trends in Greece over the last fifty years. Aiming for a more nuanced understanding of recent history, the study offers a fresh perspective on current problems.

1

Modernization and cultural dualisms

Exploring the cultural developments that have taken place since the fall of the junta, this chapter will focus on two crucial and interconnected areas, namely the discussion of various manifestations of dualism as a method of cultural analysis and the increasing tension between humanist and consumerist cultural practices.¹ The first part of this chapter interrogates the ways in which dualism has been deployed by a range of scholars to assess the extent of Greece’s modernization and how it has developed into a dominant transdisciplinary method of analysis since the 1980s. Culture in this part is discussed within a wider historical and political context. The second part looks at increasingly competing conceptions of culture in the period from junta to crisis and highlights the implications of the growing trend towards popular and material culture.² Although both parts deal with the coexistence of two competing cultural discourses and engage respectively with the two dreams of the Metapolitefsi – modernization and consumerism – the aim is not to reaffirm oppositions or reverse hierarchies but to explore hybrid tensions and cultural ambivalences.

Modernization, hybridization and cultural ambivalence

One of the most enduring and influential interpretations of Greek cultural and political developments advanced during the Metapolitefsi is that of cultural dualism, which is based on the assumption that two opposing trends or forces are vying for supremacy. Greek culture, like Greek identity, has been seen from a dualist perspective, marked by symbolic oppositions or tensions. Theories of cultural dualism, reflecting opposing views on the past and future orientation of Greek society, have been adopted in different forms by anthropologists, political scientists and historians and have framed the discussions of political and cultural developments in Greece after the fall of junta.³

In the 1980s, building on Patrick Leigh Fermor’s schema regarding the ‘Helleno-Romaic dilemma’, the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld proposed the Hellenic-Romeic distinction as ‘the difference between an outward-directed conformity to international expectations about the national image and an inward-looking self-critical collective appraisal’ (Herzfeld 1986: 20). Although Herzfeld has been keen to challenge two-column diagrams (such as the one used by Leigh Fermor) as a European product, he introduced the concept of disemia to argue that Greek identity is caught between two cultural forms: the official and the vernacular. The outward-looking and Western Hellenic self-presentation inspired by classical Greece is contrasted with the introspective Romeic self-image associated with the East, Byzantium and the Ottoman past. He suggested that the Hellenic and Romeic, or ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, views of Greek culture are the two historical images informing the respective ideals of self-presentation and self-knowledge (or self-recognition) while Korais and Zorba compete for the Greek soul (Herzfeld 1987: 95–122). More recently the Hellenic-Romeic distinction, and its class associations, has been used to analyse stylistic differences in the Greek film musical and how these differences project two distinct types of cultural identity (Papadimitriou 2012).

In the early 1990s the political scientist Nikiforos Diamandouros explored the relationship between culture and politics in Greece and charted the evolution of two cultures, which held sway alternately according to political circumstances (Diamandouros 1993: 125, 1994 and 2000).⁴ The older of these two, the underdog culture, has been seen as marked by a pronounced introversion, xenophobia, anti-Westernism and adherence to pre-capitalist practices.⁵ Defined by Diamandouros in a somewhat contradictory manner as combining a potent egalitarianism with a pre-democratic mentality, this culture competes with its younger counterpart, which has its intellectual roots in the Enlightenment and liberalism. It is also claimed that this modernizing and reformist culture, ‘outward-looking and less parochial than its rival’, was in the ascendant in the Greek world from the second half of the nineteenth century until the early to mid-1930s. From then on, until the mid-1970s, it entered a period of decline, following the weakening of the diaspora communities and the exhaustion of the Venizelist project. However, according to Diamandouros, what might have tipped the balance in favour of this culture was Greece’s increasing integration into the EU.

More than ten years later, the historians John Koliopoulos and Thanos Veremis adopted a different, but essentially similar, binary opposition, using Ernest Gellner’s concept of the ‘segmentary society’, which refers to a pre-modern social structure intended to protect the extended family and prevent the authorities from encroaching on its power (Koliopoulos and Veremis 2010). They saw the traditional segmentary society as a deep structure, resisting the unifying impetus of the modern unitary state and the adoption of Western principles of governance. This opposition contrasts the pre-modern segmentary society, broadly associated with the East, with the civil society and Western models of administration (which in the case of Greece were championed by diaspora and modernizing elites including the statesmen Kapodistrias, Mavrokordatos, Trikoupis and Venizelos) (Veremis 2011).⁶ In short, the segmentary society and the underdog culture are perceived as impediments to modernization and militate against the formation of civil society.

Cultural and political dualism, in its various forms, has emerged as the dominant model of and for the post-junta period and also for the earlier history of Greece. My aim here is to show its inadequacies as an interpretive methodology and question its evaluative implications and political uses. A cultural perspective can help us to reassess the operation of this dualism from the point of view of the underdog culture rather than that of the elitist modernizing culture. This, in turn, might shift attention from demarcating the discourses of the two cultures or confirming the superiority of one over the other to highlighting the instability and hybridity involved in constructing cultural identities. Greeks, for example, may simultaneously admire and hate anything associated with modern Europe. They aspire to be Western while at the same time looking down on Northern Europeans, saying, ‘When we were building the Parthenon, you were living in the trees’ in the same way as they treat their ‘homeland’ as a ‘whore’ and a ‘Madonna’.⁷ Caught in a ‘double bind’, as the source of Western civilization and its belated recipient, between colonization and self-colonization, they simultaneously display cultural arrogance and parochialism (Calotychos 2013: 31–2).

Recently, the cultural dualism proposed by Diamandouros has been revisited (Diamandouros 2013) and the ‘underdog’ culture blamed ‘for bringing the country to the verge of economic and political bankruptcy’ (Triandafyllidou et al. 2013: 9, 15). This culture has been presented and understood as being at the root of Greece’s debt crisis and of the country’s inability to address its structural shortcomings. Despite occasional reservations, this dualism continues to inform the way Greek identity is analysed, and Greece is presented as poised between a troubled tradition and a desired modernity. Trying to demarcate the two trends, the exponents of the dualist approach aim to highlight binary oppositions while its critics tend to emphasize their fusion.⁸ Instances of hybridization have been explored, a good example being the fusion of the two clashing modes of time. The ‘pre-modern’ mode of cyclical and ritual time embodied in the celebration of name days now coexists with an increasing awareness of the irreversible and linear time associated with birthdays. Nowadays an increasing number of people in Greece celebrate both, whereas in the past the celebration of name days was more prevalent.⁹ Critiquing the rigidity of the dualist approach by highlighting cases of hybridization or demonstrating how an individual-centred culture coexists with an earlier collectivist mentality is not sufficient. What is missing here is a historical and, to some extent, a cultural perspective, although the defenders of the dualist approach will argue otherwise.

The resilience of the dualist approach as a useful analytical tool has something to do with the fact that the notion of modernization, in the sense of ‘catching up with Europe’, has increasingly entered debates on national identity as representing a break with the vestiges of the country’s ‘Ottoman’ and ‘oriental’ past.¹⁰ Cultural dualism, as outlined above, involves a form of Eurocentrism which has been indicted by postcolonial theorists studying former colonies in south Asia. Postcolonial theory reflects a desire to avoid Eurocentrism by provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) and the need to understand the importance of local cultural categories, practices and identities. The underdog culture could be seen in terms of the ‘subaltern’ (the under-represented in India’s history and their hidden history) and the classic question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ could be applied to it.¹¹ As with the subaltern, whose identity is its difference, one cannot construct the underdog culture as a category with ‘an effective voice clearly and unproblematically identifiable as such’ (Ashcroft et al. 2007: 201). Yet, until now the emphasis by those practising cultural dualism has been on the modernizing culture and its transformative potential, while the underdog culture has been seen primarily in political and not in cultural terms and its proponents in the area of culture are not being clearly identified. What I propose to do here is to reverse the order and approach the underdogs from a cultural perspective.

The dualist approach tends to boil everything down to an underlying opposition between East and West by tacitly valorizing the West and ignoring the negative aspects of Western modernity. However, what is not acknowledged here is that the westernizing trend has always had the upper hand, not expressed in the form of a modern polity or civil society but as a centralizing state mechanism suppressing cultural diversity. In Greece the state represented an authoritarian caricature of Western modernity and kept any manifestations of the underdog culture or the segmentary society under control, both culturally and politically.¹² The unitary state exercised its power through the symbolic power of the Greek language and the classical past or through homogenizing and centralizing policies. The uniform education system has also assisted the Greek state in shaping national identity and assimilating otherness. On the other hand, the Romeic self-image, the underdog culture and the segmentary society have invariably been associated eithe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Modernization and cultural dualisms
• 2 Eurosceptics or Europhiles? The cultural dilemmas of Europeanization
• 3 Debating the nation and its contested pasts: Antiquity and mnemohistory
• 4 Identity, religion, migration: From homogeneity to embracing otherness
• 5 Language questions: From standardization to diversity
• 6 From poetry to prose: Discovering modernism and revising the canon
• 7 The challenges of deregulation: From monophonic to polyphonic media
• 8 Cinematic allegories: From history to domesticity
• 9 Youth, feminism and sexuality: From oikos to demos
• 10 The rediscoveries of Greece: From the ancient ruins to the ruins of crisis
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page