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Greece and/or Modernity: Some Reflections towards a

‘Hermeneutic’ Approach on Greek Modernities

Vassilios A. Bogiatzis1

Hellenic Open University-Research Centre for Modern History (KENI)/Panteion

University

(Contribution to the Athens Workshop, Modernization, Europe and Nation-State,

European Research Project: Framing Financial Crisis and Protest: North-West and

South-East Europe, Panteion University –KENI, 15 – 17 April 2016)

Introduction

The explosion of the current Greek crisis after 2009 triggered various and

contradicted theoretical approaches which searched for the strict identification of the

deepest roots of crisis’ economic, political, and cultural aspects. In spite of their

differences, many of them seemed to reach by different ways at the same conclusion.

The Greek Sonderweg from the 18th

century onwards, and especially after the

inauguration of the Modern Greek state, was considered responsible for the current

crisis, either in the sense of a deviance from an alleged “European norm” or in that of

the culmination of a Western-origin distortion of one undetermined indigenous

“essence”. Drawing insights from seminal works of Modern Greek historiography and

combining them with certain strands of Modernity Studies, I attempt to pose some

questions as far as Greek modernity is concerned. I am interesting in the articulation

of a so-called ‘hermeneutic’ approach which will show a greater sensitivity to the

contingencies and ambivalences of modernity as such, and, specifically, of Greek

modernity and its multiple faces. In this sense, today I would like to make some

1 Vassilios Bogiatzis holds a PhD in History and Philosophy of Technology and Science from National

Technical University of Athens and National and Kapodistrean University of Athens. He is the author

of Ambivalent Modernism: Technology, Scientific Ideology and Politics in Interwar Greece (1922-

1940) [in Greek, Meteoros Modernismos: Technologia, Ideologia tis Epistimis kai Politiki stin Hellada

tou Mesopolemou, Eurasia Publications (Athens 2012)]. He is adjunct lecturer at Hellenic Open

University (Department of European Cultural Studies), and he is a post-doc researcher at Research

Centre for Modern History-Panteion University: Department of Political Science & History. His project

is entitled “Telephones of the Beyond”: Greek Intellectuals at the Public Sphere of “The Twenty

Explosive Years” (1949-1967). His research interests include intellectual history and historical

sociology of intellectuals. Contact to: vasbogiatzis@gmail.com

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theoretical observations and to pose some questions which are moved towards this

researching orientation.

Some Preliminary Observations

Greek modernity is often read through the perspective of great absences (Liakos and

Kouki, 2015). As far as especially the “modernization” approaches and the in one or

another sense, their Marxists’ alternatives are concerned, what is seemed to be absent

is a “rational” State or a “dynamic civil society”, a “normal” industrial development

and a “real” working class, an “authentic” parliamentary system and so on. The

interpretations which are formulated in order for these absences to be explained are

mainly culturalists and tend to stress either the backwardness of the people against the

rational and knowing elites or the inadequacy of elites to fulfill their proper

modernizing role. On the other hand, and as far as the “indigenous” approaches are

concerned, the emphasis is in the “stable”, “essentials” and “unalterable”

characteristics of the Greek “manner” which is considered either as responsible for the

deficits of the Greek modernity (the Romaiiki stance, as Michael Hertzfeld has

described it) or as the one and the only way-out of –near– every crisis; in this context,

under any crisis is lied the distortion and/or the negation of an idealized and un-

historicized Tradition which should be the one and the only guide. Eleni Andriakaina

(2015) has pointedly underlined the evolutionist and teleological roots of these

modernization approaches. The same is true in one or another way for the other

approaches that we have already described.

Thus, it is useful to recall here Stefan Collini’s considerations regarding the

perceptions, appropriations and, also, the constructions of modernity. Despite the fact

that his observations are formulated with regards to the “absent thesis concerning

intellectuals in Britain”, I think that they are of general importance, especially

concerning the issue here. Collini argues that the insular celebrants of this absence as

well as its off-shore malcontents, they each have a great deal invested in assumptions

about the ‘exceptional’ or ‘deviant’ nature of British history, not least in the matter of

intellectuals. Thus, his starting-point is that we need to get away from such implicitly

binary classifications (‘British’/‘normal’), and instead attempt to identify both the

common features and the specific characteristics of the activities of intellectuals in

various societies. For, according to Collini, the truth is that each of the major, and not

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only, societies is ‘exceptional’ in its own terms: “Familiar claims about ‘the

peculiarities of the English’ can easily be matched by comparable claims about ‘Der

Deutsche Sonderweg’ or about ‘American exceptionalism’ or about ‘la singularité

française’, and so on. Britain is indeed unique—and so is every other country”. The

question, of course, is whether, when viewed from a series of analytical historical

perspectives, Britain emerges as consistently deviant from what can be identified as a

broadly common pattern elsewhere. Discussion of the question of intellectuals has

been dogged, Collini stresses, by superficial or lazy invocations of a presumed

European ‘norm’ against which the British case is to be contrasted. It is an important

part of his argument that there turns out on closer analysis to be no such common

pattern elsewhere: almost invariably the implicit content of the contrast is provided by

a stereotyped account of the situation in just one other country (Collini, 2006).

In this sense, current trends in the field of Modernity Studies can be proved fruitful

for a different approach on Greek modernity, especially when they focus on the

performative and interpretative actions of the historical agents (Pels, 1996; 1998;

2000; 2002a; 2002b; Wagner, 1999; 2003; 2008; 2012). Avoiding the evolutionists

and linear accounts of modernity –either modernizing or Marxists– Peter Wagner

(2008; 2012) for example, treats modernity as the autonomous way of dealing with

the core problématiques of human life, the political, the economic and the epistemic.

In this view, modernity is not restricted to its major moments –the significance of

which is not underestimated (Chakrabarty, 2002) as it happens in postmodern

approaches which see everywhere ‘Eurocentrism’; on the contrary, the emphasis is

shifted to the experiences of these moments and its social interpretations which form

societal self-understandings. Thus, a plurality of answers to these problématiques is

possible, so that modernity is open to reconsideration, reflection and contingency.

According to Wagner, it is crucial to advance the analysis of the contemporary

plurality of self-understandings and related institutional structures of societies and

polities in the current global context. It is needed to be analyzed these self-

understandings against the background of the historical trajectories of those societies.

The analysis of the existing multiple forms of modernity is the major challenge to

current social and political theory and comparative-historical and political sociology.

It requires a conceptual and empirical analysis of that which is common to different

forms of modernity and that which varies between them. Furthermore, it demands an

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analysis as to why particular forms of modernity developed in specific societal

settings. Convincing responses to these questions are currently not available. Scholars

in this field either underestimate variation or succumb to some idea of global trends of

‘neomodernization’ or neo-liberal transformation of global capitalism, or they

overestimate historical continuities and provide some culturalist explanation of

‘civilizational’ difference (Wagner, 2008; 2012).

This approach is in clear contrast with the traditional conceptualizations of

the Balkans as a region of primitivity and backwardness, a geographical figuration of

otherness in relation to the cultured and civilized Western world. A new concept of

the Balkans as transitional space was suggested by Maria Todorova in 1997, based on

the premise that the Balkans are not positioned as distinctly non-European; on the

contrary, that the self-identity of the Balkans is constructed as European and

Occidental, yet located on a crossroads between Occident and Orient, perceiving the

latter as its other, showing that the Balkans cannot clearly be classified into binary

categories or inscribed with a single universal meaning. (Todorova, 2009). In the

same direction, Stamatopoulos has argued that the Balkan –modern– nationalist

movements should not be understood in the terms of a simple and mimetic transfer of

the European revolutionary ideas to the region; on the contrary, that they could be

understood as the emerging answers to the rifts that the revolutionary dynamic opened

both to the West and to the East (Stamatopoulos, 2014). Thus, their modernity should

be approached in its own terms.

Posing Greek Modernity into a ‘Hermeneutic’ Frame

In this perspective, Mark Mazower’s theorization of Greek and European modernities

seems to offer a significant alternative to the above mentioned evolutionist and uni-

linear approaches. Moving against and beyond the polarized dualities to which I have

already referred to, Mazower argues that to understand Europe’s future, you need to

turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what

is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of

Europe’s evolution (Mazower 2011a). In the 1820s, as it waged a war of

independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece became an early symbol of escape

from the prison house of empire. For philhellenes, its resurrection represented the

noblest of causes. Victory would mean liberty’s triumph not only over the Turks but

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also over all those dynasts who had kept so many Europeans enslaved. Germans,

Italians, Poles and Americans flocked to fight under the Greek blue and white for the

sake of democracy. And within a decade, the country won its freedom. Over the next

century, the radically new combination of constitutional democracy and ethnic

nationalism that Greece embodied spread across the continent, culminating in “the

peace to end all peace” at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman,

Hapsburg and Russian empires disintegrated and were replaced by nation-states

(Mazower, 2011a).

A parenthesis is necessary here regarding the frequently underestimated and one-

sidedly approached Greek 19th

century. I would like to focus on the path-breaking

study of Gunnar Hering (2004) with regards to Greek political parties. Having as

starting point the ‘facts’ that the Greek political parties had already existed before the

inauguration of the independent State, and that what differentiated them from the

respected European or Balkan ones was the ‘curious mix’ of modernization

tendencies, certain receptions and appropriations of tradition and its conflictual

interpretations, Hering approaches the lengthy Greek 19th

century as a continuously

temporal interpretation of major political experiences: the Revolution, the coming of

the Bavarians, the inauguration of the crowded democracy. By underlining parties’

importance both for the completion of the political system in general and for the

formulation of requests to the State –requests that form the State in general–, Hering

proceeds to undermine the three ‘myths’ that weight on the interpretation of political

parties’ role in Greece: that they constitute ‘agencies’ of the foreign powers, that they

are mainly and exclusively clientelistic organizations, and that they consist an

extension of the egoistic seeking for power of their leader.

Rejecting ‘mentality’ explanations, preoccupations concerning the dichotomy

‘conservative elites against progressive people’, the one-sided emphasis on the

clientele networks and some Marxist interpretations which castigated ‘the oligarchy’,

the ‘foreign factor’, ‘dark powers around the Palace’, ‘a bunch of families’ and so on

–a propos, an interpretative attempt that, according to Mazower (2016) came to the

fore during the current crisis–, Hering points to the ideological factor and the political

values of the parties attempting to confirm Max Weber’s claim that political parties

has both ideology and interests, are at the same time patronage mechanisms and

creators of worldviews. Hering shows that regardless of their conflicts and ideological

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differences, the common denominator of the Greek political parties during 19th

century against the background of the above mentioned experiences consisted of: a)

the assumption that the newly formed State should be of ‘Western form’; b) that the

organization of this State should be unambiguously constitutional; c) that the basis for

such a constitutionalism should be a as possible as wide popular basis: from this latter

assumption stemmed the male suffrage already from 1844, for the first time in

Europe. In this perspective, what is appeared as a chaotic, non-structured and

amorphous mass of contradicted elements is, according to Hering, nothing but

conflicts and disputes which were revolved around the central axes of the political

struggle: tax factors, exterior policy, public works, education system, organization of

public sector, the role of Church in public life, and may above all the dilemmas

concerning kingship or democracy and war or peace; the treatment of all these issues

presupposed general aims and political orientations, and also a strong commitment to

values and ideologies. Thus, the approach of these disputes only through the prism of

clientele relationships is inadequate. This is not to idealize the developments of Greek

19th

century and of course there are serious reasons in order not to do so. But, on the

other hand, this is to stress the appearance of liberal and democratic ideas, the dangers

in which they were exposed, and their far better function in certain circumstances than

their European –mainly British and bourgeois– “prototype” (Hering, 2004).

Returning to Mazower’s argument, in the aftermath of the First World War, Greece

again paved the way for Europe’s future. Only now it was democracy’s dark side that

came to the fore. In a world of nation-states, ethnic minorities like Greece’s Muslim

population and the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor were a recipe for international

instability. In the early 1920s, Greek and Turkish leaders decided to swap their

minority populations, expelling some two million Christians and Muslims in the

interest of national homogeneity. The Greco-Turkish population exchange was the

largest such organized refugee movement in history to that point and a model that the

Nazis and others would point to later for displacing peoples in Eastern Europe, the

Middle East and India (Mazower, 2011a).

I would like to underline that despite the fact that Asia Minor Catastrophe was the

historical event which threw its heavy shadow on the Greek interwar developments,

World War I was a recurring theme of political/intellectual struggle during this period

too. Besides, Catastrophe could be conceived as the delayed end of World War I

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concerning Greece, while the matter of participation to the War caused the internal

split that was labeled as National Schism. The –conflictual– remembrance of both the

Great War and the Catastrophe rendered particularly important for the new political

projects which were urgently responded to the tasks of national reconstruction and a

new cultural orientation for the Greek nation-state. Various politicians and

intellectuals explicitly connected their visions and their projects with the interpretation

of World War I and its consequences both for the European and for the Greek “fate”.

During the interwar period all these people, and of course the ordinary people too,

were dreamed of various Spring(s) after the rites of War and the Catastrophe, in

Modris Eksteins’ (1989) terms, and they correlated with them various New

Beginnings, in Roger Griffin’s terminology, as the new “sky shelters” from the era’s

“profound disquietude”.

Thus, if, following Peter Wagner’s (1994) suggestion, we consider the inter-war

period with its two crucial turning points –World War I and the Depression– as the

heyday of the protracted first crisis of modernity during the transition from restricted

liberal modernity to the organized one, we may conclude that the Greek case fits well

in this general conceptual frame. According to Peter Wagner, the main characteristic

of this transition was the explicit rejection of the liberal belief that the free and

autonomous economy, politics and science could lead to wealth, democracy, progress

and knowledge. Not only did economic liberalism come under attack during this

period; so did the ideas of democracy and science. The growing power of the working

class opened the way for far-reaching collective initiatives and ideas, and political

instability opened up the possibility for radical authoritarian solutions (Wagner, 1994;

2008; Hård and Jamison, 1998: 7), particularly in a context of formidable ideological

anxiety. As Roger Griffin observes, during the interwar period it was wide-spread “the

conviction that the upheavals of contemporary history were the death throes of the

modern world under the aegis of Enlightenment reason and liberal capitalism. But this

was no ‘cultural despair’. In the immediate aftermath of the WWI not just the avant-

guarde, but millions of ‘ordinary people’ felt they were witnessing the birth pangs of a

new world under an ideological and political regime whose nature was yet to be

decided” (Griffin, 2007: 8). The experience of breakdown was depressive and at the

same time the need for transformation was particularly acute: the social, political and

artistic movements of the time sought to bring collective redemption, a new –national,

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or other type of– community, a strong sense of rootedness and health against the

decadence, their goal was a rebirth, a renewal, a regeneration and rejuvenation, the

creation of a new society and a new man.

It is this sense of Aufbruch that Griffin identifies at the core of modernist ethos. Based

on a wide account of modernist studies, Griffin adopts a maximalist concept of

modernism as the palingenetic resurgence against the allegedly decadent aspects of

modernity, which is not restricted in the artistic domain alone, but is extended in all

the domains of human praxis (Griffin, 2007: passim). In something like, as somebody

could pointedly characterize, a cultural re-reading of the period in which Peter Wagner

refers as the first crisis of modernity, Griffin stresses that “[B]etween the 1860’s and

the end of the World War II, modernism acted as a diffuse cultural force generated by

the dialectic of chaos and (new) order, despair and hope, decadence and renewal,

destruction and creation manifesting itself in countless idiosyncratic artistic visions

towards the revitalization and social and ethical regeneration as well as in numerous

projects and collective movements which sought to put an end to political, cultural,

moral and/or physical dissolution” (Griffin, 2007: 54). He discerns between epiphanic

–exclusively artistic expressions and experimentations in order to achieve glimpses of

a “higher reality” that throw into relief the anomy and spiritual bankruptcy of

contemporary history– and programmatic –in which the rejection of the decaying

aspects of modernity expresses itself as a mission to change society, to inaugurate a

new epoch, to start time anew– modernism, underlining at the same time the porous

membranes between the two, the syncretism of modernism and the futural overall

momentum of all these programmatic movements either of the Left or of the Right

(Griffin, 2007: 55-58, 68-69, 114-117).

Following Jürgen Habermas’ warning against interpreting vast sweeps of human

history in the narrow terms of Judeo-Christian eschatology, Griffin attempts to deal

with the psychological/social dynamics and forces were released by these extended

modernist projects during 1860-1914 and especially after the WWI, resorting to the

most ancient and universal ritualized form of the “myth of transition”, the rite of

passage. This includes in its triadic structure a phase of separation (pre-liminal), when

a person or group becomes detached from an earlier fixed point in the social structure

or from an earlier set of social conditions; a margin, or the liminal phase (liminal),

when the state of the ritual subject is ambiguous, as he is no longer in the old state and

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has not yet reached the new one; and the aggregation (post-liminal) phase, when the

ritual subject enters a new stable state with its own right and obligations. The crucial

phase is the liminal due to its unstable and ambiguous character: but, while these

rituals purpose in a lot of cases to maintain and regenerate the status quo, there are

conditions under of which revolutionary rather than restorative transitional states are

produced. This is the case of liminoidality: “[T]he liminoid transition to a new order

takes place when a society undergoes a crisis sufficiently profound to prevent it from

perpetuating and regenerating itself through its own symbolic and ritual resources.

Such crises can occur as a result of natural calamities –such as plagues, droughts,

floods or changes in habitat– or may be due to the eruption of internecine socio-

economic and political tensions, or to occupation, colonization, or acts of aggression

inflicted on it by other societies”. Then, human societies attempt to take collective

actions to resolve such crises by creating a new nomos –a new Weltanschauung in

Mannheimian terms–, a new society and a new order which guarantees –or claims

that– the metaphysical foundations of the social or individual existence: a sacred

canopy and a sky shelter. The rebirth of society in a new form as stems from the

innovative, adaptive and revolutionary reactions to the liminoid conditions, explains

according to Griffin why the new community is often described in palingenetic terms

‘in the guise of an Edenic, paradisiacal, utopian, or millennial state of affairs, to the

attainment of which religious or political action, personal or collective, should be

directed’, as Victor Turner to whom Griffin quotes points out. Such mythic self-

representation is the sign that the sacred canopy replaced by a new one, albeit one that

generally recycles a lot of the original material. It is not uncommon in these periods

the appearance of revitalization movements with its leader being represented as

propheta, healer and savior, bearer of the new beginning and guarantor of the

collective redemption (Griffin, 2007: 70-117). It was in this post-war liminoid

condition in which the “primordial” dynamics of transcendence and redemption were

released, that various “Third-way” ideologies emerged seeking for a new order (Pels,

2000: 110-130; Pels 2002; Hawkins, 2002; Clift and Tomlinson, 2002; Martin, 2002;

Gregor, 2005; Griffin 2007: 130, 163, 321).

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In this sense, the historical context of the Greek inter-war period was defined by two

features: firstly, the (terror of the) ideological void after the bankruptcy of the core

ideal of the new Greek state, the Great Idea [Megali Idea] due to the military defeat

in Asia Minor; and secondly, the tragic and palpable consequence of this defeat: the

arrival of almost 1,500,000 refugee population and their expulsion from Turkey.

Moreover, Greek inter-war was a period of economic development, of emergence of

the institutions of social insurance (Liakos, 1993) and of the formulation of a

modernistic vision based on technological development that was promoted by

engineers and industrialists (Vergopoulos, 1993; Antoniou, 2006), many of them had

a distinctive and fruitful entrepreneurial presence already from the final decades of the

19th

century and, in particular, from the first twenty years of the 20th

century

(Agriantoni, 2011). This vision and the correlated with it economic growth formed a

general optimistic feeling despite the profound difficulties at the end of the twenty’s

decade. As far as the general mood during the Greek interwar period is concerned,

Mark Mazower (2002) has depicted certain ambivalences. He observed that at the end

of 1920s a feeling of euphoria was diffused. On the contrary, from the early thirties,

when the Depression appeared, and in spite of the fast recovery a feeling of insecurity

was expanded and the quest for authoritative forms of governance was intensified.

Thus, Greek interwar was a period of political and social disturbance (Mavrogordatos,

1983; Dafnis, 1997; Hering, 2004). The deterioration of social conditions following

the Depression in spite of the fast economic recovery (Mazower, 2002) led to the

sharpening of the social conflicts and to an acute ideological crisis (Kyrtsis, 1996;

Marketos, 2006; Papadimitriou, 2006). The intense quest for authoritarian political

solutions from the major part of the political and ideological spectrum finally led to

the collapse of parliamentarism at the mid-thirties (Mavrogordatos, 1983; Alivizatos,

1995; Dafnis, 1997; Hering, 2004). In this perspective, Greek interwar society can be

described as “a stressed society”, as Roger Griffin (2007) characterizes Weimar

Germany and other European societies of the period; a society which faced a

“profound disquietude” in Karl Mannheim’s (1997) terms. Politicians, engineers,

scientists, and intellectuals –and, of course, ordinary people– were actively involved

in these debates aiming to connect technological development with the necessity of a

response to the acute social, political, and cultural crisis. The emphasis either in the

redefined national cultural inheritance, or in a mainly class orientation, or in their

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various mixing, as a New Weltanschauung, a new “sacred canopy”, as Roger Griffin

poses it, strongly connected with the desired central role for the state, a State-

Gardener in Bauman’s terminology, led to the aversion for and the undermining of

parliamentarism (Bogiatzis, 2012). In this sense, the Metaxas’ dictatorship was not the

unavoidable and predetermined consequence of a steel-made historical or socio-

economic logic; on the contrary, it was rather the failure of constituting a premature

welfare state in the conditions created after the handling of 1932 crisis that opened the

way for the establishment of the dictatorship (Mazower, 2002; Bogiatzis, 2012). A

dictatorship, somebody could/should add, which showed an intensive interest in the

fascist experimentations of the day and remained for a long time indecisive whether to

adopt a pro-British stance or a pro-Nazi ‘neutral’ position with the explosion of the

World War II (Pelt, ; Kallis, 2010).

It is ironic, then, Mazower observes, that Greece was in the vanguard of resistance to

the Nazis, too. In the winter of 1940-41, it was the first country to fight back

effectively against the Axis powers, humiliating Mussolini in the Greco-Italian war

while the rest of Europe cheered. Ultimately, however, Greece succumbed to German

occupation. Nazi rule brought with it political disintegration, mass starvation and,

after liberation, the descent of the country into outright civil war between Communist

and anti-Communist forces. Only a few years after Hitler’s defeat, Greece found itself

in the center of history again, as a front line in the cold war. In 1947, President Harry

S. Truman used the intensifying civil war there to galvanize Congress behind the

Truman Doctrine and his sweeping peacetime commitment of American resources to

fight Communism and rebuild Europe. Suddenly elevated into a trans-Atlantic cause,

Greece now stood for a very different Europe — one that had crippled itself by

tearing itself apart, whose only path out of the destitution of the mid-1940s was as a

junior partner with Washington. As the dollars poured in, American advisers sat in

Athens telling Greek policy makers what to do and American napalm scorched the

Greek mountains as the Communists were put to flight (Mazower 2011a).

If Tony Judt (2012) did not mistake when he argued that viewed through the prism of

the events and developments of 1989-1990 the post-war period should be seen as

simply an interlude, then we should seriously reflect on the consequences of this

claim regarding the post-war Greek history. It is crucial to ask with regards to the

ways in which the above mentioned experiences were interpreted. Moreover, to ask

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how these interpretations were connected with the economic development and the

“metamorphosis of Modern Greece” during the period 1953-1973 (McNeil, 1978), a

political and economic metamorphosis, one could/should add, in which West

Germany either through Christian Democrats or through Social Democrats’

governments played a significant and multifaceted role as Mogens Pelt (2006) has

conceivably showed. Furthermore, we should ask how the same metamorphosis was

interpreted by the historical agents, which was its relation with political

authoritarianism, and how and if these interpretations changed in relation with a

continuously changed international context (Judt, 2005; Mazower, 2004; Pelt, 2006).

Which were the axes of conflict in which the Greek politicians, engineers, scientists,

and intellectuals –and, of course, ordinary people– were involved in? Which

legitimate reasons did they develop so as to support the causes in the name of which

they talked about and the exclusive representatives of which they tried to be

proclaimed? How did they perform their own position and their role, the causes/

entities they asserted to represent, as well as their opponents? Which other forms of

symbolic violence did they try to exercise on the exact basis of these performances?

Were there transpositions, intersections, analogies and confessions in their thought, no

matter their diverse political stances (the Left, Center, Right) (Kyrtsis, 1994)? In

which ways do their various conceptualizations and their performances influence

today’s intellectual and ideological conflicts?

Turning again to Mazower, European political and economic integration was

supposed to end the weakness and dependency of the divided continent, and here, too,

Greece was an emblem of a new phase in its history. The fall of its military

dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would

become the European Union; it also (along with the transitions in Spain and Portugal

at the same time) prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and ’90s,

first in South America and Southeast Asia and then in Eastern Europe. And it gave the

European Union the taste for enlargement and the ambition to turn itself from a small

club of wealthy Western European states into a voice for the newly democratic

continent as a whole, extending far to the south and east. And now today, after the

euphoria of the ’90s has faded and a new modesty sets in among the Europeans, it

falls again to Greece to challenge the mandarins of the European Union and to ask

what lies ahead for the continent. The European Union was supposed to shore up a

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fragmented Europe, to consolidate its democratic potential and to transform the

continent into a force capable of competing on the global stage. It is perhaps fitting

that one of Europe’s oldest and most democratic nation-states should be on the new

front line, throwing all these achievements into question (Mazower, 2011a). This

observation does not mean that Mazower believes that for the crisis the blame should

be put on exclusively the EU’ s structures and ways-out. But, he also, refuses to

approach the post-1974 condition through the simplistic, in the final analysis,

distinction between tradition and modernity, or through the prism of “clientelism”

discourse.2

On the contrary: according to him, the causes of the present crisis arose entirely in the

post war period and as a response of the junta and the Cold War plus the policies that

were followed after that. In this sense, they don’t go any further back than that. It was

caused by the desire after 1974 to build a welfare state in very difficult circumstances.

It was caused by the way in which democracy was consolidated; the two main

political parties became established through this kind of overspending, and it was

caused by what laid behind much of this, which was the global transformation of

finance. The liberalization of financial flows also happened in the seventies onwards.

That meant that large sums of money were flowing around the world, they became

available on easy terms and they could also be withdrawn very quickly if the market

changed its mind. Those three things lie behind the crisis (Mazower 2011b; 2012).

Moreover, another cultural and political factor played its role: “A student culture

flourished in the following decades that placed a premium on activism, and saw a

revolutionary potential in every high school occupation. It was passionate, literate in

Marxist theory, highly factional and partisan. Manifestoes and party lines proliferated.

A lot of time was spent in meetings debating the democratic implications of

everything from canteens to faculty appointments. Student leaders, obsessed by the

history of the German occupation, devoured memoirs of wartime resistance heroes

and dreamed of a struggle to rival theirs”. Despite the fact that this culture and their

representatives contributed in important ways to the flourishing cultural and

intellectual scene that has emerged in Greece over the past few decades, the clientele

2 For an overview and critique of these discourses, see Liakos and Kouki (2015), and Andriakaina

(2015).

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practices and the justification of the related policies did not be avoided. Thus, the

possibility of self-critique and reflection remains ambivalent (Mazower, 2015a;

2015b; 2015c).

In this perspective, a more nuanced description and evaluation of the post-junta and

Metapolitefsi years is emerged which is sensitive to the interpretations that (parts of)

Greek society gave to these experiences during this transition (and of course, to the

transition itself). Posing himself explicitly against the political and ideological trends

which tend to discredit the achievements of this period, Mazower underlines

important developments such as the enforcement of the political and social

institutions, the expansion of the social and political rights, the formation of a

flourishing cultural and intellectual life which led to the revision of certain national

taboos and, of course, to the integration in European Community. However, he does

not neglect to mention the revival during the same period of the pre-war period

‘messianic’ politics, the over-expansion of the public sector without the necessary tax

revenues, and the uncritical idealization of the Left Resistance movement – which

creates a discourse that the current crisis seems to revitalize it in entirely different

conditions. Moreover, the expansion of a profit-seeking and consumer culture during

the ’90s decade which in the public imaginery connected EU with the money flows

and not with the culture of freedom, democracy and peace –again, a not exclusively

Greek phenomenon–, the increasingly important role of the private banking sector to

economy, and a modernizing attempt that had controversial consequences deteriorated

the already mentioned weaknesses (Mazower, 2015c: 56-73). In this sense, crisis was

not predestined.

Setting crisis into a performative context, Liakos and Kouki argued:

“Greek society in crisis has turned with urgency to the national past and re-read its transition

to democracy, so as to make sense and render meaningful its troubled present. A product of

media representations, business and elite interests and party politics, cultural traditions,

national stereotypes but also international developments, popular dreams, anxieties and fears,

this revisiting of the past has produced new historical meanings and vocabularies of its own.

Exceeding the words or deeds of the individuals or groups articulating them, the stories told

about the metapolitefsi form a sum bigger than their parts and acquire a life of their own. In

this way, they become at the same time a crucial agent in actually creating the crisis, as we

now experience it. Like all historical events, however, the contemporary crisis, as well as the

way we narrate it, has not been the result of a well-orchestrated conspiracy imposed from

above but is the product of multiple interests, profits, politics, and unexpected encounters of

people, desires and contingency”.

15

But, this crucial observation should, in my view, be put against the background two

Mazower’s assertions: on the one hand, that politicians regardless of their specific

political orientation avoided to share the burden of the crisis and to took the

responsibility for certain aspects of it, showing instead a provocative and offensive

behavior that led to the general lack of legitimacy of the post-junta democratic regime

(Mazower, 2012); on the other hand, that “[t]he public has to recognize that it has

elected the politicians. They weren’t imposed on them by anybody else. That’s maybe

the first step on their part in order to bridge the gap” (Mazower, 2011b). In this sense,

one would argue that the contemporary failure/difficulties/no-way-out are not a

culmination of a certain tendency inscribed in a specific cultural logic; on the

contrary, I think that emanates from the answers that Greek society gave to the basic

problématiques of life in common after the thrown of military junta in the post-1974

years. Conversely, the overcoming of the contemporary impasse is dependent on –

and, of course opens to– the interpretations that Greek society needs/should to give to

the experience of crisis (in the possibilities and contingencies which are opened are

included –as in every modern/modernity crisis– the collapse as well as a totalitarian

response).

A Temporal Closure: Towards “a new realism and a new autonomy”

In closing this paper, I would like to refer for once more time to Karl Mannheim.

Writing at the very end of the Weimar epoch—in a brief journalistic essay for two

liberal newspapers published after the disastrous election of November 1932—Karl

Mannheim, in contrast to those perceptions of ‘crisis’, deprecated those who

portrayed the widely-discussed “spiritual crisis” as “nothing but an evil that must

somehow be eliminated” or as something that can be understood by “grandiose

surveys based on intellectual history.” What are called “spiritual crises,” he observed,

may be “worthily worked through” and they can, in any case, be understood only by

close examination of the concrete displacements of individuals and groups, the

obsolescing of their orientations, and of their “readjustment efforts.” They are by no

means merely “spiritual”. To give weight to these reflections, Mannheim reports on

an exercise in survey research that he evidently conducted earlier in that year. The

individuals who reported experiencing such a crisis also indicate on their

questionnaires that they experienced a major change in circumstances –and there is

evidence that some at least treated the crisis as a dramatic opening to a new realism

16

and autonomy (Kettler and Loader, 2013). Thus: are there histories and approaches

that can move beyond self-victimization, beyond exclusively emphasizing either on

the ‘foreign factor’s responsibility’ or ‘elite’s inadequacies’, or on identifying

deviances from an allegedly European “norm” possible?

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