“Our Ancestors’ Bones Will Rattle:” The Discursive Use of the

Nation’s Past(s) in Contemporary Immigration Debates

Cynthia H. Malakasis

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies

Florida International University

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I. Introduction

In November 2009, the newly-elected Greek socialists proposed legislation that, if

successful, would mark a historic break with the way the category “Greek” had been defined

legally throughout the two centuries of Greece’s statehood. Since very early in the life of the

Greek state, national membership has been determined primarily according to ethno-biological

criteria (Christopoulos 2004; Tsitselikis 2006). The new bill, however, proposed citizenship for

immigrants’ children who were born or had attended primary school in Greece. The prospect of

the first jus soli provision in the nation’s history unleashed a flood of comments, positive and

negative, from diverse actors and on a variety of media.

Rather than generated solely in response to the proposed law, these discourses feed to a

great extent on the two decades of immigrant presence in the Greek national space and the

gradual dissolution of the fantasy that newcomers are temporary and will return “home”. Since

the beginning of mass immigration after the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, Greeks have been

pondering their country’s de facto pluralization. Yet the prospect of institutionalizing this

pluralization, legally turning it into a constitutive element of the nation, formally altering the

definition of what it means to be Greek, and breaking the exclusive bond between nation and

ethnic group represent a turning point in the history of Greece’s experience with immigration. As

such, it invites reactions that reveal how the presence of immigrants in a nation-state that has

striven throughout its history to eradicate ethno-cultural diversity and normalize descent-based

belonging has stirred polyvocal debates on the boundaries and character of the national

community.

In this paper, I examine how discourses for or against the jus soli legislative provision

deploy narratives of the nation’s past(s) in order to legitimize their positions. This forms part of a

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wider inquiry, which examines how large-scale immigration interfaces with and challenges the

nationalist model of collective organization. As I explain in Section III, I conceptualize the

nation as a social form that arises at a particular point in human history and in response to

specific conditions, and I define nationalism as the socio-historically embedded ideological

principle that the political and the ethno-cultural units must coincide (Gellner 1983 and

Hobsbawm 1990; cf. Smith 1998, 2008 and Hutchinson 2005). The naturalization of the nation-

state ranks among “the most powerful and pervasive fictions of modernity” (Trouillot 2003: 84)

– yet it comes under fire daily, as the constant presence of the “Other” tears at illusions of fixity

and bounded culture (ibid.). The unprecedented increase in cross-border flows and contact since

the late 1960s-early1970s – particularly in European nations, which did not see themselves as

countries of immigration – engenders and/or reinforces counter-hegemonic notions of collective

organization that stand to dispute the rootedness of cultures, groups and places and challenge the

primacy of the nationalist model of ethno-culturally homogeneous collective belonging

(Appadurai 2003; Bhabha 1990; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Trouillot 2003).

II. Theoretical Argument

The focus that this paper takes on conversations that engage the nation’s past(s) reflects

the fact that my data reveal a strong inter-discursive relationship between narratives of the

nation’s past(s) and debates on contemporary immigration issues. More specifically, actors who

voice their views on whether the nation should expand its boundaries and alter its membership

criteria to include people who do not conform to the hegemonic definition of Greekness often

make use of historical narratives in order to legitimize their views on present dilemmas.

It is important to note that the argument on who should be included in the Greek nation

and what it means to be Greek does not arise with contemporary mass immigration. The official

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narrative represents this meaning as fixed, uncontested and ethno-biological since the Classical

Antiquity and premises it upon the elements of common religion, language and the historically

dubious descent (e.g. Tsitselikis 2006). Yet wide research indicates that, in fact, “Greek” has

meant different things to different groups or actors at different times and has been the object of

confrontation throughout the history of the Greek state (see Section V), often with dire effects on

the life chances of populations that did not fit the dominant criteria (e.g. Anagnostou 2005;

Karakasidou 1997; Kostopoulos 2008, 2009; Margaritis 2005; Özkimirli and Sofos 2008;

Panourgia 2009).

The discursive (re)construction of the past reflects present social ideologies and agendas

(Wodak and De Cillia 2007). Conversely, issues that divide the body politic in the present often

map onto and strategically (re)produce historical rifts. The current debates over immigrant

inclusion or exclusion triggers a discussion on Greece’s historical relationship with ethno-

cultural otherness. Crucially for my inquiry, the position people take in these debates and the

way they (re)produce historical processes indicates the degree to which they embrace, dispute, or

(re)consider the hegemonic, nationalist model of belonging. Voices that heed the official

narrative and represent the Greek nation as historically homogeneous indicate a desire for it to

remain so, by barring immigrants’ access into the national community. Voices, on the other

hand, that contest this narrative and instead point out the fissures and multiplicities in the

collectivity’s historical trajectory are supportive of national membership for immigrants.

More specifically, exclusionary discourses reflect a conception of the nation as static and

firmly moored in symbols and events of the past – or rather, in a specific narrative of the past,

which normalizes ethno-cultural homogeneity, and has achieved hegemonic status in the national

imaginary. This conception applies both to the Greek nation as a specific entity and to the nation

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as a social form in general – although a discussion of the latter is beyond the scope of this paper.

The actors that articulate this discourse do not perceive of the Greek collectivity as “a temporary

equilibrium in an ongoing argument” (Brubaker 2004: 123), as fluid and socio-historically

contingent. Rather, they stipulate that any changes due to shifting socio-historical conditions

must occur within strict limits set by the hegemonic version of the nation’s past and by the

currently predominant conception of the nation as a social form.

Jus soli proponents that engage the national past, on the other hand, seem to do so

precisely in order to contest this hegemonic version that prescribes homogeneity and precludes

change. Instead, they propose a narrative that legitimizes change and fluidity in collective

boundaries and terms of belonging, by representing these terms and boundaries as under constant

re-evaluation throughout Greece’s modern history. In this discourse, events and symbols used by

the official narrative to cement a rigid definition of “Greekness” are, in fact, much more

indicative of the suppressed plurality in the collectivity’s historical trajectory. Further, this

discourse draws a link between historical plurality and official efforts to ban it with

contemporary ideologies and practices of exclusion.

III. Background

A) The Nationalist Model of Collective Belonging

The last two centuries have registered intense efforts throughout the globe to normalize

the nationalist model of social organization and represent ethno-cultural fixity, homogeneity and

boundedness as universal human collective patterns (e.g. Jenkins 2008). Nationalist thought

reads the past backward and reconstructs it teleologically, essentializing identities and ignoring

material realities and changes that have taken place over time (Bosworth 2007; Karakasidou

1997; Kitromilides 2003; Pieterse 2007). Further and crucially, by portraying culture as object-

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like, unchanging and isomorphic with a people and a place, nationalism precludes the possibility

of ethno-cultural mixture and harmonious co-existence; in the interests of social cohesion and

political equality, people must live with their own kind (Stolcke 1995).

Viewed in the light of the long-term historical and ethnographic record, however, the

nationalist model has never been the only or, indeed, the dominant form of human collective

organization (Pieterse 2007). The world has never consisted in “an archipelago of distinct,

bounded, culturally distinctive and homogeneous units” (Jenkins 2008: 33); rather, it has always

featured complex patterns of interconnections. In the Balkan peninsula – before the advent of

nationalism carved it in into a number of mutually-hostile nation-states – ethic difference was

considered neither immutable nor the primary axis of social organization (Detrez 2003;

Karakasidou 1997; Kitromilides 1989; Mazower 2005; Roudometof 1998). While national

mythologies pair each Balkan nation with its pre-modern ethnic group (Kitromilides 1989;

Roudometof 1998), the national model does not capture the area’s historical complexity,

especially within the Orthodox Christian community (Roudometof 1998). Greeks, Albanians,

Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians were ethnic groups in the Ottoman Balkans, aware of their

differences. What distinguished them, however, was not some notion of common descent or

essentialized cultural difference, but rather the position of each group in the local division of

labor. Ethnic labels were applied according to class and occupational status (Karakasidou 1997;

Roudometof 1998). Language, later used by nationalists as an indication of national belonging,

was used to mark occupational groups. For example, because most peasants were Slavic speakers

and most Slavic speakers were peasants, the occupational distinction became an ethnic

distinction. If Slavic speakers migrated to urban areas, took up commerce and moved into the

middle class, they learned Greek to navigate their new environment and shifted their ethnic

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identification to Greek as well – a shift seen as normal and acceptable (Roudometof 1998) and

often resulting in families straddling ethnic lines (Detrez 2003). In short, pre-national

identification was fluid, multi-dimensional and contingent on a set of mutable factors, i.e.

locality, occupation, social status and affinal ties (Karakasidou 1997).

B) Nationalism across the Board?

Pre-national, fluid patterns of social exchange and interaction were traumatically

disrupted when nationalism and the mechanisms of the modern state that sought to enforce and

normalize it made their way into the region (Karakasidou 1997). The specific historical process

of nation-state formation seeks to create the type of person “who has an identity” (Verdery 1994:

37), for whom ethno-national identification constitutes the key element of self-conception. As

young national states vied for or succeeded in incorporating former Ottoman lands, the

essentializing rhetoric of nationalism strove to de-legitimize identification based on locality,

occupation or diverse social ties and imposed the adoption of national labels instead.

Rather than a rising awareness of age-old affective ties, however, the adoption of the

nationalist principle reflects class struggles over power, status and resources and the

effectiveness of the state’s various mechanisms of propaganda (Hobsbawm 1990). In the Greek

case, the ideological framework of Hellenism opened new channels for social and economic

mobility to those actors who positioned themselves as the agents of the new state (Karakasidou

1997). To secure the state’s ideological and material dominance in an ethno-culturally plural

terrain, certain families and/or classes were empowered to administer state-sponsored initiatives

and thus pursue their own economic and political interests (ibid.). And while adherence to the

nationalist idiom spread beyond those cohorts through a variety of channels, mechanisms and

institutions (education, military, networks of patronage, etc.) (Karakasidou 1997; Kitromilides

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1989), we can never assume that the ideology of the state or of specific classes ever extends to

the entire population or that national sentiment ever trumps all other loci of identification and

allegiance (Hobsbawm 1990). Neither state ideologies nor powerful spokespeople can be relied

upon to reflect the “assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests or ordinary people, who

are not necessarily national and still less nationalist” (Hobsbawm 1990: 10). The job of the

analyst, therefore, is to interrogate into the spread or potency of national sentiment and seek

ethnographic evidence that reveals how people a continuum of power, knowledge and boundary-

making capacities conceptualize, (re)produce and enact collective belonging.

An inquiry into the diverse conceptions of collectivity and patterns of identification

which may differ from or even clash directly with the nationalist model becomes more pressing

when large immigration re-pluralizes painstakingly-standardized national terrains. The presence

of immigrants in the national space muddies the naturalized isomorphism between culture,

people and place (Appadurai 2003; Bhabha 1990; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Trouillot 2003).

Although enormous scholarly effort has addressed migration and immigrants’ integration into

new societies, research is still needed to examine how immigration prompts natives to craft and

contest national (re)imaginaries, and particularly the plural voices that emerge and express their

views in these debates.

C) Immigration to Greece and the 2010 Law

Immigration to Greece started as a trickle in the early 1980s, but did not emerge as a

massive phenomenon until after the collapse of the Central and Eastern European regimes

(Kasimis & Papadopoulos, 2005). The 1991 population census registered the foreign born at

167,000, i.e. just over one percent of the population total (Kasimis and Kassimi 2004); by 2008,

these figures had climbed to 1.3 million and 11.3 percent respectively (Triandafyllidou and

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Maroukis 2010). More than 70 percent of immigrants are of Albanian origin; other source

countries include Bulgaria, Romania, former Soviet Republics and developing countries in Asia

and Africa (ibid.).

Historically a country of emigration (Kasimis and Kassimi 2004,) Greece was not

prepared to handle its almost overnight change into a place of migrant settlement. All the more

so since the presence of immigrants in the national space threatened the ethno-homogeneous

myth dominant actors and discourses have been cultivating throughout Greece’s two centuries as

a nation-state. Almost since its inception in 1830, the Greek state has striven to create an

ethnically homogeneous populace, deploying an array of homogenizing tactics, such as

population exchanges, expulsions and forced ethno-linguistic assimilation (Kitromilides 1989;

Karakasidou 1997; Margaritis 2005; Tsitselikis 2006), in order to fashion itself by mid-twentieth

century into “one of the most ethnically homogeneous states in Europe” (Kitromilides 1989:

176). Citizenship laws were crafted very early to reflect and promote this normative conception

of the body politic as ethno-culturally homogeneous: in 1827, even before official statehood,

descent became the key criterion for belonging (Christopoulos 2004).

An overview of legislation passed to address mass migration since 1991 – with the

exception of the jus soli provision proposed in November 2009 – reveals piecemeal measures

that attempt to address short-term practical concerns (regulate flows and offer temporary

documentation to the migrant work force) while shying from altering the criteria of belonging

and thus departing from the nationalist model (Triandafyllidou 2009). Policy reflects a view of

immigration as a parenthesis that will close (when migrant labor is no longer vital to the

country’s economy) and allow Greece to preserve its illusions of an ethno-culturally

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homogeneous body politic and a reluctance to acknowledge that immigrants are inevitably and

permanently becoming a constitutive element of Greek society (ibid.).

An approach revealing recognition that immigrants were are to stay and favoring

integration and naturalization for the second generation emerged in the mid-2000s mainly in the

party platforms of the (now ruling) Socialists and most parties of the left (ibid.). A scant month

after its election in October 2009, the Socialist Party announced its intention to propose a jus soli

provision. The bill’s main stipulation consisted in citizenship at birth for children born in Greece

to at least one legal resident or Greek-born parent and citizenship at maturity for children who

had attended at least six years in the Greek primary or secondary education system.

IV. Methodology

To capture the polyvocality this study takes as its focus, I have drawn data from

commentary submitted in two Facebook groups and a government-sponsored online public

forum. The government forum was created in order to allow popular commentary on the

proposed jus soli legislative provision. The two Facebook groups were also established in the

purpose of arguing for or against the proposed legislation – playing off each other, they are

named “You are born Greek; you do not become Greek” (hereafter referred to as “the exclusive

Facebook group) and “You become Greek; you are not born Greek” (hereafter referred to as “the

inclusive Facebook group).

Rather than disconnected places hosting the production and enactment of new identities,

online public fora in general (boyd and Ellison 2007; Miller and Slater 2000), and Facebook in

particular (boyd and Ellison 2007; Lewis et al. 2008; Zhao et al. 2008), are embedded in offline

social contexts, (re)producing and enacting offline social knowledge and identities. Crucially,

they extend the discursive space to encompass people who typically lack the opportunity to

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speak and be heard in the offline public sphere; they also foster discursive exchanges among

larger and more diverse sets of actors (Byrne 2008). As such, they expand and diversify the sets

of agents who imagine the nation and the imaginaries that ensue.

The government forum opened for comments on the naturalization bill on December 28,

2009 and remained opened until January 7, 2010. During this time, 3,403 comments were

submitted. Because this is a voluntary-response sample, I did not draw a random sub-sample

from it. Rather, after transferring comments into a software program for qualitative data analysis

(MAXQDA), I engaged in open coding, reading comments in their order of submission.

Following the dictates of grounded theory (Corbin and Strauss 2008), I read and analyzed 408

submissions, until new data did not yield any new insight and conceptual categories had reached

saturation. Facebook groups were established earlier, in early December 2009, i.e. as soon as the

jus soli provision was proposed. From the data available there, I only engaged with discussion

threads, rather than solitary posts, in order to examine how actors engage with each other in spite

of physical distance and (re)produce the national narrative interactively. This data collecton

strategy resulted in 618 texts, all of which I have read and analyzed.

My analytical method follows the dictates of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Wodak

2008; Wodak and De Cillia 2007; Wodak et al. 2009). I do not harbor a socially-neutral

analytical stance, but rather a desire to throw light at essentialist conceptions of nation that

prevent the equal, harmonious co-existence of people from various ethno-cultural backgrounds

(Wodak et al. 2009). Underlying my scholarship is a normative conception of nationalism as a

reactionary ideology that prescribes a view of humanity as naturally divided in distinct, bounded,

culture-containing units and thus erects rigid social boundaries and promotes intolerance and

historical short-sightedness. Following Eric Hobsbawm (1990), I consider it the task of the

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researcher to examine whether and how people in a multitude of “social location[s]” (Mahler and

Pessar 2001: 445) internalize and (re)produce hegemonic nationalist narratives and ideologies.

V. Discussion

“Ancient Greek CivilizationByzantiumGreek RevolutionWorld WarsBalkan WarsCivil WarPolytechnicSo much history, so much blood by Greeks for this place called Greece, and you come now to sell everything out.”

I selected this quote to anchor the analysis, because it demonstrates how the nation’s

historical trajectory – or, rather, an essentialized, constructed version of this trajectory – dictates,

in a highly normative fashion, its future course. The list suggests that the author has identified

the key chapters in the history of the nation and stated them in chronological order – chapters

written and enacted, throughout the ages, “by Greeks”. This latter element, the axiomatic

“Greekness” of the actors, appears to be the thread that runs through and allows the arrangement

in linear fashion of items highly disparate temporally as well as in nature, ranging from “Ancient

Greek Civilization” (an era? a concept? a body of knowledge and cultural material?) to a three-

day student revolt toward the end of the Fordist period. Reified and essentialized, this

“Greekness” forms a “pre-discursive core” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 6) that allows only for

specific ways of imagining and enacting collectivity.

Nationalist historiography and the public and popular discourses it promotes represent the

nation as a fixed, homogeneous, immemorial unit with a distinct ethno-cultural core that changes

little, if any, in response to shifting socio-historical conditions (Bosworth 2007, Özkimirli 2003).

In the case of Greece, “the transcendental character of the Greek nation” (Özkimirli and Sofos

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2008) was the unifying element devised and used by state elites and nationalist intelligentsia to

forge a linear, unbroken, cultural and racial1 trajectory from the Classical Antiquity to the

present, (e.g. Karakasidou 1997; Kitromilides 1989; Özkimirli and Sofos 2008) in order to secure

the nation a place within the symbolic and material boundaries of European modernity (Herzfeld

2002; Tsoukalas 2000). Crucially, to argue with any credibility that the population cohort labeled

“Greeks” constitutes, in fact, a homogeneous group that has sailed through time with its racial

and cultural core intact, nationalist discourse reconstructs the past teleologically, bestowing the

nation with a historical mission. In other words, it distorts the fact that, at any given historical

moment, the character, boundaries and course of the collectivity were contingent and

overdetermined by a diverse combination of socio-historical factors and human agency, rather

than predetermined by the nation’s essence and historical destiny (Özkimirli and Sofos 2008).

Similarly, it belies the fact that the meaning of “Greek” has been fluid, contested and defined

anew several times throughout history – including during some of the eras or the events

mentioned in the above list that have achieved landmark status in the hegemonic national

narrative. During the revolution that led to statehood in the 1820s, for example, the official

criterion for “Greek” switched from residence in the territory, to religion to language to descent

in less than a decade in response to a mixture of historical legacies of identification, ideological

currents and pragmatic concerns (Christopoulos 2004). Rather than liberate unredeemed co-

ethnics, the Balkan Wars brought Greece thousands of new subjects whose national identity had

to be constructed in a protracted, complex, state-directed process involving a combination of

coercion and material incentives (Karakasidou 1997). The Polytechnic consisted in an uprising

of some Greeks against other Greeks and symbolically culminated a half-century, brutal tug of

1 For an excellent discussion of how hegemonic notions of “Greekness” combine cultural and biological elements, see Tzanelli 2006.

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war between leftists and those striving to exclude them from the national body and restrict the

definition of “Greek” to Christian nationalists (Panourgia 2009).

Although indicative of the contested and fluid meaning of Greek, rather than of unity and

essence, the items on the list come together to form the nation’s seamless historical trajectory.

Notice that the last item, the Polytechnic uprising, consists in the most recent major event

canonized in the official national narrative and formally celebrated. And this is precisely why it

(as well as all the other items) makes it into the list – because enough time has elapsed for an

“ideological management of the past” (Özkimirli and Sofos 2008: 24), i.e. the re-narration of

events and eras in a way that tailors them to custom-fit a conception of history as predetermined

and teleological, enacted, as the author of the quote puts it, “by Greeks […] for this place called

Greece”.

In this discourse, then, the key historical actor is an undifferentiated, bounded group, and

history advances linearly toward a specific telos – a collectivity hard-earned by Greeks and

therefore meant for Greeks. Because the nation’s past is normalized, it becomes prescriptive and

binding. Eras, events and symbols that have been canonized in the nation’s hegemonic narrative

prescribe its future course. The following two statements, for example, were offered as reasons

why the proposed jus soli provision should not become law. As this suggests, past actions and

decisions constitute their own justification – no further argumentation is necessary as to why the

collectivity should stay on the same course or abide by past choices:

“This state was created with blood from the sacred bones of Greeks. In 1821, Greeks did not ask for a state for all those living in the territory of Greece under revolt. They demanded and won with their blood a free state for the Greek genus.”

Similarly:

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“Greece is the nation-state of Greeks. The state, that is, that was created and exists for the protection of the Greek nation. This was the purpose of our founding fathers [sic] and this is the political legitimacy in the country.”

Deviating from this predetermined course, therefore, amounts to “selling out”, as stated

in the comment at the beginning of this section. Change in the boundaries and character of the

collectivity is not seen as a pragmatic response to shifting material realities. Rather, it is

perceived as a value-laden act of betrayal to the nation’s set historical trajectory. History must

continue to evolve within the strict confines of the nation’s essentialized narrative.

I want to emphasize once again what I perceive as the key element of this discourse,

which is the “by Greeks for Greeks” element. This is premised upon a specific definition of

Greek, which applies both to those Greeks whose struggles and efforts founded the nation, as

well as those Greeks who are supposed to take it forward. It assumes a homogeneous ethno-

cultural group that has dodged any sort of mongrelization in its three millennia of history, and

should therefore continue to do so. On the antipode are actors who wish to broaden the

boundaries of the collectivity to allow access to people of non-Greek descent. In order to foster a

different vision for the present, they also promote a different account of the past. Contesting the

hegemonic narrative, they argue that the Greek collectivity did not start out as ethno-culturally

homogeneous. Instead, it became so through a deliberate, state-directed process of quashing or

banishing ethno-cultural otherness. Consider the following quote, which encapsulates several

different elements of the inclusive discourse:

“You should read the records from the First and Second National Congress carefully to see who the people who constituted the Greek nation were and how strong were the ties that bound them together. It is mentioned there that the body of the people who participated did not understand the same language and this was the reason their positions were articulated in Albanian and other dialects as well. For what nationality, therefore, are we speaking, that others cannot acquire? For the nationality that was given to the people of Epirus2 after burning the schools where bilingual 2 Greek province annexed to the state from the Ottoman Empire during the 1912-’13 Balkan wars.

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students3 went in 1912 and 1913? For the national conscience forged by destroying local traditions and punishing all those who spoke local dialects?

First, the author invites the rest of the people in the discussion (the quote derives from a

discussion thread in the inclusive Facebook group) to “read the records from the First and

Second National Congress carefully,” i.e. prompts them to scrutinize historical records in order

to put the normalized narrative of the homogeneous nation to the test. He4 continues by giving

his own reading of the historical record, in order to promote a different picture of what was

considered normal and acceptable at an earlier point in the life of the collectivity. Not only did

people that constituted the founding core of the Greek nation not understand the same language,

but this diversity was seen as normal and acceptable enough to be mentioned in the nascent

state’s official records.

A view of the past that normalizes ethno-cultural plurality and contests the myth of the

homogeneous-since-the-beginning-of-time nation legitimizes a different vision for the

contemporary order of things. How can Greek nationality not be accessible at present to people

who are not ethnic Greeks, when at its foundational moment – the first two congresses that lay

the groundwork for the budding collectivity – the nation was not only open to, but, most

importantly, constituted by people from a variety of linguistic (and, perhaps, ethnic and

religious) backgrounds?

Crucially, apart from representing foundational events and processes as constituted by

ethno-cultural homogeneity rather than plurality, this actor takes his argument a step forward.

Specifically, he outlines a process of constructing a homogeneous national body – a process

directed from above, which he represents scathingly as deliberate and violent.

3 My own grandmother, born in a village in Epirus in 1918, often spoke about being beaten at elementary school by her teacher, when she used Turkish words in her speech.4 I use the male pronoun, because the person who wrote this comment identified himself on Facebook with a male name.

16

The ethno-cultural homogeneity of the body politic in this discourse, then, does not

emerge “naturally” and does not date back thousands of years to the earliest “Greek” political

formations, but is rather a recent product of a purposeful process of national formation. For this

actor, this consists in a process that attacked and eradicated the linguistic and cultural diversity

constitutive of the population that inhabited the territory that the Greek state gradually annexed

for itself over a century of struggles with the devolving Ottoman Empire and the rest of its

Balkan neighbors.

De-naturalizing the notion of the homogeneous nation allows this actor to release the

concept of Greek nationality from its ethno-cultural fetters and broaden the pool of people who

may have access to it at present. If plurality was legitimate – and in fact, constituted the norm of

social organization – in the collectivity’s past, it may become the norm, or at least one among a

set of acceptable norms, again in the present. As I argued in the beginning of this paper,

narratives of the nation’s past are harnessed and (re)produced strategically to promote

contemporary social agendas.

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