Is Greece a racist state?
Though the surge in support for the neo-fascist Golden Dawn has gained considerable attention in the international media, this phenomenon is better understood within the context of developments affecting society as a whole. It is Greek society in economic depression and its attitudes towards the other – the migrant or the foreigner – that will be the subject of this article.
Modern Greek history will be read as a history of migrations, both international and internal, older and newer migrants finding themselves in competition as they seek to renegotiate their position in society and their identities. It is in the light of these previous migrations that an effort will be made to comprehend contemporary policies and current attitudes towards immigration. European legislation on migration is increasing the instability of the Greek state at this crucial juncture, and, as a result, contributing to the magnitude of the crisis.
Urban strangers
Migration is not new to the region. Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Hordern have chronicled how variable microclimates in the mountainous Aegean rendered movement and hence migration a necessary technique for survival. Population hubs on islands or peninsulas were linked by sea to distant hinterlands, relying on them for nutrition and much else.
Against this backdrop, climatic, economic or political disturbances led to population movements on an even grander scale: the flow of migrants from the Balkans to the northern Black Sea coast (increasingly part of the Russian Empire) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or migration in waves from the western to the eastern Aegean, from Greece to what is today Turkey and to Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - to cite two examples from the recent past. Unlike the nation-states which followed in its wake, the port cities of the Ottoman, Russian and British Empires provided a suitable framework for such movement, and not a few Greeks grew wealthy trading throughout the Black Sea and the Levant, even as far east as Calcutta.
Two further migrations, however, have left an indelible mark on Greek society in the twentieth century. First, the forced migration of Orthodox Christians (some Turkish speaking) from the newly constituted Turkish state, and Muslims (a large number Greek speaking) from Greece, both prior to and following the treaty of Lausanne of 1923. Their story has recently been re-narrated by Bruce Clark in his poignantly named “Twice a Stranger”.
Ethnic cleansing on this scale was justified by the requirement of creating homogeneous and hence functioning nation-states, the resulting homogeneity being primarily religious. Despite efforts to settle migrants and provide them with gainful employment, these migrants, some 20% of the total population (and over 45% in Greek Macedonia), became the determining factor in Greek politics. With little allegiance to the royalist status quo, and denigrated as an inferior underclass by the bourgeois of old Greece, urban refugees provided the backbone of the Liberal and, slightly later, the Communist party, KKE.
Already in the 1920s KKE was arguing in manifestos for the imposition of a “workers' and peasants' and refugees' government”. Though it is important to take into consideration the effects of depression in the 1930s when support for KKE surged, a direct line connects the migrations of the 1920s to the Civil War of approx. 1943-1949.
On ethnic cleansing as an aspect of nationalism also see
