On the value of failing and keeping a distance: narrating returns to post-dictatorship Greece

ABSTRACT

In the years after the Greek Junta, activists who had been involved in anti-dictatorship movements abroad returned as the country’s new pool of left-leaning, well-educated political actors. Drawing on interviews with former activists and borrowing from recent developments in cultural sociology, I analyse these returns as political projects fraught with moral conundrums. I argue that the contemporary crisis structure accounts of returns by placing speakers within what Boltanski and Thévenot call a ‘situation subject to the imperative of justification’. I make two arguments regarding the critiques and valuations used in accounts: First, the idealized political subject put forward by former activists promotes withdrawal over participation and silence over speech. Second, failure is valorized as a principled mode of self-exoneration. This article further demonstrates the importance of theorizing return migration within an ethnographic treatment of the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Return migration
• Greek Left
• post-dictatorship
• grammar of evaluation
• state formation
• Greek crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. PAK stands for the ‘Panhellenic Resistance Movement’

2. PASOK stands for the ‘Panhellenic Socialist Movement’

3. I spent a total of 18 months in Greece during this period of research and 10 months in Toronto.

4. NVivo software was used to identify generalizable patterns in both field notes and interview transcriptions.

5. For a historically contextualized analysis of contemporary Greek political cultures, see Diamandouros (1983).

6. The Danforth is an area of Toronto that was home to many newcomers from Greece at the time. Today, it is still called, ‘Greek Town’, although many families have since left the city’s centre for the suburbs.

7. There is a lengthy debate exploring the cultural and economic sources of clientelism. For a sociological analysis of relations between clientelism, civil society and culture, see Papakostas (2012). For a historically grounded analysis of contemporary Greek political culture, see Demertzis (1997) and Diamandouros (1983).

8. For an interesting discussion of how this convergence impacted the politics of sexuality and gender relations, see Jane. K. Cowan (1991).

9. The Troika refers to three organizations – European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund – and the austerity measures that they have implemented in Greece since 2010.

10. Theodoros Pangalos made this statement in parliament on 21 September 2010, 5 months after the first memorandum was voted into existence. ‘Ta fagame oli mazi’ was also the title of his book, published in 2012.