Greek national identity on twitter: re-negotiating markers and boundaries

ABSTRACT

Recent empirical research is examining national identity as a bottom–up process. Despite the promise held by social media in accessing the ‘black box’ of ordinary citizens’ national identity, literature on the subject is scarce. We study Greek national identity on Twitter, in relation to the acceptance of the agreement between Greece and Northern Macedonia about the name of the latter. Despite the systematic recourse to a plethora of references and symbols from antiquity in public discourse and mainstream media, we found that Twitter users made limited use of national identity markers and put a strong emphasis on the present.

KEYWORDS:

• National identity
• social media
• twitter
• Greece
• Northern Macedonia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a presentation of the workings of identity in the first few years of the crisis, see Lialiaouti & Bithymitris, 2017.

2 The data were collected by PaloPro (https://palopro.io) Web and Social Media Analytics platform, a product of PaloServices (http://www.paloservices.com).

3 The exact query was: ‘πρέσπϵς OR πρϵσπϵς OR πρϵσπών OR πρϵσπων OR μακϵδον* OR σκόπια* OR σκοπια* OR σκοπιαν* OR σκοπίων OR σκοπιων OR fyrom* OR πγδμ OR ζάϵφ OR ζαϵφ OR prespes* OR makedonia* OR macedonia* OR skopia*’.

4 A concise presentation of the techniques mentioned, and the underlying linguistic and mathematical reasoning along with the programming methods, is out of the scope of this paper. For a presentation, cf. Clark et al., 2013; Srinivasa-Desikan, 2018.

5 Eleftherios Venizelos, Konstantinos Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou were eminent political figures throughout the 20th century. Despite they left a lasting imprint in modern Greek history, they were considered controversial. According to Clogg (1992, pp. 104–105) ‘Venizelos was, for one half of Greece, saviour and symbol; for the other he was Satan,’ Karamanlis ‘was to be a dominant force in politics, whether in or out of office, for (…) thirty-five years’ (1992, p. 151. Emphasis added), while Papandreou’s terms in office are considered as the foundation of populism in Greek politics.

6 The identification of names (Named Entity Recognition, or NER) in the corpus was completed using Python’s SpaCy library (https://spacy.io) for Natural Language Processing.

7 In fact, Alexander the Great is a contested symbol during the last three decades, as both Greece and Northern Macedonia have been claiming to be heirs of his legacy. Cf. Danforth (2003), Roudometof (2002).

8 For this analysis we used the software TXM – Textométrie (Heiden, 2010).

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Notes on contributors

Hara Stratoudaki

Dr. Hara Stratudaki is a Senior Researcher at the National Centre for Social Research, Athens. She holds a PhD in sociology and has worked in research and published on national identity, contemporary immigration, and xenophobia in Greece. Her published work (mostly in Greek) includes papers on the markers of Greek national identity, the national identity of youth, as well as the book Public Administration and Immigrants: Towards social integration. She has also been editor of the volume Institutions, Values, Behaviours: A study on the findings of the European Social Survey (2008–2009).