Rephrasing nationalism: elite representations of Greek–Turkish relations in a Greek border region

Abstract

This article focuses on the representations of Greek–Turkish relations among local political elites in the Greek border region of Evros. The transition from competitive nationalism to Greek–Turkish rapprochement in the late 1990s created a new context for political action and led to a readjustment of public practices. This process reflected an interplay of national and European policies and global normative discourses. Nonetheless, changing discourses should be critically examined, as fieldwork in Evros revealed ambivalent representations that point to the reproduction of nationalism and the state, a condition that is becoming salient anew in the context of the recent economic crisis.

Keywords:

• Greece
• Evros
• nationalism
• state
• elites
• crisis

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Othon Anastasakis and Nora Fisher Onar for their valuable comments and courageous editing efforts, as well as Carolina Kobelinsky for kindly having read and commented on an earlier version of the paper. All flaws and omissions in this paper are my sole responsibility.

Notes

1. Βorder regions bear the impact of national policies in immediate ways. The delineation, security and control of borders are crucial to the reproduction of the national state itself (Gupta 2003, 329). In contrast to examples of ‘ambiguous’ border regions, Evros and its population have been constructed in the local and national political imagination as a par excellence case of ‘bastion of the nation’ in its highly territorialized Westphalian conceptualization, with all the ensuing connotations of cleanness and internal coherence (Green 2012, 577). Furthermore, self-regulation, conformism and/or excessive patriotic displays among border populations can help us reflect on the impact of the national state on local modes of social interpretation, which include not only spoken discourses but also unspoken taxonomies and emotions, typical of what could generally be termed as a nationally conditioned borderland habitus (Billig 1995, 42; Bourdieu 1997, 142, 260, 261; Eilenberg 2005; Hirschon 2009, 74). In the case of ‘loyal’ border communities, such as Evros, one is able to reflect on the fact that despite being implicated in intersecting sub-, trans-, and supra-national conditions, a local community may internalize and adjust itself to the rationale of the national state to a relatively greater extent (Herzfeld 1987, 160; also see Thomassen 2005).

2. Within this context, the relative ethnic homogeneity of Evros and the image of an unambiguous ‘Greek Christian enclave’ provided local politicians with a certain recognition in comparison to their Christian Greek-speaking counterparts from the neighbouring regions of Xanthi and Rodhopi, who were faced with the complex reality of a multi-ethnic constituency. The following example is indicative of the symbolic and emotional construction (Wilson and Donnan 2005, 9) of this unambiguous borderland condition: during an award ceremony in honour of a renown folk artist from Evros in 1998, and in the presence of politicians from Evros, an official from the neighbouring prefecture of Rodhopi praised Evros as being the ‘only prefecture which is masculine and stands straight [o ‘Eβρoς ϵίναι o μoναδικός νoμός αρσϵνικός και όρθιoς]’ (Chronos 26 January 1998). Indeed, the delineation of the territory of Evros on the map gives the image of being straight-up, facing Turkey, and moreover the term ‘Evros’ is grammatically masculine, in contrast to most geographical terms in Greek. This honorary praise of an uncompromised masculinity was a clear reference to the ethnic reality of Thrace and the symbolic position of Evros as a presumed homogeneous ‘bastion’ against a nationally and sexually menacing Turkish expansionism. I would like to thank Fotini Tsibiridou for having provided the information.

3. Through such debates on the definition of ‘real patriotism’, we are able to grasp the correlation between power, social recognition and the right to speak about the ‘nation’. State officials, politicians, business representatives and more generally dominant classes held a specific symbolic power with regard to the audience at such events. Any ‘simple participant’ who defied their established discourse and order could easily be labeled a ‘fool’. After all, these congresses constituted displays and confirmations of social power. On a wider level, such occasions for ostentatious patriotism remind us of the hierarchical logic of nationalism and its close intertwinement with political and class hierarchies.

4. By the time I had started my fieldwork, in 2006, it was obvious that the Greek–Turkish INTERREG programme would not materialize. Nevertheless, through interviews, I came to understand that the wide majority of local politicians and local government institutions in Evros had been preparing proposals and projects, for as long as the programme seemed viable – roughly throughout the first half of the 2000s. Besides collective consultations and meetings between local politicians in Evros, most of them had also undertaken contacts with Turkish counterparts from the adjacent Turkish regions. In fact, cross-border expectations exceeded the confines of the local followers of the modernizing PASOK, thus finally involving other members of PASOK and Néa Dimokratia, even some that had stood as renown anti-Turkish ‘patriots’ in the immediate past. More generally, cross-border programmes, either with Bulgaria or Turkey, had become at that time a prerequisite for the accumulation of political capital. This orientation of local politicians had become evident with the creation of cross-border networks, meaning loose networks of cooperation between Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish local government institutions. During my fieldwork, there were still four such networks in the wider region. These cross-border networks were created and maintained by politicians, along with their consultants, as part of their strategies of political reproduction. I should point out that, in the long term, those who chose to focus on Greek–Turkish relations didn’t succeed as much as those who had focused e.g. on Greek–Bulgarian projects, given the eventual halt of EU–Turkey relations. Nevertheless, during the first half of the 2000s, Turkey’s potential accession course into the EU had provided these practices a specific momentum. A local policy consultant who had taken part in joint meetings on the issue of Greek–Turkish INTERREG pointed out the ‘Europeanization’ euphoria that prevailed at the time, while he indicated that the expectation of European funding was also widespread among Turkish mayors and representatives, who were enthusiastic about this prospect.

5. James Wesley Scott points out the importance of ‘cross-border cooperation’ within the project of European Integration since the mid-1980s, as well as its practical enactment through EU funded programmes (2012, 85).

6. Bjorn Thomassen’s reference to ‘spiritualist’ and ‘mercantilist’ readings of nationalism in Trieste (Thomassen 2005) seems to be of particular relevance to the case of Evros as well.

7. This interlocutor also seized upon the fact that I was a native researcher with a familiar Thracian surname, possible common acquaintances, etc., all of which implied a localized experience of unspoken and unofficial practices. I believe that this made him more eager to justify himself to a native researcher who might have easy access to locally intimate knowledge. After all, I was part of his constituency. Also see Herzfeld 2005, 1–38.

8. The term ‘dönme’ usually refers to the Ottoman Jews of Thessaloniki who converted to Islam from the late seventeenth century. However, in this context, it is used in a derogatory way to denote those who change beliefs and opinions, who ‘turn’ (from the Turkish verb ‘dönmek’) and align themselves to the will of the Ottoman/Muslim/Turkish ‘enemy’, in order to secure survival or gains.

9. For another case of discursive self-regulation regarding ‘nationally sensitive issues’, see Lauth Bacas (2005, 72).

10. It should be noted that these preoccupations were typical of urban political elites – local intellectuals of the national state (in the Gramscian sense), with a specific conservative class ethos, who are particularly prone to talk and theorize about politics. At the same time, the constant anxiety caused by geopolitics should not be reduced only to a strategy for social pacification or to a singularly bourgeois experience. Rather, I propose, it can be seen as permeating wider parts of the local population. In this sense, we are invited to reflect on recurrent geopolitical fears and hopes as elements of a historically constructed and shared doxa or common sense, intertwined as it is with emotions and inhibitions. This may help us to further explain hegemonic limits in social agents’ action – not only in Evros, but in other similar settings in Greece and Turkey as well.

11. These discourses can be seen as a localized critique of the one-dimensional ‘post-national and post-state’ interpretation of global capitalism that has prevailed for the last 20 years and that does not take under account that (neo) liberalism and nationalism stand as mutually inclusive constitutive traits of modern political and economic power –in Greece, as elsewhere.