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Modern Greece: an old/new nation
Roderick Beaton
Keynote paper given at the 9th Biennial Conference of the Modern Greek Studies
Association of Australia and New Zealand, La Trobe University, 11-13 December
2008
The title of this talk points to a paradox. Greece is a very old nation, perhaps the
oldest in Europe and one of the oldest surviving in the world today. But no: Greece is
a new nation, created in the early 19th century. Both these statements can’t be true.
And yet who would deny the antiquity of Greece? The name still, today, refers
primarily to one of the great ancient civilisations of the world; indeed this is why we
often have to distinguish the modern language, and the modern field of studies that
brings us together here, by the addition of the word ‘Modern’. We don’t have to talk
about ‘Modern British’ studies, ‘Modern French’, still less ‘Modern Australian’! But
in the case of Greece we often have to make that distinction, precisely because in the
minds of many people and in a wide variety of contexts, the very word ‘Greek’
implies in itself the idea of ‘ancient’. We can deplore this practice if we wish. But the
fact remains: ‘Greece’ is very old as well as, in its modern form, distinctly new.
The way out of the paradox must surely be to ask: what do you mean by a
‘nation’? That is the question that I intend to address in this talk. In particular, how
does the success-story of Greece as a modern nation map onto current and developing
theories of nations and nationalism? What does the unique and specific story of
modern Greece have to tell comparatists, theorists, and historians of nationalism as a
social and political phenomenon? And how, conversely, can the current theoretical
debate help us better to understand the specific case of Greece, both in its
particularity and in its wider political and sociological context?
Two books published in 2008 tackle these issues head on. The volume of
essays edited by Katerina Zacharia, entitled Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and
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Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate), focuses on the
Greek case diachronically, taking in the whole chronological sweep implied by its
title. Specialists on the classical and Byzantine worlds, as well as on modern Greece,
drawn from a variety of disciplines, offer their insights into the different ways in
which Greeks at different historical periods have constructed a communal sense of
identity for themselves. The other book is The Cultural Foundations of Nations, by
Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Blackwell). Smith is one of the foremost contemporary
theorists of nations and nationalism, and here he proposes a far-reaching typology of
nations and the social and political forces that shape them, that goes back as far as the
ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt and attempts to account for
nationalism as a worldwide phenomenon at the present day.
I want to say something about each of these books now.
Anthony Smith’s book is important to the study of modern Greece for two
reasons. Since the mid-1980s, Smith has been developing a theoretical approach to
nations and nationalism which has ever more parted company with a dominant
orthodoxy associated with his former colleagues at the London School of Economics.
According to this orthodoxy, known as ‘modernism’ in the technical terminology of
specialists, the idea of the nation is inseparable from modernity. The ideas on which
nationalism is based derive from the philosophy of Rousseau and Herder in the
second half of the 18th century; the political nation is a product of the revolutions of
the United States and France in 1776 ad 1789 respectively, the wars of liberation in
South America in the first two decades of the 19th century, and (perhaps) the
industrial revolution. Smith, originally an adherent of this view, began to diverge
from it, in The Ethnic Origin of Nations (1986). Without quite disowning the
‘modernist’ paradigm, he began to introduce the idea that modern nations, beginning
in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, had been built upon much older
political, social and cultural foundations.
For the study of Greek national identity, this was a promising approach.
Whereas thoroughgoing going ‘modernist’ theories of the nation seemed to leave no
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room for the greater part of Greek history (before 1821), Smith opened a way to
investigate how perceptions of the past could play a constructive role in the modern
formation of nations. As he expressed it in 2001:
Nationalism and nations [...] are part of a wider ethno-cultural ‘family’ of
collective identities and aspirations [... T]he process of nation-formation [is]
not so much one of construction, let alone deliberate ‘invention’,
as of
reinterpretation of pre-existing cultural motifs and of reconstruction of earlier
ethnic ties and sentiments. [... T]he Greeks afford a good example of this
revival and reidentification through continuity of names, language and
landscapes.
(A.D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History, Cambridge: Polity,
2001, pp. 58, 83, 84, original emphases)
This was a powerful answer to theorists such as Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, or
even Benedict Anderson, whose influential concept of ‘imagined communities’ was
still being hotly contested in the Greek press as recently as 2005.
Since then, Smith has been extending his chronological range backwards, and
the furthest reach of this process is revealed in his new book, The Cultural
Foundations of Nations. The most far-reaching argument – and it remains to be seen
how this will fare as the theoretical debate continues – is that the processes that give
rise to nations in the modern world can in principle be found anywhere in the world
and at any point in historical time. The existence of these processes can only be
demonstrated, of course, where evidence exists in the form of a historical record.
Allowing for the incompleteness of evidence for pre-modern periods, Smith identifies
among the recorded civilisations of the ancient Near East four that he argues can be
understood as ‘proto-nations’. The Greek city-state is not among them, even although
he does note evidence that the Athenians in the fifth century BC viewed themselves
in ways very similar to those that define a modern nation (59 and n.).
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In Smith’s formulation, the model of the Greek city-state was enormously
influential in later developments in nation-building. But he leaves no room for the
idea that the Greeks themselves had been a nation before the 1821 revolution. On the
other hand, his final chapter does give a welcome prominence to modern Greece – not
because of any intrinsic link to antiquity but rather as an ‘exemplary’ case in the
author’s developing typology of modern nations.
This is the more remarkable because the Greek case has tended to be skated
over in general and theoretical studies of modern nationalism. The last chapter of
Smith’s most recent book begins with an account of the Greek revolution and a
summary of the ideological mix that went into shaping the first hundred years of
Greek national identity in the modern world. Of course, like all such theoretical
studies by generalists, this one is severely limited by the sources to which Smith has
had access. But brief though it is, it is a nuanced account that Smith gives. What
interests him about the Greek case is the co-existence and competition of two very
differently based ideologies in the formative stage of the modern Greek nation: on the
one hand the classically-based model of the ancient city-state that was promoted by
philhellenes and the Greek elite, on the other the allegiance to Orthodox Christianity
that motivated the great majority of combatants and later citizens of the Greek state.
Smith’s purpose is to propose a broad-based typology of nations, and Greece
here serves that purpose because, as he reads the evidence, modern Greece is
representative of a hybrid between two of his basic types. Smith’s typology, its
strengths and possible limitations, need not concern us for now. Suffice it to say that
the two fundamental types of nation that he sees coming together in the hybrid Greek
case are what he calls ‘covenantal’ nations and ‘republican’ nations. ‘Covenantal’
nations, in Smith’s analysis, are modelled ultimately on ancient Judaea as its history
is told in the Old Testament and characterised by a community of religious faith and
divinely-inspired mission. ‘Republican’ nations, on the other hand, draw their
inspiration from the ancient Greek city-state, and particularly from the democratic
institutions of classical Athens and of republican Rome.
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The dichotomy that Smith has observed about modern Greece is immediately
recognisable as the much-discussed ‘double heritage’ of the Greeks, deriving both
from classical antiquity and from the legacy of Byzantium and the Orthodox Church.
In Greek terms this dichotomy is well known, and the actual or alleged differences
between a ‘Hellenic’ and a ‘Romeic’ identity run through the whole of Greek
literature from Korais and Solomos to the present day. The Hellenic/Romeic
dichotomy has been famously discussed in English by such different commentators as
Patrick Leigh Fermor, Arnold Toynbee, and Michael Herzfeld. To that extent Smith
is saying nothing new. What is new is: first, the attempt to contextualise that
peculiarly Greek experience in a wider theory of nations, and second, the claim that
aspects of this experience are ‘exemplary’ for the understanding of other nationalisms
elsewhere in the world. I will come back to this idea of modern Greece as an
‘exemplary’ nation at the end of this talk.
The essays collected by Zacharia are in every respect complementary to
Smith’s theoretical/general study. Indeed, despite the emphasis on ‘culture, identity,
and ethnicity’ in the book’s subtitle, its bibliography is as thin on the theory of
modern nationalism as those of Smith and other theorists are on the specificities of
Greece. The editor declares a praiseworthy aim: ‘to initiate a public dialogue among
authoritative and discipline-specific voices, exploring a variety of Hellenisms’. The
book, furthermore, ‘sets out to present a sense of Hellenism in the construction of a
grammar of national ideologies’ (1). I’m not quite sure what that last phrase means,
but I suspect that a ‘grammar of national ideologies’ is the same kind of project as
that undertaken by Smith and other theorists whose work is under-represented in
Zacharia’s volume.
I cannot possibly do justice here to the work of the thirteen authors that makes
up 400 pages of text, except to recommend the book to you. One thing that it lacks,
though, is a conclusion. On the evidence presented, it would certainly be sensible in
future to think of ‘Hellenisms’ in the plural; not least among the new things I learnt
from individual chapters was just how fluid the terms and concepts of Greek
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communal self-identification were in the ancient world. It has been a commonplace in
Greece, ever since the monumental History of the Greek Nation was published by
Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos in the middle of the 19th century, to think of Greek
history, or ‘Hellenism’, as forming a ‘continuity’. But when you look at the
characteristic ways in which those whom today we would broadly call ‘Greeks’
defined themselves in antiquity, there are striking inconsistencies within any one
historical period, and greater shifts still from one period to another.
Homer mentions ‘Hellenes’ only once, where the name is apparently local and
contrasts with the more general ‘Achaians’ (Burstein in Zacharia, p. 61; Iliad II 684;
cf. A.J. Wace and F. Stubbings, Companion to Homer, London: Macmillan, 1962, p.
285). Later, even the famous dividing line that separates ‘Hellenes’ from ‘barbarians’
who do not speak Greek appears to have been porous (Hornblower in Zacharia). The
encounters with other peoples, languages and religions, that began with the conquests
of Alexander the Great and continued under the Roman empire and with the coming
of Christianity, would all produce huge variations in the terms and concepts that
defined ‘Hellenism’ at any of these periods.
Several of the contributors reflect on the defining statement of ancient Greek
identity that is put by Herodotus into the mouth of the Athenians who replied to an
embassy from Sparta on the eve of the battle of Plataea: ‘... there is the Greek nation
[το Ελληνικόν] – the community of blood and language, temples and ritual, and our
common customs’ (Herodotus VIII.144; quoted in Zacharia, p. 21, in the Penguin
translation). As one contributor to the book puts it:
Remarkably, Herodotus’ four criteria of Greekness – blood, language,
religion, and customs – closely parallel those identified by modern scholars of
ethnicity: descent, commensality or the right to share food, and cult (Burstein
in Zacharia, pp. 59-60 and n.)
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Interestingly Smith, who also cites this passage, seems less impressed by it.
Though he concedes that here Herodotus ‘defined and articulated a sense of common
Greek ethnicity’ (57), he goes on:
And yet, for all the stereotypes of pan-Hellenic propaganda, a Greek’s first
loyalty was to his or her city-state. After all, not a few of the cities went over
to the Persians in 480 BC, and it was their intense commercial and political
rivalries ... that plunged the Greek world into the long, bitter, and divisive
Peloponnesian War (58).
Taken together, these two books place the emphasis on the processes whereby
Greeks since the late eighteenth century have drawn on the past (multiple) histories
and cultures of Hellenism in order to create an identity that was essentially new, and
would prove durable in the successful creation and consolidation of the Greek state
from the 1830s onwards. The majority of the contributions to Zacharia’s book focus
on the modern period and on this issue, from the ideological contributions of Korais
and foreign (particularly German) philhellenes at the beginning of the 19th century,
through to contemporary Greek cinema and the identity of Greek diaspora
communities in the 21st. No less important than the focus on the modern nation and
the processes that brought it into being is the need to place the modern Greek
experience in a theoretical, comparative, and historical context. And this is where
Smith’s contribution lies. Because we need not just to explore different periods of
Hellenism, but to place each and all of these periods within a broader, comparative
and theoretical context. In this way we break out of the restricting mold that on the
one hand has made Greek studies too ‘ethnocentric’ or self-absorbed in the past, and
on the other has led to the isolation of Greece and Greek studies from wider academic
and public discourses.
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In the last part of this talk I want to develop the idea of modern Greece as
‘exemplary’, in Anthony Smith’s term, in relation to the developing theoretical
debate about nations and nationalism, but not quite for the same reasons or in the
same spirit that Smith does.
My argument stems from the fact, not noted by Smith or any other theorist,
and surprisingly overlooked in histories of modern Greece too, that Greece was
actually the first of the newly formed nation states of Europe to win full sovereignty
and international recognition in the nineteenth century. To that extent, the ‘London
Protocol’, signed on 3 February 1830 by the ambassadors of Great Britain, France
and Russia, and containing an annexe in which the Ottoman government gave its
prior consent to the terms about to be agreed, marks a watershed in the history of
modern Europe. Article 1 of the Protocol states baldly and unambiguously (in
French): ‘Greece will form an independent State, and will enjoy all the political,
administrative, and commerical rights attendant upon a complete independence’
(Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece, Service of Historical Archives, The
Foundation of the Modern Greek State: Major Treaties and Conventions (18301947), ed. Ph. Constantopoulou, Athens: Kastaniotis, 1999, p. 30). Another two years
would pass before a further Protocol would ratify the final terms of independence (30
August 1832). But it is the text of 1830 that marks the defining moment when the
efforts of the Greeks who had rebelled in 1821, and of their foreign supporters, the
‘Philhellenes’, were crowned with success.
It’s worth offering a few comparisons to illustrate the significance of this
event. The Greeks had not been the first to rebel against Ottoman rule. The Serbs
rebelled in 1804, and again in 1815. They won their battles, but were still obliged to
be content, in 1829, with a degree of autonomy that fell significantly short of full
sovereignty; that would come only in 1878. Romania and Montenegro would be
recognized as independent states at the same time, while Bulgaria and what was then
Eastern Rumelia would remain for even longer nominallly subject to the Ottoman
empire. In western Europe, Germany and Italy, much the largest and subsequently the
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most influential of the new nation states, had to wait until respectively 1861 and 1871
to win the recognition that had been accorded to Greece in that Protocol of 1830.
Elsewhere, before 1860, only the Belgian revolt against Dutch rule in August 1830
and the Swiss inter-cantonal war of 1847 would result in the creation of new states,
respectively Belgium in 1831 and the Swiss Confederation in 1848.
Viewed from this comparative perspective, the Greek Revolution against
Ottoman rule can be seen as the earliest of the national revolutions of Europe (not
excluding even the French) to be fully successful in achieving its aims, in the sense of
establishing a lasting new polity based on legal and diplomatic recognition.
But this is not the way in which it has been seen, ever since. Almost every
account of the Greek Revolution, ‘Liberation Struggle’, or War of Independence,
ends by emphasizing not what was achieved by the treaties of 1830 and 1832 but
rather the unsatisfactory, provisional nature of the settlement. From the Greek point
of view, ever since the early 1830s, the Great Powers had effectively taken away with
one hand what they had granted with the other. This was most evident in the decision,
in 1832, to restrict the territory of the new Greek state within frontiers that excluded
the majority of the nation, and in the notorious client status to which nominally
independent Greece would often be reduced in practice, throughout the nineteenth
century and well into the twentieth. But these are problems that have afflicted small
or relatively weak states at all periods of history down to the present. The fact
remains that Greece since 1830 has enjoyed the legal status of a sovereign state,
founded upon on the idea of the nation, and is therefore the first of its kind to be
established in Europe.
Another reason why the significance of this event has so often been obscured
lies paradoxically in the very success of the Greek national project. Even before the
revolution of 1821, from perhaps as early as the 1790s, the proponents of Greek
independence had established a powerful and pervasive rhetoric: the present-day
inhabitants of the land that had once been known as Hellas were the children (paides)
of the Greeks of old (Hellenes); to set them free would be an act not of radical
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innovation, as in fact it was, but rather the restoration of an ancient and universally
beneficial status quo.
This kind of rhetoric could be expected to appeal to the Great Powers of a
Europe still dominated by Metternich and allies of the stamp of Wellington. The
governments that signed up to that treaty of 1830 were all ultra-conservative
(Wellington in Britain, Charles X in France, Tsar Nicholas in Russia). No wonder,
therefore, that neither the Greeks themselves nor their reluctant European backers
saw any reason, after 1830, to advertise the radical nature of what had been achieved,
still less to present it as a precedent that might be followed by other would-be nations.
It would suit conservatives, as well as radicals, to pretend that Greece was a special
case, uniquely ancient and therefore like no other. And indeed, ever since, until at
least the 1980s, Greek historians had no interest in reminding domestic or foreign
readers that the nation state in which they took a justified pride had been the first to
be recognized in Europe – in 1830. The stakes would soon be set infinitely higher,
when Paparrigopoulos in the middle of the 19th century projected the history of the
Greek ‘nation’ back to the first Olympiad in 776 BCE.
But it is that unjustly neglected date of 1830 that is the crucial one. That was
when the first new nation-state in Europe came into being. And of course the prestige
of classical civilisation was a cornerstone of that achievement. The claim that
‘Modern Greece’ represents the revival (in later formulations, the continuation) of its
ancient predecessor, can be seen in hindsight as an astonishing trump card in the
hands of the Greeks and their supporters. It was this, more than any other single
factor, that ensured the steady influx of willing and sometimes talented supporters
from the west to fight alongside the insurgent Greeks; this too that turned the military
and humanitarian disasters of the Ottoman reprisals against Chios in 1822, Psara in
1824, and the retaking of Missolonghi in 1826, into propaganda victories on an
unprecedented scale. The decisive battle of Navarino, in October 1827, was a feat not
of Greek arms at all, but of those same Great Powers that would soon meet at the
London Conference to determine the fate of a Greece whose existence they had now,
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however grudgingly, to accept as a fact. The victory at Navarino may have been
disowned by the British prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, as an ‘untoward
event’, but it was his Foreign Secretary who signed the London Protocol of 1830 that
brought independent Greece into existence.
And isn’t it one of the lessons of that Greek achievement that every nation,
however young or old, that has claimed and won recognition ever since, has also had
to have an ancient, and preferably a prestigious past?
All of this, taken together, suggests that the specifics of Greek nationalism,
and the ways in which the nation-building process operated in the case of Greece,
ought to be of far more central importance to historians and theorists of nations and
nationalism than they have been up till now. Greek exceptionalism on the one hand,
and its too-easy dismissal by ‘modernist’ theorists on the other, have together, for too
long, obscured the formative role of the Greek experience in the creation of today’s
Europe of sovereign, nation states and of the worldwide phenomenon of nationalism.
I would like to end with a few words about another new book, this one so new
that it hasn’t actually been published yet. In 2006, at King’s College London, I
organised a conference dedicated to this theme, with the title The Making of Modern
Greece: Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Uses of the Past (1797-1896). (Among
more than 30 speakers was the other keynote speaker at this conference, Karen Van
Dyck.) A volume based on selected papers from that conference, edited by myself
and David Ricks, is due to be published in March 2009, with the same title. As the
concluding words of the Introduction to that volume, I wrote:
This book is neither for nor against nationalism; it sets out neither to uphold
nor to debunk the particular claims put forward, between one and two
centuries ago, for Greek nationalism, with which it deals. There is much more
to be said, both about the specific Greek case and about the wider
phenomenon of which it forms a part. But ... I would like to express the hope
that we have played our part in ending the surprising isolation of Greece and
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Greek studies among historians and theorists of nationalism in the modern
world.
In this talk tonight, and more generally through the work of this conference, I hope
that we may continue to make that case.