The Making of Modern Greece

Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797–1896)

David Ricks, Roderick Beaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317024729
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Every Greek and every friend of the country knows the date 1821, when the banner of revolution was raised against the empire of the Ottoman Turks, and the story of 'Modern Greece' is usually said to begin. Less well known, but of even greater importance, was the international recognition given to Greece as an independent state with full sovereign rights, as early as 1830. This places Greece in the vanguard among the new nation-states of Europe whose emergence would gather momentum through to the early twentieth century, a process whose repercussions continue to this day. Starting out from that perspective, which has been all but ignored until now, this book brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the contribution of characteristically nineteenth-century European modes of thought to the 'making' of Greece as a modern nation. Closely linked to nationalism is romanticism, which exercised a formative role through imaginative literature, as is demonstrated in several chapters on poetry and fiction. Under the broad heading 'uses of the past', other chapters consider ways in which the legacies, first of ancient Greece, then later of Byzantium, came to be mobilized in the construction of a durable national identity at once 'Greek' and 'modern'. The Making of Modern Greece aims to situate the Greek experience, as never before, within the broad context of current theoretical and historical thinking about nations and nationalism in the modern world. The book spans the period from 1797, when Rigas Velestinlis published a constitution for an imaginary 'Hellenic Republic', at the cost of his life, to the establishment of the modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, an occasion which sealed with international approval the hard-won self-image of 'Modern Greece' as it had become established over the previous century.

I Nationalisms Compared: The View from the Early Twenty-First Century

1 Paradigm nation: the study of nationalism and the ‘canonization' of Greece

Paschalis M. Kitromilides

DOI: 10.4324/9781315555805-2

Challenges

The broader epistemological problem motivating the analysis that follows could be considered to be the difficulty facing the academic study of Modern Greece in establishing itself as a recognizable and legitimate subject in contemporary scholarship. To appreciate the problem and to recognize it as such one needs to take, I believe, two logical steps: first to illustrate what is meant by the claim concerning this alleged failure; and secondly to define with some precision the meaning of the term ‘canonization’, borrowed for the purposes of the present analysis from the field of hagiology.

To illustrate what I consider as the difficulty of Modern Greek studies in developing into a well-established academic field, I might follow the standard method of the human sciences, the comparative approach. The most obvious comparison is of course that between the study of modern and classical Greece. The contrast in this case could not be starker and more overwhelming. It should be pointed out that, in order to make real sense, the comparison between Modern and Classical Greek studies should be attempted as one between two independent fields of research, and their respective structures and standards, and should in no case be allowed to turn into a substantive evaluative exercise focusing on the intrinsic interest, significance, or value of each field.

The comparison over structure and standards, however, could well be enlightening – as it would be between Modern Greek studies and any other professionally constituted field of area-based historical study. On this level of analysis, all indicators of professionalization, such as the range and quality of research resources and instrumenta studiorum in general, the number and scholarly standards of specialist journals, the significance, quality, and authority of monograph series, and the level and specialization of scholarly debate and academic judgement in the broad field of classics (history, literature, philosophy, art), make the field of Modern Greek studies outside contemporary Greece appear at best atrophied and essentially dependent on the quality of the individual work of a few isolated scholars, mostly in Britain, Germany, North America, and sporadically elsewhere.

Let me clarify two things. My discussion of Modern Greek studies refers to the state of the field outside Greece. Within Greece, and especially in the period since 1974, the field has significant achievements to its credit; and, if anything, the comparison with Classical Greek studies, archaeology excepted, could be reversed. The concern here, however, is with the academic study of Modern Greek history, society and culture as an international discipline, one of the most vexing problems of which is a serious asymmetry in communication and synchronization between developments within and outside Greece.¹

¹ For a parallel case study see Shubert 2004.

Why then are Modern Greek studies marked by the lag we have identified in comparison with other epistemologically cognate and comparable fields – Turkish studies, for instance? There are no easy or obvious answers to the question, and of course it would not be acceptable to trace the problem to any presumed intrinsic epistemological weaknesses of the subject itself. Such an argument would be futile, naïve, and misinformed, even bigoted, and it is not really voiced with conviction or seriousness by anyone. On the contrary, the quality of several outstanding individual achievements of scholarship in the broad field of Modern Greek studies, spanning the whole spectrum of the human sciences (history, literature, and the social sciences) makes abundantly clear the great intellectual potential, the intrinsic interest, and the broader relevance of the field for understanding important questions of theory and method.²

² A mirror of relevant work is provided in the useful survey by Constantinides 2000.

Still, the field remains marginal and ‘uncanonized’. This is reflected especially in its susceptibility to the vagaries of the market and in its failure to establish a secure institutional presence in universities outside Greece. If the reasons for this cannot be academic or epistemological, then they will have to be sought in the sociology of knowledge, in the domain of extra-academic or non-cognitive factors that determine the course and fate of scholarship. In this interplay between thought and society the study of Modern Greece has fared miserably. It would be a long story to analyse the multifarious expressions of the problem in the intellectual history of Greece itself. What could be seen in this case would be the serious impediments to the growth of knowledge connected especially with the endemic phenomenon of factionalism, clientelism, or more simply power relations in the academic and intellectual spheres, something that the total hegemony of the so-called ‘progressives’ in the cultural life of the country since 1974 has paradoxically intensified instead of overcoming. But our concern here is with the international aspect of the problem, to which I must turn.

On this level it would be hypocritical to ascribe the problems of the canonization of Modern Greek studies to funding, availability of positions, or institutionalization. This is particularly true of North America as opposed to Europe. In the USA and Canada there are chairs and richly endowed programmes of Modern Greek or Hellenic studies, as the case may be, in several major universities, along with an active professional association and several journals; but the record of canonization has been negative rather than positive. The problem has to do with the management of such resources as there are, with the motivations and the inadequacies of persons who have found themselves in strategic institutional positions, and with a general failure of leadership in charting trajectories and developing visions for the field. This is broadly the history of Modern Greek studies in America in the last four decades or so. The problems in continental Europe are of a different order and need to be addressed on their own terms.

In order to clarify the terms of the argument, we must now turn and reflect on the idea of canonization itself and on the requirements that need to be met in order to approximate it. As mentioned above, the term is borrowed from hagiology. According to the oxford dictionary of Byzantium, ‘canonization’ means the official ecclesiastical acknowledgement and proclamation of sanctity and among its prerequisites are popular veneration, evidence of miracles, and the creation of an iconic and hagiographic tradition. To use this term to discuss the methodological and epistemological problems arising from the cultivation of a modern secular subject of research may sound perverse or, at the very least, idiosyncratic. If one thinks seriously about the subject, the idea and the term, however, it will be appreciated that it provides a useful and concise way to articulate a complex problem. Canonization means first of all the attainment of authority in the consciousness of an interested public – in the case under consideration here, authority in the academic consciousness of a professional community. And authority as far as this particular public is concerned depends on seriousness, on the recognition of genuine worth and intrinsic significance, on a general consensus about an intellectual pursuit as being valuable for its own sake on account of its contribution in substantive and substantial ways to the growth of knowledge and to the enhancement of understanding.

A second aspect of canonization is the connection between the attainment of authoritative status in the domain of the cultivation of knowledge and an evolving intellectual tradition, not iconic and hagiographical of course, yet certainly critical and capable of self-reflection and self-criticism; a tradition with its normative standards, its evolving debates and its canon of sources and frames of reference. Without these features there is no tradition and no canonization.

One of the factors working against canonization in Greek studies is the inequitable international division of academic labour. This is another expression of the interplay of power with scholarship. It is reflected in the prerogative reserved to themselves by all those who enjoy power in the academic and scholarly world – that is all those occupying positions in powerful institutions in core countries, receiving consequently the lion's share of research funding and controlling the media of academic communication (journals, conferences, lectures) – a prerogative of pronouncing on general subjects and engaging in theoretical elaboration, thus defining what is academically mainstream, while leaving what is considered ‘ethnic scholarship’ to the rest of the academic community. This last includes all those working in the smaller countries and writing in languages other than English – and maybe French – but whose judgement and views, regardless of the quality of their work, leave indifferent the power-wielders of the mainstream. They are only expected to produce ethnic scholarship, which at best may prove of some interest or relevance to mainstream scholarship for illustrative purposes. This attitude of domination amounts to a powerful pressure towards marginalization felt by fields like Modern Greek studies – and the only way to resist it is canonization and all that it involves. Otherwise the field is bound to be reduced to resignation, introversion, and eventually extinction.

Possibilities

The problems on the way to the canonization of the study of Modern Greece we have identified so far should be viewed as challenges, not as pointers to despair. In any case, as we know from the history of social theory, a sense of impasse or crisis may prove a source of striving and eventually of creativity, and it does not have of necessity to lead to resignation. So if we turn to observe and reflect upon the contemporary scene of scholarly production, we shall easily discern the promising reception of the Greek paradigm in one important and dynamic area of research, the study of nationalism. This I think is Greece's opportunity. I sincerely hope it will not turn out to be a missed opportunity.

Since the momentous years 1989–1990 and the changes they brought about to the political map of Europe and to power relations in the world, nationalism has been a growing and dynamic field of scholarship, plagued of course by many problems. This is not the place to discuss those problems, but we should reflect seriously on the place of the Greek experience in this field. Let us begin with a few caveats. Although the younger generation of scholars who gravitate with great eagerness to the study of nationalism very often appear to believe that the field has begun with their own supervisors, in fact the field is much older and so is the place of Greece within it. When Friedrich Meinecke published his epoch-making work in 1907, the study of nationalism was already on its way to becoming a fledgling field of critical scholarship.³ It has therefore at least a century-long history.

³ The seminal work for the understanding of the transformations of German nationalism, by Friedrich Meinecke (1970), first appeared in 1907, was reissued in an expanded version in 1911, and went through five subsequent editions until 1928. On the early history of the critical study of nationalism from J.S. Mill to Acton, see Lawrence 2005, 31–50.

Within this field the serious study of the Greek experience is also much older than what might be believed by readers of articles in Nations and Nationalism and in other journals in the forefront of the field today. On that score we should at least recall the contribution of Arnold Toynbee, first holder of the Koraes Chair at King's College London. Toynbee wrote extensively on Greek nationalism in specialized studies (Toynbee 1922, 1931) but he also used the Greek paradigm as an illustration of broader tendencies in the unfolding of historical change, which he tried to systematize in a study of history (Toynbee 1954, 150–98). Epistemologically speaking, this might be considered as an instance of canonization. It would be prudent, therefore, to look at earlier literature on Greek nationalism, for methodological reasons at least, remembering furthermore that Toynbee was not alone, but belonged to a whole generation of Western scholars with a very serious interest in the Balkans, including R.W. Seton-Watson and W.M. Gewehr, who can be credited with some of the most serious early attempts at understanding nationalism in the region (Seton-Watson 1917; Gewehr 1931).

I hope I will be forgiven for issuing these reminders, but I am obliged to do so to be consistent with my earlier argument concerning the necessary connection of canonization with an evolving tradition of research and methodological reflection – an engagement with substantive problems, bibliography, and sources. To make this reference substantive rather than allusive, I should perhaps point to the significance of the contributions of the generation of scholars who could be considered the successors of Toynbee and Seton-Watson in the study of Balkan nationalism. These include Peter Sugar, editor with Ivo Lederer of a classic collective work on the subject (Sugar and Lederer 1969), and in addition Charles and Barbara Jelavich, L.S. Stavrianos, J.F. Clarke, and, slightly later, Robert Lee Wolff, Gale Stokes, Stavro Skendi, and Keith Hitchins – to name just a few of the great scholars without whose work Balkan nationalism would have remained a field of amateur observation, depending largely on perceptive observers of the early part of the twentieth century like Rebecca West (1942). I cannot stress enough that it is essential to identify, reconstruct, and reflect upon these intellectual genealogies in order to have a sense of the growth of knowledge in a field and to avoid the arrogance of ignorance. Building and respecting intellectual genealogies is, therefore, an integral component of the intellectual process of canonization itself.

Among recent major theorists of nationalism, Elie Kedourie was the first to recognize and argue for the paradigmatic character of the emergence of Greek liberal nationalist thought, primarily articulated by Korais, as the first case in the worldwide transmission of Western political thought to non-Western contexts (Kedourie 1970, 42–8; 152–88). The Greek example is present as a reference in all major works on nationalism from Hans Kohn to Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson. But in all these cases, and in many others, in contrast to Kedourie, the example is marginalized, the details are ignored, the conversation with sources that would lend substance to the discussion remains non-existent. In other words, the subject remains uncanonized. This may appear rather surprising, but even some scholars of Greek origin, writing for the most par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Font Chapter
• Font Chapter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Nationalisms compared: the view from the early twenty-first century
• Part II Towards a national history: Greek & Western perspectives
• Part III Defining identity (1): religion & the nation state
• Part IV Defining identity (2): insiders vs outsiders
• Part V The colonial experience: politics & society in the Ionian Islands
• Part VI Language & national identity
• Part VII The nation in the literary imagination
• Afterword
• Index