1.1 An Old Debate, a New Phenomenon
The 10-year-old Greek crisis has pulled the country out of the universe of its dominant and largely hackneyed European, Balkan and Mediterranean representations. It has also challenged its international image. With negative and stereotypical terms at the beginning and an idealizing exoticism later, Greece found itself at the centre of global public interest (Tziovas 2017). The dominant mechanisms of perception and understanding, despite their variety and their own internal rivalries, appropriate Greece as the place of their political and cultural imaginary. In brief, through this peculiar exoticism, they tend to organize the exacerbation of globalization and the social liquidation of the Western-capitalist canon itself.
Starting with an ideal type of the insurgent or/and alternative country, the cultural and ideological matrixes of the western capitalist centre will give birth to a new grammar of Greece as a place of authenticity and cradle of rebellion, as the ideal radical democracy, against neoliberal globalization and financialization.
The particular interest of this debate is the sudden revival of an old phenomenon. What we now understand as new Greek exoticism has its roots in the political and cultural history of European modernity (Giakovaki 2011), taking the form of a special type of orientalism called philhellenism. This discussion, which originally concerned erudites and scholars, was enriched in the last four decades on the basis of the post colonial direction that cultural studies took after the change of paradigm by E. Saidâs work (1978). Undoubtedly, the Greek state has never been a colony, although in the wider region of the post-Ottoman states considerable geopolitical tensions and interests of the great protecting powers have developed (Karapidakis 2008; Lekkas 2011). Because of the particular importance of this state of the âWest of the Eastâ or of the âEast of the Westâ, cultural projections have always been an ideal ground for the exercise of power as well, with a catalytic effect on the indigenous self-image. Similarly, âbalkanismâ, a concept introduced by M. Todorova (1997) in the international debate further contributed to a deeper analysis of nationalism and national identities in the specific historical context of the Balkans (Stamatopoulos and Tsibiridou 2008).
Especially for the Greek case, nationalism had evolved, throughout the twentieth century and specifically after 1974, into a typical leftwing anti-imperialist ideology. The 2010 Greek debt crisis, that had been followed by the ten-years international rescue programs, revived this existing Greek anti-imperialist reaction that was a key component of countryâs political culture in the twentieth century. The dramatic conditions of the Greek crisis and the constant, internal and external, directing of a âsmall and weakâ peopleâs struggle against the so called international economic capital and the great European powers have put Greece in a new way in the debate of hidden-colonialism or neo-colonialism (Machart et al. 2016).
The concept of exoticism proposed in this volume as a tool for understanding this late phase of the âGreek Questionâ seems to be able to sum up many of these enduring aspects. It simultaneously allows the examination of the mechanisms of power over the country and the comprehension of Greeceâs image and self-image construction.
1.2 OrientalismâPhilhellenismâAntisystemic Exoticism
Westerners have been visiting Greece for the three past centuriesâever since travelling to the âEastâ became the passport to adventure for every young artistic European reaching adulthoodâjust to meet the âBalkansâ, in the name of a charming (once antiquity-lover and now anti-globalizational) exoticism (Schmidt 2015). Of course, this kind of philhellenism has never been about the real Greeks, not then and not now. It has always been all about its exotic nature and its fantasies for mythologised worlds and places. When faced with actual reality, idealised philhellenism quickly turned into frustration and aggressiveness, due to bitter disappointment. As the French Count Dâ Estourmel (who had visited post-revolutionary Greece, when it had ceased being an âideaâ and turned into a âboringâ independent national state) wrote: âHere, one must live solely in the past but at risk of collapsing under the weight of the present; to meet just a sad reality; an arid land with no vegetation; the blazing sun; bloodthirsty mosquitoes and Kolokotronis.â The early neoclassicism that sought ancient ruins here, guided by Homer and Pausanias, had begun to crumble.
In the twentieth century the western traveller would now be seduced by the âreal peopleâ and not the ruins. He would rather be fascinated by what would remind him of his lost, primitive, and yet authentic self. Zorba (the Kazantzakisâ hero) could thus be declared the most authentic Greek of modern philhellenism. An extrovert, fun seeker, womaniser, prideful, trickster, irrational and stubborn icon. He lived for the present and challenged Gods and death each and every single day. Who wouldnât fall in love with him? Of course, back in the 1960s when Zorba was praised, Greece had already achieved a developmental miracle, only a decade after the foreign occupation and the disastrous civil war. Instead, the West was focused in the countryâs dominant feature, which had only changed a little since, namely the exotic âindigenousâ people, syrtaki dance and the sun. Whether this meant the marbles or Zorbas, what was permanently lacking from this view was the contact with the controversial contemporary Greek society that stubbornly kept going through growth and development.
What did westerners see in the recent Greek crisis? Their point of view remained pretty much the same. Those who are still fascinated by this exoticism (European left, antisystemics, American liberalism) raised their own ambivalence, through Greece, about globalised capitalism and western culture (Tzirtzilakis 2014). Those who, on the other hand, have been long disappointed by this untrustworthy Greece âthat can not be modernisedâ (European conservatism) looked down the country as a burden, which they had once wrongfully assumed. In the meantime, the European youth saw the ruins of modern Athens as an opportunity for graffiti tourism, while a liberal newspaper, The Guardian , had recently the idea to organise tourist group visits to Greeceâs crisis âhot spotsâ.
It goes without saying that the question is not only the foreignersâ view, but also how the âindigenousâ view themselves (Sotiropoulos 2019). The issue was that Greeks seem to respond enthusiastically to the role of a strange and exotic bird. For the past two centuries, they tend to form a narrative of the âindigenousâ person, who will welcome foreign leaders with his Balkan âfoustanelaâ, demonstrating that they have not been subdued to the dominant culture. That they are free, wild and handsome, like Kazantzakisâ character (Liegener 2019). It is in this context that underdog culture forms a defeated identity of the âweak Greek peopleâ, always complaining about the Great Powersâ injustice and always subjecting to them willingly. Similarly to this self representation foreign friends and allies use the narrative of the bon pour lâ Orient, coming to the stereotyped conclusion: âUltimately, they deserve what they are.â
The images and the rhetorics around Greece, as they emerge from radical and post-colonial theories, as they get organised as a left-wing and social-democratic opposition to post modern capitalism, reconnect themselves with the earlier philhellenism. A new Greek utopia (Sevastakis 2017) is thus realised as a new Arcadia of the a...