More than a referendum: Will Greece exit

the West?
Greeks may be voting on austerity but their choice will usher in a new phase in
Hellenism's turbulent history.
30 Jun 2015 11:41 GMT | Politics, Europe, Greece, European Union, IMF

1061

77

Demonstrators gather to protest against the European Central Bank's handling of Greece's

debt repayments [Reuters]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Iason Athanasiadis
Iason Athanasiadis is a photojournalist who covers the Middle East.

It was on a Friday night, but the reason why Greeks hardly slept related less to
partying and more the wake-like atmosphere that descended after Prime Minister
Alexis Tsipras' announcement that he would open up the result of five months of
negotiations with the troika to popular referendum.
As they took to social media to apportion blame and digest the consequences of a
possible exit from the euro, queues built up outside gas-stations and bank ATMs.

Analysis: What will a referendum mean for

Greece?

The July 5 referendum will transcend a choice between the harsh austerity proposed
by international lenders and an exit from the European currency and become a
critical test of whether two centuries of Western patronage have fostered a strong
enough nation-state identity for Greece and its integration with Western Europe.
Or, in an age of failing states, collapsing stability in western Asia, and massive
migration inflows, might Greece flounder and revert to the borderless Hellenism that
characterised Greeks for most of their history?
Turban v tiara
"How idiotic is the nation that hews to the idea that the Turkish turban is better than
the Catholic tiara?" asked Alexandros Massavetas, a historian of the Mediterranean
and strong proponent of remaining in the European Union, referring to a millennial
Greek mistrust of the West stemming from the Crusader sacking of Constantinople in
1204. "We were dragged into four centuries of darkness and are now readying to do
it all over again by those who repeatedly choose 'worse' over 'bad'."

In an age of failing states,

collapsing stability in
western Asia, and massive
migration inflows, might
Greece flounder and revert
to the borderless Hellenism
that characterised Greeks
for most of their history?
Romantics conjure up images of a return to Alexander of Macedon's ecumenism; the
Byzantine Empire and its Ottoman successor; the rootless cosmopolitanism of Greek
diasporas in Europe and Czarist Russia; and Greek-speaking trading communities
stretching from the East Mediterranean to the Black Sea and Central Asia.
But the possibility of leaving Fortress Europe in an age of rolling economic crisis and
resurgent Islamism may end up being both harsher and more merciful to Greece,
exposing the country's new currency to rampant inflation but opening up its tourism
sector by releasing it from the constricting Schengen zone while insulating it from
uncontrolled migrant inflows searching for a corridor into the EU.

Even after Greeks won independence from the Ottomans and acquired a country
with borders, they worked to expand eastwards in an irredentist project dubbed the
Great Idea that saw a rapid if disastrous and short-lived push into the ancestral lands
of antiquity and Byzantium that lie in today's Turkey.
Bellicose antagonism
Enlightenment-inspired nationalism impelled the creation of the Greek state but also
resulted in Turkish and Arab successor states to the Ottoman Empire, ringing the
death knell for ancient Greek communities across Africa and the Middle East.
The crushing of the Greek army by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish state,
spelled dispossession for Greek-speaking Christian communities spread across a
greater landmass than that occupied by the newly founded Greek state.
Millions of newly minted refugees arriving in an alien homeland were exposed to
bellicose antagonism by mainlanders who resented their affected ways and
multilingual cosmopolitanism.
In a world of nation-states, multiethnic Hellenism lost out; Greeks went from being
part of an ethnic rainbow of competing communities, often in cosmopolitan port cities
of the East Mediterranean, to adopting a narrow-minded, small-state parochialism
imposed by a state where full citizenship favoured Greek-speaking Orthodox
Christians.

Alexis Tsipras, Greece's prime minister

[GETTY]

Within decades, mainland Greece segued from a kaleidoscope of diversity to largely

monolingual mono-sectarianism. Once-thriving Slavic, Armenian, Vlach, Pontic,
Pomach, Sunni Muslim ethnic Turkish, Jewish, and Catholic communities withered.
Out went one of the largest Jewish communities of Europe, the Thessaloniki that
was once known as a Second Jerusalem, alongside Italian-speaking Catholic

communities in the Ionian Islands that had contributed luminaries to the fledgling
state like Russian foreign minister and first prime minister of the Greek state Ioannis
Kapodistrias and Dionysis Solomos, a poet whose work was used as the basis for
the Greek national anthem.
Wandering spirits
Greeks retired their wandering spirit and settled down. The old Eastern languages
were forgotten as multilingualism shrivelled away in an exclusively Greek
environment fostered by successive right-wing Cold War governments promoting a
Westernisation intended to cement Greece in the Western firmament.
In 1981, accession to the European Union coincided with a sexual revolution to bring
prosperity and wider horizons to a generation who acquired skills and foreign
educations. But it was not until crisis roiled the economy that Greeks started
emigrating en masse to embrace a renewed if individualistic cosmopolitanism in
northern European cities, GCC economies, Australia, and North America.
"On a deeper, spiritual and existential level, we are still the children of [first Byzantine
Emperor] Constantine, looking east, still thinking we can span the cultural and
emotional divide that separates the continents," said Zafira Tenedios-Zamfotis, a
member of Istanbul's Rum community who now lives in the US. "This may be the
blessing and the curse of our inheritance and, as it did a thousand years ago, the
West is once again redefining our identity for us; the Great Ecclesiastical Schism
[1054AD] continues today through the troika and the euro."
By the time of the schism, the centre of Hellenism had already moved east to
Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire for six centuries, letting geographical
Greece subside into a medieval period that segued into the four century Ottoman
occupation until the 1821 War of Independence led to the country's yoking to the
West.

A group identified as Greek Jews in

Ioannina, Greece, waiting to be taken to Nazi
death camps in 1944 [EPA]

European powers imposed first a Bavarian king and then a Danish royal lineage
upon a newly independent Greece, after militarily supporting its struggle against the
Ottoman Empire in an early echo of the 2011 NATO-backed Libyan Revolution.
Several decades of political instability (and five defaults later), Greece was occupied
by the Nazis during World War II and liberated by the British. The demands of
international geopolitics at a time of Soviet expansion resulted in London supporting
Royalist against Communist factions in the civil war that exploded after the Nazis'
departure.
A new start
But a Greek default and elimination from the euro may imply neither failure nor a
doomed plunge to some purgatorial, medieval east. Supporters of Syriza, the ruling
party, point out that the EU in its present form has strayed from the humanistic vision
of a unified Europe cherished by the bloc's founders and been hijacked by corporate
interests.
With the 2008 economic crisis showing no sign of ending, they argue that Greece
has been dragged into a systemic breakdown of capitalism, accentuated by
technological displacement and a new precariat created by EU efforts to become
more competitive by ingratiating itself with private banks and transnational
corporations.
A thinker called Dimitris Kitsikis who advocates closer ties with Turkey, Russia,
Israel, and Iran to revive the eastern Mediterranean's fortunes in a geopolitically
crucial region he calls the Intermediate Region, appears to be receiving a listening
within Syriza.
Brussels must salvage its currency's credibility by demonstrating that indebted
countries cannot be allowed to just walk away. But the rolling nature of the crisis, and
suspicions that the EU is unviable without the kind of political integration that would
turn it into either a dictatorship or a union unpalatable to its constituents, posits
Greeks before a choice between staying in a harsh and punitive institutional
environment, or spreading their wings and reacquainting themselves, possibly even
contributing to stabilising, a familiar neighbourhood currently experiencing
unprecedented turmoil.

It may sound unlikely, but it may also not be as bad an idea as it sounds.
"A strange bond connects the Greek to his unhappiness," writer Nikos Dimou opines
in his book The Misery of Being Greek. "That is when he's at his best, when unhappy
or threatened; crisis and confrontation empower him; rejection becomes a position."
Iason Athanasiadis is a photojournalist who covers the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Source: Al Jazeera