Rethinking Greece | Dimitris Tziovas on Greece in Transition: Identity, Culture, and Global Engagement

Dimitris Tziovas is Professor Emeritus of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, where he taught for over thirty five years and supervised many research students. In 2022 he received the Grand Greek State Award for his contribution to scholarship. His book Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity (Bloomsbury 2021) won the European Society of Modern Greek Studies Book Prize. He has served as Director of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham (2000-2003), on the editorial board of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (1995-2009; 2020-; Reviews Editor 1995-2005) and Journal of Modern Greek Studies (U.S.A 1992-2007) His research interests involve the study of Greek Modernism in a comparative context; the reception of Greek antiquity and Byzantium; the study of Greek fiction informed by recent developments in critical theory; Greek diaspora and travel writing; nationalism and Greek culture; the Greek language controversy; and the cultural encounters between Greece and the Balkans.

Professor Tziovas spoke to Rethinking Greece* on the duration of Metapolitefsi, the aftermath of the crisis and its impact on the (self)image of Greece, how Greek fiction proposed a critical revisiting of the past, the influence of the Greek diaspora on cultural production, why Greek cinema was successful in conversing with global cultural trends, his proposal for a “hybrid” model of analysis instead of the dualist and ‘pendulum’ models that accentuate polarities in Greek modern history, and finally, on the Metapolitefsi period as an era of identities.

Beyond your academic career, you are a public intellectual that often writes on Modern Greek Studies and Greece’s image abroad. In your book “Greece from Junta to Crisis,” you mention that the recent financial crisis led to a reassessment of the Metapolitefsi era and yet another “rediscovery” of Greece from the West. Where do you think we stand on these issues today i.e. the assessment of Metapolitefsi and Greece’s (self)image?

The period following the fall of the military junta in 1974 is known in Greek as Metapolitefsi (meaning regime change), referring both to the transition from dictatorship to democracy and to the ensuing period. Though it has been praised as a period of peace, democratization and improved access to health and education, there is no agreement as to when it ends. Some argue that it ends as early as June 1975, others place its conclusion in 1989 with the end of the Cold War or much later with the economic crisis. In my view, the crisis was both a global and a local event which turned the international spotlight to Greece, judging from the number of articles in the popular press, prime-time television programmes and academic studies on the Greek crisis. Since 1974, no other event in Greece attracted such a global interest. During the crisis a frequent use of stereotypes was made either of those modelled on Zorba depicting Greeks as feckless, lazy or profligate, or the ones based on the contrast between ancient and modern Greece.

The imaginative force of Greek mythology has been repeatedly deployed to describe the trials of the Greek people in images and cartoons or in stereotypical headlines such as ‘Greek tragedy’, ‘Greeks bearing gifts’ and ‘Odyssey without end’. It is interesting to note that the connection between Ancient and Modern Greece is made by westerners only in difficult periods in order to criticize contemporary Greeks as not worthy of their heritage. In short, the Metapolitefsi starts with the euphoria of the restoration of democracy (despite the invasion of Cyprus) and ends with the melancholy of the crisis and an attempt by the country to redefine its (self)image. After the crisis Greece, together with other countries, are entering an era of polycrisis and are facing increasingly new challenges posed by the climate, artificial intelligence, migration, demography and the shortage of energy.

In Greece, literature often explored historical topics—like the Civil War—before historians did, at least until the post-dictatorship period. Does this trend still exist? How has the relationship between history and literature changed in recent decades?

The gradual transformation of Greek fiction since the fall of junta involved the erosion of the national history by highlighting marginalized events and the critical revisiting of the past. Fiction explored aspects of the historical past not touched before or followed the trend in Greek society towards diversity and the creation of space for the inclusion of the Other more closely than poetry did. The themes which have preoccupied fiction writers since the early 1990s can be classified under three broad and overlapping categories: identity and otherness, the historical past and the validity of representation, and cultural metaphors and cosmopolitanism. Novels with a historical theme do not aim to recreate the past but challenge the modalities of historiography and the truth-seeking involvement with the past. Narrativity emerged as the common ground between literature and history while the notion of mnemohistory signifies the impact of memory studies on both fields. It is remarkable the number of novels published on the Greek Civil War and its aftermath, focusing on the role of memory and highlighting the interaction between fiction and archival investigation. The emergence of graphic novels reinvigorated to some extent the historical orientation of Greek fiction which now tends to deal with current biopolitical issues.

You have noted that, during the Metapolitefsi, Greek culture became more outward-looking, with a renewed appreciation for the diaspora’s role. Can you tell us more about how the Greek diaspora’s perspective has influenced cultural production?

Up to 1974 Greece’s image was the one constructed mostly by foreign writers and scholars such as Arnold Toynbee, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durell, Patrick Leigh Fermor or Jacques Lacarrière. Following the fall of the dictatorship Greece gradually attempted a rebranding by promoting its own image and becoming more extrovert. This coincides with a preoccupation with Greekness and the publication in collective volumes of the essays by important literary figures of the 1930s such as George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis and George Theotokas. Since the 1980s the term ‘diaspora’ has been less strongly associated with a traumatic experience and has started to signify something positive in terms of its historical and cultural contribution. Diaspora writers and artists received special attention, and Greek populations were ‘discovered’ in some former socialist countries. Many writers started placing their stories outside Greece and there has been a particular emphasis on border literature. The global aspirations of the Greek nation since the 1990s changed dramatically during the crisis when Greece became once again a country of emigration, this time not of manual workers but of young professionals seeking skilled employment abroad due to the crisis. The earlier touristic image of the country as earthly paradise has been challenged and Greece has been treated as an ideological construct of the West or as a cryptocolony, even though the country has never been strictly speaking a western colony.

The push for Europeanization has made national identity an important topic, shaping Greece’s modern identity in dialogue with Europe. How do you see this relationship evolving in today’s complex political landscape?

Attitudes to Europe are central to the culture of post-junta Greece and reflect its ambivalence, ranging from Euroscepticism to fervent Europeanism. The West started to be associated more with Europe and democracy and not so much with the Cold-war identification with anti-communism. Economic and institutional Europeanization/integration have led to a preoccupation with identity since statements such as ‘Greece belongs to the West’ can be seen as identity statements. The dominance of the term ‘Europeanization’ in the political discourse raises the question as to whether we can talk about the Europeanization of Greek culture in the same way as many analysts talk about institutional or political Europeanization. On the other hand, anti-Europeanism has often been associated with populism and been represented as defying rationalism and modernization but, most importantly, culturally isolationist and unproductive.

In your books, you point out that, during the Metapolitefsi, Greek novels aimed to go beyond national boundaries, and in the past 15 years, Greek cinema has tried to do the same. Have these efforts been successful? How did these two art forms relate to broader European and international artistic trends?

Several recent Greek novels take place (partly or entirely) outside Greece or are written by Greeks residing abroad. They involve travel or migration, and they point to the increasing centrality of space, the growing role of technology and the fluidity of identities. As part of the effort of making Greek culture more extrovert there were attempts to promote Greek literature abroad, but the emphasis is no longer on national literatures but on individual writers or texts as part of a global literary network. Contemporary Greek literature lacked the emblematic figures of Angelopoulos and Lanthimos who made Greek cinema known beyond its national borders. By overcoming the earlier preoccupation with political history, the new cinema of the period of the crisis has become increasingly transnational, performative and biopolitical. The new filmmakers deconstruct the image of Greece as a holiday idyll that had been constructed by earlier films, going one step further in interrogating the notion of national cinema, trying to reach a transnational audience. In this respect, Greek cinema was more successful than Greek literature in gaining wider recognition and conversing with global cultural trends.

One of the most enduring interpretations of modern Greek identity is that of cultural dualism—between a culture of modernization and an underdog mentality. What do you think of this interpretation? Would you suggest an alternative?

Cultural and political dualism, in its various forms, has emerged as the dominant model of analysis for the post-junta period as well as the earlier history of Greece. In the early 1990s the political scientist Nikiforos Diamandouros charted the evolution of two cultures. The older of these two, the underdog culture, has been marked by a pronounced introversion, xenophobia, anti-Westernism and adherence to pre-capitalist practices. This culture competes with its younger counterpart, the modernizing or reformist culture, which has its intellectual roots in the Enlightenment and liberalism. Apart from the dualist pattern there is also the ‘pendulum model’ which sees Greek history and culture as swinging between polarities: archaism/anachronism and modernization (Vassilis Vamvakas), individual and society (Vaggelis Hatzivasileiou), catastrophes and triumphs (Stahis Kalyvas). An alternative method of analysis, based on hybridity, does not highlight polarities or the struggle for the supremacy of modernizing culture but the in-between space which involves the tension and hydridization of competing cultures or opposites. The language reform of 1976 can serve as a case in point here. On the one hand, it could be seen as a victory of modernization and on the other hand as a rehabilitation of the underdog culture and its Romeic strand. It is also interesting to note that some of those who fought for the institutionalization of the demotic language resisted the introduction of the monotonic system in the early 1980s or agonized over the decline of linguistic standards.

You define the Metapolitefsi period as an era of identities, noting that identity issues unite both phases of this period. Can you tell us more about the concept of identity, how it was expressed during the Metapolitefsi era, and how it reflects current global cultural and political developments?

First, I should point out that a classic book Keywords (1976) by the British Marxist intellectual Raymond Williams did not contain an entry on identity which was added in the second posthumous edition (New Keywords, 2005). This suggests that the emphasis on identity is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its rise coincides with the post-junta period. In Greece the prominent role of identity in various forms resulted from the major shift from politics to culture and the disentanglement of group identities from political affiliations. After 1974, Greece opened to the world and renegotiated its position and its image by looking not only towards the West but also eastward and engaging with its forgotten Balkan and Ottoman pasts. The common denominator in the fundamental questions that preoccupied Greeks during the post-junta period (how the nation is defined; who owns the past; and how the past is remembered) is the quest for identity. As a result of the critical engagement with the past and its perceived loss of stability, questions were posed about identity more intensely than ever before. The thematic shift in contemporary Greek cinema away from the grand narratives of political history to concerns about identity, sexuality and family dynamics coincided with similar transitions in social movements. Queer culture gained in visibility, while homosexuality began to be perceived as an identity and no longer just a sexual practice. In conclusion, politics might help to divide the post-junta period into phases, culture and identity draw it together, acting as its overarching metaphors.

*Interview to Ioulia Livaditi

TAGS: CINEMA | CULTURE | HISTORY | LITERATURE & BOOKS | METAPOLITEFSI | MODERN GREEK STUDIES