Journal of Modern Greek Studies Volume 28, Number 2, October 2010

Editor’s Introduction Maria Koundoura

This is my first issue as Editor and I want to thank my predecessor, Peter Allen, for his excellent work during his tenure. The incoming editors have assisted me tirelessly with this issue, while all of the outgoing editors have ensured a smooth transition. Greg Nichols, my editorial intern from Emerson College, has been invaluable in the production of this issue. Renowned photographer Constantine Manos graciously provided the photo for the cover from his 1972 award-winning book, A Greek Portfolio, reissued in 1999 by the Benaki Museum on the occasion of an accompanying exhibition. The Journal’s Editorial Board and the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association have been very supportive during this transition. My previous editorial experience has taught me that editing a journal is collaborative work. I am delighted to be working with this outstanding group of scholars and all the authors whose manuscripts I look forward to receiving. A tradition of the Journal has been to feature work presented at the Modern Greek Studies Association Biennial Symposium. In keeping with this tradition, we have included articles in this issue on the December 2008 events in Greece, a keynote theme of the 2009 MGSA Vancouver symposium. In consultation with the MGSA Board, we are introducing an “Interventions” section in the journal, which will engage with current issues involving Greece. The first “Interventions” section is represented in this issue by the debate held at Birkbeck College, University of London, on the economic crisis in Greece. My own disciplinary background is in English Studies, having completed a PhD in English Literature at Stanford University, with a special interest in postcolonial and transnational cultures. In my work on transnationalism, Greece is one of the locations I constantly engage with. In my first book, I examined the cultural material that produced Greece as both Europe’s origin and Other, in order to address post­ colonial theory’s revision of the critical discourse on modernity and, in particular, the nation, one of its primary forms. In a forthcoming book, I read contemporary literature to map the poetics of transnational literacy and address questions of culture and globalization, identity and Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 171–172 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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a­ esthetics, history and present life. This work on Greece is aligned with the cross-disciplinary nature of Modern Greek Studies. During my tenure as Editor I hope to build on this interdisciplinarity, welcoming submissions on Greece from all fields. As a Greek-Australian-now-American, Greekness, for me, is always found elsewhere, with that elsewhere also being Greece. To the dehistoricizing nature of specialized activities like cultural theory, everyday experience of mobility helps rehistoricize theoretically abstracted concepts like “identity,” “nation,” “home.”

No More Heroes? Rejection and Reverberation of the Past in the 2008 Events in Greece Kostis Kornetis

Abstract This article attempts to trace the contested relationship between the December 2008 riots in Greece and the revolutionary past, aiming to promote a discussion on the dynamic relationship between past and present. The article argues that even though the activists’ repertoire was pretty much removed from the past, their discourse often echoed or reverberated its poetics. The article further discusses how past movements—including December 1944, May 1968 and the Polytechnic events of 1973, were picked up and promoted by the media as compelling alter egos. The paper further reacts against the assertion put forward by prominent analysts that the 2008 “December events” were a direct consequence of the so-called “spirit of the metapolitefsi” and catalogues the novel characteristics of the movement, including the extensive use of technology and its transnational outlook. The boys and girls of today think they’ve invented the world. Youngsters always think that the world begins with them. Pietro Nenni in Orianna Fallaci’s Interview with History

Placing one’s self in a longstanding revolutionary tradition has been a typical feature in leftwing social movements ever since the ur-historical uprising of the modern era, the French Revolution. The so-called Polytechnic Generation in Greece, for example, that spearheaded the antidictatorship struggle in the early 1970s coined the slogan “EAM-ELASPolytechneio” in order to create an imaginary link with the generation that waged the wartime resistance of the 1940s (Kornetis 2006). In contrast to Italy and the critique of the Resistenza, the 1970s activists in Greece worshiped and idealized the wartime Communist resistance and its revolutionary tradition, which operated in highly selective ways. In its turn, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 173–197 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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the Polytechnic Generation itself became “a culturally reproduced site of youth rebellion” for many generations to come (Karamichas 2009:291). The December 2008 events in Greece, namely a series of nation-wide riots in the aftermath of the killing in cold blood of the 15-year-old student Alexis Grigoropoulos in the center of Athens by an armed policeman, tried—at least programmatically—to become an exception to this rule. The “December Events” of 2008 were three weeks of civil disobedience, violent demonstrations and destruction of public and private property but also peaceful sit-ins outside the parliament, all triggered by Alexis’s (as he became known) death. Impromptu demonstrations and extensive riots took place, several university buildings were occupied, protesters clashed daily with the police, and a general rage against state arbitrariness and police impunity was expressed. Even a banner was raised on the Acropolis calling for “resistance.” As Hara Kouki notes, “three gunshots and a dead 15-year-old boy […] trigger[ed] the most severe acts of civil unrest that the country has seen in its entire post-1974 dictatorial era” (Kouki 2009:2). The majority of the activists to a great extent tried to avoid identification with past events, even though this tendency was not a coherent one. The main attitude was one of a stated indifference: here, the politically contestatory events seemed indifferent to the historical precedent(s) (Liakos 2008). Accordingly, one of the major slogans printed in leaflets during the December Events read, “We are an Image Coming from the Future,” exemplifying a “time of the now” attitude, a conviction that the moment cannot be postponed. Similarly, the 2008 student movement in Italy, dubbed “anomalous wave,” declared that “Il nostro tempo è qui e comincia adesso” (“Our time is here and it starts now”), again cutting the bridges with the past and stressing the “here and now” conviction almost verbatim. This of course cannot but bring to mind the slogan “the future is now” of May ’68, underlining the hic et nunc attitude that characterizes social movements (Kornetis 2009c). The majority of the activists based their stance on the grounds that outside analysts committed a very basic misreading in trying to identify elements of continuity with the recent or distant “revolutionary past.” Several blogs, for example, pointed at these connections as a construct coming from external projection: “Their biggest error is that they search for elements of the past that the insurrected ones themselves are constantly trying to avoid,” according to one of them (G. Zeros, Loaded Pencil Blog, comment posted 21 December 2008). This rejection was contradicted by the facts, since the past was present at least in terms of slogans and graffiti written in December 2008. The present article sets about to interpret the tension between the refusal of the December activists to adhere to a “heritage” and the

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tacit adoption of some of the latter’s verbal premises. The histoire-problème that is posed here is not connected to the casual factors that led to the revolt but to the extent or the way in which the historical past becomes transformed into an element that is important for the outlook or the quest for the identity of this specific movement. Can the rejection of the past be interpreted as a total absence of a revolutionary tradition that produces a movement ex nihilo? And how do historical projections by analysts, including juxtapositions, comparisons, and the drawing of parallels with earlier movements play in all this? “The sixties”: reverberating the rejected past The most important element of appropriation of the past involved slogans and graffiti on the walls. Despite the stated indifference and the supposed rejection of any influences, the past was present in terms of three emblematic moments in the December riots: the December Events of 1944, May 1968, and the Polytechnic Uprising of 1973. At the same time that a giant slogan at the central Klafthmonos Square declared “Fuck May 68: Fight Now” (Figure 1), thus articulating in the most vocal way the rejection of its legacy and reacting to the jubilee literature that the fortieth anniversary had produced, the most famous situationist slogan of ’68, “imagination au pouvoir,” was written in the neighboring Panepistimiou Street. The graffiti “No God, No Master!,” again a slogan that comes from the past, was also widely reproduced, as was “Attention: the police are talking to you through the 8 o’clock news,” indicating the growing suspicion of the movement vis-à-vis the role of the media. Similarly, a leaflet bore the name “open committee of Athenian énragés” and, in other instances, the voiced slogan was “this is just a beginning,” echoing May 1968’s “ce n’est qu’un debut.” For Guy Debord, in our image culture, “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (Debord 1995:2), and this is how the past appears here. The slogan seen in Salonica “Manson Family: Kill your Parents,” on the other hand, departs from the above, as it refers to one of the darkest pages of the American 1960s, that is, the violent murders that took place in Los Angeles in 1969 by Charles Manson’s notorious commune. The slogan indicates an unbreachable generational rift and a complete rejection of the family structure. It also connects in a way to the Italian Sessantotto’s idea of a generation that “chooses to be orphans” (Passerini 1996:22–36). Even though the latter was formulated in a less violent way, the Oedipal subject matter was similar. Even more important, an unintended reverberation is found in the Greek up­rising. One of the most publicized manifestos that circulated during the December events

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Figure 1.

read “we used to be invisible.” This brings to mind Nanni Balestrini’s emblematic autobiographic novel Gli invisibili (The Invisibles), about the 1970s evolution of the extraparliamentary leftist movement in Italy and the embrace of so-called dynamic forms of struggle (Balestrini 2005). “We don’t ask for much, we want it all!” again echoes 1968’s “Lo vogliamo tutto” (“We want it all”). It is not a coincidence that Ballestrini’s writings had indeed been translated, published, and widely disseminated in anarchist circles of Athens and Salonica in the past five years (Kornetis 2009b:15). Slogans like “what does not get modified gets destroyed” are also part of this spirit, which might not involve the praxis of a conscious reference to the past but nevertheless evokes it, reverberating one of the most widespread Luxemburgian dilemmas of the global 1968: modification or demolition (Holloway 2002).

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References to the Polytechnic More interesting is the presence or absence of references to the Polytechnic Uprising of 1973. The Polytechnic became the national “lieu de mémoire” and symbolic commemorations have become standard practice ever since the democratic consolidation. What is sure is that the 1973 moment came to haunt future generations. Every youth mobilization since then, from the mass student occupations of 1979 to those of 1985, even up until the massive school occupations of the early 1990s and the recent anti-globalization bloc, implicitly or explicitly evoked the Polytechnic as a model. Accordingly, the history of the student movement was seen to be of paramount importance in terms of providing interpretative keys to understanding the contemporary crises in student consciousness. In this logic, the Polytechnic was considered to be “the matrix and sole parameter for analyzing and judging every expression of political radicalism” (Betta and Capussotti 2004). Controversial politician Mimis Androulakis, a student leader during the dictatorship period, has argued that the Polytechnic Generation acts like a group of “vampires.” In his view, through its deification, the Polytechnic Generation absorbs younger generations in its own past, rather than allowing them to develop their own genuine rebellions (Androulakis 2004). This is probably a contributing factor behind the fact that few references were made to the Polytechnic in the 2008 uprising. In a constant attempt to break away from any past, its traces in the activist discourse convey an anti-heroic tone and a rather critical attitude. Contrary to almost every youth movement since 1974 that used the Polytechnic as a point of reference, here we have a conscious attempt to reject the notion that December 2008 was somehow an afterlife of November 1973. In a leaflet bearing the Latin epigraph “ego te provoco” and dated 12 December, we read: “the mandarins of harmony, the barons of quiet, law and order call on us to be dialectical. […] We saw them in May, we saw them in LA and in Brixton, we have been watching them for decades licking the bones of the Polytechnic.”1 Here, apart from the interesting mentioning of the Los Angeles and Brixton riots alongside May 1968, the reference to the appropriation of the Polytechnic legacy implies that it is a rotten one, that it is nothing but a corpse. This reference implies an acute resistance against the cannibalization of a historic tradition. Nevertheless, there were moments in which there was a direct interpellation of the 1970s in an attempt to show that there is a thread that connects the dictatorship period with the present, even if in rather unpleasant ways. There was graffiti, for example, reading: “In every corner a policeman, the Junta did not end in 1973” («Σε κάθε γωνία υπάρχει

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αστυνομία, η χούντα δεν τελείωσε το 73»). This slogan links 2008 to 1973, making an enormous temporal jump but also implying that, after the restoration of democracy, the regime did not cease to be authoritarian. Interestingly, this slogan also got the dates wrong for the sake of rhyme, as the Junta of course collapsed in 1974 and not 1973. But it also reverberates something that remained imprinted in Greek collective memory: that the students of the Polytechnic actually brought down the Colonels in November 1973, a conviction that is entirely inaccurate, as the Junta decided to transfer the power to the politicians for largely unrelated reasons. The attitude towards the Polytechnic events, nevertheless, is not clear-cut either. Apart from the frequent occupation of its actual premises, which is a ritual full of symbolic meaning, and the occasional graffiti with the most famous slogan of 1973, “Bread-Education-Freedom,” one of the alternative information platforms of left-wing students during the 2008 events was a website called “Polytechnic’s Calling” («Eδώ Πολυτεχνείο»). This refers directly to the famous cry of the pirate radio station that was set up during the Polytechnic occupation on 14 November 1973. As the description of the website goes, “that was a slogan that gave hope to the Greek people against the oppression of the dictatorial regime. Today we find ourselves confronting the phony democratic regime which is trying to undermine our rights, our lives and our dignity.”2 In short, there is an ambiguous relationship to this particular past and, just like with 1968, its discursive utterance makes this past quite present. Even so, this is quite far from Karamichas’s conclusion that the December 2008 events should be seen through the prism of mimesis (of the Polytechnic) that reveals “a particular, self-reproducing, culturally legitimized pattern of youth rebellion in Greece” (Karamichas 2009:291).3 The “inheritors” The last and more widely cited connection with the past—maybe the only connection that was openly welcomed by the majority of activists—has to do with the 1940s and the notorious 33-day-long fighting between the Communist-led resistance group EAM/ELAS and government forces, supported by the British allied troops stationed in Athens. The fighting that started after the massacre of an unarmed crowd during a pro-Communist demonstration resulted in a fierce civil conflict, several thousands of casualties, and a ravaged capital. It ended up with a ceasefire and the Varkiza agreement in January 1945 that called for the complete demobilization of ELAS and is seen as the prelude to the civil war of 1946–1949. These events are commonly known as the “Dekemvriana” (Mazower 1993).

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The brochure-analysis that the assembly of the Anti-Authoritarian Solidarity Movement of Salonica published in early January 2009 about December, printed in 2000 samples and distributed in several different cities, bore the title “The December events of our generation” («Τα Δεκεμβριανά της γενιάς μας»). Using the term “Dekemvriana” was a conscious choice that makes an unmistakably direct reference to 1944, associating that traumatic moment in Greek history with the present. Constant references were made to a “civil war” being waged. Young anarchist Elias Nikolaou wrote from Amfissa prison on 19 January 2009, where he was kept under the accusation of firebombing a police station, that “social peace only lives in the imagination of those that cannot understand that reality is characterized by a permanent, [a relentless] civil war, with a revolutionary side that rebels against this democratic monstrosity.”4 A statement distributed by the association of employees in the suburb of Agios Dimitrios in Athens reads in a similar tone: “We are in Civil War: With the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society.”5 Using the term civil war in the Greek context is something that cannot but invite memories and juxtapositions with past events: the “Dekemvriana” and their aftermath. Similarly, on a widely circulated sticker in mid-December, one could read the motto “In these December events we shall win.” Another slogan that drew explicitly on this legacy was “Varkiza is over” («Βάρκιζα τέλος») (Figure  2), again implying that in the present civil conflict the winners would be the ­radical Left, thus

Figure 2.

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proclaiming the 1945 Varkiza agreement to be annulled. All this seems to comply perfectly with Raoul Vaneigem’s conclusion that “to construct a present is to correct a past” (Vaneigem 1967). The idea here is that the trauma is inherited and the legacy of violence can be transmitted across generations, even if in a non-verbal and non-mnemonic way.6 Alekos Alavanos, a former leader of the left-wing party coalition SY.RI.ZA, elaborated on this idea in an interview that he gave almost a year after the events on the occasion of a recently released film on the Greek Civil War. Alavanos wondered whether or not it was a coincidence that young activists at present used violence in order to bring about political ends, in the same manner in which their “grandfathers” tried to settle their differences with the Greek state in the late 1940s. The journalist who conducted the interview agreed that probably this was part of an ongoing “inter-generational trauma.”7 In the midst of all these indirect references to the revolutionary past as a model and inspiration of the present, the most direct mentioning of a specific moment in the past was made by the immigrants who participated in the events. The “Albanian Immigrants Hub” issued a manifesto, entitled “These Days are Ours Too,” in late December that referred to a legacy closer to itself as it saw it, “closer to the silent rage of 18 years”: the riots of 2005 in the suburbs of Paris. According to the statement, “for us organized immigrants this is the second French November of 2005” (steki-am.blogspot, comment posted on 15 December 2008). As Peter Bratsis notes, “one of the greatest achievements of the December events are the linkages that have been formed between the current, largely immigrant and very urban, proletariat in Greece and the student, anarchist and other autonomous leftist movements” (Bratsis 2010:194). The presence of immigrants in the public sphere, and in fact in contestatory action, was not a common phenomenon in Greece. This insurrection created a new rupture, breaking this taboo and signaling the emergence in the public realm of “the rebellious immigrant, politicized and public, claiming a political life” (Kalyvas 2010:356). If there is a difference, apart from the more all-encompassing composition of the movement, between the Greek events, the Los Angeles ghetto riots in 1992, and the events in the Parisian banlieues in 2005, however, it is that in both of these places—in contrast to Athens—the rioters mostly burned the cars and buildings in their own neighborhoods. The visibility of immigrants in Greece became more accentuated when in late December, Konstantina Kouneva, a Bulgarian immigrant working as a janitor in a cleaning facilities firm and active in the union advocating precarious workers’s rights, was attacked with sulphuric acid by unidentified individuals. The movement of solidarity that was created in the wake of the attack and the

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relative publicity that the issue attracted were landmark moments (Sotiris 2010, Celik 2010:31). In many ways, the broad transformative promise or potential connected with December did not lead to any alternative institutions being built (or even imagined) but to a large extent was channeled towards consciousness-raising regarding the exploitation of documented and undocumented foreign workers. Last, but not least, the lexical resources of the movement drew on earlier student movements of the past ten years and the abundant clashes between protesters and the police. In fact, many of the most widely circulated slogans of December 2008, including “City that burns, flower that blossoms,” were older slogans used in the clashes between university students and police against educational reform in 2006–2007 and were re-activated; they were part of a repertoire that was already being used. In the end, what we see here is “a curious mixture between the [acute] remembrance of the past and the search for the future” (Singer 1972 quoted in Varikas 2002:102). Do the December events have a relation with the past that is not yet recognized? Possibly, as they explicitly recalled it in the mode of direct or indirect citation, even in this time filled by the presence of the “now.” Lost in analysis The great debate that emerged in the press evolved around the terms “revolt” and “uprising,” mainly putting in question whether this was a social movement or not.8 The question of “what is (and what is not)” a protest movement is again an old one, as is the question whether social movements emerge out of rational calculation or whether they are the product of cultural residues and expressive impulses (Seferiadis 2009). In this framework, connections with past events were very much promoted, drawing parallels or rather juxtaposing the events with 1944, 1965, 1968, 1973, 1985, and 2005. For some reason the debate shifted from the present to the past and their interrelation. The reference to the “Dekemvriana” became a widely publicized and standard feature of newspapers. Articles with titles like “A New December or a New May ’68?” became a standard feature in newspapers. Here is one example: “December of 44, just like December of 2008 started for the same reasons and with the same pretext: the police fired at the crowd. And things became uncontrollable then and now alike. There was only a sparkle that was needed in order for the kiln that was boiling to explode” (Oikonomidis 2008). On the opposite side of the spectrum, political scientists Stathis Kalyvas and Nikos Marantzidis, tried to attack the notion that these were the “new December Events,” repudiating the idea of similarities with the revolutionary past. In a highly controversial

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article, they argued that the only connection between the past and present “Dekemvriana” was Marx’s conclusion that history repeats itself as a farce (Kalyvas, Marantzidis 2008).9 In fact, most analysts were eager to stress all possible differences, divergences and discrepancies rather than similarities between now and then. Many analysts called December “a crisis of meaning,” others an identity crisis, a nihilist outburst, or a collective psychodrama, and juxtaposed it to the euphoric utopianism of 1968. According to the common attitude, if 1968 was “a revolt with a utopian vision,” 2008, just like 2005 in the banlieues of Paris, was “just an outburst with no pretence to vision” (Žižek 2008:74). According to this argument, there were no particular demands made by the protesters, who were driven by the desire to become “visible”: “there was only an insistence on recognition, based on a vague, unarticulated ressentiment,” to quote Slavoj Žižek’s conclusion regarding the uprising in the French suburbs (Žižek 2008:63). Journalist Elias Kanellis, for example, argued on the occasion of the first “anniversary” since December that, in contrast to May 1968, the riots were an irrational party of destruction for the sake of destruction (Kanellis 2010). Similarly, other analysts described the events along the lines of a “subconscious or conscious invitation to self-destruction […] reflecting the ultimate in self-negation, self-rejection, and hopelessness,” thus echoing Kenneth Clark’s analysis (Clark 1970:108). Celebrated author Nanos Valaoritis juxtaposed the Greek slogans with the French ones of 1968: “In France, since the insurrection [of May 68] was inspired by small poetic groups of surrealists, the artistic level was sufficiently high so that the slogans did not become vulgar or ignorant” (Kiousis 2008). Prominent sociologist Constantine Tsoukalas argued that in 1968 in Berkeley, Berlin or Paris, “no hoods appeared, nothing was burnt, no shops were looted” (Tsoukalas 2008). In this kind of analysis we can discern a nostalgia for the past; for veterans Valaoritis and Tsoukalas, la belle époque is already over and the past looks much more benign than the present, even in terms of social protest. A similar critique was to be discerned by a group of authors that issued a manifesto against the protesters new “cultural revolution” (Doxiadis et al. 2009). As the December uprising started with the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos, all kinds of movements that emerged after the assassination of individuals were also evoked. Those were the assassination of independent MP Grigoris Lambrakis in May 1963 in Salonica by parastate thugs, that gave rise to a youth movement named after him. Also mentioned was the killing of leftist student leader Sotiris Petroulas in July 1965 during a series of civil unrests as the Greek capital was completely paralyzed and set on fire for more than a month.10 Composer Mikis

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Theodorakis, a protagonist of these earlier events, intervened in those of December 2008 in order to juxtapose the two and stress the fact that, in his view, the current movement lacked legitimacy: “During the July events, in one of the most turbulent times of our history, thousands of youth were going down the streets and we never had the slightest destruction even though we were mourning for two dead, Lambrakis and Petroulas, who died fighting for a better future” (Theodorakis: 2008).11 The absence of determinant content by the demonstrators in the recent riots made others exclude any kind of affinity to the Polytechnic past. Connections with the past, however, were also put forward by analysts who argued that the events might not have had affinities with the global contestation of the 1960s or even their local surrogates (1965 and 1973), but that they were the sheer reflection of an anarchist subculture, born in the aftermath of the Polytechnic Uprising, and its domination over contentious politics ever since. Some talked about “the creation of a public discourse of resistance against authority that emerged and became dominant during Greece’s transition to democracy in the mid-1970s” (Kalyvas 2008). In fact, many of the mostly used slogans, including “One in the ground, thousands to the struggle” («Ένας στο χώμα, χιλιάδες στον αγώνα»), “Violence against state violence,” and the standard soundtrack of activists’s actions, “Cops, Pigs, Assassins,” are all slogans that were generated in the troubled post-dictatorship period. The eruption of violence in January and February 2009 right after the emergence of a number of terrorist organizations that claimed to be the continuation of December by other means were also seen by commentators as proof that Greece was entering a moment similar to Italy’s infamous “years of lead” in the 1970s, namely, a protracted period of political violence with no clear end in sight—what is often termed a “low intensity civil war.” It is accurate to say that in the aftermath of the dictatorship a particular subculture with counter-cultural characteristics emerged around Exarcheia Square, the anarchist quarter of Athens. It is also certain that the 1970s police brutality had lasting effects in people’s social imaginary. The late 1970s and early 1980s were indeed years of increased tension with constant clashes between police and rioters. In 1980, protesters Iakovos Koumis and Stamatina Kanellopulou were clubbed to death, and in 1985, the 15-year-old young anarchist Michalis Kaltezas was shot dead by a 25-year old policeman. These were critical moments that led to an ongoing vendetta between the anarchist movement, the extraparliamentary left, and the police. But to deduct from this that there exists a “cycle of protest,” according to the term coined by Sydney Tarrow, and to argue that nothing has changed in this particular subculture ever since the 1970s is problematic (Tarrow 1998). First and foremost, because youth

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subcultures always have a highly ephemeral character, a nature that cannot survive inalterable for long, let alone for decades. Accordingly, the weakness of this theory is owed to the fact that it provides a static vision of social and historical processes, as if people and culture can live for an indeterminate amount of time in a vacuum, whereby new generations are nothing but past clones, without ideological originality or other differentiations. Moreover, this theory presupposes that people did not deduct any political lessons from the Greek transition to democracy and did not modify their political beliefs and tactics, despite the dramatic changes in the political environment.12 Analysts used the term “culture of metapolitefsi” in order to describe this negative, disruptive spirit, that traces its roots in a failed transition to democracy (Kalyvas 2009:58–59). Others, like the well-known writer Apostolos Doxiadis, insisted that one should go even further back in time—to the period of the dictatorship itself—in order to understand what he sees as the psychopathological condoning of the youthful violence by people who were themselves students in 1967–1974 (Doxiadis 2009).13 A “glocal” movement? If we look closely at the December activists, however, we are not going to see much of the 1970s subculture. A crucial difference, apart from the obviously different sociopolitical conditions, is that the recent movement was a genuinely polycephalous one, including anarchists, teenagers, immigrants, hooligans, dissolute intellectuals, and unspecified others, across the country, without the central planning and coordination that previous movements involved. Apart from the so-called “known-unknowns,” meaning anarchists who routinely repeat a repertoire of clashes with the police on an annual basis, the composition of the protesters changed dramatically with the inclusion of 15-year-old school students in the movement. As Kouki notes, “until the end of December, 800 schools were under occupation and thousands of secondary school pupils were taking to the streets on a daily basis to stage protests against police brutality and unaccountable authority” (Kouki 2009:3). In terms of action repertoire, self-perception, and cultural and ideological references, we can also find clear-cut ruptures rather than continuities with the activist past. In almost the entire period of the events, police stations were almost daily attacked by teenagers, who added in their action repertoire the disruption of television news and theatrical performances. The age component and the fact that 14 and 15-year-olds were the protagonists of this movement is crucial in order to understand the programmatic rejection of past legacies.

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An additional element that differentiates this movement from any one in the past is the use of technology; accordingly, we should focus on the changing tropes of protest mobilization, including the introduction of new technologies. This connects with recent mobilizing tendencies, be it in the US concerning the war in Iraq or in Iran after the June 2009 presidential election. The common thread between these heterogeneous movements, which constitute a radical departure from earlier days, is the informal network of communication such as blogs (about 80 of them), and formal ones such as Facebook and the web wunderkind Twitter. These did not just provide alternative information channels but created networks that galvanized and synchronized political activism among this generation of “digital natives.” The Facebook group “Alexandros Grigoropoulos,” for example, was formed the day after Alexis was killed and attracted thousands of members. The role of new technologies reduced the distance between the participants and allowed for direct communication, eliminating discrepancies between different groups and creating a common identity, a common micro-culture and an alternative (counter-) public sphere (Della Porta and Diani 2006:221). Technology not only served as a vehicle of communication and co-ordination but also as the embodiment of the very political and organizational goals of the activists. The political relationship with technology and its transformation to an innovative structure for the exchange of ideas was also crucial for linking the bloggers to activists abroad.14 All this represents what Cleaver calls an opposition to “the official reports of governments and commercial mass media,” but also reflects the horizontal, non-hierarchical manner of grassroots organization throughout the events, while the authorities were struggling in vain to identify possible ringleaders (Cleaver 1998:84). As Christos Memos notes, “the role of the internet in the interlinking of previously unrelated groups was immense and allowed the activists to self-organize in a very short period of time” (Memos 2009:227). Technology ended up defining the specific characteristics of the movement, including the unprecedented simultaneous mobilization of thousands of people in many different parts of the country. Within hours, the political geography of the movement covered all major Greek urban centers, including a number of islands. The fact that 44 cities experienced simultaneous mobilizations transformed the December riots from isolated urban incidents to a national event and from a local to a global, or more fittingly, a “glocal” movement.15 Throughout Greece, but especially in Athens and Salonica, slogans were written in different languages, especially French: “Grèce, puis France, c’est l’insurrection qui vient ” (Figure 3), or “Grèce Generale”—a play on words

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Figure 3.

of the standard French slogan “Grève Generale” (General Strike). A leaflet circulated by an organization entitled “Direct Action” declared emphatically in French “Nous avons la Rage: Baise la Police” (“We are enraged: Fuck the Police”)16 (Figure 4). All these slogans were reproduced in various locations in the French capital. Other graffiti reproduced Shepard Fairey’s famous André the Giant calling on people to “obey,” while a satirical drawing of a person wearing an anti-asphyxia full face mask—a direct statement on the use of chemicals by the police to disperse the crowds—bore the caption “inhale,” in English17 (Figure 5). The most widely circulated slogan in English went “Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear,” playing on the approaching Christmas vacation. Another widely reproduced graffiti bore the face of the avenger of “V for Vendetta” and the English caption “Remember, remember, the 6th of December” (Figure 6). The fact that all these slogans in graffiti and leaflets were written (and reproduced) in French and English was without precedent and demonstrates an attempt of a tacit communication with movements elsewhere—of placing the Greek case within a wider context and paradigm. This is a radical departure from any previous practice. Indeed, the Greek events seemed to generate a cross-fertilization between different movements and transnational networks (Petropoulou

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Figure 4.

2010:220), demonstrating the validity of Doug McAdam’s and Dieter Rucht’s famous formulation that “protest makers do not have to reinvent the wheel at each place and in each conflict. […] They often find inspiration elsewhere in the ideas and tactics espoused and practiced by other activists” (McAdam and Rucht 1993:58). Mimicry plays an important role, leading hundreds of youths elsewhere to try to emulate what was going on in Greece in an expression of solidarity and a network of alliances: from Sweden to France, Bulgaria to Spain, the UK to Canada and the United States. Interestingly, in Macedonia and Turkey—two countries with a series of open disputes with Greece—people protested outside the Greek Consulates in support of the demonstrators and created stencils with Alexis’s face (Figure 7). As Andreas Kalyvas notes, “this uprising becomes all the more remarkable once we move beyond narrow and indulgent Greco-centric approaches to integrate the domestic with the transnational” (Kalyvas 2010:355).

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Figure 5.

On a different level, European elites started worrying that the conditions were ripe for the insurrection to spread. Even if the spillover that the French President Nicolas Sarkozy feared never did materialize, the fact that he postponed an educational reform on these grounds bears a special significance. Interestingly, the phrase used by several French politicians (“all it takes is a spark”) was exactly the term used in graffiti in Athens, written in French, calling for “Spark in Athens/Fire in Paris/ It’s the insurrection that’s coming!” (Kalyvas 2010:355)18 (Figure 8). Similar metaphors were used by major specialists on social movements, like Isabelle Sommier who rhetorically wondered whether Greece and France were sitting on the same powder keg (Sommier 2008). Equally important was the influence and impact of the anti­globalization or global justice movement. The fact that the corner of Messologhiou Street in Athens where Alexis was killed became a shrine, and the street plate was changed to “Alexis Grigoropoulos’s Street,” demonstrates the similarities with yet another tragic incident—the kill-

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Figure 6.

ing of Carlo Giuliani in Genoa in 2001 and the re-naming of the piazza Gaetano Alimonda by activists to “Piazza Carlo Giuliani Ragazzo.” The affinities go further than this. Many of the tactics used in the Greek uprising, including the fact that a number of banks and public buildings were set ablaze, resemble the violent legacy of the Black Block. Bratsis stresses the fact that “thousands of Greek anarchists […] have trained and been educated through their participation in anti-globalization protests throughout Europe” (Bratsis 2010:195). Apart from their capacity to cause mayhem and disruption, the Black Block were pioneers in using new technologies as a platform of “counter-information”—yet another lesson that activists have drawn from the anti-globalization struggles (Memos 2009:227).19 The December Events bear the clear imprint of the spirit of Seattle and bring to mind the concept of “multitude,” as it was coined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, according to whom it is very difficult to separate a set of movements and a movement of ideas from one another (Hardt and Negri 2000:60–66).

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Figure 7.

Epilogue: re-crusting the past I have attempted to trace the contested relationship between the December 2008 riots in Greece and the revolutionary past, aiming to promote a discussion on the dynamic relationship between past and present. Even though the activists’s repertoire was pretty much removed from the past, their discourse often echoed or reverberated its exact moments. These were picked up and promoted by the media as compelling alter egos, even though it is certain that many activists would probably not share this reading.20 Intentional or unintentional, conscious or subconscious, the similarities in sloganeering point to some kind of longue durée poetics and frames. The past was not necessarily present in the form of the knowledge of history, but in the form of a cultural memory that flashed up at specific moments. According to Cornelius Castoriadis, “no historical action is ‘spontaneous’ in the sense of arising in a vacuum, of being totally unrelated to its conditions, its environment, its past” (Castoriadis 1993).21 Still, even though the past proves hard to escape, the new December Events and the supposed “inheritors” of earlier traditions did not bring about a riot simulacrum of past clashes. In the end, it was not so much proximity or affinity, but temporal and semantic distance from

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Figure 8.

any predecessors that shaped the character of the events. The connecting lines between the local and the international illustrate how the intricate mixture of these elements shaped the character of the events, rendering them a phenomenon with novel characteristics. As Andreas Kalyvas notes, “the foreign becomes the decisive factor, the central signifier for a fuller understanding of the unrests” (Kalyvas 2010:356). The short-lived legacy of the new December Events has already suffered several setbacks, however. The first one was during the events themselves, when several shops were looted by protesters and when incidents such as the accidental burning of the prestigious Library of International Studies alienated parts of the populace. The only political party that directly supported the protesters, SY.RI.ZA, saw its percentages in the polls fall from an estimated 15% to just over 3%, showing that by the third week, the protesters had lost touch with society as a whole. Finally, the emergence of a new generation of terrorists claiming to avenge Alexis’s death in early January 2009 aggravated the situation. The violence that accompanied the one-year anniversary since the events in December 2009—including the bullying of the dean of the University of Athens—sealed these negative developments. Last, but not least, in December 2008, one of the most popular slogans was “You are talking about glass windows, we are talking about lives,” again, a slogan that had been used before. This phrase epitomized the self-righteousness

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on the side of the activists, enraged for the loss of an innocent life.22 However, when on 5 May 2010 three persons suffocated to death when the bank they were working in at the centre of Athens was firebombed by unidentified individuals during the anti-austerity strikes, hardly any sentimentality of the kind was expressed by non-traditional social actors, nor did any spontaneous protest emerge. Even though this incident is not a direct afterlife of December, the contrast between these landmark moments deserves to be stressed. In a time of crisis and transformation in which many foresee social explosions resulting from the austerity measures that are imposed in order to deal with the problems of the Greek economy, December 2008 might be recovered by future movements and act itself as a point of reference, definitely replacing the “heroic” but distant 1960s and 1970s. Brown University

NOTES Acknowledgments. This article was presented at the MGSA Symposium in Vancouver in October 2009. I would like to thank Donatella della Porta, Jeremy Varon, and Ben Dorfman, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their very insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. 1  You can read the entire text in http://katalipsiasoee.blogspot.com/2008/12/blogpost_4576.html. 2  http://www.edopolytexneio.org/wiki/ Εδώ_Πολυτεχνείο—Edo_Polytexneio:Σχετικά. 3  An interesting view concerning the possible linkages between the Polytechnic and the “December Events” was made by poète chansonnier Dionysis Savvopoulos, who referred to the Polytechnic as a myth of origins. Also worth mentioning is his counterfactual assertion that “if Alexis Grigoropoulos had not been killed next to the Polytechnic but somewhere in Kifissia or Nea Ionia, […] December would not have been as tense and the mobilization of the people, alas, would not have been so great” (Liavas 2009:7). 4  Translated and reproduced in http://greeceriots.blogspot.com/2009/02/letter-fromgreek-anarchist-ilias.html. 5  Translated and reproduced in http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2008/12/12/weare-in-civil-war-with-the-fascists-the-bankers-the-state-the-media-wishing-to-see-an-obedientsociety. 6  This idea can be found also in Elias Maglinis’s controversial novel The Interrogation. The novel’s protagonist was arrested by the military police during the dictatorship and suffered torture, including sexual abuse—about which he maintains an unfailing silence. His 30-year-old daughter is clearly haunted by her father’s experiences, not because she

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lived them or has direct access to them, but because the trauma is, in some sense, inherited (Maglinis 2008). 7  Alekos Alavanos interviewed by Maria Choukli. See “O Αλέκος Αλαβάνος από το Α ως το Ω” [Alekos Alavanos from A to Z] http://www.protagon.gr/Default.aspx?tabid=444& VideoId=1875. 8  See Kornetis 2009a. Parts of this debate were echoed in a recent roundtable discussion in which Greek historians opined on the crisis (21 January 2010). The statement by historian Vassilis Kremmydas, “I would call it an outbreak, an uprising, a rising, but not a ‘revolt,’” is telling (Kremmydas et al. 2010:5). 9  An elaboration of the idea of the December events as a farce was made by Marantzidis in an article in Le Monde (Marantzidis 2009). 10  Interestingly, during the tragic events of 5 May 2010 that followed the largest demonstration that took place in the country since 1974, three people died on the other corner from where Petroulas was killed. Flamboyant left-wing MP Grigoris Psarianos commented on the symbolic dimensions of this coincidence in a speech in the Greek Parliament on 6 May 2010. 11  Theodorakis’s point regarding the absence of destruction in 1965 is entirely inaccurate and not substantiated by the facts. 12  For a detailed analysis of the theory concerning political lessons regarding the authoritarian past, see Bermeo (1992). 13  References to supposed historical analogies were also made by political psychologist Thanos Lipovats (“the acceptance of such acts of violence led and lead to totalitarianism and the gulag”), former US diplomat Brady Kiesling (“the Greek Krystallnacht”), and Cambridge historian Paul Cartledge (“the events refer to Thucydides’ concept of ‘stasis’”). See Paraskevas Matalas’s intervention in Kremmydas et al. (2010:16). 14  The most well-known grassroots, non-commercial information platform, Indymedia, defines itself as a “collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage.” See www.indymedia.org/nl. An alternative platform similar to Indymedia in Greece is Indygr (http://indy.gr). 15  For an elaboration of this concept see Robertson (1995). 16  Photos courtesy of Kyriakopoulos and Gourgouris (2009). 17  Photos courtesy of Kyriakopoulos and Gourgouris (2009). 18  See for example the statement by former socialist minister Laurent Fabius in Chloé Leprince, “La France peut-elle s’embraser comme la Grèce?” Rue 89 11 December 2008. 19  Also see an overview of the Black Block’s role during the G8 Summit in Genoa in 2001 in Lucarelli (2009:21–22). 20  As Umberto Eco has argued, there is never a single message uniquely encoded in a text, but several messages as decoded by different readers endowed with different “intertextual encycopledias” (Eco 1979:5). 21  My emphasis. Here we should add Charles Tilly’s famous theory according to which no social movement is entirely spontaneous but depends on specific resources and political opportunities. See Tilly (1978). 22  See also the fake dialogue «Πέθανε ένας άνθρωπος Κώστα» (“A human has died Kosta”), reproduced in Kyriakopoulos and Gourgouris (2009).

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Androulakis, Mimis 2004 Μίμης Ανδρουλάκης, Βαμπίρ και κανίβαλοι. Το ρίσκο μιας νέας σύγκρουσης των γενεών (Vampires and Cannibals. The Risk of a New Conflict of Generations). Athens: Kastaniotis. Balestrini, Nanni 2005 Gli invisibili. Rome: Derive Approdi. Bermeo, Nancy 1992 “Democracy and the Lessons of Dictatorship.” Comparative Politics 24(3):273–291. Betta, Emmanuel and Enrica Capussotti 2004 “‘Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo’: l’epica dei movimenti tra storia e memoria.” Genesis 3(1):113–123. Bratsis, Peter 2010 “Legitimation Crisis and the Greek Explosion.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):190–196. Castoriadis, Cornelius 1993 “The Hungarian Source.” In Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, Vol. 3, 1961–1979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society, edited by David Ames Curtis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Celik, Ipek 2010 “Sex, Reproduction and Family in Sotiris Dimitriou’s Europe.” Unpublished Paper Presented at the Cogut Center, Brown University (February). Clark, Kenneth B. 1970 “The Wonder is There Have Been so Few Riots.” In Black Protest in the Sixties, edited by A. Meier and E. Rudwick. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Cleaver, Harry 1998 “The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle.” In Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, edited by J. Holloway and E. Peláez. London: Pluto Press. Debord, Guy 1995 The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. (First published in 1967). Della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani 2006 Social Movements. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Doxiadis, Apostolos 2009 Απόστολος Δοξιάδης, «Πολιτική Ζωολογία της Μέσης Ηλικίας» (“Political Zoology of the Middle Age”). Ta Nea 10–11 January. Doxiadis, Apostolos, Takis Theodoropoulos and Petros Markaris 2009 Απόστολος Δοξιάδης, Τάκης Θεοδωρόπουλος, Πέτρος Μάρκαρης, «Πού μπαίνει το όριο στην κωμικοτραγική “πολιτιστική επανάσταση” των απολίτιστων;» (“Where is the Limit in the Tragicomic ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the Uncultured Ones?”) Ta Nea 25 December.

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Eco, Umberto 1979 The Role of the Reader. Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri 2000 Empire. New York: Macmillan. Holloway, John 2002 Change the World Without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today. London: Pluto Press. Kalyvas, Andreas 2010 “An Anomaly? Reflections on the Greek December 2008.” Constellations 17(2): 351–365. Kalyvas, Stathis 2008 “Why Athens is Burning.” The New York Times 11 December. 2009 Στάθης Καλύβας, «Η “εξέγερση του Δεκέμβρη” ως σύμπτωμα της κουλτούρας της Μεταπολίτευσης» (“The ‘December Insurrection’ as a Symptom of the Metapolitefsi Culture”). Athens Review of Books 2 December. Kalyvas, Stathis and Nikos Marantzidis 2008 Στάθης Καλύβας, Νίκος Μαραντζίδης, «Τα Δεκεμβριανά ως φάρσα» (“The December Events as a Farce”). To Vima 21 December. Kanellis, Elias 2010 Ηλίας Κανέλλης «Η κουλτούρα του Δεκέμβρη» (“The Culture of December”). Athens Review of Books 3 January. Karamichas, John 2009 “The December 2008 Riots in Greece.” Social Movement Studies 8(3):289–293. Kiousis Giorgos, editor 2008 «Εκ των Έσω» (“From within”). Eleftherotypia 23 December. Kornetis, Konstantinos 2006 Student Resistance to the Greek Military Dictatorship: Subjectivity, Memory, and Cultural Politics, 1967–1974. Unpublished PhD thesis. Florence: European University Institute. Kornetis, Kostis 2009a Κωστής Κορνέτης, «Χαμένοι στην ανάλυση των εξεγέρσεων νέας κοπής» (“Lost in the Analysis of the Uprisings of a New Kind.”) Ta Nea 28 February. 2009b “Introduction: 1968–2008: The Inheritance of Utopia.” Historein 9:7–20. 2009c “‘Everything Links’? Temporality, Territoriality and Cultural Transfer in the ’68 Protest Movements.” Historein 9:34–45. Kouki, Hara 2008 “‘Where do we go from here?’ December 2008 Riots in Greece and Social Movement Analysis.” Paper presented at the workshop “Student movements, youth movements: A historical and cross-national perspective” organized by the Department of Social and Political Sciences, European University Institute. Florence, 18–19 May 2009.

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Kremmydas Vassilis, Matalas Paraskevas and Chatziiosif Christos 2010 (forthcoming) Βασίλης Κρεμμυδάς, Παρασκευάς Ματάλας, Χρήστος Χατζιηωσήφ. Οι ιστορικοί μιλάνε για τον «Δεκέμβρη» του 2008 (The Historians Talk about “December” 2008). Athens: Asini. Kyriakopoulos, Alexandros and Efthymios Gourgouris 2009 Κυριακόπουλος Αλέξανδρος, Ευθύμιος Γουργουρής, Ανησυχία (Restlesness). Athens: Kastaniotis. Leprince Chloé 2008 “La France peut-elle s’embraser comme la Grèce?” Rue 89 11 December. Liakos, Antonis 2008 «Τα χρόνια της ουτοπίας: κοινωνικά κινήματα και θεωρητικές αναζητήσεις σαράντα χρόνια μετά το 1968» (“The Utopian Years: Social Movements and Theoretical Inquiries Forty Years after 1968”). Avgi 13 July. Liavas, Labros, editor 2009 Λάμπρος Λιάβας, Το ροκ του μέλλοντός μας (The Rock of our Future). Athens: Sui Generis. Lucarelli, Carlo 2009 G8. Cronaca di una battaglia. Turin: Einaudi. Maglinis, Elias 2008 Ηλίας Μαγκλίνης, Η Ανάκριση (The Interrogation). Athens: Kedros. Marantzidis, Nikos 2009 “La farce grecque: billan d’une fausse révolte.” Le Monde 29 April. Mazower Mark 1993 Inside Hitler’s Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941–44. New Haven: Yale University Press. McAdam, Doug and Dieter Rucht 1993 “Cross-national Diffusion of Movement Ideas.” Annals of the American Academy of the Political and Social Sciences 528:56–74. Memos, Christos 2009 “Dignified Rage, Insubordination and Militant Optimism.” ephemera 9(3):219–233. Oikonomidis, Foivos, 2008 Φοίβος Οικονομίδης, «Ένας νέος Δεκέμβρης ή ένας νέος Μάης του 68;» (“A New December or a New May ’68?”). Eleftherotypia 20 December. Passerini, Luisa 1996 Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Petropoulou, Chryssanthi 2010 “From the December Youth Uprising to the Rebirth of Urban Social Movements: A Space-Time Approach.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):217–224. Robertson, Roland 1995 “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” In Global Modernities, edited by M. Featherstone, M. S. Lash and R. Robertson, 25–44. London: Sage.

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Seferiadis, Seraphim 2009 “1968 as an Epistemological Catalyst: Contentious Politics and Antinomies in the Study of Social Movements.” Historein 8:101–116. Singer, Daniel 1972 “It’s Only a Beginning.” The Nation 6 March. Sommier, Isabelle 2008 “Nous sommes sur une poudrière.” Liberation 12 December. Sotiris, Panagiotis 2010 “Rebels with a Cause: The Greek December 2008 Youth Movement as the Condensation of Deeper Social and Political Contradictions.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):203–209. Tarrow, Sidney 1998 Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theodorakis, Mikis 2008 Μίκης Θεοδωράκης, «Οι μπάτσοι» (“The Cops”). Ta Nea 18 December Tilly, Charles 1978 From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading: Addison Wesley. Tsoukalas, Konstantinos 2008 Κωνσταντίνος Τσουκαλάς, «Οργή και Πολιτική» (“Rage and Politics”). To Vima 14 December. Vaneigem Raoul 1967 Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations. Paris: Gallimard. Varikas, Eleni 2002 “The Utopian Surplus.” Thesis Eleven 68(1):101–105. Žižek, Slavoj 2008 Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.

Stones (papers, humans) Neni Panourgiá

Abstract The making and self-making of political subjects is a process that presupposes an engagement with both intellectual and tactile materials. One of these intellectual materials is ideology, which stains tactile objects, such as stones and paper, with the heft of its own meanings. Competing ideologies strive to control the meanings of objects. Such has been the case for stones as observed in their use at the concentration camps of the Greek Civil War period, or the camps in Tito’s Yugoslavia, or conversely, by the high school students during the December 2008 Events in Athens. Where sovereign power recruits objects and materials as parts of its apparatus, resistance movements appropriate these same objects as means of opposition.

Who and what can have a life? Even if we manage to decide on what “life” is, we seem to be unable to make such a decision on the most fundamental level, as technological inventions suspend our disbelief almost daily.1 The life of the human, the one of the animal, that of the stone, increasingly have come to belong to the same world that seems to be growing more and more hesitant to take a position of accountability as to who and what holds life.2 Yet a moment existed, around the 1920s, when the question of whether there was a world commonly shared by animate and inanimate beings and the possibility of their mutual transposability was articulated. “Can we transpose ourselves into a stone?” asked Martin Heidegger in 1929, as the discussions regarding what constitutes “life worth living” were raging all around him (1995:204).3 No, Heidegger decided, we cannot, because a stone “does not admit to such a possibility at all.” Therefore, the question here becomes not an existential one, not one of radically different forms-of-being-(or not)-in-the-world, but one of transcendence, of metaphysics. In other words, if I am reading Heidegger correctly, the reason why we cannot transpose ourselves into a stone is not because we are animate beings and the stone is not, not because of the integrity of the living existence, but because the stone itself does not allow it. Therefore the question is not about the agency of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 199–223 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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human being (even if such an agency could allow such a transposition) but about the agency of the stone. What would happen if we reversed the question and asked not if we can transpose ourselves into a stone but rather if the stone can triangulate the relationship among the human, the animal, and the inanimate object, dislocating all existing dialectics of human/divine, human/animal, human/non-human? Put differently, can the stone posit a question regarding the humanity of the human? And in what sort of a world would such a stone belong? I want to look at this question through the example of Greece, a space that has had a very idiosyncratic and intimate relationship with the stone as object and subject, an object that has been given the capacity to cull human life out of the animality of existence. Because in Greece, even if stones do not hold or carry life (and they most emphatically do not), they have certainly managed to organize it.4 “Enchanted to a stone” 5 On 6 December 2008, a policeman who was later charged with premeditated homicide and whose trial is currently taking place in Greece, aimed, shot, and killed 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, after the end of yet another demonstration against the excesses of the government. The uprising of the high-school students that followed brought center stage the festering wounds of the modern Greek polity. The high school students, along with university students, immigrants, Anarchists, anti­ exousiastes (antiauthoritarians), urban guerrillas, the lumpen, the poor, occupied the University of Athens, the Law School, the School of Public Governance, burned stores and rubbish bins, overturned police cars, threw stones and Molotov cocktails, burned the Municipal Christmas tree three times over, looted, wore balaclavas and surgical masks, were attacked by the police with tear gas, smoke bombs, and baton beatings, turned Athens first, and Greece shortly thereafter, into an ongoing demonstration for three weeks, demanding, demanding nothing in particular and everything in general.6 Athens and other cities were littered with stones, heaps of them, thrown at the policemen, the special forces, the gas tanks. For nineteen days, Greece drowned in a rain of stones, the object that became readily and immediately recognizable as the extension of the children’s bodies.7 “Fuck May ’68, Fight Now” became the slogan of the Events. “You have destroyed our lives” was the charge by the students towards everyone: their parents, their teachers, their schools, the government, the state, society, the church. As properties burned and businesses were looted,

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the students (most of them from middle class families, just like the one that Grigoropoulos had come from, and most of them children without any prior particular political engagement or discourse at their disposal) quickly discovered the words that gave meaning to their emotions. Transcending and abandoning all conventions that keep children from speaking openly to their elders, they reached deep into their existence, an existence that has been shaped, organized, manipulated, and manhandled by a global economy that deals in human bodies and psyches as commodities. This became the nodal point of the uprising, the bracket that framed the destruction of objects: “We destroy everything because you have made us into commodities. And we don’t like it” was one of the main points in the communiqués that came out over the independent media. It was handwritten on makeshift placards and was quickly scribbled on errant pieces of paper handed over to the passers-by with the request to pass them on. Stones and pieces of paper. Not particularly ominous objects qua objects. One of those children tried to explain that existence to all the parents who lamented the unruliness of their children in a song that circulated on the internet:8 Μαμά, Μπαμπά είμαι κουκουλοφόρος (Mom, Dad I wear a balaclava) Μαμά, Μπαμπά είμαι κακό παιδί (Mom, Dad I am a wicked child) Μαμά, Μπαμπά στην τσάντα έχω μπουκάλια (Mom, Dad in my school bag I have bottles) Μαμά, Μπαμπά στην τσάντα έχω στουπί (Mom, Dad in my school bag I have a rag) Ποιός έχει την βενζίνη, (Who has the gasoline?) Ποιός έχει την ευθύνη (Who bears the responsibility?) Ποιός έχει τα πλακάτ (Who has the placards?) Ποιός θα βαράει τα ΜΑΤ (Who will attack the Special Forces?) Ποιός έχει δικηγόρο (Who has a lawyer?) Ποιός έχει μαρκαδόρο (Who has a marking pen?) Ποιός έχει το κουτί με το Maalox (Who has the box with Maalox?)

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Neni Panourgiá Μαμά, Μπαμπά μη τους δικαιολογείτε (Mom, Dad don’t make excuses for them) Μαμά, Μπαμπά δε τά’σπασα εγώ (Mom, Dad I didn’t break anything) Μαμά, Μπαμπά τα’σπάσαν ασφαλίτες (Mom, Dad the Special Forces broke everything) Μαμά, Μπαμπά το δέντρο έκαψα εγώ (Mom, Dad I only burned down the tree) Ήπιαμε χημικά (We ingested chemicals) Σπάσαμε μπατσικά (We smashed police cars) Μπήκαμε στο στενό (We hid in the alley) Πήραμε το μετρό (We rode the metro) Τους ρίξαμε αυγά (We threw eggs at them) Πέτρες, πολύ μπογιά (Stones, tons of paint) Μα κράταγαν ασπίδες τα μουνιά (But they were holding shields, the cunts) Μαμά, Μπαμπά, τις τράπεζες βαρούσα (Mom, Dad, I was only hitting the banks) Μαμά, Μπαμπά, τις έβριζες και εσύ (Mom, Dad, you were cursing at them, too)

Papers and stones On 23 January 1879, Stephanos Koumanoudes (1818–1899), the renowned Latinist at the University of Athens, wrote on the back page of a letter sent to him by M. I. Gedeon, the famous archaeologist, the following note: The deceased lying here in front of us had requested that if I were ever to make a funeral speech about him to only say the following . . . . That true philology ought to conjoin the study of the papers with that of the stones. «Ο προκεíμενος νεκρóς με παρήγγειλεν, αν ποτέ εκφωνήσω επ’ αυτού λόγον να είπω μόνον τα εξής . . . Ότι η αληθής φιλολογία πρέπει να ενώση την σπουδήν των χαρτίων με αυτήν των πετρών.» (Χουλιάρας 1992:60)

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Quoting this note by Koumanoudes, the poet Yiorgos Chouliaras, in Χαρτιά και πέτρες (Papers and Stones), a poem dedicated to the memory of Stephanos Koumanoudes, writes: «Χαρτία καí πέτρες» Δεν έχω άλλο τíποτε. Ένα φύλλο χαρτιού ξεγλιστρά απó πέτρινο δέντρο αναμμένο Στις πέτρες μαλακώνω τα χαρτιά όπου κληρονομήσαμε την αλφαβήτα στα μάτια μου σπάζουν οι πέτρες για να δω, ν’ ακούσω τα γραμμένα Είμαι εγώ που έβαλα στην πέτρα το σημάδι, άλφα και ωμέγα της επιγραφής κι αυτήν την πέτρα τώρα σημαδεύω που θα λιανίσω στο χαρτί «Χαρτία και πέτρες» Δεν έχω τίποτε άλλο. “Papers and stones” I have nothing else. A piece of paper slips by from a stone tree burning On the stones, I soften the papers where we inherited the alphabet On my eyes, I break the stones so that I can see, hear the writing I am the one who put the mark on the stone, the alpha and omega of the sign and this stone I am now marking the one that I will crush on the paper “Papers and stones” I have nothing else.

«Χαρτία και πέτρες,» “papers and stones” then, two materials that have made up Greece as a modern nation: papers bearing the words of space, stones bearing the witness of time. In the course of production of the modern Greek state as a nation-state, as an entity belonging to and fitting into the new global political object, the new “instrument” as the venture capitalists would call it, that new project of the nineteenth century, “democracy” as it has been called, a democracy that sought to separate the “West” from the “Rest” in the course of this production,

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papers and stones (χαρτία και πέτρες) were called in as the instruments of first order. From the hero Ioannis Makrygiannis’s exclamation “we fought for these” when he saw the ruins of the Parthenon for the first time, to the folklorist’s Nikolaos Politis’s “monuments of the word” when referring to Greek folk literature (the locution being itself a Hellenization of an alloethnic—that is, German formulation), stones and papers have been the substantive matter of modern Greek Bildung. As paper became increasingly part of an economy of ephemera, stones—stones that have a “bosom” and “do not fit under a stranger’s stride” (as Yiannis Ritsos wrote in “Romiosyne”)—became more and more indices of an ideality construed as transcendental substance (“the Parthenon,” “Apollo’s temple at Delphi,” “Olympia,” “the Charioteer”) as an unbounded global spirit, a quality of being that cut through time and space and participated in the production of a universal subject: the ethical subject of modernity, the non-ethnic “Hellene.”9 Stones had a purpose: they built buildings. From the first peasant houses to the neoclassical and Arcadian structures, the rapidly developing bourgeois and capitalist “west” looked towards the ideality of ancient Athens, and in a strange twist of significations, reintroduced to Greece the stone architecture of its past. Stones also enclosed fields and sheltered animals. And they indexed class and prosperity, alongside indexing culture (High Culture, as Matthew Arnold would call it) and power (not the subtle, Foucauldian puissance, but the more crude and brutal power of sovereignty). They defined the landscape. Sometimes they defined punishment—in the form of chain gangs that broke stones in order to produce raw materials for buildings. They built homes and houses, images that, as Gaston Bachelard has noted, “would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being. [Houses] constitute a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (1964:17, my emphasis). The distance, of course, between proof and illusion is chasmal. And so is the difference between the stone as instrument of construction and the stone as object of destruction. Construction of a house, a fence, a game, a play, a church, a nation. Destruction of the house, of the fence, of the game, of the human subject. These are simple things that the small children hurling stones at IDF soldiers during the first intifada knew only too well. There, at the point where the menial stone became the instrument of desperation, the object of blind rage, being hurled at anyone who could not be recognized as a friend. “I, of all people, should never have been stoned. After all, unlike those other Westerners one saw in the West Bank—the settlers, tourists, and embassy officials—I was a good foreigner,” lamented Ted Swedenburg, the American ­anthropologist who

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conducted fieldwork in the Occupied Territories from 1984 to 1986, and who recognized a relationship of friendship between him and the Palestinians who were the objects of his research. Until he, himself, recognized not only the difference between the liberal subject of the humanitarian and human rights discourses (the spaces of which he was occupying by his own admission uncomfortably) but, primarily, the immense distance between the two modalities of existence that Carl Schmitt delineated so clearly over forty years ago—the enemy and the friend; and the impossibility of any other existence between them. That distance is the difference between the stone and the stability of the house. In a letter written in 1972, Foucault mentions in passing that his real interest was not “to analyze the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the findings of such an analysis” (2003:284). In a sense, Foucault was not interested in producing laundry lists of where power can be found and what that power did. He was far more interested, he says, in producing a “history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (2003:284). As a way of arriving at this genealogy of subjectification, Foucault mentions that he wanted to analyze power relations, relations that produce subjects out of human beings through the act of “the most disparaged of all wars: neither ­Hobbes, nor Clausewitz, nor the class struggle: [but] civil war” (2003:282). In setting civil war (emphýlios pólemos) apart from the contours of both the “absolute war” of Clausewitz (where the enemy has to be obliterated militarily and politically) and the Hobbesian notion of war as the means for entering civilization, Foucault recognizes that only civil war engages with the project of biopolitics in that it engages in the production of a new type of citizen. The world of the human with that of the stone On 5 February, 1946, before the actual civil war started but during the height of the White Terror against the Left that followed the end of the Second World War in Greece, the Greek government issued Emergency Law 890, abolishing the concentration camps of the prewar dictatorship of Metaxas.10 A year later, on 19 February 1947, a few months after the beginning of the Civil War, the government proceeded with the organization of three concentration camps: Makrónisos for those drafted into the Greek armed forces, Trikeri for “suspicious” men and women of the areas cleared out by the government army, and Yioúra (Yaros) for those convicted under criminal law.11 The latter were members of the Resistance against the Germans, members of the civilian organizations of defense of the partisans, and low-ranking members of the Communist Party, all accused under criminal law of murder, espionage, and “having

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broken the peace and quiet of law-abiding citizens.” Children 14 to 18 years old whose parents were either fighting with the Democratic Army or were imprisoned for being Communists were also held in Yioúra. These children had originally been placed in rehabilitation centers, primarily in the Rehabilitation Center for Juvenile Delinquents in Kephessia, a notorious place where organized torture, including systematic beatings, rape, and terrorization sought to extract deloseis metanoias (“declarations of repentance”) from them. The stated purpose of the organization was: (1) to concentrate all battalions of sappers (i.e., noncombatant conscripted soldiers) in one place, where they could be used “in fruitful occupations with an eye toward redirecting them to the Fatherland”; and (2) to come into contact with the directors of the prisons throughout Greece and discuss the alleviation of the problem of overcrowding. In actuality, the interned included the leadership of the Communist Party and the captured leaders of the Democratic Army; members of the Communist Party; uncommitted Leftists, suspected Leftists and their families, at some point including women and children aged two to eighty; and countless people who had participated in the Resistance against the Germans yet were merely antifascist in their political convictions. Characteristically, Andreas Nenedakis (1964) mentions the case of an old man who was the president of a mountain village and who gave food and shelter to the partisans as they passed by his village one night, for which he was court-martialed and sent to Yioúra with a life sentence. Long Island Makrónisos is a long island, 5 square kilometers in all, 10 kilometers from north to south (hence its name), and 500 meters at its widest point, from east to west. It is located off the coast of Attica, across the water from Lavrion, on the thirty-seventh parallel. Its western flank looks at Athens; its eastern flank looks at Kea (Tzia). Between Makrónisos and Tzia sank the Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic. It is a dry island with only two small springs. Its terrain is not as precipitous as that of Yioúra, even though its highest peak is 281 meters. It is an island of ravines and slopes, full of poisonous laurels, myrtle bushes, low-lying junipers, and the ubiquitous afánes (“tumbleweed”). It has five natural coves on its western flank, facing Athens, but its eastern flank is largely inaccessible. The two springs are located on this inaccessible eastern flank, which faces the island of Tzia. In antiquity Makrónisos was named Helene, after Helen of Sparta (or Helen of Troy, depending on one’s position in history), because that

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is where, legend has it, Helen and Paris found refuge after the fall of Troy, as Pausanias mentions in his Attika. The ancient ruins found on the island indicate that in antiquity it was used as a sacred place of worship, without permanent residents. Some itinerant shepherds occasionally brought their goats to the island, and at the end of the First Balkan War, in 1912, a group of Turkish prisoners of war, ill with cholera and tuberculosis, were abandoned there. Russian and “undesirable” Greek soldiers were brought there in 1922, as were briefly, in 1929, refugees from Asia Minor. During the war the Germans established watch towers there. When established as a place of exile and internment in 1947, Makrónisos had a single purpose: to reeducate Greek Leftists into the principles of nationalism (ethnikophosyne) and Christianity and to obtain from them written declarations renouncing communism and submitting to legality, the famous de \lôseis nomimofrosynis which, in conjunction with the deloseis metanoias, comprised the pistopoietikon koinonikon phronematon (certificate of political beliefs—a certificat de civisme) that became the sine qua non part of the relationship between the citizens and the state. From 1947 to 1958, over one hundred thousand people were deported and tortured on Makrónisos, Yioúra, and Trikeri before being transferred to exile on the other “small islands” or dying.12 The islands, then, constituted a space where new political subjects were systematically produced by the postwar governments (Voglis 2002). This process of reformulating political subjects rested upon a form of governmentality convinced that populations (in this case, the population of Greek Leftists and dissidents) could be inscribed and reinscribed, almost ad infinitum, in new subjective positions through a process of reeducation and rehabilitation. A skylark Unlike Makrónisos, which is easily visible from Lavrion on the mainland (where, people say, with the right—or wrong—wind, one could hear the screams of the men and women being tortured) and from the boat that takes you to Kea (Tzia), Yáros (or Yioúra, as it was called by the prisoners of 1947–1953) is barely visible from the surrounding islands. On a clear day, when there is little evaporation off the sea, if one stands on a high spot on the eastern part of Syros or the western part of Tenos, one can perhaps make out the shape of its mountain in the midst of the sea, and in the middle of the fabled Cyclades. It is a rock of 23 square kilometers, located almost on the 38th parallel, in the midst of a circle composed of the islands of Andros in the northeast, Tenos, Delos, and Renia in the southeast, Syros and Serifos in the south, Kythnos in the southwest, and

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Tzia and Makrónisos behind it in the northwest. The closest two islands are Tenos and Syros, about 15 nautical miles away. Yáros has no fresh water, only some puddles of saltwater sludge that support scorpions, snakes, rats, tumbleweed, some thyme, laurels in abundance, and the occasional fig tree, a sight of delight everywhere in Greece except on this island, where the fig tree became the instrument of one of the most feared and horrifying tortures (Figure 1). It has been reported that someone saw a skylark flying over Yáros in 1947 (Nenedakis 1964). There is no shade on the island, no soft ground where the eye can rest, no gentle slope where one can lie down. From its peak, the mountain slopes down to the sea at a precipitous angle of 45 degrees; the ground is strewn with jagged rocks; it is riven by gullies full of poisonous laurels. A small boat can approach the island by five coves, the largest of which came to be known as the Fifth Cove. As Yáros is totally exposed to the elements, the only things found in abundance there, other than vermin, rocks, and stones, are the sun, which scorches, and a constant wind, which uproots. Because the soil is so thin, barely four centimeters deep, the slightest wind creates a dust cloud that penetrates everything: food, clothes, mouths, ears, noses, wounds. The common joke among detainees and seamen alike is that there are two windy seasons (meltémia) on Yáros: one that starts in May and ends in October, and another that starts in October and ends in May. Under these conditions, one would be hard pressed to decide which is more difficult, reaching or leaving Yáros. The Carceral Archipelago Up and down the coastlines of the Aegean and Ionian seas of Greece and the Dalmatian Coast of Yugoslavia, island prisons were set up to incarcerate the Left, with a unique eye towards its rehabilitation. Whether in democratic Greece or in Tito’s Yugoslavia, the stones on the island prisons howled with the screams of the tortured. Whether it was the Stalinists off the coast of Croatia, on the islands of Goli Otok (for men) and Sveti Grgur (for women), or the more generalized category of the “Leftist” on Makrónisos, Yáros, and Trikeri, boats ferried the abjected accused citizens to these places, where the abundance of stone transformed the torture of stone into an almost exact science. The boat skirts Sveti Grgur portside. The captain brings it as close to the coast as safety allows, and we see the rocky coast drop straight into the crystal-clear sea. Having in mind the landscape of the desert islands of Greece, the sight of Sveti Grgur, which has been described repeatedly as such another desert island, catches me by surprise. The island

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Figure 1. The Torture of the Fig Tree.

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is about the size of Yáros, with an elevation of 200 meters at its highest point (about 600 feet). But where I expect to see only rocks, I see thick pine forest rising from sea level all the way to the island’s peak. I have the naïve thought that, if the Greek desert islands had so much forest on them, many more prisoners would have succeeded in escaping. The forested landscape suggests this. The geography, given how close Sveti Grgur is to the northern point of Rab, invites it. It is a short swim from one island to the other. Of course there are watch towers, bunkers, and search lights, but the thought sticks with me—until we reach the bend and see the ruins of the women’s prison. In a cove at the beginning of the rocky part of the island are the remnants of the prison’s stone structures. Built on an incline, this settlement is an exercise in stone. No one can escape from here. Nothing can move without being noticed. Everything is stone, and stone is everything (Figure 2). The single path that leads uphill from the buildings, the small, pebbly beach, the slopes surrounding the cove, everything, as far as we can see, is a muddy off-white. The roofs of the buildings have been pillaged long ago; there is no discernible structuration to the settlement, nothing that would indicate how each building was used. An oblong building sat on the slope to the left entrance of the cove, separate from the rest, looking strangely like a miniature Byzantine basilica, a chapel. But we know better. This could not have been a church; it must have

Figure 2. Sveti Grgur.

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been the administration building. Grgur was the women’s prison and, as Mestrovic mentions, the place “where most of the killings took place” (Mestrovic in Markovski 1984:ix). The captain does not linger for long. He turns the bow of the boat and heads to Goli Otok. The two islands are very close to each other, the channel between them is very narrow, although not as narrow as the passage between Rab and Grgur. Seeing the dramatic view of Goli has a profound and dramatic (but also traumatic and frightening) effect. The first thing one sees is the marble quarry that dominates the southwestern part of the island. Goli (as it is usually referred to) is about seven miles long and two miles wide, about the size of Grgur but of much lower elevation. There are no high peaks here, or, rather, the high peaks of the island are marble rocks. I keep thinking about what Markovski wrote about Goli Otok, which I have seen repeated in so many accounts of the place: “Goli means bare, naked; and Otok means island: the bare island. Nothing grows here; there are rocks everywhere, and not a blade of grass. When the first prisoners were brought here, there was nothing on the island. The convicts themselves have built the jail with their hands, without picks and shovels, without pickaxes—with only their sweat and blood” (1984:40). I have prepared myself for this encounter for a few years now. A rock of marble in the middle of the Adriatic, with not even a blade of grass, never inhabited, never visited prior to its establishment as a rehabilitation camp (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Goli Otok.

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The world of the stone Makrónisos and Yioúra each have a small, open-air theater. About the one on Makrónisos, the architect Tasos Daniel, who had been interned at Makrónisos and held in the military prison there, spoke about the handling of stone. He stated that the little theater they built on the island: open, classical, . . . was endearing . . . for three reasons. First, because it was a faithful copy of the ancient theaters. Second, because mortar had been used for its construction. Mortar is a strange medium to be used for the construction of bleachers and an open classical theater. But we had an allergic reaction to stone. We saw stone as the most violent form of hard labor, the most bestial hard labor, when we saw our fellow soldiers in the Battalions be made to transport it. (in Bournazos and Sakellaropoulos 2000:264–265)

The islands existed in a space where, as Begoña Aretxaga has noted, “the State was both the law and its transgression” (2000:60). They were set up to receive the Left as the refuse, the dregs of humanity, as undesirable and “superfluous.” And they produced stone, in abundance. Consider this: In the technologies of punishment and rehabilitation, there seems to have been a constant preoccupation with the handling of stone: from the shameful, even if purposeful, use of the stone as a form of punishment in the chain gangs of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century United States to the torturous and useless engagement with stone in Dachau in 1933. The big stone roller that the prisoners were made to roll endlessly within the confines of the camp, back and forth over the stone paths, for no apparent reason, was called by the Nazis “the Jew-and-big-shot” roller, where Jew and “big-shot” stand for the communist and the intellectual (Marcuse 2001: 26). On Makrónisos and Yáros, on the British political prisons on the Andaman Islands, on Tito’s post-Stalinist concentration camps on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, as in Dachau, the mindless, useless, and repetitive handling of stone became the syntagmatic modality of both punishment and resistance. The constant repetition of the Sisyphean act of needlessly and mindlessly carrying stone sought to obliterate the political consciousness of the prisoner, emptying his conscience, as if time did not exist, as if time were endless, as if the carrying of stone were the syntax of the prisoner’s life. The order was always very clear: take those rocks from up there and bring them down here. When the transport was done, the order was reversed: take the stones from down here and move them up there. This would take place all day long, in the heat of summer or the cold of winter, always under a relentless wind, without water, without rest, without shoes, in tattered clothes on tattered bodies. At some point

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the torture acquired a target: make embankments for the tents. The tents were large enough for ten people but were occupied by 30, 40, or sometimes 50. Some had cots, most had nothing, as if the lack of objects would teach the Leftists the value of property, would infuse in them the merits of our “Western, democratic values.” The torture by stone on Makrónisos became an exercise in a nationalist history lesson: make replicas of ancient structures, build and sculpt as if you were ancient Greeks. The segments of the camp where repentant soldiers stayed, those who had signed the de \loseis (declarations), became an open-air exhibit of small-scale replicas of the Parthenon and other classical buildings. On Makrónisos the project of rehabilitating the Communists into nationally minded Christians passed through the archaeolatry of the national state as its only point of reference (Hamilakis 2009). The torture of stone on Yáros was even more ambitious: to level the mountain to build your own prison. The prisoners were made to build their own prison, breaking stones with no equipment, with their hands, with other stones. The prisoners did. They leveled the mountain with axes and shovels, and they built the prison—a labyrinthine structure with long, wide corridors that ended in steep, wide staircases—with cement and seawater. The building was uninhabitable. Bitter cold in winter, scorching hot in summer, its walls started crumbling as soon as they were built because of the seawater. The prisoners mutinied and refused to move inside. So they stayed in the tents. But if stones were found in utter abundance on the islands, paper was a controlled and scarce commodity. The literary production of Makrónisos (Yáros had no in situ literary production) was either committed to memory and written down later, or written on paper smuggled onto the island illegally. Correspondence, strictly censored and controlled, had to fit in the small two-leaf writing tablets provided by the State. No marginalia: “don’t write in the margins,” Katerina Hariate-Sismane wrote from Makrónisos to her mother, “because you make the censor’s work more difficult”13 (Figure 4). Paper, though, was in abundance in the form of deloseis —extracted declarations of loyalty to the nationalist ideals of the State, and the “certificates of social convictions/pistopoie \tiká koino\nikôn phrone m \ áto\n” (or certificats de civisme). The deloseis had already been instituted by the Metaxas dictatorship of 1936–1941 and they comprised a signed declaration of loyalty to the state that were extracted from the accused by any means whatsoever. They would then be announced publicly through the press in the daily newspapers of Athens; through the press in the signer’s place of origin and residence; and by the priest at the signer’s parish. Recognizing that

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Figure 4. Katerina Hariate-Sismane’s Margins.

the deloseis might become an empty gesture, with its form maintained while its content of repentance was withdrawn, the Metaxas government, through its Undersecretary of Public Security Konstantinos Maniadákis, instituted a further measure to prevent signers from retracting their act. This was the requirement of a certificat de civisme (Clause 11 of Obligatory Law 1075/1938) which declared that: (1) No one will be eligible for a position in the public sector or receive a state scholarship without being able to produce a certificate relating to his social beliefs issued by the undersecretary of security and (2) that the aforementioned certificate is required for hiring at corporations whose funds are in the excess of 20,000,000 drachmas and in companies that have underwritten contracts with the state whose object is directly or indi-

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rectly connected to the security of the finances of the country. (Lymberiou 2005:Appendix)

The burden of collecting the information required to issue a certificate fell to the local police, except in areas where there was a branch of Special Security, under whose jurisdiction the investigation would then fall. Once all the information had been collected in “a meticulous and careful manner . . . based on specific and proven information so as to avoid the possibility of unfairness . . . since often false information is provided for reasons that are self-centered, irresponsible, or even vindictive” (as the Undersecretary of Security noted), the National Security Office would issue the certificate and send it to the requesting authority, keeping in mind that “the disclosure of the contents of the certificate should not be communicated to its subject or to anyone else even if there is nothing objectionable stated therein” (Lymberiou 2005:Appendix). Declarations written and signed on paper, extracted through torture—the torture of stone being one of them—constituted an intimate relationship indeed between stones and papers, hartia kai petres. Refusal to sign the paper signaled further holding of papers, an exclusion from a community of paper holders: passports, driver’s licenses, university degrees, jobs in the public sector (Figure 5). The exiles on “the islands,” beaten, tortured, and pressured to sign declarations that they were not what they claimed to be (Leftists) but something that they were not (Christian nationalists), found themselves somatically in the place of Oedipus: with feet swollen from falanga (bastinado) and eyes gouged from strikes to the head, all the while being asked to answer the unanswerable question: Are you (with us) or are you not? They were consistently told the same thing: you will become human (anthropoi) or you will die. “In order for them to make us human, they first made us into King Oedipus,” wrote one of those exiles. The riddle of the Sphinx became reversed in this context: “Who is human?” asked the liberal state when it engaged in the first acts of the Cold War, only to construct itself as the only correct answer: the human is the animal that recognizes the power of the state as the maker of the human. This was the point where the torturers on the islands could not hear the response that they were given: we are already humans, we are already anthropoi. “You are born an anthropos, just as you are born a musician,” George Seferis was reported to have heard someone say in 1944 (1986:363).14 The establishment of the modern Greek state, predicated upon the ideality of an unbroken organic history of Greece spanning ten millennia, has produced a historicity of political forms of life that in the early twentieth century demarcated the possible and the desirable from the

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Figure 5. “Delose.”

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impossible and the undesirable. The Left, from the moment of its inception as an agrarian party to its eventual materialization as a Communist Party, and all the hues of the Leftist spectrum in between, fell under the second category: that of the impossible (within the context of the Greek psyche) and the undesirable (within the context of the Greek imagination). The torturers on the islands engaged in a program of returning those considered to be wayward and lost Leftists to the common imaginary of Greece as a capitalist entity. The bamboo sticks that fell on heads, backs, arms, legs, feet, and testicles carried the voices of the torturers with them from the first moment the Leftists arrived on the islands: you will become human or you will never leave this island alive (θα γίνετε άνθρωποι ή δεν θα φύγετε από ‘δω ζωντανοί).15 The implication was that Communism transferred Communists to a being that João Biehl has called the “ex-human” (2005:24). The islands would turn these “ex-humans” into humans again by imparting to them the knowledge of the good and the correct that would come by way of torture. If torture did not manage to turn them into humans again, then torture would kill them. Not alive or dead, but rather human or dead became the dialectic of existence on the islands, where the wounded bodies (some of them permanently), the wounded minds (all of them permanently), and the wounded psyches of the Leftists made the metaphor of Oedipus a possibility. This is not naked life (either in Benjamin’s sense or in Agamben’s). This is a tug-ofwar for what is recognized as human. Rather than Agamben’s bare life and sacred man then, I suggest anthropos as the only possibility of exiting the barbed wire and the stone landscape of the camp. Consider this in light of what this new global neoliberalism has brought forth: a proliferation of papers, a new commoditization of useless hartia (papers), “hartia” bearing the seal of the state: university degrees, state decrees, newspapers, the “scrolls of the ancestors” (oi pergamenes ton progonon), the honors and awards bestowed by the bankrupt Academy of Athens, money, especially paper money, devalued and despised to the point of being called toilet paper. When these “hartia” failed in their purpose to create yet another generation of compliant, manhandled, manipulated, lobotomized youth, this youth picked up the stones again. Around the world a new youth subject is being formed, a subject that recognizes the stone as part of its epistemology of being. Undoubtedly ignorant of the meaning of the stone in prior times and spaces—such as the Easter 1916 Uprising in Ireland or the use of stones by the paramilitaries and the Deep State in Greece of the 1950s—Kashmiri students debating if stone pelting might be unislamic or not (Wani 2009), Puerto Rican high-schoolers and University students, fighting against budgetary cuts pelt stones and are being arrested, Arab students writing that real

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sovereignty is in the hands of the Greek students who are throwing the stones are the ones who can still remind us the meaning of the human.16 They, and the 15-year-old female Greek student who writes on a message, “I am 170 cm tall and weigh only 55 kilos. But you have no idea what I am capable of”; or the student who cries out in his song addressing everyone’s parents “we are your children, we are not the enemy.”17 With them stood those who are newly refused papers, hartia, called hartiá now: the sans papiers, immigrants, refugees, the refuse of humanity that lives in the margins of the official seals of the state and handle stones every day as construction workers and farm hands. Trying to create a cogent narrative (even if I have permission to narrate, as I keep in mind Edward Said’s word of caution) of the global experience of perpetual resistance to the excesses of state power by the human being through the small example that is contemporary Greece, is a challenge both because of the trenchant critique that my generation of scholars has articulated against the production of grand and seamless narratives and because of the ethical impossibilities of forcing such a narrative onto this experience. What I have attempted to do, both epistemologically and ethically, is to lay open its seemingly endless layers, where what appears as stable at one level collapses under its own weight at another. Because I only have “χαρτíα και πέτρες” papers and stones. Nothing else. columbia university

NOTES Acknowledgements. In a much shorter and much earlier form this article was delivered as part of the keynote panel at the 21st Biannual Symposium of the Modern Greek ­Studies Association Meetings in Vancouver, BC in October 2009. I want to thank the Program Committee of the Symposium for inviting me to participate in the keynote panel. I want to note here my deep regret for the fact that although there was a provision for post-panel discussion an organizational misunderstanding preclude it. Even without the discussion period, however, I benefited greatly from the comments delivered by Professor Aamir Mufti, from the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA who was the discussant of the panel, and, also, from the ensuing discussion with members of the audience. Subsequently I delivered this paper in different forms at the following fora: the Anthropology Department at Bard College; the Poetics and Theory Workshop “. . . for example” organized by the Humanities Initiative at New York University; and the Bios: Life, Death, Politics annual

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colloquium organized by the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I wish to thank all organizers for inviting me and all participants for their insightful comments, especially Yiorgos Anagnostou, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Martin Harries, Anthony Vidler, Matti Bunzl, Lauren Goodlad, Michael Rothberg, Priscilla Wald, and Susan Greenhalgh. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers for the Journal of Modern Greek Studies for offering invaluable comments for expanding the piece. But my deepest thanks are owed to the young students who participated in the December 2008 Events and talked to me about their experience. 1  This paper was written before the recent events of 5 May 2010 and the deaths by a petrol bomb of three bank clerks of Marfin Bank in Athens. The deaths occurred during a demonstration against the imposition of strict economic measures by the PASOK government dictated by the IMF, the Central European Bank, and the European Union. It is not possible to engage in analysis of these events in this paper and it is not entirely clear yet what the political and conceptual connections were between these events (which were attended primarily, even if not exclusively, by middle-aged middle class workers, the working class, workers in the public sector, and pensioners) and the youth events of December 2008. 2  Here, when I speak of “life” in English, I mean both bios and zöe, not because there is no conceptual difference between the two terms but because the differences that reside in them are other than the ones that have been animated by the Agambenian position and the elaborations that this position has produced. I have argued elsewhere (Panourgiá 2008, and Panourgiá 2009) that the distinction between zöe and bios proposed by Giorgio Agamben in 1998 is an artificial one, and one that is not borne out either of the Ancient Greek grammatology or of the modern Greek usage. The Agambenian position has a certain heuristic value, as a means of delineating the difference between a life lived in a social context, “in the world” so to speak, and a life lived severed from that. Roberto Esposito has problematized interestingly the question of zöe and bios by underlining the need seen in Gilles Deleuze for untying the “biojuridical node between life and death” as this need manifests itself in the distinction that Deleuze makes between “life” and “a life” (Esposito 2008:194). 3  For one example of these discussions and debates as produced in the Weimar Republic, see the pamphlet co-authored by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche entitled Authorization for the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Being Lived, published in Leipzig in 1920 by the distinguished publisher Felix Meiner. Binding was a specialist in penal law and Hoche a professor of medicine interested in medical ethics. Giorgio Agamben (1998) has discussed how the issue of euthanasia and the question of the legality of suicide were presented by Binding and Hoche as nodes on which rested the legal construction of the ownership of human life. 4  Consider the elemental position that the stone is given in the expression «το ξέρουν ακόμα και οι πέτρες» (“even the stones know it”) where the stone is endowed with a knowledge that it could not possibly possess precisely because of its immateriality and unworldliness. The stone is presented in this expression as not only the limit of knowledge but as the limit of existence. 5  This is a line from W. B. Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” that refers to the Easter uprising by the Irish Republicans against British rule. The uprising resulted in four hundred and fifty deaths and was part of a longer struggle that ended with the Irish Independence in 1922. The line used here is from the third stanza where Yeats likens the determination shown by the Irish rebels to the hardness of the stone: “Hearts with one purpose alone / Through summer and winter seem / Enchanted to a stone / To trouble the living stream.”

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6  As the slogan “Τίποτε λιγότερο από τα πάντα” (“Nothing less than everything”) that was scrawled on the pillars of a neoclassical building declared. 7  I term what happened as the “December Events.” I refuse to refer to this period of nineteen days as the “Greek riots” or the “December riots” or the “Dekemvriana” (a reference to the Athens Revolt in 1944) as they have invariably been termed. Obviously, what happened was not a revolution, although it might have been a revolt. The Invisible Committee that published The Coming Insurrection has argued that it was, indeed, an insurrection. Andreas Kalyvas sees no difference between a rebellion and an insurrection as he writes: “An insurrection occurred in Greece last December; a rebellion against state authority and its constitutional order by a part of its population” (Kalyvas 2010:355). Without minimizing the significance of all different actors who participated in the Events, Kalyvas focuses more on the participation of the non-Greek participants. Kalyvas recognizes that the non-Greek, non-Euro-American foreigners, primarily from Albania (or other post-socialist countries), Africa, or the Indian subcontinent, whether “illegal immigrants” (lathrometanastes), “legal migrants” (metanastes), “foreigners” (allodhapoi or xenoi), part of the work force, or part of the parasitic black economy that is rampant in Greece were present in the Events in numbers and capacities that, even if still unknown, were nevertheless significant. Kalyvas, interested in the new subjectivities produced during and on account of the events, sees there the appearance of this new subjectivity, the “rebellious immigrant [who] claims a political life” (2010:356). In a special segment of the March issue of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research entitled “Debate on the Greek Insurrection,” Mihalis Mentinis focuses on the lack of meaningful participation of the working poor in the political landscape of the country and sees it as a “new radical political morphoma.” Christos Memos and Peter Bratsis examined the Events as symptomatic of two deep crises in the modern Greek polity, that of identification with the neoliberal state and global capitalism the former and that of legitimation of the state the latter. Chryssanthi Petropoulou attributes to the Events a broad political texture as a social movement that attacked the manifestations of neoliberal global economies and, thus, moved beyond the strictly partisan-oriented movements that have erupted in the post-war period. Panagiotis Sotiris views them as a youth movement the anti-systemic character of which underscores the instability of neoliberal European hegemonies. However, the voices and the cries of the students during the Events, and the analyses in which we all engage, cannot occlude the fact that, over and above everything else, the Events were an exercise in the dialectics of (existential, political, social) silence. 8  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjhx2UG8w_g. 9  Yiannis Ritsos himself painted on stones that he found at places where he was exiled. So did Katerina Hariate-Sismane during her time on Chios, Trikeri, and Makronisos, and Vasso Katrake during her imprisonment on Yaros in the course of its second usage (by the Colonels’ dictatorship of 1967–1974). 10  The bibliography on the Greek Civil War and the islands of banishment, torture, and exile is, by now, immense, if one takes into account all publications that have appeared in the major European languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Dutch) and cannot be reproduced here even in a cursory manner. For English-language references see indicatively Tsoucalas 1969; Iatrides 1981; Close 1995; Hart 1996; Voglis 2002; Panourgiá 2009; Hamilakis 2009; and their bibliographies. 11  For the difference that the two names have in signifying time and political experience see Panourgiá 2009. 12  See the brilliantly creative rendition of the concept of the “small islands” in the song by Nena Venetsanou «’Κείνο πού θυμάμαι απ’ τά νησιά μας» (What I remember from our

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islands) in lyrics by Stella Hrysoulaki here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adeCErNbflg. The particular site includes a very good translation of the lyrics. 13  Katerina Hariate-Sismane, Private Letters to her Mother. Archive of Exile Museum Ai Stratis, Athens. Published with permission. 14  This was Nitsa Kanellopoulou [the wife of Panayiotis Kanellopoulos] in September 1944 at Cava dei’ Tirreni (called Phaka, “trap,” Phaka dei Greci, by the Greek delegation, where the Greek government-in-exile was waiting to be transported back to Greece) when she heard about specific atrocities that the German army was committing as it was evacuating from Greece. See Seferis 1986:363. 15  There are over one hundred published testimonials regarding the experience of the exiled and tortured on the islands. This phrase I found repeated in many of them. See, for instance, Geladopoulos (1994) and Yiannopoulos (2001). 16  During the Events, Indymedia published a string of messages commenting on the Greek situation that had appeared on the website of Al Jazeera. One of those messages attributed to “Ahmed” was the following: “This confirms that we Arabs amount to nothing. While the police kill demonstrators in Egypt and beat the most educated folks just because they are asking for work, in Greece, the country that emitted the idea of the human (alinsi), has toppled its government and has imperiled the entire security apparatus and has paralyzed movement across the country merely upon the killing of a single young man. Long live the people that do not agree with tyranny. As for ourselves, our brothers in Gaza die from the lack of water and medications and all we do is pray.” I am grateful to Rodney WJ Collins who translated the passage for me. 17  Both are taken from the video “Potentiality of Storming Heaven” created in Thessaloniki and presented for the first time at a squat in January 2009: http://www.veoh.com/ browse/videos/category/travel_and_culture/watch/v17498010KC7b6Dkf.

REFERENCES CITED Agamben, Giorgio 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Aretxaga, Begoña 2000 “A Fictional Reality: Paramilitary Death Squads and the Construction of State Terror in Spain.” In Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, edited by Jeffrey Sluka, 46–70. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bachelard, Gaston 1964 [1958]  The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Forward by Etienne Gilson. New York: The Orion Press. Biehl, João and Torben Eskerod 2005 Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bournazos, Stratis and Tassos Sakellaropoulos, editors 2000 Ιστορικό Τοπείο και Ιστορική Μνήμη. Το Παράδειγμα της Μακρoνήσου (Historical Place and Historical Memory: The Paradigm of Makronisos). Athens: Philistor.

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Bratsis, Peter 2010 “Legitimation Crisis and the Greek Explosion.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):190–196. Chouliaras, Yiorgos. 1992 Fast Food Classics. Athens: Ypsilon. Close, David 1995 The Origins of the Greek Civil War. Harlow: Longman Group Limited. Esposito, Roberto 2008 Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated and with an introduction by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel 2003 Society Must Be Defended. New York: Picador. Geladopoulos, Philippos 1994 Μακρόνησος. Η Μεγάλη Σφαγή, 29 Φλεβάρη–1 Μάρτη 1948 (Makrónisos: The Great Massacre, February 29–March 1 1948). Athens: Ekdoseis Alpheios. Hamilakis, Yiannis 2009 The Nation and Its Ruins. Antiquity, Archaeolatry, and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hart, Janet 1996 New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Heidegger, Martin 1995 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeil and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Iatrides, John, editor 1981 Greece in the 1940s: A Nation in Crisis. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England. Kalyvas, Andreas 2010 “An Anomaly? Some Reflections on the Greek December 2008.” Constellations 17(2):351–365. Lymberiou, Theodoros M. 2005 Το Κομμουνιστικό Κίνημα στην Ελλάδα. Τόμος Α (The Communist Movement in Greece. Vol. A). Athens: Papazeses. Marcuse, Harold 2001 Legacies of Dachau: Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Markovski, Venko 1984 Goli Otok, The Island of Death: A Diary in Letters. Introduction by Matthew Mestrovic. Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Monographs. Memos, Christos 2010 “Neoliberalism, Identification Process and the Dialectics of Crisis.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):210–216.

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Mentinis, Mihalis 2010 “Remember, Remember the 6th of December . . . Rebellion or a Constituting Moment of a Radical Morphoma?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):197–202. Nenedakis, Andreas 1964 Απαγορεύεται. Το Ημερoλόγιο της Γιούρας (It Is Forbidden: The Yioúra Diary). Athens: Themelio. Panourgiá, Neni 2008 “Desert Islands: Ransom of Humanity.” Public Culture 20(2):395–421. 2009 Dangerous Citizens. The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. New York: Fordham University Press. Petropoulou, Chryssanthi 2010 “From the December Youth Uprising to the Rebirth of Urban Social Movements: A Space-Time Approach.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):217–224. Seferis, George 1986 Μέρες Δ’ 1 Γενάρη 1941–31 Δεκέμβρη 1944 (Days 4 January 1, 1941–December 31, 1944). Athens: Ikaros. Sotiris, Panagiotis 2010 “Rebels With a Cause: The December 2008 Greek Youth Movement As the Condensation of Deeper Social and Political Contradictions.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1):203–209. Swedenburg, Ted 1989 “Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 4(3): 265–272. Tsoucalas, Constantine 1969 The Greek Tragedy. London: Penguin. Wani, Riyaz. 2009 “Is Stone-Pelting Islamic: Kashmiri Separatists Debate.” IndianExpress.com, comment posted March 31, 2009. Yiannopoulos, D. Yiorgos 2001 Μακρόνησος. Μαρτυρίες ενός Φοιτητή 1947–1950 (Makrónisos: Testimonials of a University Student 1947–1950). Athens: Bibliorama.

The Phenomenology of Hoods: Some Reflections on the 2008 Violence in Greece Marinos Pourgouris

Abstract The 2008 Greek riots were dramatized as a discourse of phainesthai: the violence that describes them manifested itself in the proliferation of a number of interrelated constructs, such as apháneia, diapháneia, apokálypsis, kálypsis, koukoulofóroi, and gnostoí-ágnostoi. Much of the discussion here focuses on the function of the hood ( koukoúla) and, more specifically, the implementation of a law in Greece to outlaw hoods during demonstrations. Such phenomenological exploration opens up a space where the relationship between (in)visibility and violence can be examined in the framework of what Slavoj Žižek calls “objective violence.” Against the background of a wider theoretical discussion on the ethics of violence (Arendt, Benjamin, Foucault, Critchley, Žižek), the 2008 events are also considered in relation to the French riots of 2005 in an attempt to map out their revelatory force: i.e. the violence and the tensions they revealed. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth. Oscar Wilde And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land? Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood in the streets! Pablo Neruda

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Violence: objective, subjective, academic When a literary critic takes on the subject of popular riots, it follows that a number of apologies are in order.1 First, because they appear to be stepping in a territory that is assumed to be the exclusive prerogative of anthropology, sociology, political science, history, psychology, or even economics. In short, literary criticism, or continental philosophy for that matter, can neither speak scientifically nor offer objective truths. Though we could preface such explorations by investigating this tendency, as Foucault did, of the unchallenged perception of science-aslegitimization, there is hardly a need, I believe, to justify such analysis. The compartmentalization, or division, of knowledge into prescribed disciplines is a modern phenomenon that has followed a similar path to the one described by Karl Marx in his description of the division of labor. What such division perpetuates is, first, the lamentable split between “intellectual and material activity” or, better yet, between aesthetics and praxis and, second, the alienation of scholars who are now thought to belong to precise disciplines and, thus, can only speak a certain kind of discourse. To paraphrase Marx: as soon as knowledge is distributed, each scholar has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity forced upon him and from which he cannot escape (Marx 1983:177).2 A second more urgent problem in undertaking such endeavors is the apparent split between the event itself—an event which, in the case of the December 2008 riots in Greece, was initiated by the brutal execution of a 15-year-old-student by the police, and which resulted in many injuries as well as the destruction of dozens of stores in downtown Athens—and the attempt to make sense of what happened in an academic forum. As Costas Douzinas has argued, part of the “incomprehensibility” ascribed to these events is the fact that they were turned by anxious commentators “from a usual protest by students or workers into something new which sublates, both retains the characteristics of urban resistance and politics, and overtakes them radically changing the situation” (Douzinas 2010). Such overtaking—such capitalization we might add—naturally seems hubristic. One is hardly surprised, then, by the customary apologies that prefaced many scholarly discussions on the subject. We are also reminded here of Harold Pinter’s memorable Nobel Prize lecture, where he splits his exploration of “Truth” into two distinct discussions: one on Art and one on Politics. For Literature, he argued, truth is a relative and subjective concept; in Politics, truth must be lucid and lead to accountability. Faced with the disparity between aesthetics, metaphysics, phenomenology, or poetry on the one hand, and murder on the other, we can only ask for a “permission to narrate.”3 What we are confronted with here is

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the violence that describes the transposition of the Act to Logos. The academician, then, is confronted with the opposite of what Lacan calls passage a l’acte: instead of a “passage to the act,” we are dealing with a passage, or regression, from the praxis to logos. If the passage to act describes the violent dissolution of the symbolic network, the passage from the act to the logos is essentially the attempt to reintegrate the event—après-coup—into a network of signification and meaning. And we recognize that by reversing the process we are unable to account for the very violence we set out to expose. We apologize for assuming that we can speak on behalf of the subject in question; for the audacity of believing that we can “deconstruct” such an explosive event; for writing about it from a safe distance and for even constructing its ideological parameters; for the implicit postulation that we know anything worth saying about the violent reactions of the youth. In the spirit of Pinter, I should state from the outset what I consider to be obvious facts, and clarify the trajectory that my own commentary follows in discussing the 2008 riots. On 6 December 2008, Alexis Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, was shot and killed by Epaminondas Korkoneas, a police guard in the district of Exarcheia in Athens. In the immediate hours and for several days following the shooting, protests and demonstrations erupted, first in Athens and then in almost all major cities in Greece, that often turned into violent confrontations between the police and the protesters (most of whom were relatively young). These demonstrations continued well into January (2009) and they resulted in the burning of dozens of stores in downtown Athens and the injury or arrest of dozens of protesters by the police. The event also took an international dimension when demonstrations of solidarity to the youth of Greece were organized in Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. What I hope that this essay will add to the many analyses of this event is a more phenomenological and systemic critique that will not concentrate on assigning culpability or even looking for the historical roots of rioting in Greece. In fact, as will become clear in the discussion that follows, I am approaching the event outside traditional historical discourse and more along the lines of its manifestation as an act—an “acting out” of sorts that can only become visible if we remove those distracting elements that persist to examine the subjective manifestation of violence. As Slavoj Žižek argues (following Alain Badiou), subjective violence names the visible perpetrators of a violent act: a Hitler, a Saddam Hussein, a Stalin, etc. Objective violence, on the other hand, looks for that which is obfuscated by our historical convictions or even our sentimental readings that naturally and unavoidably tend to empathize with

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the victims. As such, objective violence aims to make visible, as much as possible, the systemic structures that might be imperceptible to the perpetrator and the victim alike. Žižek writes: The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. (2008:2)

To clarify my own reading, then, I will not concentrate on the question of what caused the riots but rather on how they appear as an event and the way in which this visible subjective violence unfolded against the background of a less apparent objective violence. In doing so, my aim is to make more evident—that is, more phenomenological—another system of associations that link the subject to quite a different conceptual network or grouping. I use the term “phenomenology” here as a way to frame this discussion as an examination of that which appears (phainesthai) or, better, that which is essentially experienced as a revelatory phenomenon (an apokálypsis) beyond its historical significance. The discussion will thus focus on the proliferation of the term koukoulofóroi (hooded) during the unrest and its correlation with a number of comparable terms that are persistently used in Greek politics and society, and that point to the tension between visibility and invisibility: diapháneia (transparency), apháneia (invisibility), kálypsis (concealment), apokálypsis (revelation) and gnostoí-ágnostoi (the known-unknowns). A third clarification, or apology, concerns my focus on the mask or the hood. In examining the phenomenology of the hood, I am not suggesting that most of the protesters were in fact covered. Such assertion would be plainly wrong. But it would be equally wrong to assume that these “hooded” young men or women constitute an exception to the otherwise “normal” state of protest. To see them as the cause of extreme violence would give us a reading of this violence as subjective; such a position might justify, for some, the protests as an exception, or it might even allow us to empathize with the victim(s), but it is also distracting and forecloses any further discussion on the subject. The ambivalence of the Greek public during the unrest was perhaps best expressed in the following way: we understand the anger of the youth and we empathize with their protests; but we cannot condone the actions of a handful of “known-unknown” extremists who burn, loot, and cover their faces behind a hood. What I argue instead is that it is precisely this excep-

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tion that constitutes the rule. As Walter Benjamin writes, and Agamben further elucidates, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (Benjamin 1969:257 and Agamben 2005:57–59). In the act of covering up, these few “known-unknowns” unwittingly unveiled the violent force of a spectacle that was always already present in the systemic shortcomings of both the political and the social structure in Greece. Revelation/revealability In his 1994 lecture “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Jacques Derrida made a number of playful semantic associations to the word “phos” (light): “Light (phos), wherever this arché commands or begins discourse and takes the initiative in general (phos, phainesthai, phantasma, hence spectre, etc.), as much in the discourse of philosophy as in the discourses of a revelation (Offenbarung) or of a revealability (Offenbarkeit), of a possibility more originary than manifestation” (1998:6). Though Derrida’s lecture focused on the significance of these concepts in the context of religion borrowing the terms revelation/revealability from Heidegger, I am interested here in the way an event appears—the way it reveals itself to us—against a background that is marked by certain phenomenological associations that can only be understood as a spectacle or as an appearance. The 2008 Greek riots appeared as a revelation in the sense that they were both apocalyptic (i.e. the violence of the execution of a young student, the burning down of stores, the reported looting, the clashes between the police and the protesters, the suspension of law, etc.) and revelatory (i.e. they brought to the surface, yet again, social and political tensions, they unveiled a state of corruption and police brutality, etc.). This appearance (phainesthai) became manifest in the most prevalent image that accompanied news bulletins or newspaper articles at the time: on the one side, we saw young people whose faces were covered with hoods, motorcycle helmets, scarves etc. On the other side, we were confronted with similarly masked policemen who were covered with, or protected by, the official riot gear of the State: helmets, gas masks, shields, batons, etc. In some cases—and this is corroborated by several photographs taken during the demonstrations—“hooded” individuals (presumably policemen in civilian clothes) worked alongside the police. The thin line that separated these two masked sides was that of the Law: i.e., the Policemen were masked with the authorization of the State, whereas the protesters were masked using personal items of concealment. I will return to the concept of the Law later in my analysis, since much of the

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political ­discussion that ­followed the riots centered on the illegalization of the “hood” (koukoúla). For now, let us stay with this image of the two masked sides, the police and the rioters. When the rioters were faced with the police, what they were confronted with was not the entire history of Greece since the restoration of democracy, but rather a spectacle: television cameras and reporters on the one hand, and masked policemen on the other. Likewise, those who were watching the protesters (policemen, journalists, the public) were always seeing them through a lens or a filter: television screens, camera lenses, or helmets. The protesters were being watched from a distance, as it were, and they came “face to face,” not with people’s faces, but with the always already objectified State Law or technological apparatuses. Such an oblique, obstructed and mediated gaze points to the fact that, contrary to popular perceptions, the covered rioters were not merely hiding behind the anonymity of a mask—they were in fact revealing themselves to the State and to the media as masked. The hood or the mask, in other words, signifies a revelation with all the apocalyptic violence that such an appearance might suggest. The most common response of the riot police to the violence was the use of tear gas to disperse the protesters. Once again, the tension here is one between visibility and invisibility. Protesters that are not recognizable, that is to say they are not identifiable, also become unable, when exposed to tear gas, to see. They become both unseeing and unseen. What I mean, then, in arguing that the protesters revealed themselves to the State as masked, is that the issue which was acted out in these confrontations was intrinsically linked to the discourse of phainesthai; that on a phenomenological level, the question was who gazes at what and how they are seeing the spectacle. Here again, the view is obstructed and distorted. Furthermore, what obstructs the view, in this case, is the forceful evocation of tears through the use of another technological apparatus. Another way of putting it is this: the protesters were emotionally upset and angry with the representatives of the state, the police, for the brutal murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos. Through the use of tear gas, the police essentially forced the protesters, who were, after all, on the brink of tears, to cry in order to obstruct their threatening gaze. Hyperbolic as it may sound, this argumentation simply aims, once again, to emphasize the appearance of the event as a spectacle where visibility and invisibility, seeing and not-seeing, being seen and being unseen, were reenacted in a number of interconnected ways. Two more images conjure up and effectively capture both the appearance of the event as a spectacle and the tension between visibility and invisibility that was acted out during the riots. On the third day of the demonstrations, the Christmas tree which is traditionally decorated

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and placed at Syntagma Square was torched. As the local and international media reported, after this event, the city authorities decided to re-decorate a new tree and they sent riot police to guard it. They surrounded it—dressed in full riot gear—and kept vigil as protesters gathered around them. In the context of what the youth largely perceived as a cover-up of murder, here was a much-too-visible—not to mention well-lighted—symbolic object of festive celebration; its burning signified, perhaps, a spectacular smoldering of a symbol that was already meant to be a spectacle: to be seen, admired for its proportions, to evoke a certain emotion. But the State’s decision to re-decorate and re-place the tree on Syntagma Square is equally astounding in this context. In essence, it was an emblematic gesture, not so much indicating the State’s resistance to the uncontrolled violence, but one that signaled the desire for a return to normalcy and order. The paradox here, of course, is that normalcy appears as a provocation of symbolic violence and as a state-of-being that must be protected even if one must use violent means. Hence, this strange image of the protesters and the riot police gathering around the Christmas tree points to a staging of systemic violence as an event that is always measured against (to return to Žižek’s description) “a zero level standard.” One of the most controversial images of the riots was the photograph of two policemen, dressed in full riot gear, including gas masks. One of them aims at the protesters with a gun, and the other extends his index finger imitating the standard symbolic hand/gun gesture. In other words, one of the policemen aims at the crowd with a real gun and the other aims representationaly or symbolically. The scene effectively captures the full force of the representational act itself. The real gun pointed at the crowd might reveal a number of conflicting states, from fear to anger, and the display of power. The virtual hand/gun, however, can only be understood as an act of symbolic violence par excellence. And it is all the more powerful as an act when we realize that the policeman who is making this gesture is carrying a real weapon. In effect, what his act is gesturing is, I desire to shoot you, even though I know I am not allowed to do so. Is this not precisely a blatant example of what Bourdieu means when he describes symbolic violence as “the hidden form which violence takes when overt violence is impossible” (1977:196)? Real guns may kill, but symbolic guns terrorize. So far, I have concentrated on three images that best capture, in my opinion, the phenomenology of violence as it was represented and staged during the Greek riots of 2008. I am situating these in a phenomenological discourse in order to outline what Žižek calls systemic violence. All three images are examples of how the Greek riots were an externalization of

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an ongoing violent interplay between visibility and invisibility. They are also commentaries on the relationship between representational and subjective violence. As I have already argued, such an approach allows us to explore more effectively the kind of violence that is structural, or systemic, by analyzing how the riots unfolded against the background of the tension inherent in such violent revelations. (In)visibility and its vicissitudes Apart from the term koukoulofóroi, a second term that was persistently used to describe the hooded youth was gnostoí-ágnostoi (known-unknowns), which we can also translate as the “usual unidentified suspects.” Here too, we have a tension between visibility and invisibility, i.e., between our knowledge of the much-too-visible violent act and the invisibility of the perpetrators’ identity. These hooded men are “known” since their violent “kind” has appeared often enough for it to be recognized; they are “unknown” because their identity cannot be determined. What they represent is a type. Like the term koukoulofóroi, the term gnostoí-ágnostoi succinctly captures the externalization, or the manifestation, of a knowledge that was both known and unknown to Greek society. The 2005 riots in France make a good point of comparison. To begin with, like the Greek riots, they were sparked by the death of two young immigrants that the protesters attributed to police actions. They also brought to the surface social conditions that were largely known/unknown to the French public, namely, the deplorable state of immigrants living in France, and their ghettoization. Still, as Žižek writes in the context of the looting in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the sobering effect of these riots was that people “had to acknowledge that such a thing can happen here as well” (2007b:304). What is shocking in this framework is not that a new and hitherto unknown truth is unveiled to us, but rather that we recognize, to a certain extent, what is present as a knowledge in a particular systemic structure. In other words, the problems of clientalism, nepotism, of a slow moving bureaucracy or embezzlement, are standard “knowledge” in developed, developing, or underdeveloped societies alike. But, as Stathis Gourgouris notes, “if there is a mark distinguishing advanced (“developed”) capitalist societies, it is that such scandals have ceased to be experienced as scandals. They merely become the way of things” (1996:69). Žižek’s “zero level standard” is increasingly redefined, in this framework, to compensate for the system’s excess. Until, that is, violent outbursts, such as the Greek riots of 2008, force us to actually face, or to recognize, that which we suspected all along. The shock value

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in such recognitions is based on the foreknowledge of systemic violence which has something of the characteristics of ancient tragedy: what shocks us in the plight of Oedipus, the quintessential schizophrenic subject of imperialism/capitalism (as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have it), is that his fate has been foretold; that even though he knew it all along, he still re-enacted it in the most violent and tragic way. But what exactly did we know all along in the case of the 2008 Greek riots? In the immediate aftermath of the civil unrest, commentators, journalists and intellectuals alike concentrated precisely on those uncomfortable social issues that the riots brought to the surface. The most pertinent subjects they focused on were: (a) the repeated and well-documented police brutality that had reached a climax with the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos; and (b) the economic conditions that marginalized the youth. Along these lines, yet another term was coined to describe the Greek youth: the generation of 600 Euro.4 Undoubtedly, these were, and still are, important social issues that urgently need to be addressed in Greece, particularly in light of the current economic crisis, but the question of whether these riots had a program, whether they were ideologically motivated, is a different question altogether. Apropos of the 2005 French riots and the New Orleans riots following Hurricane Katrina, Žižek argues that these lacked the “positive utopian prospect” that characterized the May 1968 riots in Paris. He further claims that the aim of the 2005 French riots, which largely involved young Muslims, was more simple: The Paris outbursts were thus not rooted in any kind of socio-economic protest, still less in an assertion of Islamic fundamentalism. One of the first sites to be burned was a mosque—which is why the Muslim religious bodies immediately condemned the violence. The riots were simply a direct effort to gain visibility. A social group which, although part of France and composed of French citizens, saw itself as excluded from the political and social space proper wanted to render its presence palpable to the general public. Their actions spoke for them: like it or not, we’re here, no matter how much you pretend not to see us. (2008:76–77)

As I have been arguing, in Greece too, the 2008 riots manifested themselves as a discourse of visibility. The irony here, of course, is that the demand to be seen was paradoxically expressed in the context of concealment. That is, the discourse around visibility became discernible behind hoods and unidentified suspects. But is this not yet another example that points to the fact that these protesters revealed themselves to the State as masked? This is the same conundrum that describes the relationship between violence and visibility: the only way that this event could become

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an event, that the media and the State could take notice, was in fact a violent one. And the only way that this violence could express itself was in the context of concealment. But what is markedly different in comparison with the French riots of 2005 is that we cannot assign an easily identifiable social problem (i.e. immigration) as the definitive motive for this outburst of violence. Even though there were some reports of immigrants participating in the demonstrations against police brutality, such participation did not become part of the wider popular discourse on the riots. As in the case of the Muslim youth in France, here too the violence seemed to be indiscriminate. And as was widely reported in Greek media, many of the young demonstrators were, in fact, children of middle-class families; what they destroyed was not simply banks and official state buildings, but also small businesses whose owners belonged to the same social class as their parents. In 2010, a demonstration against the austerity measures announced by the government in order to cope with the economic crisis led to the death of three people, one of whom was pregnant, after a Molotov bomb was thrown in the bank where they worked. Politicians and the media alike reverted to the same language, describing hooded anarchists and the known-unknown terrorists as the instigators of this horrible crime. Here too, violence presented itself as indiscriminate: the symbolism of targeting of a major bank was rendered obsolete, or it was muted, by the actual death of three innocent civilians. This event led to a public outcry against the perpetrators of this act. Once again, we are faced with the same question: what is the aim of such violent acts? Can we relegate the blame to the actions of a small group of anarchists? In her book On Violence, which is perhaps the most thorough study on violence and its relationship to power, Hannah Arendt reached a similar conundrum. What is the aim of violence, she asks, if it ends up replicating the same conditions that it sets out to confront? Her conclusion is even more pertinent today, when the post-1989 Left seems to have lost its ideological program, and when violence appears to be increasingly irrational and indiscriminate: Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals. Violence does not promote causes, neither history nor revolution, neither progress nor reaction, but it can serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention. (1970:79)

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Like Žižek, Arendt too, then, emphasizes the fact that violence, first and foremost, serves as a dramatization of grievances; that is, violence or, more precisely, the passage to the act of violence, has a chiefly spectacular aim. The difference between their positions is that for Žižek, the aimlessness of violence is the consequence of capitalism’s de-totalization of meaning: “its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of a truth-without-meaning, as the [Lacanian] ‘Real’ of the global market economy” (2007b:307). Capitalism, in other words, has foreclosed access to any “meaningful” reaction to the status quo since it is not “global” at the level of meaning: “it can accommodate itself to all civilizations from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist” (2006:181). For Arendt, the aimlessness of violence has always been inherent in its very essence; violence does not lead to revolution because, historically, it has only proven to lead either to a further empowering of Power (and Žižek would certainly concede that, in the aftermath of the French Riots, the Right gained more power) or to a total negation of the supposed aims violence set out to achieve, as in the case of Stalinist Russia or Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Where does this leave us in connection with the Greek riots of 2008? As I have argued from the outset, a phenomenological reading of the riots does not provide us with solutions but it leads us to an understanding, a revelation of sorts, of what was revealed as such during this violent eruption. Conservative commentators in Greece and abroad stressed the fact that the riots were largely a result of the Greek State’s inability to deal with anarchists since the fall of the Junta in 1974. The taboo, in other words, of being associated with the state terror of the Generals’ Junta provided a fertile ground for the unchecked evolution of anarchist violent outbursts in Greek society. Liberal commentators, on the other hand, read the riots as a desperate cry for a much needed reform in Greek society: better training for policemen, dealing with the exclusion of young men and women from the social structure, etc. Many Leftist or liberal commentators went as far as naming the riots (Néa) Dekemvrianá—referring to the violent confrontations that took place in Greece in December 1944–1945 between Leftist and Right-wing organizations, the government, and British soldiers. In short, the reading of the riots was either a cultural reading in the spirit of here is what’s wrong with Greek society or attempts to import the historical meaning that the riots seemed to lack. Apropos of the imposition of meaning on violence, one might be tempted to read the New Orleans and the French riots as proof of what Jameson calls “the tendential leveling of social identity generated by consumer society” (1993:37). In other words, one is tempted to say that these two violent outbursts are principally consequences of class divisions;

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the only reason we read them as ethnic, cultural, or racial phenomena is because consumer society has broken all links that might suggest a more universal relationship, such as class struggle, between violent outbursts. To put it simply, the French riots and the New Orleans unrest are more likely to be described in the context of immigration and race respectively rather than as manifestations of the more encompassing category of class struggle that would give them universal significance. Although I would certainly agree that Marx’s re-reading of history along the lines of class struggle has been relegated to the background today, the problem with ascribing such meaning to the Greek riots is that the demonstrators themselves, as was widely reported, were children of middle-class families. If a phenomenological reading of the riots can teach us anything, it should be precisely this: ideology, in the current global economy, has been rendered totally incapacitated, and meaning can only be understood in the context of a revelation of the system’s limitations. It is not so much that the riots revealed the gap between two vastly different ideological positions, but that the inflicted violence revealed the fallacies of a system that operates as an automaton, i.e., itself participating in a network that keeps maneuvering and readapting to cope with the demands of global economy. Paradoxically, one of the words that have dominated Greek political discourse since the restoration of democracy is diapháneia (transparency). The very repetition of the word, particularly during election campaigns, indicates something of a discomfort—a kind of unconscious realization on behalf of the State that a truth which amounts to a complete transparency is always foreclosed (that the system in which the State itself participates is beyond its control). The term diáphaneia is yet another manifestation of the discourse of phainesthai and it should be understood, in the case of the riots, in relation to its tension with its antonym, apháneia (concealment, invisibility, oblivion or obscurity). The rioters indeed perceived themselves as aphaneís, lost to obscurity, metaphorically and literally. This was clearly not a revolution of the masses as some journalists tried to speculate. On the contrary, it was motivated mostly by high-school and college students whose first act was, naturally, to barricade themselves in schools (the known phenomenon of katálipsi in Greece). What I am arguing here is that we must see the actions of the State, and its ever pursuing diapháneia, as intricately entangled with the position of the youth, not in terms of class, but in relation to the failure of achieving the much-desired transparency, or visibility, and of being confronted, once again, with the frustrating results of systemic obscurity. Was the almost total collapse of the Greek economy in 2010 not an equally

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emphatic manifestation of the intricate connection between the continuous pursuit of transparency and the ever-present conditions of systemic concealment? One should hardly be surprised that the crisis caught the Greek State itself by surprise. Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market becomes eerily relevant here: the indiscernible multi­directional workings of the global economy are indeed “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of [our] intention” (Smith 1902:160). This invisible hand is perceived as both sublime and natural. Thus, when we are faced with the images of masked protesters and policemen confronting one another, we are also faced with a conflict between apháneia and diapháneia or, more precisely, between the apháneia of a system that renders everything under its auspices invisible, and the utopian desire for an absolute diapháneia. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man provides us with a poignant commentary on the symbiotic relationship between violence and revelation. When the nameless black protagonist of the novel decides to go underground in order to escape a discriminatory and repressive system, he designates himself as an “invisible man” (in fact, we could also call him aphanis). One day, the invisible man “accidentally” bumps into a tall blond white man who “perhaps because of the near darkness” actually saw him and called him an insulting name. The invisible man becomes so enraged that he beats him violently, almost killing him. Then, suddenly, he stops and becomes very amused: Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn’t linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been “mugged.” Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man! (Ellison 1995:5)

This passage succeeds in both capturing succinctly the schizophrenic nature of irrational violence (with laughter and anger as alternating states) instigated against the background of the de-totalization of meaning (as Žižek would have it), and revealing the interplay between (in) visibility and violence. In the aftermath of the riot’s devastation, we could say that the Greek State too was tested to the point of destruction by invisible men—the hooded and the known-unknowns—who, knowingly or unknowingly, were forced to go underground.

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Visibility before the law Article 167 of the Greek Penal Code, which has been in effect since 1976, stipulates that resistance (antístasis) to officers of the law is punishable by a one-year imprisonment. In cases where such resistance involves individuals who “cover or alter their characteristics,” the punishment is a two-year sentence (or more). But the law was hardly ever put into effect, and the presence of hoods in demonstrations in Greece has been a standard phenomenon, particularly since the 1980s. Given the rise of the trend among protesters to cover their faces, the then ruling New Democracy party attempted to pass a new and more specific law, in 2007, that would outlaw the “hood.” In the aftermath of the 2008 riots, the debate on the subject intensified and in 2009, the law was eventually put into effect, becoming known as “Dendias Law” after the Minister of Justice Nikos Dendias who implemented it. When the socialist PASOK government took over in October 2009, it nullified the law. After the death of three bank workers during the May 2010 demonstrations caused by a Molotov bomb thrown in a bank by hooded protesters, the debate on hoods and violence resurfaced once again. The 2007 justification was published under the heading “Measures to Protect Public Peace” (Μέτρα για τη διασφάλιση της κοινωνικής ειρήνης) and was signed by Aliki Giotopoulou-Marangopoulou, a professor of Law at Panteion University. Among other provisions, it stipulates the following: Taking advantage of public gatherings and the peaceful demonstrations of citizens, persons who cover or alter their physical appearance (τα φυσικά τους χαρακτηριστικά), hiding behind the anonymity provided by such covering, are engaged in legally punishable and disciplinable acts, such as the unwarranted destruction of foreign property, including the destruction of public buildings . . . aggravated assault, robberies, etc. The frequent manifestation of this phenomenon and the intense social misconduct that describes the act of covering or altering facial characteristics dictates the implementation of measures by the State. Besides, it is the duty of the State to protect the constitutional right of people to gather freely which is undermined and hampered by the violence of those who are hooded (των κουκουλοφόρων) .  .  . In addition, it must be stressed that the European Court of Human Rights has declared that the State is obliged to protect the smooth conduct of demonstrations by citizens, free from agitators who attempt to obstruct them, and that every citizen must be able to demonstrate without the fear of becoming a victim of physical or other abuse in the hands of other demonstrators.5

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What we are presented with in this justification is the full force of the Bentham’s Panopticon that Foucault so memorably elucidates in his Discipline and Punish. The major effect of the Panopticon, Foucault tells us, is “to induce in the inmate [or the suspected perpetrator we might add] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (1995:201). What is permanent about this visibility is not only the fact that demonstrations should take place in open view of the State; it is also that they are accompanied by a plethora of technological apparatuses—from state installed cameras to news crews, photographers, journalists and even bystanders—that ensure, knowingly or unknowingly, this “automatic functioning of power.” Not surprisingly, during the height of the violent confrontations in the center of Athens, a camera was broadcasting 24/7 live footage from Syntagma Square; and, of course, during the 2008 attack on Gaza, we were presented with a similar permanent visibility of anticipatory destruction with live webcams positioned in various parts of the city under siege. And here lies the crux of Panopticism in the era of global capital: the “Benthamite physics of power” (Foucault 1995:209) have been internalized and present themselves in the context of our desire to become voyeurs and participate in the surveillance apparatus. This is the same jouissance, as Žižek has argued, that produced a plethora of destructive films that can be seen as forerunners of the 9/11 attacks.6 In the context of the discourse of phainesthai, the Law against hoods essentially stipulates what the State purportedly desires: absolute and complete transparency (diapháneia). The obvious problem here is the same as in Bentham’s Panopticon: the Law desires that “one is totally seen, without ever seeing.” And from the vantage point of the State, “one sees everything without ever being seen” (Foucault 1995:202). Such unidirectional gaze therefore ensures the discipline of people even as, or precisely because, they protest. Finally, the hood, or the invisibility it suggests, is linked to the crime a priori— covering one’s face becomes the criminal offense itself. The most astounding argument in the justification of the illegalization of “hoods” is the claim that it is a necessary step for the protection of protesters. In other words, what is striking here is the State’s paradoxical position of describing itself as the protector of demonstrators at the same time as it possesses the role of quenching or controlling the protest. These are, as Foucault tells us, the ethics of biopower, where even the right to dissent falls under the control of the State, which justifies its actions as an attempt to protect life. What these lawmakers were upset with was that the “physical characteristics” of hooded rioters were not accessible to them: one can protest, in other words, as long as the State can see his or her face, as long as his or her identity is visible. What

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emerges, then, in the attempt to implement this law is not simply the protection of the State’s panoptical technology of controlling the body by insisting on its visibility. Instead, what becomes plainly evident, besides the deep discomfort of the State with its failure to render its own workings transparent, is the attempt to control demonstrations by removing all their violent byproducts. Is this not the ultimate “democratic” and liberal fantasy that always envisions a non-violent reaction against the State? In this sense, the Law to protect demonstrators from demonstrators and to ensure the “smooth conduct of demonstrations by citizens” may be compared to the signs held by demonstrators in many American cities that read: honk if you are against the war! At this point we are faced with an impasse: the deconstruction of Power’s inner workings seems to presuppose a certain justification of violence in siding with the perpetrators or in endorsing their acts of vandalism, looting, burning, and even murder. To put it bluntly: one can either “honk against the war” or throw Molotov bombs. The recent death of the three bank workers in Athens brought the question of the ethics of violence to the foreground. The type of unidentified “hooded” anarchists that protested the brutal execution of Alexis Grigoropoulos were now deemed responsible for the death of three innocent workers, including a pregnant woman. This choice, I believe, between the endorsement of violence and organized non-violent acts of protest, is the fundamental dilemma that also describes the ambivalence of the New Left today. If one considers the ideological confusion that characterizes the relationship between (Leftist) systemic critique and praxis in the post-1989 era, addressing this impasse has become particularly urgent. Conclusion: ethical violence and violent ethics Hannah Arendt was undoubtedly one of the first philosophers to note the shift in Leftist ideology from an emphasis on non-violence as a response to the proliferation of atomic weapons to the endorsement of violence as the only possible means of resistance. In her reflections on violence, she criticizes such scholars as Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Sorel, and Frantz Fanon, as “preachers of violence” and suggests that much of its “present glorification” is due to the “severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern world” (Arendt 1970:83). But in her polemic against the valorization of violence, she also seems to reach an impasse as to the kind of non-violent position that systemic critique can take. Her analysis is more a phenomenological deconstruction that presents us with the reasons behind the rise of resistance by violent means: from bureaucracy to technology, science, and nationalism.

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More recently, the debate on the ethics of violence reached its epitome in the caustic exchange between Slavoj Žižek and the British philosopher Simon Critchley. In essence, their disagreement centered on the form that the opposition to the capitalist system should take. Arguing that the liberal democratic system is here to stay, Critchley suggested that resistance can only be effectively carried at a distance from it; resistance, in this context, means bombarding the state with infinite demands, knowing fully that it would be impossible to keep up with them. The desired effect of this infinitely demanding politics of resistance is to hold the State accountable and to expose its fallacies. Žižek’s most fundamental problem with Critchley’s argument is that it promotes a kind of anemic liberal resistance to the State that ends up endorsing and perpetuating its power. For him, the symbiotic relationship between power and resistance came to the fore in the demonstrations against the Iraq War; in the end, both sides—the protesters and the State—were satisfied: “The protesters saved their beautiful souls”7 (Žižek 2007a:7) in disagreeing with government policy and the government verified its own liberalism and “democratic” function by arguing that such protests are the greatest proof of their tolerance towards dissenting opinion. How can we understand this ideological impasse inherent in the relationship between violence, power, and resistance in the context of the December 2008 events in Greece and the more recent 2010 demonstrations? Several conclusions may be drawn in the aftermath of a violence that was both valorized and criticized for its indiscriminate destruction. First, that the event of the demonstrations in Athens, particularly in the framework of the intense emotions that it elicited, cannot be separated from the violence that accompanied it. In fact, it became an event precisely because it was dramatized by violent means. In this sense, hooded rioters, the known/unknowns in this drama, cannot be considered either the exception or the violent minority: if we are to consider them as such, then we must necessarily add that they are the exception that confirms the rule; that visibility, in other words, became manifested only in its excess. Second, the reasons behind this excess cannot be neglected. What Žižek labels “systemic” violence, as well as the critique that exposes it, opens up a space where violence can be analyzed as a multi-directional cycle that is to be located in both sides of the spectrum: the arche and the anarchy. Third, if violence in the era of global capital is largely irrational, at a time when political structures function in ways often unbeknownst to governments themselves, then it is hardly possible to rationalize this violence at the time of its inception. If rational violence is described as a systematic attack based on prescribed principles and aims, the problem with Žižek’s critique is that it can only speak after the fact. It doesn’t guide events;

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it merely deconstructs them (and why should it guide them?). Here I find Critchley’s position instructive. In his analysis of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “Critique of Violence,” he offers a number of conclusions that try to navigate between the obscure gap that separates the law from the praxis of opposition to it. The most significant point that pertains to this discussion on the December 2008 Greek riots is this: The question is, can a struggle against violence avoid the institution of violence out of this very struggle? The only honest answer is to acknowledge that we do not know, we cannot be certain. Violence is in the very air we breath and its unforgiving and bloody political and legal logic is irrefutable. . . . All that we have is the folly of a plumb-line of non-violence, a set of exceptional circumstances and a moral and political struggle, wrestling with the infinite ethical demand. (Critchley 2008c:5)

For Critchley, and certainly for Arendt too, the valorization of violence is not only self-negating; it is also “endemic to fascism” (2008c:5). In this framework, the four deaths that tragically marked the violent demonstrations in Athens in 2008 and 2010 may equally point to a systemic reading of violence and expose the shortcomings of a crippled system. At the same time, however, we must also underline the fact that a phenomenological reading of these two events is by no means ethically comparable. As Douzinas has argued, and as I have attempted to emphasize in exploring the phenomenological appearance (phainesthai) of the event, the visibility that the 2008 young protesters sought amounted to a proclamation: “We, the nobodies, they seem to be saying, the schoolkids, the suffering University students, the unemployed and unemployable, the generation that must survive on a salary of 600 euros, are everything. We, the apolitical, voiceless, indifferent nothings, are the only universal against those who have always interpreted their particular interests as universal” (Douzinas 2010). Excessive violence in this case was the aporia of an execution, a declaration that forced the state to confront the violence of its own Law. Lamentably, in trying to illegalize the wearing of hoods, the state clearly misread the message by responding to the question Can you see us? with We command that you take off the masks so that we can see you. The problem is, of course, that such a demand misses the point, since what the Greek State had already told the youth was: Put on the masks so that we can see you/us. In the case of the 2010 demonstrations, which led to the deaths of three people, the problem was not merely that violence was excessive. Violence, in fact, always is. The problem, rather, is that this violence was not simply “phatic,” to use Jacobson’s term, but “conative.” The phatic question “Can you see us?” became, in this case, an emphatic and provocatively narcissistic statement: “You can’t see us!” What I hope we can

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responsibly recognize, at this ethical juncture, is that we are no longer speaking of “known/unknowns,” at least in the phenomenological reading that I have outlined here. What we are speaking of are mere “unknowns” that triumphantly endorse state violence by presenting it with an alibi. And in doing so, they also corroborate Hannah Arendt’s worst suspicion that “the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world” (Arendt 1970:80). BROWN UNIVERSITY

NOTES 1  I should add a note on my use of the term “riots” in connection with the 2008 events in Greece. The reader will note that I use the terms “demonstration,” “event,” “civil unrest,” “protest,” and “riots” to describe them. At the 2009 Modern Greek Studies Association conference, organized by the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Neni Panourgia correctly noted that the term “riot” is already laden with connotations of power and that its discursive usage has been historically shaped by those who opposed or quelled them. Though I share her cautionary position, one should further add that there is a performative connotation in the colloquial use of the term “riot” which is intriguing in a phenomenological consideration of the December events. As the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, since the early twentieth century, the term is also theatrical, and may refer to “an uproariously successful performance or show, a ‘smash hit.’” Could we not say, in this sense, that what transpired in Greece was literally a smash hit of the most violent kind? (cf. “riot, n.4d” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 16 May 2010 ). 2  The much-celebrated interdisciplinarity of our times has supposedly emerged as a response to this intellectual division of labor. But one would simply have to read Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Derrida, Hegel, or Kant, to see that this illustrious “inter” of disciplines is not a modern invention. It also seems unnecessary to stress that the entire Foucauldian project consists in exposing the genealogy of this dissemination of knowledge into increasingly specialized disciplines. 3  The phrase is from Edward Said’s article “Permission to Narrate.” C.f. Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13.3 (Spring 1984):27–48. 4  The description refers to average monthly salary of young people in Greece, which is far below the European average. 5  The excerpt was translated by Marinos Pourgouris from the report (Aitiologikí Ékthesi) published in full on the website of the Greek Ministry of Justice. Greek Ministry of Justice, “Αιτιολογική Έκθεση” www.ministryofjustice.gr/files/23-04-09-aitiologiki.pdf. 6  In Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, Žižek argues that the obsessive repetition by the media of the World Trade Center’s collapse is the finest example of jouissance. In essence, “we were all forced to experience what ‘the compulsion to repeat’ and jouissance beyond the

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pleasure principle are: we wanted to see it again and again; the same shots were repeated ad nauseam, and the uncanny satisfaction we got from it was jouissance at its purest” (12). At the same time, the scenarios of total destruction were already the “object of fantasy” in Hollywood films; therefore, Žižek writes, “America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” (16). 7  The sardonic reference to these non-violent “beautiful souls” is not entirely without context: the trajectory of the term passes from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, to Hegel, and to Lacan, who writes that the “me [moi] of modern man . . . has taken on its form in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who does not recognize his very reason for being in the disorder he denounces in the world” (Lacan 2006:233). The implication, of course, is that these “beautiful souls” are not cognisant of their own reciprocal relationship to power, which they end up endorsing by detaching violence from protest.

REFERENCES CITED Agamben, Giorgio 2005 State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah 1970 On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company. Benjamin, Walter 1969 Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Knopf. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, Simon 2008a “A Dream of Divine Violence.” Review of Violence, by Slavoj Zizek. The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/reviews/ violence-by-slavoj-zizek-769535.html. 2008b “Letters: Response to ‘Resistance is Surrender.’” Harper’s Magazine, May 2008:4–6. 2008c “Violent Thoughts About Slavoj Zizek.” Naked Punch 11:3–6. Derrida, Jacques 1998 “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, translated by David Webb. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Douzinas, Costas 2010 “The Athens December Events (Ta nea dekembriana or honouring the name),” Naked Punch. http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/64 (accessed May 16, 2010). Ellison, Ralph 1995 Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International. Foucault, Michel 1995 Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.

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Jameson, Fredric 1993 “On Cultural Studies.” Social Text 34:17–52. Lacan, Jacques 2006 Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Marx, Karl 1983 “The German Ideology.” In The Portable Marx, by Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka. New York: Penguin Books. Neruda, Pablo 1990 “I am Explaining a Few Things.” In Pablo Neruda Selected Poems, by Pablo Neruda, edited by Nathaniel Tarn, 155. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Said, Edward 1984 “Permission to Narrate.” Journal of Palestine Studies 13.3:27–48. Smith, Adam 1902 The Wealth of Nations (Part II). New York: P.F. Collier and Son. Wilde, Oscar 2007 “The Critic as Artist.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Vol. 4, edited by Josephine Guy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj 2002 2006 2007a 2007b 2008

Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso. The Paralax View. Cambridge: MIT Press. “Resistance is Surrender.” London Review of Books 29 (22):7. The Universal Exception. Edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London: Continuum Books. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador.

Remembering Diaspora, Forgetting the Global? Emerging Cosmopolitics in Contemporary Greece Ioanna Laliotou

Abstract Mobility constitutes a normative characteristic of the traditions and the historical development of the region of Modern Greece. Revisiting the history of the nation, not in its own terms, but in the terms of globality, and focusing on issues related to migration and diaspora, highlight the role that mobility and stasis play in the constitution of the social and the political in contemporary Greece. They also highlight some of the regional emergences of globality and of the conflict, crisis and expectations that these emergences provoke.

Revisiting the nation Let us accept, as most historians of world history do today, the assumption that the twentieth century was definitively marked by the steady intensification of global flows of people, capital, knowledge, ideas and culture. As Michael Geyer and Charles Bright explain in their article “World History in A Global Age,” while historians confined themselves within the analytical constraints of professional national historiographies, at the same time globality was being consolidated through processes of uneven globalization (Geyer and Bright 1995:1036–1060). In Geyer’s and Bright’s view, historians are now forced by history itself (that is the advancing history of globality) to use their craft in order to revisit the events of the modern era (particularly the history of what they call the long twentieth century starting already in the 1850s) from a global point of view. This would not of course mean the abandonment of the nation and national histories as a field of study. On the contrary, the nation now becomes a privileged area of investigation, not as an analytical category, but as a historical reality and as a product itself of globality. The message

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that comes across is: let us revisit the history of the nation, not however in its own terms, but in the terms of globality. Let us revisit the Greek example, not as an example or as a case of global configurations—which we can then compare with other national cases—but as a product itself of transnationalization and globalization.1 I will focus on issues related to migration and diaspora in order to examine the role that mobility and stasis play in the constitution of the social and the political in contemporary Greece. While analyzing Greek, so to speak, events, images and texts, I do not intend to ultimately contribute to a comparative history of globalization, but to highlight some of the regional emergences of globality and of the conflict, crisis and expectations that these emergences provoke. Of course, one needs to take into consideration the fact that this approach may analytically jeopardize the structural integrity of the Greek example as such. By foregrounding the porous and fluid nature of its surface, we are perhaps led to the point that the validity of Greekness as an analytical category comes under question. Contemporary conditions: the eruption of violence December 2008: A high school student is shot dead by a police officer near Exarcheia Square in Athens. Only a few hours later thousands of young people organize and participate in massive demonstrations in various cities across the country. They protest against violence and they occupy schools and other public buildings. The mobilization lasts for two to three months and it includes several violent confrontations with the police forces. A few days later, again in Athens, a Bulgarian female immigrant is attacked by men who spill all over her face, and actually force the woman to swallow, large quantities of acid. The woman is an activist and a prominent member of the Janitors’ Union in Athens. The attack is a punishment for her efforts to organize her colleagues and demand better conditions of work and payment. A large movement of solidarity develops in the following months. The dramatic events that took place in December create the conditions necessary for the development of a wide public awareness around phenomena of violence that had previously been silenced, almost obliterated from collective consciousness, and excluded from hegemonic political sensibilities (right, left and center, so to speak). The reality of everyday violence comes into the foreground of public debate, political discourse, and social imagery: harassment of African immigrants, violence against foreign students in schools, physical abuse and public humiliation of Pakistani immigrants in rural villages, rapes and sexual exploitation of young girls and women, cruel working conditions in construction and manufacture industry, as well as the violence of everyday degradation, humiliation and emotional abuse effected by formal and informal practices of racism and ethnic and racial discrimination, so prominent and pervasive in contemporary Greek

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society. All those aspects of contemporary life were dramatically disclosed, retrieved from forgetfulness and incorporated in everyday discourse. More importantly it became evident that one can no longer analyze, experience, exercise governance or make policy in Greece without taking into consideration the already accomplished intense transnationalization of Modern Greek society and politics. Transnationalization and invisibility The establishment of migrant communities in the midst of Greek cities, villages and neighborhoods has produced various circuits of a transnational flow of people, ideas, capital, and culture. Intense conflict, violence and antagonism erupt at the points where these circuits intersect with the dominant nexus of native Greek society. As the presence of foreign migrants in the urban and rural landscape becomes more and more ordinary, so does the exercise of violence between natives and non-natives. During the last few years, native and non-native people in Greece—as in many other countries of the economically developed world—have experienced a sharp accentuation of radical forms of racism. Forms of naturalized racism mark almost every aspect of private and public life, as discrimination based on racial and ethnic background has become legitimized in public common sense, in official policies, and in everyday life. As native Greeks became gradually accustomed to the presence of foreigners amongst them, they also internalized, and accepted as natural, various discriminatory and racially/ethnically hierarchical forms of organizing public affairs and private lives.2 As part of this process, the actual life histories of migrants and the historical background of contemporary migration movements are completely silenced and erased from public debate. As they are overlooked, the migrants are often presented as people without history, culture, traditions, and subjectivity. It is as if the non-native people who live in our neighborhoods have no present or past history, but just happened to be there, a bizarre historical accident. The most violent confrontations have occurred when migrants organize in order to claim rights, to expose their personal and collective histories, and to demand lawful treatment by individuals and authorities. Any mobilization that makes a claim to legality is met by the most violent forms of repression (Laliotou 2009). Transnationalism in the popular imagination During the 1990s, transnational themes and issues were gradually introduced in various kinds of popular culture, including television programs, music, cinema, advertisements, magazines, and everyday discourse.3 At

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the same time that the stories of migrants were silenced, transnationalism became fashionably vociferous in popular culture as well as in the arts. The introduction of migration themes in popular media was slow and gradual, following the systematic familiarization of Greek public opinion with the lasting presence of migrants “amidst us.” The slow and hesitant introduction of characters representing foreign migrants in Greek sitcoms and soap operas, for example, Δύο Ξένοι (Two Foreigners) Mega TV, 1997–1999, Η Αγάπη Ήρθε από Μακριά (Love Came from Afar) Antenna TV, 2002, Εκείνες κι Εγώ (They and I) Antenna TV, 1996, aimed mostly at enhancing the claim to a more realistic representation of Greek society. The tele-presence of the migrant maid or worker enhanced the realist presentation of the contemporary middle-class urban household that is usually portrayed in soap operas and sit-coms. In a few cases, migrant characters were also used in order to enhance the dramatic impact of the plot by thematizing problematic love relationships between Greeks and migrants. Television shows present the ethnic and racial diversification of Greek society as a matter of fact, while accommodating all the xenophobic and racist connotations that mark stereotypical representations of ethnic, racial, and sexual otherness. By exaggerating the assumption that Greece has already become harmoniously multicultural, the telepresentation of migrants masquerades the dynamic cultural workings that are set into motion by the accentuation of cultural, demographic, and economic flows of mobility in recent decades (Laliotou 2009b). At the same time, Greek migration and the diaspora became very popular themes in mainstream literature as well as in cinematography. Ranging from books such as Soti Tryantafyllou’s Το εργοστάσιο των μολυβιών (The Pencil Factory) (2000), to Mara Meimaridis’s Οι Μάγισσες της Σμύρνης (The Witches of Smyrna) (2004), the reading public embraced transnational themes related to the history of Greek diaspora. During the early 2000s, A Touch of Spice (2003), directed by Tassos Boulmetis, sold more tickets in its first few weeks on screen than any other Greek film screened by that time—outnumbering blockbusters such as the Matrix Revolutions that was released in Greece around the same time. Similarly, Pantelis Voulgaris’s Οι Νύφες (The Brides) had great commercial success, proving that the Greek public was more receptive to stories related to the Greek diaspora and their portrayal of exotic Greek worlds, either in the homeland or abroad. More recently, even the scholarly documentary Το Ταξίδι. Το Ελληνικό όνειρο στην Αμερική, 1890–1980 (The Voyage. The Greek Dream in America, 1890–1980) (2007), directed by Maria Iliou, became very popular as thousands of people watched it at the Benaki Museum in Athens and then at various museums and public showings around the country. As the history of transnationalization of Greek urban and rural spaces

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was silenced, the popular imagination became very receptive to themes, issues, texts, and images related to the history of transnationalization of Greek culture throughout the twentieth century. Diaspora became comfortable, popular, even trendy, and remembered. Remembering diaspora As the historical study of twentieth-century Greek diasporas has shown, the experience of migration, and the formation of collective memories of Greek migration, often facilitated the internalization of hierarchical discourses of racial and cultural superiority. The resurgence of the memory of diaspora in Greece during the last two decades and the popularity of diaspora themes in contemporary cultural production are mostly based on the comfortable and patriotically reassuring reproduction of hegemonic narratives of Greek migration as a success story. In this sense, remembering diaspora is a way of “remembering” the positive elements of Greek nationhood. This type of memory contributes in the consolidation of national and nationalist conceptualizations of collectivity and, consequently, facilitates the erasure of the traces and the impact of globalization on contemporary as well as historical developments. Remembering diaspora is thus complimentary to the concurrent silencing of migrant histories in Greece. Such memories of transnational Greek worlds are compatible with nationalist reactions to the current forces of globalization.4 Forgetting the global? Emerging cosmopolitics June 2009: The results of the Euro-election in June register a significant rise in the popularity of extremist rightist racist discourse. This development leads both majority political parties to hastily embrace xenophobic anti-immigration policies. Not only the far rightist and the conservative parties, but also the social-democratic party PASOK endorses the “zero tolerance to illegal immigration” position. In the midst of the global economic crisis and recession, Greek domestic politics remains focused on numerous debates over immigration. The migrants themselves are targeted as the main symptom, if not the cause, of all the misfortunes and the current political, economic and social problems of public life. Criminality is pronounced the number one problem of Greek state politics and the decadence of Greek urban centers is portrayed as the result of the foreign presence amidst us. In an effort to satisfy public outrage and dissatisfaction, the official state declares a war against those who have occupied “our” cities, neighborhoods, and fields. A new series of violence began which included prosecutions, imprisonments, physical and psychological abuses, terrorization, deportations, and confinement in concentration

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camps. It was not until October 2009, right after national elections, that political debate and public awareness was finally re-directed to the real enemy within, the financial catastrophe that had already, silently and almost subterraneously, set the country into a seemingly permanent state of emergency. During the last two decades, the national imaginary has identified immigration with criminality, while no effort was made on the political or cultural level to produce positive representations and cultural references that would relate the migrants to the hegemonic narratives of economic development and modernization. The essential role that migrant labor played in the economic achievements of the late 1990s and the pre-2004 period was erased from public memory. Consequently, the actual histories of migration became symbolically invisible, and the migrants’ physical presence was associated with the decadence of urban centers and with criminality. The experience of migration was mutilated and the life histories of those who migrated were silenced. It was as if those people had no past before arriving to the Greek homeland, as if their present had no other content than the provision of cheap and hard labor, as if their future should not exist. Immigrant organizations and activists have suggested on many occasions that it is urgently necessary to bring the actual histories of contemporary migrants into the foreground of social understandings, cultural conceptualizations and political planning. Incorporating the diverse histories of migrants into the native memory presupposes a radical re-organization of the ways in which we understand the relationship between the region and globality. The following text was distributed recently at Nea Smyrni Square in Athens: From the street vendors of Nea Smirni Square We all came from a terrible and horrible life history. We left our communities because they are shut before they grow. We hailed from the Southeast of Nigeria, where people are agitating for their rights and freedom to live, but these rights are denied and humiliated. Most of us lost our dear ones in clashes between the government and our communities. Military government forces were sent to us not to keep peace but to kill every living grown up in our communities. That has triggered, in turn, the formation of militant resistance groups to protect the communities and the right of the people to live. But people died every day and there was no media there to expose these calamities for the world to see. We left for Europe in order to protect our lives because our places were not safe for us to live in. We spent months on our way in order to arrive in Greece. Life is not a bed of roses. But everyone who left his country for another place must seek a way of survival. We searched for jobs but it was very difficult to get them. We became street vendors not because we want to be on the streets but in search of a way of survival. We are not criminals, nor are we dangerous to society. We are

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chased every day by the municipal police pushing us forward to become dangerous to society. Some of us have been in the Square of Nea Smirni for years and have already become part of this area. We are appealing to the people of Nea Smirni who give us the welfare of our staying in Greece to help us stop the menace.5 The street vendors of Nea Smirni Square

The question arises here of why the Greek native social body seems unable, or unwilling, to “stop the menace.” And how can we redress this inability and/or unwillingness? What is forgotten as the partial memory of mobility (i.e. the recent resurgence of the memory of Greek diasporas) acquires a privileged position in the popular imagination? The statement circulated by the African immigrants in Athens offers an answer to this question by allowing a brief insight into the diverse stories of mobility and global flows of power, capital, and violence that force people to relocate themselves, despite all the dangers, the adversities and the abuses that they suffer. The history of the region of Modern Greece is constituted by these diverse stories of mobility, globalization, and trans-border interactions. In this sense, the history of the region is not exclusively indigenous, but it is also exogenous, it includes facts, events, texts, and images that originate in other global settings. As the history of Greek migrations and diasporas in the modern era shows, mobility has always definitively marked the region. One could safely argue that mobility constitutes a normative characteristic of the traditions and the historical development of the region of Modern Greece. An understanding of national history as something not indigenous presupposes a certain degree of estrangement from our own culture and history, and a certain degree of affinity to other histories. It presupposes a new cosmopolitical ethic. I am not referring here to the old cosmopolitanism of the social elites, but to a type of vernacular cosmopolitanism—to use Paul Gilroy’s term—that will express the desire and the need (analytical as well as political) to identify with what is not our own (Gilroy, 2005). This cosmopolitical approach to the history of mobility may in fact contribute to the elaboration of a critical version of regionalism that would pay attention to the particularities that mark the history, culture, and politics of a certain area while at the same time remaining critical of nationalism, essentialism, fixed religious and ethnic identities (Spivak 2007). Critical regionalism provides the conceptual framework for acknowledging the particular characteristics that have marked the formation of Greek politics, culture and society and the role of history-specific geopolitical structures on the articulation of social, political, and cultural collective identifications. This acknowledgement,

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however, also foregrounds the historicity and the transformative nature of nationhood and thus entails a systematic critique of nationalist fixations on the uniqueness, the superiority, and stability of national values and traits. Anti-ethnic nationalism and critical regionalism may not be a magical solution to the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical problems that we face today both as students of the history of globality as well as researchers in the history of modern Greece. It could, however, be a starting-point for revisiting the position of “Greek worlds in the context of globalization.” University of Thessaly

NOTES 1  This article was originally written in September 2009 in the pre-IMF era of Greek encounters with globality. I intentionally decided not to include references to the ways in which both Greekness and globality are now reconfigured under the impact of the economic crisis. 2  There is today a growing interdisciplinary field of contemporary migration studies. Many recent publications have begun to illuminate various forms and practices of discrimination and violence against migrants in Greece. Most of the studies concern the field of domestic work (e.g. Psimmenos and Skamnakis 2006) and education (e.g. Katsikas 2005). 3  For a case-study, see Papailias (2003). 4  See also Dimitris Papanikolaou (2009). 5  “This is a story of a migrant in Greece” in http://www.africanwomen.gr/.

REFERENCES CITED Geyer, Charles and Michael Bright 1995 “World History in a Global Age.” The American Historical Review 100(4):1034–1060. Gilroy, Paul 2005 Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Katsikas, Christos and Eva Politou 2005 Χρήστος Κάτσικας και Εύα Πολίτου, Εκτός Σχολείου το Διαφορετικό (Outside School the Other). Athens: Gutenberg.

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Laliotou, Ioanna 2009a Ιωάννα Λαλιώτου, «Μεταναστευτική εργασία και η οικονομία του ρατσισμού» (“Migrant Labor and the Economy of Racism”). In Επισφαλής εργασία, «γυναικεία εργασία» (Unstable Work, “Women’s Work”). Athens: Nefeli/Historein. (Also accessed at: http://www. historein-historein.blogspot.com.) 2009b «Η ιστορία της μετανάστευσης και οι μεταλλάξεις του εθνικού φαντασιακού» (“The History of Migration and the Transformations of the National Imaginary”). In Ιστορία και Γεωγραφία των Κριτικών Αφηγημάτων. Χώρες της Θεωρίας (The History and Geography of Critical Fictions: Theory’s Locations), edited by Apostolos Lambropoulos and Antonis Balasopoulos, 125–138. Athens: Metaixmio. Papailias Penelope 2003 “The Story of a ‘Hero’ of Migration, and Other Transgressions of the GreekAlbanian Border.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29(6):1059–1078. Papanikolaou, Dimitris 2009 “Repatriation on Screen: Cinema, National Culture and the Immigrant Other Since the 1990s.” In Greek Diaspora and Migration Since 1700, edited by Dimitris Tziovas, 257–272. London: Ashgate. Psimmenos, Iordanis and Christophoros Skamnakis 2006 Ιορδάνης Ψημμένος και Χριστόφορος Σκαμνάκης, Οικιακή Εργασία Μεταναστριών στην Ελλάδα (Domestic Labor of Migrant Women in Greece). Athens: Papazisis. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 2007 Other Asias. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

A Pyrotechnic of Multiple Puns: Decoding the Political Satires of Nicolas Calas Lena Hoff

Abstract In the 1960s and 1970s, the Greek-American poet and art critic Nicolas Calas wrote a series of satirical poems with highly political content. While most of his postwar poetry was written in a dense language characterized by cryptic word-games, the three political satires which attacked the monarchy and the junta are almost overloaded with multilevel puns that need careful decoding in order to be fully understood. Their conversion to English becomes an important part of the deciphering process. Several of the caricatures which emerge border on the grotesque as Calas mercilessly exposed and ridiculed the objects of his scorn. The exaggerated gestures of these political satires make us see the society that he criticized through a magnifying glass, or, rather surrealistically, in contorting fairground mirrors.

Although Calas has now been rediscovered and recognized as an important avant-garde poet of the 1930s, it is also true that his 1960s and 1970s satires have had a somewhat mixed reception by Greek critics. Alexandros Argyriou, who was the first literary historian to champion the cause of his “rehabilitation” and his rightful placement in the Greek poetry canon, argues that Calas’s absence from Greece and Greek culture negatively influenced his new poetic oeuvre: “These new poems are, most of them, as far as I can judge, nothing more than satirical, mocking, poetic sketches that are relatively removed from any poetic codes. They are (as far as they are) the poems of an amateur who is cut off from the next poetic phase of the other Greek poets of his generation” (1990:25).1 According to Leonard Feinberg, the literary genre of satire has usually been considered a kind of second-class literature because of its exaggerated intellectualism. That is, since satire is not directed at our emotions but to our intellect, it naturally has a limited readership, because it demands the participation of the reader through an intellectual process and offers Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 257–276 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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no emotional satisfaction (1967:264). It was precisely this intellectualism which was deemed unpoetic and even non-Greek by many critics, both in the case of Calas’s early 1930s poems and especially with these new satires.2 In his review of Οδός Νικήτα Ράντου (Nikitas Randos Street), the 1977 poetry collection which included most of Calas’s satires, Takis Kar­ velis seems to share Argyriou’s critical assessment of the satirical poems when writing that the sparkling and clever word-games detracted from (rather than contributed to) the creation of an aesthetically satisfactory result (1977:74). However, Calas also had a couple of champions of his satires. Nanos Valaoritis, whose literary avant-garde journal Πάλι (Again) first published these poems in the 1960s, was positive towards Calas’s new form of expression and the strange idiom of the satires. In a letter, dated 5 May 1960, he commented: I find [them] tremendously biting and with a healthy irony. [...] You will excuse my liberty to correct your Greek which you have become a little unused to in the grammatical sense, but I must say that your style has great originality and probably its strangeness comes also from the fact that for so many years you have not used it, in the current or the intellectual sense. These poems for me have a freshness and a biting acid quality which is necessary and also at moments very beautiful, and one feels that, unlike so much Greek poetry today, carefully chosen to express a very definite feeling and not just mumbo jumbo as most Greek poetry today with very few exceptions. There is behind them authority of mental, moral, and emotional attitudes and experiences which strike me immediately as authentic and profound. (Calas Archive, Nordic Library, Athens, file 30.3.15)3

Similarly, Kimon Friar has praised the satires for their “sharpness and acuteness of imagery” (1973:72), which he believed revealed Calas’s true tendency and talent even more than the early 1930s poems. Towards a theory of satire M. H. Abrams describes satire as using laughter as a weapon against an individual or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even the whole human race (1993:187). He further argues that the “various forms of satire are didactic in that they are designed, by various devices of ridicule, to alter the reader’s attitudes toward certain types of people, institutions, products, and modes of conduct” (1993:45). Even though Calas’s satires cannot be described as didactic, it is true that they share an ethical core or purpose and can thus be understood as an integral part of his writings as a “diagnostician” by unmasking the falseness and revealing the sickness of a society that he wanted to subvert.4 According

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to Alvin B. Kernan, satire functions as a form of catharsis from the evils of society through its use of irony, sarcasm and caricature (1971:271–272). Tassos Vournas further describes satire as “an enraged whip that assails the back of an unjust and authoritarian society” (1979:154). If satire cannot always be the social dynamite that blows up the establishment, it can at least function as a challenge and as a warning of resistance (Hoff 2009:231–232). The different “weapons” that satire uses to accomplish its goals can be identified as irony, parody, paradox, antithesis, idiolect, vulgarity, violence, and exaggeration. This description holds true also for the specific case of Calas, whose peculiar idiom was, above all, characterized by his use of a decidedly original “pyrotechnic of multiple puns” (Friar 1973:659). His highly personal satirical expression is immensely dense, almost overloaded with puns, “misspellings” and caricatures which border on the grotesque. In particular, the political satires that we shall consider here are formulated with a highly individual expression that uses mostly untranslatable multilevel puns and humorous alliterations in malicious attacks on the Greek monarchy and the Colonels, which he describes in a grotesque and vulgar fashion. The satirical outlook of an outsider and “heretic” Greek The relatively large group of satirical poems that Calas wrote in the 1960s was highly colored by his lengthy absence from Greece. It seems that the physical and emotional distance from his homeland fueled Calas’s critical disposition as the poems reveal a distinctly sharp and sarcastic, although humorous, form of expression. Removed from the Greek literary scene, Calas was free to pursue his own highly unique poetic vision, which strikes the reader as both original and bold, even strange, in comparison with most other post-war Greek poetry (Hoff 2009:230–231).5 He had been living permanently in New York since 1940 and consequently stopped writing poetry in Greek for a substantial number of years until his eventual “comeback” as a poet through the publication of ten satirical poems in the first issue of Πάλι in February 1964.6 What was initially just meant to be the title of Calas’s post-war series of poems eventually became the title of the 1977 collection Nikitas Randos Street which also included the four Τετράδια (Notebooks), first published between 1933 and 1936. Although the book gives the chronology 1945–1977 for the post-war poems, there is nothing to indicate that these poems were written before the late 1950s or early 1960s when we consider their specific contents, which critically comment on some of the historical events of that era. Furthermore, in a letter to Nanos Valaoritis dated 11 December 1959, Calas claims to write nothing other than a few articles for Art News since concentrating

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on a study of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (Valaoritis Papers, Princeton University). In another letter to Valaoritis, dated 7 October 1960, he writes: “I have done nothing to promote my poetry for the very good reason that it is only recently that I have started after so many years to write poetry again, and that only very unsystematically” (Valaoritis Papers). One of the reasons for his relative silence as a poet was surely his physical detachment from both the Greek language and Greek society, further accentuated when he chose to also keep his distance from the Greek communities of New York. However, a few lengthy trips to Greece between 1955 and 1959, in order to sort out family affairs after his father’s death, inspired him to start writing poems again in Greek. We can assume that feelings of disappointment and even anger with the repressive intellectual and political climate of post-war Greek society functioned as a trigger for him to resume his role as a poet, apart from deciding the satirical form of his new poems. The satires, which were the outcome of his critical observations from the viewpoint of a “heretic” Greek, an outsider, attacked the cultural and political status quo in Greece in a number of ways. The poems mocked Greek (conservative) modernists, such as George Seferis, organized religion, the ideology of Greekness, post-war Americanized petit-bourgeois Greeks, and Greece itself as a tourist destination. However, Calas saved his most scathing satires to attack and ridicule the Greek royal family and, by extension, the Colonels of the junta. Three political satires In the three political satires that we will take a closer look at here, the monarchy comes to symbolize Greece’s continued dependence on the “protection” of foreign powers manipulating the domestic political developments for their own interests through securing an undemocratic right-wing rule. The tradition of close ties between the royal family and politics was firmly established with King Constantine’s German-friendly interventions during World War I and would continue to be a significant factor in Greek political life until a failed counter-coup by Constantine II made him flee the country in December 1967. While George II sanctioned the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936, his successor King Paul and his German-born wife Frederica maintained an anti-communist campaign through support for oppressive elements in the political Right, despite their periodic clashes with prime ministers Alexandros Papagos and Konstantinos Karamanlis. While most of Calas’s satirical poems were written in a dense lan-

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guage characterized by cryptic word-games, the three political satires which mocked the monarchy and the junta are almost overloaded with multilevel puns that need careful decoding in order to be fully understood. Although the punning style of these poems almost defies any attempt at translation, their conversion to English also becomes an important part of the decoding process. Several of the caricatures which emerge clearly border on the grotesque as Calas mercilessly exposed and ridiculed the objects of his scorn. The exaggerated gestures of these political satires make us see the society that he criticized through a magnifying glass or, rather surrealistically, in contorting fairground mirrors. “Happy City” Calas’s first anti-royalist poem «Ευτυχούπολις» (“Happy City”), a pun on the Danish Glücksburg royal dynasty ruling Greece, was initially published in the second issue of Πάλι in 1964–1965.7 He was most probably inspired to write this satire by two recent events alluded to in the poem: Constantine II’s succession to his father King Paul in March 1964 and the symbolic beheading of the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, 24 April 1964, by unknown vandals.8 Furthermore, in September of the same year, Constantine II married Anne-Marie, the Danish princess and sister to the future queen of Denmark, Margrethe. ΕΥΤΥΧΟΥΠΟΛΙΣ Πάνε στο Σάπιο ν’ απολαύσουνε την αίγλη της αποτυχίας των. Ο γερο-παλατιανός πατριωτικότατα μασάει μια κοπενχάη ενώ στο διπλανό τραπέζι γύφτισσα υπενθυμίζει στο γιό του πως στη Δανία εκαρατομήθη άγαλμα σειρήνας. Μα το θέμα δεν έχει ποιητική οξύτητα θα δώσει ή δεν θα δώσει η κυρία Παλατιανού το ετήσιο γκάρντεν πάρτυ της μιά κι η κυρία Ερέτιμος δεν είναι πια στο υπουργείον Συνωστισμού κι ο διευθυντής του διεθνούς Τουρτουρισμού επαύθη; Με αριστερούς θα πισινίσει τώρα η Χρυσίδα; Καλύτερα να μην ανοίξει την νεόδμητο στέρνα της καλύτερα να πνιγεί! Μα τότες ποιά η ωφέλεια; Περιφρονούνε στ’ ανάκτορα τα θεατρικά. Θα συμμορφωθεί κατά τι με την νέα κατάσταση και κάθε βράδυ προτού να πάει στο τένις θα σεργιανίσει στο λαϊκότατο το Ζάππειο

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Lena Hoff κι εκεί καθώς λένε συχνάζουν επιβήτορες. Εν τω μεταξύ η γύφτισσα υπενθυμίζει στους αριστερούς το «Φοβού τους Δαναούς και δώρα φέροντας!»

(1977:104)

HAPPY CITY They go to the Rotten Gardens to revel in the glory of their failure. The old courtier very patriotically eats a Danish pastry while at the neighboring table a gypsy woman reminds his son that in Denmark the statue of the Little Mermaid was beheaded. But the issue has no poetic acuteness will the Lady of the Palace give or not give her annual garden party since the honorable Lady E.R.E. is no longer in the Ministry of Co-ordinated Squeezing and the director of International Cold Tourism has been dismissed? Will the Golden Lady swim in the same pool now as leftists? She better not open her newly built cistern better she drown! But then what would she gain? At the Palace, theatricals are frowned upon. She will somewhat conform to the new state of affairs and every night before going to the tennis club she will stroll amongst the common people in Zappion Park which, as they say, is full of studs and grabbers. In the meantime the gypsy woman reminds the leftists to “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”9

The Danish origin of the Glücksburg dynasty becomes the main source of different puns aimed at ridiculing the monarchy and its interference with political matters. In the Rotten Gardens an old courtier patriotically eats a Danish pastry while we are reminded of the possibility of a future overthrow of the monarchy through the (actual) beheading of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen. Zappion Park turns “rotten” by misspelling (Ζάππειον/Σάπιο) which, apart from being a common colloquial pun, could also be interpreted as a Shakespearean reference to Hamlet and there being something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark. There is another reference to Hamlet through the (futile) drowning of Ophelia (in a cistern), since “ophelia” means “profit” or “gain” in Greek.

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More than being a satire of the monarchy, “Happy City” can be read as an encoded description of the recent political developments in Greece as well as a comment on the complicated relationship between the Glücksburg family and Konstantinos Karamanlis. The prime minister’s conservative party, the National Radical Union (E.R.E. = Εθνική Ριζοσπαστική Ένωση) initially had the support of the palace since King Paul had chosen Karamanlis as the successor of Papagos upon his death in 1955. Mogens Pelt argues that the king’s choice of Karamanlis, which discarded the interests of the political parties, both Center and Right, should be seen as way of “preventing a ‘military’ solution and thus of accommodating American interests; furthermore it was a means to safeguard beyond Papagos’s premiership the survival of the political order established after the Civil War” (2003:76). Finally, it was an attempt by the king to enhance his own political position since Karamanlis did not have “any significant power base of his own” and would thus be “heavily dependent on the king and the goodwill of the Armed Forces” (2003:76). However, the ensuing conflicts and eventual hostility, especially between Karamanlis and Queen Frederica, greatly complicated matters. Furthermore, the dominance of Karamanlis on the political scene was seriously challenged in the 1961 elections by the Liberal George Papandreou’s Center Union. Karamanlis’s victory was tainted by the scandal surrounding the fraudulent elections as a result of manipulation and improper pressures by the army through the NATO plan code-named “Pericles,” which was designed to preserve the right’s hold on power. Following the suspicious circumstances of the murder of Grigorios Lambrakis in 1963 and further clashes with the royal couple after their refusal to follow his advice to postpone a problematic state visit to London, Karamanlis resigned and left the country. Returning in November 1963 to fight the elections, his weakened position was successfully exploited by Papandreou, who secured a narrow victory. Thus, Karamanlis finally left Greece to live in Paris for the next eleven years. With a centre-left leadership in place, the future of the monarchy seemed less secure than before and the “Lady of the Palace” could therefore no longer be certain to give her annual garden party. The “honorable” lady E.R.E. («κυρία Ερέτιμος» = Queen Frederica) had stopped visiting the ministry since she had given Karamanlis the cold shoulder and discharged him from his work. The “busybody” queen is widely thought to have exerted more political influence than her husband (Close 2002:87). Clogg notes that Karamanlis had “clashed with the palace and, more particularly, with the German-born, strong-willed Queen Frederica” (1992:157). Moreover, Pelt reproduces extracts from special American reports (from the National Security Council as well as

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Athens Embassy) which detail the strained relations between Frederica and Karamanlis after he attained a more “independent and powerful stature,” thus causing the queen’s irritation (2003:83–85). So, would «Χρυσίδα» (The Golden Lady) now be forced to “rub bottoms” with, or swim in the same pool as, the leftists?10 Calas himself explained to his English translator Kimon Friar that “The Golden Lady” is a reference to an old friend called Dora whose name also served as an anagram for his early poetic penname (Nikitas) Randos.11 This is most probably Dora Vourloumi—a friend from his student days who had gone from being a communist and a member of the «Φοιτητική Συντροφιά» (Student Society) to press agent for the royal family. However, «Χρυσίδα» could also be understood to symbolize the Greek monarchy in general which was forced to look for new political allies after Karamanlis’s departure. While it is tempting to interpret the final line of the poem as yet another allusion to Denmark, with the Homeric «Δαναούς» (Danaans) resembling «Δανούς» (Danes), that is, the Danish “gift” of a princess to the Greek royal family, as well as the Danish Glücksburg dynasty itself, it is more likely a reference to the (party) political situation of the times.12 In fact, there would not be much reason to warn the leftists of collaborating or fraternizing with the royal family when it was Karamanlis who rightfully should have been advised to be careful about his relations with King Paul, who had helped him to power, since their close relations eventually soured and led to his “dethronement.” Dimitra Karadima instead argues that the line constitutes a warning to the leftists to beware of collaborating with the political opposition, possibly even within the ranks of the Center Union Party (2006:808). Indeed, the party was hardly characterized by ideological homogeneity. According to Richard Clogg, it ranged from “dissident right wingers with a grudge against Karamanlis to former adherents of the far left” (1992:155). Mogens Pelt points out that the British Embassy even viewed the party as “right-wing” since the key post of Minister of Defence had gone to Petros Garoufalias, who was understood to belong to the extreme right of the Party (2003:85–86). Seen in this light, Calas’s warning reminds us that if the right-wing elements in the Center Union accepted leftists within its ranks, it was only due to political strategies in the quest for power and as a way to monitor the communists. After securing a second victory in the elections of 1964, Papandreou made clear his intentions to reform the country and to bring the armed forces under political control, which led the palace to intervene and force the prime minister to resign.13 The young King Constantine II essentially encouraged a development which included preparations for a military putsch that was then taken over and executed by the

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Colonels on 21 April 1967. One of Calas’s old friends, the Trotskyist revolutionary Michalis Raptis, immediately organized an international resistance network which also published the paper Αντίσταση (Resistance) between 1967 and 1971 in Paris and London. Calas contributed a book review and a polemic to the paper. Moreover, encouraged by Raptis, he organized a small resistance group in New York, which, among other things, helped with the American distribution of the paper. However, the group quickly fell apart due to internal ideological conflicts after their different interpretations of the violent suppression of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks.14 “No and Never” Although Calas wrote a poem entitled «Όχι και ποτέ» (“No and Never”) especially for Αντίσταση, it failed to get published at the time. In a letter to Calas, dated 17 February 1968, Raptis acknowledged the reception of a satirical poem, which he seemed to like, and promised to publish it in the following issue of his journal (Hoff 2002:38). However, when the May–June 1968 issue failed to include his poem, Calas wrote back to Raptis asking why it had not been published at the same time as suggesting that it be sent to another resistance paper (Hoff 2002:45). Since Raptis did not respond to Calas’s question regarding the fate of his poem, we have no way of knowing the reason for why it was rejected. Perhaps as a kind of “repayment,” Raptis published the thematically linked «Η οσφύς του λαγού η μοναρχική μου αγάπη» (“The Back of the Hare My One and Only Monarchical Love”) that we shall also take a look at here, in the political journal Για το Σοσιαλισμό (For Socialism) (no. 4, 1975) which he brought out upon his return to Athens following the fall of the junta. While “No and Never” was not published at the intended time during the junta years, it was discovered during the organizing of the Calas Archive (now located at the Nordic Library in Athens) and is thus reproduced here in its entirety for the first time.15 ΟΧΙ ΚΑΙ ΠΟΤΕ Έχουμε κι εμείς μια «Κηφισσιά», χωρίς δέντρα και πρασιές όλο μπουζούκια, ρετσίνα, «παιδιά» και «Ζορμπά» Αντίς από τ’«Αστέρια» έχουμε την «Αστόρια» Έχουμε και βάσανα. Σεις βασανιστές, Ηρακλείδες του Στέμματος Χούντα, Χέσσα, χεσμένο μίνι βασιλιά κι αντιβασιλέα Μάξιμον σταματήσαν την χαρά. Ποταποί παττακοί ψιττακίζουν Κυματίζει η Κυανόλευκος σα σημαία ευκαιρίας για λεφτά με χούντα

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Lena Hoff Ξένες εταιρείες θαυματουργούν. Παναμάς θα γίνει ο Μωριάς κι ο Ερμής μπανάνα και μπουναμάς του Τουρισμού χάριν του τουρτουρισμού ο ρωμιός θα νηστεύει τρις της εβδομάδος και κάθε μέρα θα κάνει δίαιτα ηθικής και λογοκρισίας για ν’ αδυνατίση η Ελευθερία Στο λιμάνι των ελεύθερων ξενιτεμένων μια χούφτα γραικών με Μελίνα και μελάνι με λόγο σε χαρτί και δίσκο. Μουντζώνει την χούντα βροντοφωνώντας την ταυτότητά της Το «όχι» της Αντίστασης, και το «ποτέ» μιας και άλλης μιας και πάλι άλλης νέας Μπουμπουλίνας (Calas Archive, Nordic Library, Athens, file 17.3.24) NO AND NEVER We have our own “Kifissia,” without trees or greenery full of bouzoukis, retsina, Greek kids and “Zorbas” Instead of the “Stars” we have the “Astoria” We also suffer torments. You suffer tormentors, the Strongmen of the Crown The junta, Hessa, shit scared mini king and viceroy Maximus they put an end to all joy. Perverted Pattakos and his pack prattle on like parrots The Greek flag flaps like a flag of convenience for money together with the junta Foreign companies work wonders. Morea will turn into Panama and Hermes become banana and a bonus for tourism thanks to the cold tourism the Greeks will fast three times a week and follow a daily diet of morality and censorship so that Freedom will grow thinner In the harbor of the free emigrated a handful of Greeks with Melina and ink with speeches on paper and records give the junta the finger thundering out their identity The “no” of the Resistance, and the “never” of another and one other and yet another young Bouboulina

Chiefly being a resistance poem, the satire also contains a critique of the monarchy and foreign interference in Greek politics. Moreover, the initial lines ridicule the conservatism of the Greek communities of America, which not only resisted cultural assimilation but also failed to embrace a multitude of different cultures in their insistence on tradition and cultivation of feelings of nostalgia for the homeland. Calas here

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satirized the Astoria neighborhood in Queens, New York, which was said to be home to the largest concentration of Greeks outside Greece. In an interview from 1981, Calas confessed that he had always kept his distance from other Greek expatriates since he believed that their interests and problems were completely different from his own. Moreover, he claimed that he wanted to stay clear of a Greek plutocracy that showed no interest in a “fallen” member of their own class (Fostieris and Niarchos 1981:488). In fact, it was not until the late 1960s that he was finally able to find some common ground with other American Greeks through their anti-junta work, instigated through his involvement with Raptis (Hoff 2009:232). However, while they had their share of troubles («βάσανα») in America, Greece had its torturers («βασανιστές»), namely the Colonels who were mockingly called “the Strongmen of the Crown.” Calas further emphasized the close connection between the palace and the junta which he presented as a natural outcome of the repressive politics of the right, particularly the hysterical anti-communist feelings that characterized the postwar governments and paved the way for the military putsch in 1967. Calas’s favored puns in relation to the members of the royal family include incredibly crude declarations of their stupidity through scatological references. The untranslatable Hessa is Frederica, the mother of the mini (insignificant) King Constantine, through a pun which combines «χέσε» (shit) with an allusion to her murky past as a member of the Nazi youth party in Germany by borrowing the name of the Nazi criminal Rudolf Hess.16 It is also a reference to the German royal house of Hessen, the neighboring district of Frederica’s Hanover. The reasons why Constantine is «χεσμένος» are manifold—more than being “shit scared” about his uncertain future, he was also “in the shits” through his new exile status. “Viceroy Maximus” is a reference to general George Zoitakis who served as a regent of Greece from December 1967, following Constantine II’s failed counter-coup and flight to Italy, until 1972 when he was replaced by the junta leader George Papadopoulos. There are two possible reasons for why Calas chose the nickname “Maximus” for the viceroy. First, it is an ironic comment on both the Kingdom and the junta by using the Latin term for “greatest” or “largest” for the leaders of the country who had a ridiculously inflated sense of their own importance. Moreover, the name could refer to Demetrios Maximos (1873–1955), the Greek banker and right-wing politician who first had close relations to King Constantine I (even following him into exile in 1922), served as foreign minister between 1933 and 1934, and finally formed a monarchist government for

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nine months in 1947 together with Constantine Tsaldaris. Calas hereby stressed the “tradition” of close connections between extreme right-wing governments, moneyed interests, and the palace. Under the rule of the Colonels, the despicable Pattakos and his companions («παττακοί»), the Greek flag had become a “flag of convenience” as Greece continued being a country ruled by the interests of foreign powers. While Morea in the poem stands for Greece (a pun on «μωρία» = stupidity and «Μοριάς» = the Peloponnese), the reference to Panama means that Calas suggested that Greece was in effect an American colony apart from reminding us about a possible violent development of the political situation. Student revolts in the Panama Canal Zone in 1964 had provoked the violent suppression by American police forces which resulted in many deaths and hundreds of wounded. Indeed, in a few years time, a similar situation would arise in Greece with the tragedy of the military response to the Athens Polytechnic occupation in November 1973, when at least 30 students were killed (Clogg 1992:167). Calas further characterized Greece as a “banana republic” which acted as the puppet of foreign capital and the commercial interests of tourism. The reference to “cold tourism” («τουρτουρισμός»), a pun also used in “Happy City,” means that Greece would put on a show of normality in order to attract the money of the tourist business (and other forms of foreign investment or support). This could only be achieved through the containment of freedom and the implementation of strict censorship which also included the advocacy of medieval moral codes. However, resistance to the regime was building also in New York, the “harbor of the free emigrated” (a pun on the poem “The Free Besieged” by Dionysios Solomos). Encouraged by the example of Melina Mercouri, the Greeks of the Diaspora openly voiced their opposition in the hope that their protest would spread and inspire many more to act like Bouboulina, the heroine of the Greek War of Independence in 1821. “The Back of the Hare My One and Only Monarchical Love” Calas would return to the subject of the Glücksburg family and the rule of the Colonels in «Η οσφύς του λαγού η μοναρχική μου αγάπη» (“The Back of the Hare My One and Only Monarchical Love”) published in 1975 in Raptis’s new political journal, as previously mentioned. The satire recounts the history of the Greek monarchy, the rule and the fall of the Colonels, and the return of Karamanlis, chiefly by employing the satirical methods of grotesque caricature and vulgarity.

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Ο ΟΣΦΥΣ ΤΟΥ ΛΑΓΟΥ Η ΜΟΝΑΡΧΙΚΗ ΜΟΥ ΑΓΑΠΗ Πρώτοι μας δυνάστες οι Βιτελοβλάχοι Κόθωνας με Αμυαλία. Μετά ξέρασεν ο Βόλγας την Αφροδίτη Βρωμάροβνα που τόκισε τους Γλυκοβούργους με χυλόπιτες και τους Ρωμιούς με αναθέματα. Του πετεινού ο γιος αντίς από την Πόλη πήρε την Ασοφία. Ένας του γιος ασπάστηκε τη Μαϊμού. Κι ο άλλος εγκαινίασε μεταξωτό πολιτισμό. Η Χέσσα μηχανεύτηκε ανάπαυλα πράματα κι ο Κοπρώνυμος Β’ Άνω Μωρία. Πάνε τώρα οι Γλυκοβούργοι αλλού να φάνε την κοπενχάη τους στο Τυχεράν της Ιρανίας ίσως. Εδώ ποταποί παττακοί ηρακλείδες του στόματος ψιττακίζουν έρχεται, ερχέζεται ο Βάσος Υλικός. Ελλάς εργατών κι αγροτών, Ελλάς ποιητών φοβού τους Δαναούς. Προσοχή Ήτταν ή Επί Τανκς.                   Βακιλοκτόνος

(1977:131)

THE BACK OF THE HARE MY ONE AND ONLY MONARCHICAL LOVE Our first despots were the Wittel-Vlachs Otto the Bumpkin with no-brains Amalia. Then the river Volga spewed up, instead of Aphrodite, Olga the Dirty Romanov who lavished the Glücksburgs with mittens at an interest and the Greeks with anathemas. The cocky son got unwise and conquered Sophia instead of Constantinople. One of his sons received the kiss of death from Mr. Monkey. While another paved the silky way for the culture of Metaxas. Hessa was contriving behind the back of Paul and King Dunghill II devised utter nonsense with his Anna Maria. Now the Glücksburgs have to go and eat their Danish pastry somewhere else Iranically, perhaps, in lucky Tehran. Here, perverted Pattakos and his pack of claptrap Strongmen

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The obscure title of this satire is a pun on the favored watchword of King George II: «Ισχύς μου η αγάπη του λαού» (The love of my people is my strength).17 What then follows is a feast of slanderous abuse and insult of the members of the royal family and the Colonels which is both grotesque and immensely funny in its utter lack of respect and its witty word-play and clever alliterations. Starting with the first royal dynasty, the House of Wittelsbach is likened to a dynasty of country bumpkins, «Βιτελοβλάχοι», represented by King Otto, that is, «Κόθωνας», which combines «Όθωνας» (Otto) with «κωθώνι» (bumpkin), and his Queen Amalia who has become a fool through the simple misspelling of her name, «Αμυαλία» (Folly). Otto was followed by the Glücksburg family from Denmark. George I married the niece of Tsar Alexander II, Olga Konstantinovna, who is unfavorably compared to Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, fertility and sexual love. Far from being born of sea foam, Olga Vromarovna (the word merges her family name Romanov with «βρώμα» which means dirt) was spewed up from a filthy river. The reference to Aphrodite should be understood on the background that the queen was indeed quite fertile and had eight children who are likened to «χυλόπιτες» (romantic refusals or “mittens”) which are given to the Glücksberg dynasty in abundance (with an interest). The anathemas (rather than curses) that she gave the Greeks should be interpreted as an allusion to her political failure with the translation of the New Testament into modern Greek. Unauthorized by the Greek Holy Synod, the publication in 1901 led to riots, with many killed and wounded, and ultimately caused the fall of the government of George Theotokis as well as the resignation of Procopius, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Athens. The heir to the throne, Constantine I, married his Sophia who, similarly to Amalia, lost her wisdom with the simple addition of a letter to her name («Ασοφία»). However, the “unwiseness” of Sophia is also a reference to the Greek Orthodox church of Constantinople, Haghia Sophia, and thus comments on the stupidity of Constantine I to support the Great Idea. The king was consequently overthrown in a military coup following the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922. The description

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of Constantine I as the “cocky son” (or rather the son of a cock) parodies the royalist song «Του αετού ο γιος» (The son of the eagle).18 His son, Alexander, did not manage to rule for long before dying of blood poisoning following a bite from his pet monkey. While George II paved the way for the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936 («μεταξωτό» as a pun on Metaxas meaning “silky”), his successor to the throne, King Paul, married the German Frederica (Hessa), whose fierce independence, strong will, and scheming was widely known. In fact, Karadima convincingly argues that the reason why King Paul is the only monarch not directly referred to in the poem, other than as a sidekick to Frederica, is that he existed in the shadow of his wife who was politically more powerful (2006:809). Finally, Calas scornfully likens her son Constantine II to a dunghill «Κοπρώνυμος» (Kopronymos), a word which puns on “kopros,” meaning excrement but also someone who is a bum.19 He calls his wife Anne-Marie the high priestess of stupidity («Άνω Μωρία»). Moreover, the utter nonsense concocted by both Frederica and her son is also a reference to the king’s failed counter-coup in December 1967. The Glücksburg dynasty thereafter fled into exile and was thus forced to eat their Danish pastry elsewhere. Calas proposed Tehran as an ideal place for the royal exile. The Shah of Iran was indeed a very lucky king since he had absolute political power as opposed to the Greek monarchs. Furthermore, in 1967 he held a lavish coronation ceremony to demonstrate that he had defeated his opponents and secured a male heir to the throne. However, even if Constantine and his entourage were removed from Greece, the problem of the monarchy remained unresolved for a while, thus constituting a topic for the “prattling parrots” to discuss, at least until 1973 when Papadopoulos declared Constantine deposed. Finally, one month after the November 1974 general elections, a referendum on the future of the monarchy led to a convincing (70%) rejection of its return. The monarchy («βασιλεία» or «βασιλικός») has been split in two parts in Calas’s word-play in order to point out the materialistic («υλικός») interests ruling its politics and which were at the basis («βάση») of its existence. The two descriptions of the Colonels from “No and Never” here merge into one, with the only difference being that the “Strongmen of the Crown” humorously turn into the “Strongmen of the Mouth” or “Claptrap Herculeses” by substituting «Στέμματος» (Crown) with «στόματος» (mouth) thus parodying the Colonels’s habit of endless speeches and ridiculous declarations. In the final lines of this satire, Calas cautioned against false saviors of Greece: “Caution / Defeat or Ready the Tanks” is a reference to the rallying cry of the (moderate) left, «Καραμανλής ή τανκς» (“Karamanlis or tanks”), which was formulated by Mikis Theodorakis in order to form a

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united front and to prevent the socialists and the communists from viewing the fall of the junta as the start of a revolutionary situation. While the communists (KKE) warned about a simple changing of the guards (from the Colonels to Karamanlis), Andreas Papandreou sarcastically changed Theodorakis’s slogan into “Karamanlis and tanks.” Calas’s pun plays on the Spartan command which told the soldiers going to war: «ή ταν ή επί τας», (“either return with your shields or on them,”) meaning that either win the battle or die and be carried back home upon your shield. He overturns this phrase by equalling Karamanlis to defeat («ήτταν»), that is, the political compromise of the left to accept a right-wing politician in a return to democracy. Karamanlis returned to Greece after the collapse of the junta in July 1974 and won the ensuing free elections. Although forced to accept the political solution (as momentary), Calas also satirizes the picture of Karamanlis returning to Greece as a national savior and hero and reminds his countrymen to “beware of Greeks” and their empty promises.20 His warning thus includes a call for radical political change since Karamanlis was not to be trusted. Finally, Calas signs the poem «Βακιλοκτόνος» (Bacillicide), fusing “regicide” with “bacillus,” which suggests that the regicide is simply an exterminator of germs. Conclusion While many of Calas’s satirical poems include references to the political situation of the time, such as the Cyprus crisis of the 1950s, only the three above examined satires can be characterized as overtly political. They reveal an acutely political mind that utilized both wit and intellect to attack the fascist rule of the Colonels and especially emphasized the royal interference in political matters. These three political satires are interesting for a number of reasons. First, they stand out from Calas’s political oeuvre as the most crude, funny and dense where almost every word contains some sort of pun or word-play showing the highly original linguistic playfulness of his poetic expression. The “pyrotechnic” of puns was here used to intensify his slanderous assault on monarchy and Colonels alike which was clearly sparked off by the political indignation and frustration that he was feeling even before the advent of the junta. Second, these satires are noticeable for being probably the most confrontationally political texts in Calas’s entire post-war production. Furthermore, they show that he sought to initiate a dialogue between the different spectrums of the left and to participate in some sort of political debate, even from afar. Although it is perhaps a little surprising that he did not write more poems like these, it seems that he was experiencing enormous difficulties

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in getting published in Greece before the late 1970s. Political satire is especially sensitive to delay since it is written to be read at a very specific historical moment as a form of protest. Calas’s isolated position and detachment from Greece (and Greeks) unfortunately meant that he had very few or no opportunities to publish this sort of material. However, we also know that he was against overtly political poetry in principal. Already in 1929 he had written in a letter to his friend Yiorgos Theotokas that the “poet should never get involved in politics so as not to damage his aesthetic sensibilities” (Konstantoulaki-Hantzou 1989:23). The fact that he broke his own rule and ended up writing these powerful satires should thus stand as proof of Calas’s very acute sense of rage with the political situation in Greece as well as his wish to show his dissatisfaction with the state of things and to issue some sort of a warning to Greeks apart from encouraging their active resistance. The form of satire gave him the perfect opportunity to re-engage in Greek matters, as well as Greek letters, in a very unique way which managed to fuse his different roles as poet, critic, diagnostician, polemicist, and surrealist. UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

NOTES Acknowledgements. I wish to thank Princeton University’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (Manuscripts Division—Nanos Valaoritis Papers) for permission to include a paragraph from a letter (Calas-Valaoritis), and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, for permission to include unpublished material from the Calas Archive, Nordic Library, Athens, Greece. 1  Τα νέα αυτά ποιήματα, όσο κρίνω, δεν είναι, τα περισσότερα, παρά σατιρικά, χλευαστικά, ποιητικά σχέδια, που βρίσκονται σχετικά έξω από τους ποιητικούς του κώδικες. Είναι (όσο είναι) ποιήματα ενός ερασιτέχνη που βρίσκεται αποσυνδεδεμένος από την επόμενη ποιητική φάση των Ελλήνων συνομηλίκων του ποιητών (Argyriou 1990:25). 2  For a discussion on the critical reception of Calas’s poetry debut in 1933 (as Nikitas Randos), see Hoff (2008:105–107). 3  This letter was written in English. 4  Calas signed his last articles (early 1980) published in Artforum as “poet, diagnostician, and polemicist.” 5  See Hoff (2009) for a discussion on how Calas’s diaspora status affected his post-war poetry, and Kremmydas et al. (2006) for recent appraisals of his poetry. 6  The first issue of Πάλι included the poems «Ξένα δοχεία» (“Foreign Vessels”), «Με ασπασμούς» (“With Kisses”), «Παράδεισος» (“Paradise”), «Ηρώον» (“Heroi(n)sm”), «Λιρισμός»

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(“Lyricism”), «Διγενή» (“Man of Two Races”), «Φουρτούνα» (“The Storms of Fortune”), «Οι Εφέσιοι» (“The Ephesians”), «Περιποίηση» (“Good Treatment”), and «Θεατρικά» (“Theatrics”) under the headline «Οδός Νικήτα Ράντου, μέρος Α» (“Nikitas Randos Street, Part I”). The second issue of Πάλι included five untitled poems, numbered 1–5, «Κοροϊδία» (“Mockery”), «Ασπασία Γλυκοφιλούσα» (“Sweet-Kissing Aspasia”), and «Ευτυχούπολις» (“Happy City”) under the headline «Οδός Νικήτα Ράντου, μέρος Β» (“Nikitas Randos Street, Part II”). The poems were later republished as «Συλλογή Α» (Collection I) in Nikitas Randos Street. 7  While Kimon Friar has translated the poem as “Happy City” (1973:464–465) with the approval of Calas, Nanos Valaoritis renders the title “Glucksville” in a more recent translation (see Valaoritis and Maskaleris 2003:172–173). 8  The first vandalism (which was later repeated) of the Little Mermaid became a legend and has remained an unsolved mystery in Denmark since the head was never recovered. 9  The poem has been translated twice into English, first by Kimon Friar (1973:464–465) and recently by Nanos Valaoritis (see Valaoritis and Maskaleris 2003:172–173). However, my own translation differs substantially from both versions on a number of points, especially through my decision to render the multiple meanings of the puns whenever possible rather than settling for a straightforward translation which would demand a set of explanatory footnotes. I have followed the same principle in my translations of “No and Never” and “The Back of the Hare My One and Only Monarchical Love.” 10  Calas here invented the verb “pisinisei” (πισινίσει) which puns on “pisina” which can mean either “swimming-pool” or “bottom” according to where the accent is placed. 11  Letter to Kimon Friar, 14 October 1967 (Calas Archives, file 26.19.14). “Doré” means gilded or golden in French but is also a double pun with «δώρα» (gift) and the “Greeks bearing gifts” which is an allusion to Dora Vourloumi. 12  Sidetracked by the constant references to Denmark in this poem, I was previously (mistakenly) led to believe that this was the right explanation and also refer to it in my PhD thesis (see Hoff 2006:237). However, it seems that I was not the only one to be misled by the “Danish connection” and thus note that Nanos Valaoritis renders the last line: “to ‘Fear the Danes bearing gifts!’” (Valaoritis and Maskaleris 2003:173) in his translation of the poem and further explains in a footnote that the “gift” is a reference to “the Danes who supplied Greece with the royal family” (173). 13  See Pelt (2003:85–92) for more details on these events. 14  See Hoff (2002) for the correspondence between Calas and Raptis. This book also reproduces Calas’s book review, the polemic (against Andreas Papandreou and PAK) as well as a draft for the same polemic (see pp. 150–159) published in Αντίσταση. See Hoff (2003) for an analysis of the same correspondence and the resistance work of Calas and Raptis. 15  A couple of short excerpts of the poem were reproduced and discussed briefly in an article on the post-war poetry of Calas. See Hoff (2009:232, 235). 16  Meletis I. Meletopoulos (1994:167) tells that the “official” nickname of Frederica was «Φρίκη» (Horror)! 17  Karadima (2006:808) refers to an unpublished anti-royal essay (1935) from the Calas Papers at the ELIA-Archive in Athens entitled «Κήρυγμα» (file 1.5) which also includes a reference to the same watchword: «Τύραννοι, ο έκπτωτος και οι έκπτωτοι εις την ψυχήν που τον περιστοιχίζουν πρώην άνθρωποι και ισκαριώτες, αυλάρχοι και μανδρόσκυλα. Τύραννοι και κούφιοι άνθρωποι, κεφαλή κούφια με στέμμα για να τους δίνει κάποιο βάρος. [...] ‘Η ισχύς μου η αγάπη του λαού’ παπαγαλίζει ο έκπτωτος ενώ ξέρει πως η ισχύς του θα είναι οι φόροι» (Tyrants, the deposed king and his royal family to whose soul former people and Iscariots, chamberlains and henchmen gather round. Tyrants and deaf people, empty head with a crown to give them some weight. […] “The love of my people is my strength” the deposed king prattles like a parrot while he knows that it is the taxes that will be his strength).

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 I owe this interpretation to Karadima (2006:809).  Konstantinos Kopronymos (718–775) was, in fact, a Byzantine emperor who was given this insulting nickname by his opponents with the explanation that he had soiled the font during his baptism. 20  In a letter to his artist friend Takis, dated 19 September 1973, he wrote: «Κι αν έριχνε ο Καραμανλής την χούντα θα ήταν μόνο ένα πρώτο βήμα [...]. Μοιραία ο Καραμανλής ή ο Μαύρος πρέπει να ξεπερασθούν και να αντικατασταθούν από δημοκράτη τύπου Παπανδρέου» (Even if Karamanlis would bring down the junta it would only be the first step […]. Karamanlis or Mavros would inevitably have to be overstepped and replaced by a democrat like Papandreou) (Calas Archives, file 29.25.29). 18 19

REFERENCES CITED Abrams, M. H. 1993 A Glossary of Literary Terms. London: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. Argyriou, Alexandros 1990 Αλέξανδρος Αργυρίου, Ο πρωτοποριακός και τρισυπόστατος Νικήτας Ράντος, Μ. Σπιέρος και Νίκος Καλαμάρης. Athens: Etairia Syngrafeon. Calas, Nicolas 1977 Νικόλαος Κάλας, Οδός Νικήτα Ράντου. Athens: Ikaros. Clogg, Richard 1992 A Concise History of Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Close, David H. 2002 Greece since 1945. London: Longman. Feinberg, Leonard 1967 Introduction to Satire. Iowa: The Iowa State University Press. Friar, Kimon 1973 Modern Greek Poetry—from Cavafis to Elytis. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hoff, Lena 2003 “Resistance in Exile—A Study of the Political Correspondence between Nicolas Calas and Michalis Raptis (Pablo) 1967–72.” Scandinavian Journal of Modern Greek Studies 2:17–41. 2006 “Surrealism and the Art of Criticism: The Cultural Politics of Nicolas Calas.” PhD thesis, University of Birmingham. 2008 “The Critical Poetry of Nicolas Calas: Challenging the Poetics of Greekness.” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 32:1, 104–121. 2009 “The Return of Nikitas Randos: Satire, Memory and Otherness in the Post-War Poetry of Nicolas Calas.” In Tziovas 2009:229–240. Hoff, Lena, editor 2002 Νικόλας Κάλας—Μιχάλης Ράπτης. Μια πολιτική αλληλογραφία. Athens: Agra. Karadima, Dimitra 2006 Δήμητρα Καραδήμα, «Οι μεταμορφώσεις της ποιητικής του Νικόλαου Κάλας». PhD thesis, Cyprus University.

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Karvelis, Takis 1977 Τάκης Καρβέλης, «Η ανανέωση της ελληνικής ποίησης». Διαβάζω (December) 72–74. Kernan, Alvin B. 1971 “A Theory of Satire.” In R. Paulson 1971:249–277. Konstantoulaki-Hantzou, Ioanna, editor 1989 Iωάννα Κωνσταντουλάκη-Χαντζού, Γιώργος Θεοτοκάς και Νικόλας Κάλας. Μια αλληλογραφία. Athens: Prosperos. Kremmydas, Kostas, editor 2006 Κώστας Κρεμμύδας, Νικόλαος Κάλας, Ξαναδιαβάζοντας το έργο του (1907–1988). Athens: Mandragoras. Meletopoulos, Meletis, I. 1994 Μελέτης Η. Μελετόπουλος, Η βασιλεία στην νεώτερη ελληνική ιστορία. Από τον Όθωνα στον Κωνσταντίνο Β’. Athens: Nea Synora, Livani. Paulson, R., editor 1971 Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Pelt, Mogens 2003 “The Colonels’ Coup of 21 April and the Regime Issue in Greece 1944–1967.” Scandinavian Journal of Modern Greek Studies 2:69–94. Tziovas, Dimitris, editor 2009 Greek Diaspora and Migration since 1700. Society, Politics and Culture. Oxford: Rowmand & Littlefield Publishers. Valaoritis, Nanos and Maskaleris, Thanasis, editors 2003 An Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry. New Jersey: Talisman House. Vournas, Tassos 1979 Τάσος Βουρνάς, «Η δημοσιογραφική σάτιρα.» In Σάτιρα και πολιτική στη νεώτερη Ελλάδα—από τον Σολομό ως τον Σεφέρη, 154–80. Athens: Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias.

Greek Chorus in 09 Vassilis Lambropoulos

The question of the chorus has been of special importance to twentiethcentury theater. Plays like Toller’s Mass and Man, O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Kazantzakis’ Capodistria, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, and Heiner Müller’s Mauser attempt to assemble people in a public setting of common interests and concerns. The quest for a viable chorus explores the possibility of a modern socio-political community. How can such a community be constituted and governed? How can it claim legitimacy? How can it define its space and its membership? If we assume that the ancient chorus represented the citizens of the polis, whom might a modern chorus represent? Recently Greek theater has offered some interesting experiments. Among the several offerings of the Athens Festival in the Summer of 2008, two stood out in terms of both media coverage and audience response, the opening and the closing one. The opening show, X skinis: Afta pou kapsan to sanidi (On Stage: Burning Down the House), produced by composer Stamatis Kraounakis, was a review of twentieth-century Greek music for the stage. Its program moved mostly chronologically through famous songs from epitheorisi/variety show, operetta, ancient comedy and modern Greek and non-Greek plays. People of all generations packed the Odeon of Herodes Atticus to hear and sing along all-time favorites. The show that closed the Festival was a stage adaptation of Dimitris Dimitriadis’s novella Pethaino san chora (I am Dying as a Country) (1978), produced by director Michael Marmarinos. In it, a foreign occupation has crushed a country’s culture and thrown it into a state of advancing anarchy, sterility, and self-destruction. People packed “Peiraios 260,” a furniture factory turned theater in an industrial part of Athens, to see a devastating commentary on twentieth-century Greek history. The contrast between the celebration of the first show and the lament of the second could not be starker, in terms not only of content but also of dramatic style. For example, Kraounakis brought out the legendary 1960s singer Zozo Sapountzaki to recreate her old hit “Panayia mou, ena paidi” (“My God, what a guy”),1 while Marmarinos brought out the legendary 1960s singer Beba Blanche to declare “I despise this country” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 277–283 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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against a tape of her old hit “To karavi” (“The boat”).2 Both singers stood outside history to declare, the first, its suspension (the ’60s never ended) and the other, its destruction (everything ended with the ’60s). The two producers started with similar assumptions. In an interview he gave to the official newspaper of the Athens Festival on 19 June 2008, just days before the premiere, Kraounakis was asked about the future of creative artistic work in Greece. His response sounded like a quote from I am Dying as a Country: “I do not believe in Greece. At all. I do not believe it has any future. Everything is done so that they can cut the arms and legs of those of us who still manage to do what we feel or what we believe is our job.” And later in the same interview, when asked about the current phase of Athens, Kraounakis called it “post-decadent, as in ‘post-modern.’” Thus the two producers had remarkably similar general views of Greece. The radical difference lay in their treatment of these desperate views. Kraounakis took over a Hellenistic amphitheater to present a threehour extravaganza, giving 5000 people the transcendent opportunity to sing together and feel again unified and homogeneous. All divisions seemed overcome as operetta co-existed with Lorca and camp with Pirandello, the Weimar Republic with the Greek 1967 junta and the Balkan Wars with Irish anti-colonialism. With Greek quality popular music exhausted for years, and the CD practically dead, Kraounakis seemed to celebrate the era of the 78 and 45 records. Marmarinos took over a big, empty industrial space and used very few scattered props. Divisions in Greek life were foregrounded—sexual, ethnic, linguistic, social and others. Nameless people walked in line or wandered around, unable to communicate with one another. A sense of desolation prevailed everywhere. At the end, a seven-minute scorching monologue on the empty stage denounced Greece and everything Greek. The most interesting contrast between the two shows pertained to the use of the chorus. Kraounakis used as a chorus his own ten-member musical theater company called Speira Speira, and acted as their koryfaios (leader). The group offered choral accompaniment, acted out some songs, and in general, by singing and dancing together, established a comforting sense of belonging to a community of warm sentiment. Marmarinos used as his chorus 200 volunteers from many ethnic, professional, and age groups. They formed a long line that entered the stage from one end and exited from the other as their faces were projected on the back wall, creating a conflicting sense of intimacy and alienation. By walking mostly silently and, when speaking, never using a common

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voice but only individuated monologues, they highlighted the absence of a shared language.3 In the summer of 2008, the two shows at the Athens Festival sought to assemble people in a modern Athenian chorus, inspired by different but equally desperate views of national identity and culture—one view recovering nostalgically traditional codes and symbols of community, and another denouncing all expressions of traditional community. Both projects registered the erosion of the indigenous, the authentic, the lived and shared; but they both failed to constitute a dramatically legitimate chorus because they took what we might call an anti-theatrical approach: ultimately they argued that the chorus was their audience itself. The chorus on stage was assumed to be the same as the people watching the show. Art and life merged, theater was abolished. But if the audience itself is the chorus, then the world is a stage and society a phantasmagoria. Modernist theater was still able to constitute an engaged chorus with a distinct collective identity—peasant women in Kazantzakis, townsfolk in O’Neill, proletariat in Toller, inmates in Weiss. But if the audience of the postmodern theater becomes part of the stage, how may a chorus with a distinct identity be assembled? Or is it time to abolish it altogether? In the case of both shows, what invited the audience to spill onto the stage, as it were, was the abolition not just of the fourth wall but all four walls through a pronounced theatricality. From beginning to end, Kraounakis and Marmarinos made it abundantly clear that these were not mere stage works—they were theatrical occasions. The audience was not encouraged to identify emotionally with the show or to view it from a critical distance but to join it, to become part of it. In Burning Down the House, people were singing all their favorite songs together with the actors, as if they were all in a taverna. In I am Dying as a Country, it was as if people left the auditorium to join the line passing through the stage and then returned to their seats. In both cases, actors and audience became interchangeable, or rather everybody present could turn into a performer. The question then becomes whether it is possible to have a chorus when everybody is a performer, in other words, whether it is possible to constitute a political community under conditions of total theatricality. How can citizens act together in a theatrum mundi ? Must all politics turn performative? The two shows raised this question with great urgency and left it open. They dramatized the tension between modernist identity and postmodern performance, more specifically, between nation and theatricality. The possibility of a chorus became the focal point of this

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tension. Until recently, Greeks could be represented by a chorus of national origin and resistance, as, for example, in the theater of Yiorgos Theotokas or Iakovos Kambanellis. In our global world, that indigenous chorus has disintegrated. Which theatrical device might replace it? What might be some alternatives to the traditional national community? What can assemble in public people living in a multicultural, decentered metropolis like Athens? How can a political community constitute itself today by acting together? In addition to the disintegration of the national chorus, the two shows also pointed toward the bankruptcy of Greek theater as a national institution. It is interesting that neither Kraounakis nor Marmarinos chose a contemporary Greek play to produce since almost none seems to have grappled with the major socio-political issues that concerned them. (Of course Marmarinos could have chosen a play by Dimitriadis, instead of his novella, but Dimitriadis’s plays are almost never performed in Greece because they are considered too radical.) In fact, in the second half of the twentieth century, playwrights have been the least interesting Greek artists. For example, in sharp contrast to Greek writers, painters, or composers, playwrights (with the single exception of Dimitris Dimitradis) are totally unknown beyond their country since they are very rarely translated and almost never reviewed or performed abroad. Though very popular in Greece and regularly produced, theater is the most insular of Greek arts, functioning as the only, and belated, inheritor of ethographia. Innovative directors are usually uninterested in it as it sounds like second-rate Arthur Miller or Harold Pinter. Its status exemplifies the decline of national art promoted by conservative modernism everywhere, an art that addressed a homogeneous audience with memories of and/or plans for liberation and fulfillment. Thus several issues converge on the question of the chorus on the modern stage—the function of the theater, the public role of art, national identity, and political community. There is yet another issue, the relation with the past—namely, with ancient drama. For much of the twentieth century, Greek producers, in their search for the chorus, when not borrowing from German expressionism, were drawing on traditional rites and rituals such as the panigyri (local festival), the Christian liturgy, or the folk lament. In their choruses, they revived indigenous forms of worship, celebration, and commemoration, providing audiences with a reassuring mediation between antiquity and modernity. The most recent and successful example of this approach was the closing ceremony of the 2004 Olympics, a celebration of summer and the senses that brought a Dionysian chorus on a stage in the Panathenaic Stadium.

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Dimitris Papaioannou, the highly acclaimed producer of that ceremony, made headlines once again in Fall 2009. On 14 October, the beautiful neoclassical building of the National Theater in downtown Athens, which was built by the German architect Ernst Ziller in the 1890s, reopened after a ten-year total renovation. It did not open with an ancient play, a heroic nineteenth-century one (as it first did in 1901), a classicizing or a modernist one. It did not open with a play at all. Instead, choreographer Papaioannou was commissioned to produce a brand-new, site-specific work. He came up with a 30-minute piece for 26 performers called Pouthena (Nowhere), which remained in repertoire for a few weeks. Though site-specific, the piece completely ignored the ornate neoclassical interior that painstaking restorative work brought back to view after many decades. It was totally uninterested in the national, classical, and theatrical history of the building. Instead, it took place on an empty stage and drew on the theater’s exposed brand-new machinery. Without any historical references, without any theatrical conventions, without even a prepared script, the production started literally from scratch. According to Papaioannou’s press interviews, the work wrote itself as it created its own narrative. Its subject was theatrical space, one that is both multiple and atopic—a space measuring the stage with bodies and bodies with stage mechanisms. Papaioannou hoped to open up space to new possibilities and multiple uses. However, although he mentioned the group dynamic between performers and audience, he called the work “an existential search.” The problem is that the title Nowhere denied the work all specificity. The renovated National Theater re-opened with a performance that presumably cannot be repeated anywhere else. But if the performance is nowhere, it cannot be presented even at the National Theater. The group of 26 performers was asked to constitute a utopian community not existing anywhere. The title “Nowhere” had yet another, unintended meaning: people could hardly attend the show. In June 2009, as soon as tickets for the grand re-opening on 14 October went on sale, the Artistic Director of the National Theater, Yiannis Chouvardas, sent a personal appeal to Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, asking him to intervene directly and guarantee the safety of those planning to attend the premiere. The reason was that the neoclassical building stands in what is commonly perceived as one of the most dangerous areas downtown. Crime, violence, prostitution, drugs, gangs have all made attending a performance quite challenging. Thus the National Theater itself operates in the middle of nowhere, even though it stands in the center of

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Athens. The center of Athens has become, for its disoriented inhabitants, the middle of nowhere. Papaioannou did not acknowledge this in his interviews but the National, the Classical, the Theatrical—all notions cardinal to the ancient and capital city—have been rendered impotent by the globalized Athens of the twenty-first century. The only chorus they can still create belongs nowhere. Thus we are left with the open question of the chorus, where issues of artistic and political representation converge. The chorus may not be an indispensable part of theater, not even of tragic theater. But at a time of great interest in theatricality and performativity, when history repeats itself as farce, the need for new forms of civic community that reject dominant forms of representation is often felt (hence the allusion of my title to Richard Schechner’s landmark production Dionysus in 69, which has been captured in Brian de Palma’s film by the same name). The two shows that opened and closed the 2008 Festival failed to establish a chorus on the stage, while the 2009 show that opened the new National Theater placed its chorus nowhere. The inability of these projects to constitute a viable chorus can stimulate general reflection on the place of art and politics in a globalized metropolis and transnational world. What kind of chorus is possible when traditional forms of collective agency do not function any longer? For example, it is interesting that no Greek director, producer or choreographer has drawn inspiration from assemblies that are neither folk nor religious but are instead civic, whether voluntary or involuntary—from the concentration camp, the political prisoners, the strike, the demonstration, the party mobilization, the gay pride celebration, the immigrant gathering. What would happen if a new chorus was based on ways in which people today join forces in public? It has not been tried yet, so we do not know. What we do know is that a few months after the Athens Festival, for two weeks in December 2008, thousands of people who did not feel represented took their protest to the streets of many Greek cities in an attempt to constitute themselves in alternative political ways. Protest and theatricality, politics and art, merged in an unprecedented performance of revolt. It was not a complete revolutionary event but it was a full rehearsal. The streets that are only mentioned but never seen in plays like Grass’s The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising and Genet’s The Balcony became the true stage of revolt as citizens took them over, rehearsing the chorus and searching for their place in the theater of democratic politics. University of Michigan

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NOTES Acknowledgments. This position paper was delivered as part of the Keynote Panel of the Twenty-first Symposium of the Modern Greek Studies Association, which was hosted by the Hellenic Studies Program of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. I am grateful to Yiorgos Anagnostu and his Symposium Program Committee for their invitation to that panel and to Aamir Mufti for his valuable response. 1  Video available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nStYTLt0RVY&trans lated=1. 2  Video available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zbJlHxsRm4. 3  Video excerpts from a 2008 rehearsal in Vienna available on YouTube: http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=EhWDWb1amuQ; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEFlZNFi4ZQ.

The Greek Tragedy Costas Douzinas

Few events in recent European political history have baffled the commentariat more than the widespread Greek insurrection or “riots” (according to right-wing analysts) of December 2008, and those last month [May 2010], when a quarter of a million people took to the streets and the Greek Parliament was stormed by trade unionists and other demonstrators. The catalyst for the 2008 events was the unprovoked police killing of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos on 6 December in a bohemian district in downtown Athens next to the polytechnic and the law school, both associated with student militancy for some 60 years. The catalyst for the 2010 events was the imposition on the Greek people of the harshest austerity measures ever seen in modern Europe. The Greek government accepted a loan from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union that could tide over repayment of its debt (but would not resolve the underlying problem), and in return, it adopted measures that will lead to a deep economic depression and destroy the post-war social contract. The reaction of the Greek people was expected, but would not have been as immediate and powerful had the 2008 events not happened. Within hours of Alexis’s killing, huge protests, occupations, and demonstrations broke out all over Greece. In an unprecedented move, large numbers of secondary pupils occupied some 800 schools. Daily marches to police stations, parliament and ministries were accompanied by sit-ins, street demos, theatre disruptions, the raising of a banner on the Acropolis Hill calling for resistance, and the burning of the Christmas tree in Syntagma Square. Violence against banks and luxury shops was limited and no casualties were reported. Opinion polls had half the population supporting the protests. Solidarity protests throughout Europe created fears of the protests spreading and French Premier Nicolas Sarkozy had to pull back a school reform bill. The insurrection led to a plethora of anxious interpretations. Many often contradictory causes were put forward: economic (unemployment and neo-liberal economic measures), political (persistent corruption and failure of education), cultural or ideological. But Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 285–291 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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the most prominent reaction of commentators was incomprehension mixed with incredulity. No political organisation directed the insurrection, no single ideology motivated it, and no overwhelming demand was put forward. The persistent question “What do the kids want?” often led to the conclusion that the events were not political because they could not be integrated into existing analytical frameworks. What united the protestors was a refusal, a “No more,” and “Enough is enough.” Is this a new type of politics after the slow decay of democracy? The urban space has always been a site of conflict. From the riots of early modernity to the Bastille, the Paris Commune, the Reform, Suffragette and Civil Rights Movements, to May 1968, the Athens Polytechnic 1973, and the Prague and Bucharest Uprisings, the “street” has changed political systems, laws and institutions. In this sense, the December insurrection was a recognisable form of “street” resistance. But this was no ordinary protest. Imagine Westminster and Whitehall under siege everyday for two weeks. A condensation of causes, strategies, and actions turned December into the Greek May. As events developed, the insurrection took on an impetus of its own, drawing in ever-larger numbers in a snowballing effect that kept unsettling every attempt at explanation or pacification. The listing of possible causes could not help understand the effects. The before and the after became indistinguishable; causes, effects, and actions were intertwined into a knot that could not be easily unravelled. In the same way that the coming of the insurrection could not have been predicted, its happening could not be controlled and its long-term effects are only now becoming clearer. This was a type of political action that could not be simply explained from what predated it or reduced to the sum of factors that made it possible. It was precisely the rejection of routine politics that turned the insurrection into an event, in the technical sense of philosopher Alain Badiou. Every social and political situation has an infinite series of elements, classes, groups and people with different interests and ideologies, customs and habits. But in the midst of this plethora of differences, there is an empty place, a void which, while invisible for the dominant forces, supports the stability of the totality. This void lies close to the most anonymous and vulnerable. An event is precisely a type of political action, which does not belong to the standard matrix of the situation from which it emerges. The December insurrection disrupted the settled state of recognized differences: what was invisible, unspoken, and unspeakable (under the pre-existing rules) came to the fore. This made the insurrection difficult to comprehend. It turned these events from

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a usual protest by students or workers into something new, which both retained the characteristics of urban resistance and politics, and overtook them by radically changing the situation. The antagonism that became suddenly visible in Athens resulted from the tension between the structured social body with its political representatives and, on the other side, groups, causes, and interests radically excluded from the political order: huge numbers of people who cannot formulate their most essential demands in the language of a political problem and have nobody to represent them. In this sense, the insurrection was an expression of political agency at its degree zero. The protesters did not say “I want this or that,” but simply “Here we are, we stand against.” Not “We claim this or that right,” but “We claim the ‘right to have rights.’” They seemed to be saying that “We, the nobodies, the schoolkids, the students, the unemployed, the generation that must survive on a salary of 600 Euros, are everything.” Before the event, political change was a matter of policing and consensus. After the rift, politics returns to a certain normality; its terrain has changed, however, through the appearance of new politicized subjects and the re-arrangement of the rules of political participation. For Badiou, the event is evanescent; its very purpose is to disappear. In February 2009, I was writing in The Guardian and in Greece that the insurrection only retrospectively can be recognized as an event, if people, some people remain true to that “next to nothing” that came temporarily to visibility and voice. “This is a wager on all of us. Whether the insurrection becomes an event or remains just that (important as that is) depends on those who after its disappearance will give it a name and will remain loyal to the idea of re-writing the rules of political visibility.” It looks as if the prediction is in the process of being confirmed. A name was given: the “New December” (“ta Nea Dekemvriana”). It evokes the legendary battle in December 1944 between British-led troops and the left-wing guerrillas who had liberated some 80% of Greece by 1943. And from Spring 2010, political visibility and the meaning of politics are being re-defined. Things moved fast after December. Thoroughly discredited, the neo-liberal right wing government disintegrated two years into its term. Early elections were called in October 2009 and the social-democratic PASOK party was easily re-elected after a five-year absence (the socialists have dominated Greek politics since the election of Papandreou père in 1981). PASOK ran its election campaign promising to reverse neo-liberal privatization and de-regulation and to strengthen social justice through extensive re-distributive measures. “There is money,” Papandreou kept saying, “we will make Greece the Denmark of the Mediterranean.”

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Four months later, every single promise lay in tatters. Under instructions from the EU, the IMF, and the ECB, the public sector has been decimated, civil servants and pensioners have had 30% pay cuts, and VAT has been raised by 4%. The economic causes of the Greek debt and deficit have been widely discussed. They are of two types: the neoliberal economic model of the last 20 years with its excessive reliance on growth based on financial markets, real estate values and debt has brought the whole of Europe to its knees and is the main contributor to the Greek tragedy. Secondly, the two ruling parties have used the Greek state to strengthen their political hegemony. Clientelism, nepotism and corruption, tax evasion, and, even more importantly, lawful tax avoidance offered by the ruling political to the economic elites have added to the woes (ship-owners based in Pireas receive some 58 tax breaks which makes the British non-dom furore look like small change). Political scientists bemoaning the apathy, lack of interest, and increasing voter abstention claim that the repeated breaking of manifesto promises is a major reason why citizens turn away from politics. On this basis, the Greek case will become a textbook example of political rather than statistical dissembling. It is morally unimaginable how professional politicians can live with such a violent reversal of promises or hope to go on being taken seriously. But what does losing the trust of citizens mean when the country has lost the trust of the “markets”? Ralph Miliband, one of the great radical thinkers of the last century, describes in his State in Capitalist Society how Labour governments soon turn into “pillars of the established order,” making a more valuable contribution to “the strengthening of the capitalist state” than their opponents (this is a book the younger Milibands—Ralph’s sons, both MPs with the Labour Party—seem intent to prove right). Unfortunately, it is a thesis universally applied. In Greece, it fell upon a “socialist” party to decimate the post-war welfare state it had helped build. But the radical re-structuring of the social bond goes further. Neo-liberalism is not just a pernicious economic model; it is a global ideology and world-view making people understand their lives and relate to others as infinite appropriators and desiring machines and turning politics into the administration of economics. While the economic catastrophe is now clear to all, its political repercussions have been largely ignored. The politics of neo-liberalism takes economic and moralistic forms. In the former, politics becomes an activity resembling the market-place. Individuals, interests, and classes accept the overall socio-economic balance and use politics to pursue marginal improvements of interest and profit. In the second, politics is presented as a process of argumentation where rational consensus about public goods can be reached. Approached

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as a neo-liberal marketplace or as a town-hall debate, neo-liberal politics pronounces conflict finished, passé, impossible, and, at the same time, tries to foreclose its appearance. Its replacement by a collaboration of “truth-telling” economists, modernizing bureaucrats, and patriotic media turns the state into the muscleman for the market internally (exemplified by police coercion and brutality) and a superficially tolerant enforcer of humanitarianism externally (as seen in the recent “humanitarian wars”). But conflict does not disappear—the neo-liberal recipes increase inequality, fuel antagonism, and turn the anger against immigrants and the “undeserving” poor. It is precisely this attitude to politics that the political elites introduced to Greece. None of the unprecedented measures was discussed or approved beyond a small number of government insiders. Their imposition was presented as the inescapable result of greedy market action and perfidious European inaction (which lies behind the market’s greed). They are presented as a humanitarian campaign to save the victims of a natural catastrophe. Neo-liberal economists, experts and the mainstream media pronounced that there is no alternative and then launched one of the most sustained campaigns to persuade the public. Austerity and honesty, salary cuts, and moral righteousness constitute the universal neo-liberal recipe. It takes a harsher form in Greece than in Ireland or Iceland because the (economic) punishment must match moral laxity. While billions were given to the banks socializing their debts, the Greeks on 800 Euros a month, who never saw a penny of state largesse, are now condemned to collective punishment for the misdeeds of their rulers. The moral infamy of collective responsibility which was rightly not applied to the German nation is now visited on the Greeks. To paraphrase Berthold Brecht, you go to prison if you fiddle with your benefits but you get huge bonuses if you bankrupt a bank. Two strategies were used to present this controversial cure, which is worse than the disease, as a matter of scientific objectivity. The first asserted that the neo-liberal diagnosis and recipe is the only available “truth.” Understanding the problem (its history, causes, and context) and discussing alternatives was peremptorily dismissed as ignorant or naïve. But even in Britain, the cradle of neo-liberal idolatry, a large number of senior economists insist that the worst thing to do in a recession is to cut public spending. Greece is predicted to have –4% growth this year before the new measures have kicked in, while 33% of the 18–24 age group are unemployed. This is a virulent type of postmodern cynicism. For real politics, on the other hand, the idea that “there is no alternative” does not exist. Democracy is precisely the expression of disagreement and conflict, a

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form of life through which the most imponderable problems can be put to debate and testing, solutions can be found and then acted upon. This is precisely the reason why the experts and commentators had to pre-empt public opinion by announcing that the most controversial problem of our times belongs not to political judgement and normative evaluation but to the truth-telling discourse of experts. The attempt to cow people before the mystical knowledge of experts and disqualify alternatives was followed by the strategy of the normalization of the extreme. It was the poor man’s version of the politics of fear developed in the Anglo-American “war on terror.” “Greece is at war,” said Papandreou at the height of the crisis. But whom do they fight? The only conclusion is that the Greek government under foreign mandate is fighting the Greeks. Fear is accompanied by a paroxysmal nationalism, which rhetorically attacks the foreign “agents” of Greek travails while adopting all their commands. Greece, we heard, has lost its sovereignty; it is like the Titanic, a guinea pig, a proud country resisting the Germans, etc. This was crowned by the “tragic kitsch” of the anonymous wage earner who accosted the Prime Minister to offer his salary, and the OAP Nana Mouskouri who gave her MEP’s pension for the salvation of the homeland. The IMF and the European Commission now insist that improvement in competitiveness must follow. Deep salary cuts, the undermining of social rights and further labor market flexibilization will be imposed on the private sector after the decimation of the public. These measures are part only of a wholesale radical restructuring of life. Its effects will be more radical and long-lasting than any economic measures. And this was something that those who had participated or welcomed “December” cannot accept. The term “legitimation crisis” describes the mass loss of trust in the (always fragile) social contract, which can no longer mobilize popular assent to a balance of power so palpably and unfairly stacked against the interests of the majority. Such crises arise when the omnipresent gap between rulers and ruled becomes an unbridgeable chasm, and the claim of political elites to represent the public interest no longer convinces. This is happening right now. The general strike and the huge demonstration in Athens on 5 May 2010 marked the beginning of the fight-back. Large sections of the population, traditionally voting for the two ruling parties, are increasingly detached from the political system. Some PASOK MPs and many trade-unionists have broken away from the government and participate in the escalating campaigns. Social disgust at the political elites is changing from passive disengagement into active force. The established media have been worrying that the Greek economic

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“disease” will spread to the rest of the Eurozone starting with the “PIIGS” (the debate in the Western media has been laced in an unprecedented way with racism and Orientalism). Economists suddenly realized that the Euro may be at risk and perhaps even the Union itself. What they had not predicted was that what is at risk is the anodyne post-politics that has dominated Europe. Greeks will not accept becoming a permanent IMF protectorate or the absurdly unfair terms it demands. Perhaps the closest parallel to the current crisis is not the 1930s crash but the collapse of the Italian political system in the 1990s. Greece is entering a prolonged legitimation crisis which could rebound on the rest of Europe. It could be that neo-liberal Europe has picked the wrong link with which to test its muscle. The end or purpose of politics is social justice; when it loses that end, politics comes to an end. This is where we stand today: the Greeks fight for the survival of politics. In turning from guinea pigs into the vanguard of the counter attack, they will be offering a service to the world as important as that of the invention of democracy. university of london

The Greek Crisis— Politics, Economics, Ethics A Debate held at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, 5 May 2010 Costas Lapavitsas

It’s a pleasure to be here, but not under these circumstances, obviously. I’d like to thank Costas Douzinas for organizing the event. What I intend to do here is to give you very briefly some elements of political economy of the current crisis from a report we put together in March with research funds at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) on money and finance in relation to the Eurozone. Then I want to talk about the broader political issues invoked in this terrible situation unfolding in Greece and more broadly. What has caused this crisis? What are the more proximate causes of this crisis? I’d like to argue that there are two. The first has to do with the structural nature, the structural bias of the Eurozone stemming from the way the Eurozone has been set up. I don’t mean by this the contradiction between a unified monetary policy and a fragmented fiscal policy. I’ll come to that, but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that the Eurozone has quite clearly become an area of structural generation of surpluses for the core countries, Germany fundamentally among them, and deficits for the rest, primarily the periphery. These surpluses appear on current account, and then they become transformed into export of capital in the form of foreign direct investment or bank lending (by German firms primarily) to the periphery and elsewhere. In short, the Eurozone has become an area of almost complete German domination when it comes to current account. This is an unprecedented period—and it isn’t just in the Eurozone; there are the surrounding areas of Europe, but the Eurozone is at the core of it. The reason why this has happened is no mystery. Loss of Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 293–309 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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c­ ompetitiveness on the part of peripheral countries is fundamental to this. This loss of competitiveness, again, is no mystery. It’s got nothing to do with German efficiency, German technologies, and so on. It has to do primarily with the very high rates of exchange with which peripheral countries joined the Eurozone, ostensibly to keep inflation down. But more than that it has to do with the eye-watering, incredible wage suppression in Germany itself. It has to do with the fact that the German ruling class, the German employers, have been incredibly successful at keeping wages down, something that has been tried across the Eurozone, but with particular success in Germany for reasons [relating to] the political economy of the country itself. As a result, Germany has been able to gain competitiveness throughout this period, and it has managed to create, to generate, structural surpluses in the Eurozone. The Eurozone has become a mechanism for German domination of much of Europe. The second reason for the current public debt crisis has to do with the gigantic financial crisis that emerged in 2007, which then became a recession by 2009. The state suffered from this for two reasons. First of all, because the state across Europe—to a lesser extent in Greece, but clearly across Europe—rescued the banks, and rescuing the banks is a very expensive business. More fundamental than that, however, is the fact that the recession that followed crushed tax revenue. As a result, state finances began to go into deficit and state debt began to rise. In other words, the public debt crisis, which is happening in front of our eyes in Greece and in the rest of southern Europe, has got nothing to do with state profligacy, a sudden wild bout of expenditure on the part of the Greek State. It follows from these two structural events, causes that I have already explained. Why Greece, though? If these are general causes (and I think they are), they apply to the periphery, as we show in this report. Why Greece? Again there is no mystery. First of all, the productive structure of Greece—this structural imbalance between the core and periphery of the Eurozone that I’ve already mentioned—is particularly weak. Of the sixteen countries, Greece has suffered very severely from this contrast, as you can see from the current account deficit, which has been gigantic (15–16% of GDP) and clearly unsustainable. The second reason is, of course, the weakness of the state. The crisis allowed the internal weaknesses of the Greek State to become clear. It hasn’t been caused by that. Because of these factors, the weakness of the state, which we all know—corruption, clientelism, inefficiency, inadequacies, the lack of a welfare state, the lack of an ability to tax the rich—came to the fore. The third reason for “Why Greece” is, of course, the fiddling of the

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figures, a systematic fiddling of the figures of a particular type, so that the country lost credibility in the international markets. The fourth reason for “Why Greece” is the small size of the country and its public debt markets. You can speculate against Greece; it’s easier. You can’t speculate so easily against Italy; it’s much larger. So if you’re a speculator, and you’ve seen these structural weaknesses, you will pick on Greece in the first instance. These I think are the reasons for “Why Greece.” But there’s something else, too, which has come out of this particular Greek turn of events, which has to do with the nature of the Eurozone, and which has become clearly a political reason. Not simply in terms of the surpluses and deficits which I’ve mentioned to start with, but in terms of the way in which this monetary union and the broader economic and political union have been set up. There is, of course, the contradiction between singular monetary policy and fragmented fiscal policy—sixteen states competing against each other for funds and one central bank managing the money market. There’s more than that, however. This central bank, as it became very clear, made its main task to rescue the banks. When the banks were in trouble in 2008, the central bank, the ECB (European Central Bank), pulled all the stops to rescue them (in terms of liquidity, provision, and so on). When states were in trouble in 2009, the central bank stood on the sidelines and simply watched. It did that because of how it has been set up, reflecting the nature of the hierarchy of power within the Eurozone, among the Eurozone states. When the central bank actually intervened, when they actually agreed to provide money to rescue temporarily the Greek State, they only did it fundamentally in order to rescue French and German banks. The 120 billion Euros that were made available were obviously aimed at preventing a bank collapse in the core countries. One more point about the crisis and what it reveals and where it comes from. The crisis also reveals the social failure in Greece. This social failure, again, is not of the type people talk about, which is that Greeks are this, that, and the other; they’re corrupt, they’re crooks, and so forth. The crisis shows that the Greek ruling class has failed, and has failed in a profoundly historical sense. This lot of people, who has basically taken the lion’s share of political power and economic power in the country for decades, has actually shown itself incapable of succeeding in the European markets. It has shown itself incapable of sustaining investment. It has shown itself incapable of actually devising an independent economic policy at all. It is being pulled and dragged. It’s a sorry sight to see the Greek ruling class the way it looks at the moment. It is unable to formulate a strategy that will actually be in any way different from what

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Brussels demands that it should be. The failure of the state reflects the failure of the ruling class at the moment. The state depicts and reflects the ruling class. Its society has failed. Its class has failed, and its state has failed as a result. What will the measures do? What will happen? The measures are disastrous. They’re not only disastrous because they take away so much income from people and impose taxes—everyone can see that. More fundamentally, they’re disastrous because there is no way out if these measures are followed. It doesn’t require science or economics to understand this. Consumption is declining. Investment is weak and falling in the climate of uncertainty. Exports, which are not a particularly large part of aggregate demand, cannot rise as a result of devaluation. Where will growth come from? It will not. So the most likely outcome is deep recession, and its result is, of course, default. Default is almost certain. I don’t believe the Greek State will avoid default, probably in 2011. The money that has been given simply buys time, and it buys time to rescue the French and the German banks and possibly prepare some defenses for the Portuguese and Spanish economies. The Greeks are doomed in that respect. The real question is how will default be handled. It isn’t whether it should happen. There are people on the left who think, “let’s go for default”; they think this is a revolutionary and radical position. Actually it’s not, because defaulting can happen in many ways. Default can happen by being managed by the IMF. Default can be managed by a conservative Greek government. If we want a radical position in this, we’ve got to demand that default is managed in the way that is in the interests of the broad majority of Greek people. That default actually opens up new paths for the Greek economy and breaks the deadlock in which it finds itself at the moment. I would argue, then, that default must be accompanied by a policy of exit from the Euro. The Eurozone has been disastrous, for reasons I have touched upon, and I think that there is no future for Greece within it. I think exiting from the Euro is a position the left should seriously consider. However, if there is an exit, and a default to accompany it, obviously other measures must be taken very quickly because it’s clear that the banks will find themselves in a bankrupt position. Banks will have to be nationalized. There can be no “ifs, ands, or buts” about this. If that were to happen, other parts of the national economy will have to come under public control, because either they will go bankrupt themselves or their conditions of existence will be severely affected. What that would be—transport, energy, and so on—is for the left to work out. We need a program and a strategy on this. The next thing that should happen is capital controls. If you have

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any program, any set of actions of this type without capital controls, it will drag its feet. It will not be able to work. Next, there must also be protection of workers’ income from the impact of exit from the Euro. Finally, some kind of industrial policy must be put in place and some kind of path to development, some kind of growth, must be worked out to move the economy away from the situation of 71–72% consumption, next to no investment, and a huge current account deficit. All these things, of course, cannot happen without some kind of destruction of the state. The present Greek State is completely incapable of delivering these changes. We’re talking about profound political change that will produce a state that can tax, a state that can transfer income, a state that makes income and equality an important consideration in how it operates, and tries to effect some income distribution that Greece needs very badly. Who will do all this? Clearly there are social and political requirements. A different alliance of social classes needs to go closer to power in order to affect a shift of power away from capital and towards labor. The social layers that hold power in Greece are bankrupt at the moment. However, there are clearly working class layers in the cities, huge small business type, professional type layers in both city and country, and of course farmers, who are desperate for an alternative policy, desperate for a social alliance that would bring some kind of shift out of the current deadlock. A social alliance, then, of this type—and I believe with working people being the natural leader in this. Politically, that would require a front, a political front. The left must be at the heart of it. Unless the left comes up with these ideas and suggestions, no one else will. The left must go beyond its own weaknesses, beyond its own factionalism and all the rest of it, which you know very well; it must position itself in the center of a broad front that can take on the measures that are being imposed on the Greek people, and begin to develop the alternative program that I suggested. Is this likely? Actually it’s more likely than you think. Things at the moment are careening out of control in Greece. People are looking for alternatives. They’re not moving to the left necessarily, but they’re looking for alternatives. They are open to radical ideas. If they don’t find them, and if the left cannot come up with coherent alternative ideas, they might go to the right. They might do something else. Therefore the time is now. It is for the left to work out how to take advantage of it. SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES

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Kevin Featherstone

We do have a debate here. Because there are a number of points that Costas has just made that I would disagree with. Why has Greece entered this crisis? I think what made Greece vulnerable cannot be divorced from the domestic conditions. It was ultimately, I think, a crisis invented in Greece. It was a comfortable blame shift away from the general public and the workers to a Greek ruling class, a European Union, international capital. There is a list here that we could extend; a blame shift away from society as a whole. It has “nothing to do with state profligacy.” Sorry, I had understood that the debt to GDP ratio since 1993 has been consistently around 100% of Gross Domestic Product. How could a state sustain those levels of debt and not be vulnerable? Costas Lapavitsas has also indicated there’s no way out of the crisis unless these measures are followed. He mentioned the extensive nationalization, an autarchic position. Greece has a number of constraints which are accepted across the political spectrum and across most of Greek public opinion. If you wish to exit the EU, if you wish to exit a relatively liberal international economy, well okay, but that is a different debate. In the conditions that we find ourselves, Greece has to learn to live with constraints. So how did Greece get into this position? I think it does ultimately stem from the nature of the Greek State, which Costas mentioned. I think there we can agree with all of the usual combination of factors that we are aware of: politics of rent seeking, of rousfeti (bribes), of clientelism, all of these are a growth of the state in a society in which there was no constituency to limit the growth of the state. Greece is therefore on its way to being a failed state. I agree there is a continuing risk of default. I agree that there is a continuing risk of the debt having to be restructured, of investors accepting haircuts on loans to Greece. We’ve seen the response of the international markets to the recent package. It may not be enough to give Greece the assurances it needs. But nothing to do with state profligacy? I thought that the relationship that the state has to wider society, and the wider economy, is fundamental to the nature of the crisis that we have at the moment. To bring it down to the most crude of examples, rousfeti politics, clientelism, etc.—no one forces people to accept a bribe, no one forces people to insist on bribes being offered. This is clearly a context in which petty corruption, sometimes larger scale corruption, has been tolerated. The state has become obese because of party, political, and

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clientelistic reasons. There is a cultural setting here, which has led to the profligacy of the state. But what have we learned about the Euro and the Eurozone? I agree that whilst the crisis has been largely invented in Athens, it has been greatly weakened by the inaction and the divided signals of Eurozone leaders. The EU and the Eurozone have created the risk of contagion to the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain). I agree that the German stance in particular has been confusing and apparently selfdefeating. Germany consistently has reflected a position of auto-liberal economics, a belief, an assumption that discipline cannot be imported; it has to be nurtured, grown at home. I agree that Maastricht and the design of the EU had a fundamental design problem from the very beginning. The risk of establishing an economic and military union, which is mostly a monetary union, without a European monetary fund, made the system vulnerable. These limitations were foreseen at Maastricht, but the solutions were ruled out by Germany. Germany, I think, is now bearing the cost of the narrow vision it had for EU at Maastricht. I also agree that Angela Merkel’s delay, all apparently because of a few votes in North Rhine-Westphalia, has plunged the Eurozone into a crisis. I cannot believe that any previous German chancellor of the postwar period would have acted in such a small-minded, narrow-visioned fashion. Belatedly, Merkel and Eurozone leaders have committed themselves to the loan. Political credibility is clearly now on the line, for presidents are not gurus. You can think of the difficulties of governments in Europe trying to defend themselves against markets with, say, Black Wednesday here in the UK in 1992, then later in August of 1993 for the wider exchange rate mechanism and the wakeup of the ERM at that time. In each of those cases, we could note from the history that Germany has behaved in a way which has implied preference for a smaller Deutsch Mark zone. I suspect that that is still the case today. That it’s not only just the German stereotypical prejudices against lazy Greeks, but rather that Germany has realized that the Eurozone is fundamentally flawed, and that German interests are better served by a smaller Eurozone, something of the kind of Deutsch Mark zone of the early 1990s. Can Greece implement reforms and get out of crisis? We have a failing state and a state that seems to be barely fit for purpose. The crucial core functions of the state expose the inadequacies of the administration, if you think of the system of budget managements within the Greek government, a chaotic, archaic system of management. In 2009, budgets consisted of 14,000 separate budget lines. The difficulty of trying to control spending, of having sufficient and reliable information in this

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context, is tremendous. How much does Greece spend on education? The answer tends to be, “it is the amount of money spent by the Ministry of Education.” That is not exactly the answer to the question. What we have is a system that is incapable of monitoring spending, coordinating spending, and this now in a context in which budget time is of utmost importance. Greece, of course, has little experience of financial auditing and the evaluation of public spending. Here in the UK, a couple of weeks ago, we had major controversy as a result of a report published by the Institute of Fiscal Studies. Oh for the want of an Institute of Fiscal Studies in the Greek context, something which inculcates debates about where the state is spending, the usefulness of that step, of that expenditure, the rewards from it! If you think now in terms of the number of posts in the public sector, the idea that the Greek State doesn’t have an accurate understanding of how many people are required in the wider public sector as a whole, it is a fundamental dysfunction in terms of budget management and audit. Also if you think in terms of the current fashionable focus on opening up the closed professions, how well does the Greek State know about these closed professions? Can it identify them and know how to re-regulate them? We have a system within government of very poor coordination and very weak centralization. We have a governmental system which is full of paradoxes, a system which emphasizes ministries and ministerial domains, a system in which the cabinet is very weak; a prime minister that, in formal terms, is tremendously powerful, but who lacks the resources to coordinate and direct. You have the sense, when we look at the Greek system, of political leaders being in government, but not necessarily in power. Not fully in power. Of a machine in which those at the head of the administration lack the levers, the information, the resources, to provide effective management. This must undermine our confidence in the ability of the machine to implement the necessary reforms. What is the alternative here? There is an emphasis that Greece could readjust its policies and could leave the Eurozone, that it could nationalize various industries. What is the effect of leaving the Eurozone in this context? It would be financial Armageddon coming at full speed. The idea that Greece could exit the system and then deal with the chaos of state employees, benefits, and operations not being funded, is, I think, not one that we could perceive being managed at all effectively. So Greece leaving the Eurozone is not a realistic proposition. Turkey’s voting for Christmas comes to mind in this context. The measures are extremely difficult. If we were trying to explain why Greece got into this mess—and a mess it is—would we say that it has got into this mess

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because of external problems, etc? The imbalances within the Eurozone, the structural benefits that Germany enjoys? Yes, to some degree. But would we not say (and have I not heard generations upon generations of Greek scholars emphasizing to outsiders like myself) that problems within Greece stem in significant part from the nature of the Greek State? That is, its clientalism, its corruption, its rousfeti, its profligacy, and state expenditure? I don’t think in this context we can deny, in other words, that we have a crisis which was ultimately invented in Athens. LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Peter Bratsis

Since it looks like our presentations will take more the form of a debate than we thought originally, I think I would like to challenge some of Kevin’s arguments and assertions. First of all, we have in the current discourse on the crisis in Greece certain contradictory arguments about why the PIIGS, as Kevin alluded to them, are all in crisis. PIIGS is a troubling term for many of us. That it can be printed freely in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, is itself a sign of the routinization of racism. Why are the PIIGS, like the Greeks, pigs? They are pigs because they cannot control their urges. They cannot refrain from immediate satisfaction: an easy job, retirement at 42, with a beach house and maybe a chalet in Switzerland (if they have at least been a member of Parliament). As opposed to the good white people who are civilized and trained and can work dutifully up to at least 73 and 74 years old and pay more than their share of taxes for the Greek citizens. Their answer to the Greeks and the other PIIGS—who will, I’m sure, have a similar crisis in the near future—is clear: you expect us to sacrifice our immediate wellbeing for you? You expect us German taxpayers to pay our tax money to you lazy people? If civilized means we sacrifice our self interests, or at least the immediate self interest, for longer term collective good, then the Germans very happily (if they were really civilized, unlike the PIIGS), should say, “yes, please; here take this money, you need it, we are willing to sacrifice.” But they don’t say this because they are pigs like the Greeks. Secondly, the idea that corruption and clientelism are the sources of the crisis is a completely ideological, metaphorical understanding of the problem. It goes back to the old colonialist idea that the cause of

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poverty in the south is because the people are not hardworking enough, not civilized enough, and corrupt in general. Why? Corruption in the case of Greece—clientelism—is not qualitatively different, from the standpoint of how public policy is made, from what happens in London or in Washington or in Paris or Berlin. If corruption is a problem because private interests infiltrate the policymaking process and result in policy decisions based more upon private good rather than public wellbeing, this is no different than the way the city of London controls the British Parliament. One could argue that the difference is that in Greece, these processes are personalized. In the eyes of the “good white Europeans,” it looks like being dirty. From the standpoint of public policy in general, it is difficult to argue that one system is inherently better or more efficient at creating policies that are good for everybody. Public policy in Greece is very bad. It’s not because of clientelism, however; it’s not because private interests are able to easily enter the public sphere, because that’s also true here in London. It’s also true in Paris. In the popular understanding, the Althusserian idea of the spontaneous ideology of the crisis is related to the racism, ethnicity, the dirty and the clean. And this is, in my mind, a sign of the failure of the European project. Let’s keep in mind that the European project, as it was conceived initially, was not simply to create an economic common market. It was to create economic interdependencies so as to minimize the possibility of violent political antagonisms—initially in France and Germany—so we can avoid another world war. Let’s create economic interdependencies in such a way that whatever conflicts may arise in the future, they will not result in war. Our existence is dependent on each other. Beginning with these principles, which even those of us on the left can appreciate and respect, we should organize ourselves in ways to minimize killing each other. Now, it works the opposite way. The interdependencies are such that a lot of the money goes to Germany or France and so forth. The money sent to Greece didn’t go to buying coffee and cigarettes. It went to building the metro by Siemens, and to Volkswagen for all its cars that the Greeks buy; it went to the wellbeing of the Germans. These interdependencies make it more likely that we will have, or are seeing, violence and conflict within Europe grow. So this tells us something about the contemporary political moment and the incapacity of economics in itself to solve anything. We need a return to the question of politics, the question of organization, to the question of culture and civility. Let’s forget all the easy answers (i.e., it’s a question of good policies, of not being corrupt, of being honest, of being hardworking). We know for sure that they have been no good. UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD

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Stathis Kouvelakis

One of the ways, it seems to me, that is more relevant to understanding what is happening in Greece is to use a notion recently developed by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. I think it’s interesting to pose the terms of the problem in that way. What is going on in Greece simply means that it’s the first time the so-called shock doctrine, as a necessary constitutive element for any neoliberal purge, is put into practice in a western European country. After having been tested, of course, many times in the past in other parts of the world and in the eastern part of the European continent, the results are now very familiar to us. The idea of the shock doctrine is, to put it very simply and as briefly as possible, the following: it’s impossible for this neoliberal purge, or, if you like, for this kind of qualitative leap in rhythm and the depth of the neoliberal purge, to be implemented—but furthermore, to be even, if not accepted, at least tolerated by societies—outside the creation and the staging of an exceptional situation, of a situation of emergency, in the wake of which, somehow, normal life is disrupted and what seemed until quite recently unimaginable, just happens. Shock and awe are exactly what the shock doctrine is about: shock and awe, which are directed within societies, targeting the social body itself, and of course within the social body, the popular classes and the subaltern groups of society at its very core. The normal time and the normal course of events are somehow interrupted. I’ve been to Greece many times, and each time I was amazed by the very concrete experience I had of acceleration, a constant acceleration, of the pace of events. The acceleration was fed by the media, by the political system, but also it came from the unfolding of the objective contradictions of the situation. This event has therefore to be understood as the unleashing of violent elementary systemic forces, such as (to repeat or to quote some examples underlined or analyzed by Klein in her book) wars, military occupations that follow, military coups, and of course the use of certain national disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, for example. And I think that a major economic crisis, such as the one that is happening, is precisely an event of this type. Major not in the sense of a usual cyclical recession, but something close to a collapse affecting the foundations of the economy of the state, of the social and political system in its entirety. It is an organic crisis, to use the term of Antonio Gramsci. This means that Greece, the social and political forces in Greece, has to face a new and unprecedented situation. This is a situation for

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which no one is prepared; neither on the top layers, on the ruling ­layers of society, nor on the bottom, on the side of the popular forces of all the people who would somehow suffer the consequences of what is happening. Everyone somehow is destabilized, and this is why what is going on now in Greece is absolutely crucial. What I’ve said about this shock therapy is, of course, of a much more general and varied validity, it seems to me. What is specific to Greece is that, as has been suggested in very powerful terms by the speakers before me, in Greece, this shock therapy and this neoliberal purge is even more necessary because indeed we have to deal here with the weakness of the political structures and of the Greek State more specifically. Costas Lapavitsas, in a very relevant way, emphasized the failure of the ruling class. I think that failure can be understood in two ways. The first is the short-term way. There has been an immediate failure to deal with the contradictions of the Greek capitalist system. The conversation of all these contradictions just happened, so I will not repeat it. There is a more long-term understanding of this failure, however, that I want to emphasize as a long-term event, because it seems to me that it is relevant to the many points of the debate we just had among the previous speakers. I come from, and I situate myself, within the Marxist tradition. One of the key ways within this tradition of dealing with the state is to talk about its relative autonomy. Nicos Poulantzas famously elaborated a lot on the relative autonomy of the state. Its relative autonomy means that the state has the capacity to be at a distance from the different factions of the ruling class and of the balance of class forces in society. That it intervenes to constitute somehow the overall outcome of those class forces and in-class relations is the condensation of that balance between class forces, as Poulantzas famously said. The characteristic of the Greek State is precisely that this relative autonomy (for reasons that go very deep in Greek history) has been much weaker, much more limited than in other cases. The Greek State, indeed, has been in constant war with the popular classes and with its own people for many decades. What is at the very root of the weakness of the Greek State, paradoxical as it may sound to some people, is the very failure of the popular classes in Greece to reach a permanent form of representation and regulation of their interests within the state itself. All the phenomena we are talking about are just ways to compensate, from above and below if you prefer, this form of weakness. The popular classes, precisely because they are deprived of the more institutionalized, of the more stabilized form of the social compromises that have been reached by the popular classes in other parts of the European continent

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in the context of the so-called welfare state, have to bypass these stable forms somehow and reach some purely particularistic or fractional form of fulfilling certain immediate interests via practices such as those mentioned before. But this is much more the case of the permanent classes, of course, and the dominant groups. What we call corruption in Greece just means how obscene and how incestuous the relations between fractional capitalist interests and the Greek capitalist state as such are. This is exactly, I think, what we are talking about. What are the possibilities that are opened up by the structural weakness of the Greek State? I would point to two of them. The first has to do with the relative position of the Greek national formation within the international division of labor. I think that one of the main interests of this very important piece of research produced by Costas Lapavitsas and the whole group of economists working with him is exactly the way it updated and made relevant the analysis about this division and the polarizing effects of the core/periphery division in Europe. We have to distinguish two levels of periphery within Europe. The first with Greece, the south, and the so-called PIIGS, and the second will be the peripheral, which means Eastern Europe, of course. The weakness of the Greek State, in the context of the shock therapy, just means the loss of the remnants of what can be a form of national sovereignty. Which means also the erosion of a level of control of the popular forces in the state and the disorganization of the representation, of the relation of representation, between the state and the factions of the dominant class. This downgrading of the position of the Greek State within the international system will have far-reaching consequences. It is within this context that the popular forces have to situate their own struggle, elaborate their own strategy, and operate their own system of allowances on a European and on an international level. The second consequence of that weakness of the Greek State, to put it very simply and a bit more optimistically, is that it opens up the possibility of direct intervention of the popular forces. Indeed, as we all know, Greek history and even recent events in Greece have been characterized by exactly this direct intervention of the popular forces, of the popular struggles in the political scene. Because it is important to understand that what happens today just gives us a taste of what will follow in the forthcoming weeks and months, I will offer some examples. In 2001, an uprising of the Greek Trade Union movement succeeded in preventing the brutal and savage reform of the pension system initiated by the modernizing government of Costas Simitis. In 2006 and 2007, Greece was the only country in Europe where a successful student movement succeeded in blocking many of the effects of the Bologna process, and

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of blocking the partial privatization of higher education. In 2008, as a result of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, the very legitimacy of the state was put into question by the most important popular uprising that has happened in Europe since the 1970s. What we have seen happening in the streets of Athens is a combination of all those events. The two-day-long national strike organized by the unions, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating, public sector workers entering into clashes and violent insurrectionary form of practices with the police. This form of social practices from below, transgressed in the existing framework of political representation, of political confrontation, and of public debate, will be one of the major characteristics of the period to come. It will also be one of the major challenges the Greek left and the popular forces in Greece will have to face in the future. From this test and from this challenge, they can be destroyed, but they can also open up a new and unprecedented perspective for the future of the country, for the popular movement, and, moreover, for the progressive forces in Europe and elsewhere. KING’S COLLEGE, london

Etienne Balibar

First I want to say that I’m not an economist. I’m not a politologist. I’m not Greek. I’m not an expert on Greek issues. So what could I say that would be relevant to the current discussion? Of course, something that is tempting is to play the role of the arbiter. Pick up something from one of the previous speakers, something from the other, they are opposing each other on several issues, and I would take a moderate or some sort of intermediary position, but that’s not very serious. The reason why I accepted the very kind offer that was made to me to become part of this panel, in which initially I had no reason to be, was not only friendship but also the fact that I was thinking that it would possibly, if only symbolically, add to the pan-European dimension of this discussion which, from my point of view, is extremely important here. Basically, what I want to argue is that we cannot deal separately with the problem of Greece and with the problem of Europe. The situation is extremely complicated, as has been illustrated in the previous interventions, both from the point of view of the consideration of causes and origins of the current situation and from the point of view of the

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possible outcomes and developments. If I have one thing to say, it’s precisely that: within this complexity lies an absolute interdependency of both sides. Therefore, I don’t see any possibility to play Europe against Greece or Greece against Europe, since this has practical or concrete consequences as soon as we come to some of the most burning issues that are at stake. If we take as an example the issue of whether it would be the good solution for Greece, given the catastrophic situation, the extreme likeliness, as was argued a moment ago that the default will come anyway, and whether it could be a good solution or the only possible solution for the Greeks to leave the Euro, or whether they should remain inside. I don’t know if anyone is in a position right now to say yes or no, but I would argue that this question cannot be discussed only from the point of view of the Greeks. It has to be discussed from the point of view of the Europeans themselves. This is a bit strange to argue, since we are here in Britain, there is something a little surrealistic, because Britain is not part of the Eurozone. This is not to say that Britain is not involved—and again I’m no economist—if we simply agree on the idea that the problem created by this cycle of financial speculation, state intervention, opening the possibility for a new moment or a new level of financial situation which is now directed not only at private firms but at states themselves, is not something that concerns only Greece. It’s not something that concerns only the Eurozone itself with its common currency, but it’s something that has a much wider meaning. I brought with me (and I hope this is not considered a provocation) an issue of the French newspaper Le Monde, more particularly, its economic weekly supplement, considered in France and in some other places to be a serious journal, although you may disagree with many of its positions. (The issue was published just a few days ago, I think on May 4th, though it’s dated May 3rd, so you can see it’s extremely recent.) The big headline is the following: “United Kingdom, Greek Peril.” Agree or not with the reasoning, I think that says something about the interdependency of all this. To conclude on these general considerations, I would like to say two things. The first is, as European citizens, as leftists and leftist intellectuals, some of us, like Stathis Kouvelakis, raise the Marxist flag. I’m not against that. Others would choose a slightly different etiquette, but there is something I believe as part of a left intelligentsia. We have, as a first obligation, to express solidarity with the protests of the Greek people as it is developing now for at least two reasons, which do not concern them. The first has to do with democracy. This has been powerfully

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argued by Costas Douzinas in a few recent papers, but I think it can be expanded and it can be taken as a starting point for a common position. The fact is that the purge, or the work of economic social measures and restrictions that are now imposed on the Greek people on account of solving the debt problem, has been imposed in fact without any— without the slightest—element of democratic discussion, both within the country and outside the country. These are purely technocratic measures which amount to a kind of dictatorial process. I have long argued that democracy is in crisis in Europe, both at the national level and at the supranational or communitarian level. This doesn’t work as a zero sum game. Democracy goes down at the national level as it is blocked at the common level. The converse, the opposite process, is also true, though there is no guarantee at all, only a possibility. This raises accompanying issues. A moment ago, Stathis Kouvelakis was powerfully arguing that popular movements and revolt forms of collective expression in Greece could start something like a reversal of the current facts on the ground at a more global and European level. I wish I could say immediately yes you are right, but I’m not absolutely sure of that. Perhaps for similar reasons somebody else suggested a moment ago that the people (and I would say not only Greek people, but others as well) are ripe for radical solutions. Whether or not these solutions will be on the right or be on the left is not something that we can count on. Sometimes this is called populism, but the name populism covers a wide range of different possibilities. If as intellectuals, with our limited but not absolutely insignificant possibilities, we have a role to play here, this is to act as quickly and powerfully as possible to create a circulation of hypotheses, ideas, and propositions at the European level in order to facilitate a positive reaction from other countries to what is likely to take place. The second thing I would like to say is that the program of bailout that has been adopted in the course of only two days was presented first in triumphalistic terms. At last, after one month or three weeks of contradictions among the leading countries of Europe, they have reached the solution that everyone was expecting. Then, no more than two days later, some of the most influential media outlets, like The Wall Street Journal, have titles such as “The Greek Bailout Frappé.” The solution that has been proposed and adopted is not likely to block the cycle that I was alluding to a moment ago. This being the case, the fact is that the plan is nevertheless being adopted. What this plan means, in my opinion, is that the European community, and particularly the Eurozone, is not now asking some sort of complementary help or support from the IMF. It is just he opposite. The figures show that three quarters of the money will come from Europe and one quarter will come from the IMF, and there

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are rules according to which this help is provided. The IMF has been implementing for decades such programs all over the world, even with some precautions. The implementation of its plan in Greece means that the Eurozone, which was meant to become a zone of complementarity and solidarity among national economies in Europe, is now decidedly a zone of fierce and wide competition among its own members. The conclusion that I derive from this is not, despite all the good reasons we have heard, that the inevitable outcome should be to leave the European Union and allow its common currency to collapse and perish. I think that result would be even worse, not only for the Greeks, but for all of us. Some sort of radically alternative understanding and vision, both of the European economic policy and of the European social model, is now badly and urgently needed. university of california–Irvine

Nemesis: From the Cruelest of Aprils to the Most Unpredictable of May Days Constantine Tsoucalas

Whatever the outcome of the “Greek crisis,” all current discourses seem to be announcing a new era. Despite their obvious differences in culture, in tactics, and in style, political leaders and bankers, economists and analysts, bureaucrats and activists seem to agree on the explosive unpredictability of the situation. It would seem that the new universal specter haunting the actual developed world is not communism—or even terrorism—but financial speculation. Is capitalism in danger of being devoured by its own offspring? Are we obliged to reconsider the actual situation in the light of Karl Marx’s contention that the only real limit of capital is capital itself? Obviously, the debate must remain inconclusive. But there can be no doubt that it is open. Of course, the ubiquitous signs of alarm may be interpreted in a narrower “technical” sense. Indeed, to the extent that mismanaged national economies always run the risk of falling into the clutches of the extortionist interest rates of the free market, all prospective emulators of Greek practices, by now seen as the epitome of disgraceful irresponsibility, must be unanimously discouraged. And in this respect, the pitiless capital market and the even more ominous International Monetary Fund may well function as the most effectively deterring of scarecrows. It is by now openly maintained that if governments do not conform to the rules, it is their countries and people who will have to pay the price. In this sense, regardless of their effects, the decisions of the free market are seen as theodicies. Even if they are unpredictable, they always remain “rational” and “just.” However, the very vehemence of anti-speculative discourses seems to indicate that much more than market rationality and justice is at stake. Indeed, by now it would seem that even the established and “responsible” political systems feel increasingly vulnerable when facing the unpredictable activities of capital markets. Not more than two years ago, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 311–320 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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the operations of U.S. financial capital had serious destabilizing effects all over the world. And at present the situation looks even more risky. The combined and unpredictable influence of international financial consortia, stock markets, evaluating houses, and speculative “bets” on national fiscal entities, national or even on transnational currencies like the Euro, and on the dynamics of the international economy seem to be leading to a second and even more uncontrollable round of capitalist instability. A general crisis of public debt on a wide scale may constitute a threat for the entire capitalist system. And for the time being at least, there seem to be no plausible ways out of this nightmare. Moreover, such an eventuality seems to be inscribed in the central logic of current developments. It should be kept in mind that what has been referred to as irresponsible “casino-type” activities are not exclusively confined to maverick speculators specializing in money laundering and short-term turnovers within their well-protected off shore havens. It would seem that by now, most “serious” banking investing houses and institutions from the infamous Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sacks to the once venerable Deutsche Bank or the proverbial Zurich gnomes tend to have abandoned all remnants of their in-built conservatism. The quest for maximizing immediate profits whatever the consequences is by now not the exception but the rule. Unrestricted and instantaneous capital mobility inevitably increases market uncertainty and enhances speculative competition. In this context, rapid structuration and de-structuration of all forms of entrepreneurial activities are organized in view of flexible liquidation of assets, immediate capitalization, and swift returns. Thus, short-term concerns tend to displace long-term investments. Gresham’s law seems eminently applicable. In the same way that “bad” money tended to drive out “good” money, it would seem that “good” and sound banking investments are increasingly being driven out by their wildly speculative counterparts. This is far from being new. Indeed, by definition, profit maximization must always provide the overarching blueprint for all rational economic actions. In this sense, the only conceivable limit of entrepreneurial profit making initiatives is always external to the “economic sphere.” Profiteering is a rational “bet” where institutional certitudes are balanced against market uncertainties. In this sense, if uncertainty is a necessary component of the free market, it must take place within a stable environment of pre-established “rules.” The beneficial effects of the “invisible hand” can be ensured only if profitable “private vices” are activated under historical conditions setting certain limits and constraints. In order for private property to be able to function as the foundation of social relations, it must be recognized and protected.

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This is precisely the reason why the reproduction of the system of capitalist social relations cannot take place automatically. A totally free market is by definition tantamount to complete normative, political, and moral anarchy and anomy. If left unleashed and unhindered, unrestricted individualistic market forces menace to defeat their own purposes. Social reproduction is impossible without some kind of exo-economic intervention. Therefore, if the system is to be protected against explosion, a minimum of institutional, regulative and normative coherence must be respected. And such respect can only be imposed by means of a “State of law” ensuring a mandatory system of binding provisions. In this sense, the existence of an independent and legitimate territorial sovereign State power is the historical condition of social reproduction. And this is precisely the reason why the separation and articulation of political and economic systems must be institutionalized. Capitalism cannot survive if long-term public norms cannot act as a countervailing power to shortterm private profit seeking. In order for the positive aspects of market uncertainty to be ensured, institutional security must be maintained. In this sense, if wild private speculation per se is as old as the capitalist world, public regulation is equally inescapable. The present crisis should be considered precisely in this light. Indeed, it is my contention that the general political concern about the growingly nefarious role of international finance is to be attributed to the dislocation of the internalized norms of articulation between the State and the market, between the public and the private sphere, between the stability of norms and the fluidity of actions. However, the new situation the capitalist world is facing cannot possibly be ascribed to a “sudden” realization of the normative deficiencies of free speculative endeavors. By definition, private profiteering activities must remain true to their historical essence. The new emerging menace can therefore only be explained in terms of deep changes in the regulating and normative functions and intervention capacities of the State itself. What is being uprooted is the historical balance between private entrepreneurial freedom and public normative regulation, between market uncertainty and normative stability. The main reason why speculation is running wild is the demise of the “braking” mechanisms of stable control. This is precisely the focal point of actual developments. Indeed, it is by now clear that most organized political subsystems are growingly incapable of keeping market speculation under public control. And consequently, the dominant system of social relations seems to be facing an acute crisis in the modes of its reproduction. The balance between the regulating State and the whims of the free market is being drastically revised in favor of the latter. Both institutionally and rhetorically, the

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dynamic development of market forces is being growingly “liberated” from the normative order and constraints imposed by the political systems. The advent of the phenomenon we usually refer to in terms of globalization seems to be announcing a significant displacement of the modes of articulation between economic, political and normative power. Most of the mechanisms ensuring the smooth reproduction of social relations within circumscribed social systems are being dismantled. Increasingly, capitalist accumulation is running wild. In this context, it is most probable that the actual role of capitalist states should be redefined. Indeed, it should be kept in mind that the traditional role of States as “keepers of the normative order,” as “instruments of the ruling classes,” or as “general staffs of the ruling bourgeoisies” supposed their (relative) autonomy vis-à-vis the various fractions of the ruling classes. Within given legal-territorial entities, capitalist States were thus endowed with the ultimate political responsibility both for maintaining “law and order” and for ensuring the long-term stable conditions of capital accumulation. This is precisely the reason why liberal capitalist societies were organized and perceived as totalities consisting of institutionalized “levels” of interacting and interdependent power forms. Market forces must function within the limits imposed by “publicly” defined normative and legal systems. Henceforward, however, it would seem that the “balances” between the subsystems of organized power are being dismantled or, at least, displaced. The fact that financial markets are developing into autonomous, uncontrollable, and intrinsically menacing actors is tantamount to increasing public powerlessness. Within this new context, the overall reproduction of social relation is not subjected to direct public scrutiny. Both on the global-international and on the national level, the powers of normative and institutional intervention of public authorities are under rapid evaporation. On the one hand, and most obviously, there are no international institutions endowed with the power and competence to intervene on the transnational level. Even if it were possible to create global control from scratch, such regulatory options lie far beyond the limits of dominant political imagination. In the emerging balances of power, de-territorialized financial entities are increasingly autonomous from any kind of territorial constraints. And in this context, political inactivity is usually preferable to risk. The message of the Copenhagen Summit could not be clearer: if no commonly acceptable political decision is to be reached, sleeping dogs are let to lie unhindered. On the other hand, within national State systems themselves, growing political hesitancy and impotence are becoming even more significant. Indeed, within the all-enveloping globalized economic system, State power

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is being seriously impaired. States are increasingly incapable of defining, producing, let alone imposing their own particular normative and political terms of reference. The very fact that States define themselves as obliged to succumb to unrestricted capital mobility and to tolerate offshore institutions escaping all forms of effective jurisdiction is only the pretext for complying to what is referred to not only as inevitable but also as technically and ideologically rational. The TINA syndrome is by now an all-enveloping assumption. Under the circumstances therefore, the most that can be hoped for is some kind of distinction between “good” forms of speculation that may be favored and encouraged and “bad” forms that must be dissuaded. Whatever the criteria adopted, such rhetorical distinctions must however remain totally ineffective and irrelevant. To the extent that unrestricted capital mobility and rapacity are a given in advance, even if speculation were to be put under some kind of (shadowy) normative control, even if it were to be (minimally) taxed, it would still have a free hand. This, of course, is not the place for treating this immense problem. But the very fact that such questions may legitimately be asked is characteristic of our turbulent and probably transitional times. In what follows, I only intend to raise some questions on the immediate effects of globalization on the changing modes of the dominant liberal consensus, reflected as they are on the fundamental principles of social organization. Indeed, the institutional, ideological and imaginary distinction between the social and the political, the articulation between the fields of action of private economic and entrepreneurial liberty and organized political collectivities, the separation between the private and the public realms and interests, and the radical disjunction between the official capacities of the State and the functions of the free market are undergoing rapid modifications. And this entails an even deeper dislocation of the distinction between economic and political power. The distinction between the private market dynamics of the productive system and the public responsibility for reproducing the conditions of production is being bereft of its traditional importance. Together with the functions and mechanisms of production, the mechanisms of reproduction are increasingly being privatized and “liberated” from the public yoke. Within this context, the notion of the political is undergoing a significant change. If we still insist on defining politics as the “specialized field” where historical decisions on common welfare and the public interest are reached and implicated, it is by now clear that most decisions with far-reaching social effects are taken outside the democratically organized political “subsystems.” The powers transforming the world

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seem to be set in motion not by deliberate public decisions, but by the uncontrolled strategies and interests of the private masters of knowledge, technology, and finance. The main new feature of State-centered political systems seems to consist of the fact that State power is by now increasingly circumscribed by its structural heteronomy. Indeed, what we used to refer to in terms of political sovereignty appears to be withering away. In Carl Schmitt’s terms, the margin of independently deciding on “exceptional circumstances” is narrowed down. It is no accident that the concept of “government” is being transformed and transliterated into “governance,” a neutral euphemism for governments deprived both of legitimacy and of real power. Inevitably therefore, under the circumstances, in spite of the persistence of old-fashioned rhetorical exhortations still based on symbolic reminiscences of sovereign, independent, and responsible public decision making, political discourses feel obliged to comply with universally valid and imposed blueprints. By now, no one “in his right senses” would dare challenge the actually dominant dogmas. Deregulation, competitiveness, productivity, and maximization within a totally liberated market environment are seen as given and immutable components of the same universal game. Increasingly, therefore, real social issues are technicized, de-politicized and “de-socialized.” In this sense, crucial decisions are not reached after a public debate of real options. Henceforward, the organizational and ideological laws of “globalized capitalism” function as if they were embedded in “obviously” immutable “constitutional” provisions. No one is entitled to change or revise them, least of all petty “States” representing petty “people.” It would by now seem that Ibsen’s dictum that “people are always wrong” is being taken at face value. When matters become serious, there can be no option. It is no accident that even on the traditional territorial level, key institutions like central banks are being endowed with growing autonomy vis-à-vis national political authorities, and key functions like the judiciary are gradually being ensured by means of agreed private arrangements of litigations. Together with the traditional separation of powers, the very essences of the unalienable public sphere and of political democracy seem to be withering away. It is a fact that popular consultations on fundamental issues are things of the past. In view of the above, actual developments seem to be entangled in an unprecedented antinomy of scale. Indeed, the most important political side effect of globalization may well consist in the new forms of separation between what one might refer to as growingly disempowered and inactive “pseudo” or “mock” territorial power systems and “really” active extra-territorial powers. While the (democratic or authoritarian)

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“political subsystems” must still be organized on the legal-territorial basis that circumscribe their legitimate competence, all other social subsystems, including the market, capital accumulation, finance, labor forms, knowledge, science, information and even justice, are henceforward organized and reproduced on a trans-territorial basis. In this sense, henceforward, organizational and normative realities seem to precede their institutionalized recognition. Territory-bound “pseudo-politics” and globally unbound “meta-politics” evolve in their own separate ways without even having to “negotiate” on their respective fields of competence. Organized political decision-making refers to social structures and “materialities” that are already being shaped by uncontrollable trans-territorial forces. The ways of the world are marked by this newly-defined structural, semantic and ideological hiatus. The field of national politics is increasingly circumscribed by the “leftovers” of the meta-political globalized power system. Even if the political is not dead, it is being emasculated. Within this new context, the inherent theatricality of liberal representative democracy is only enhanced. Indeed, the growing importance (and cost) of what is referred to as “political communication” develops as a direct response to the thinning out of relevant democratically debatable issues. Therefore, before anything else, the political system is obliged to persuade its audience of its continuing raison d’être. This is only one of the paradoxes of actual liberal democracy. The frantic quest for political credibility seems to be developing in inverse proportion to the restriction of the scope and field of collective political power and action. These changes are inevitably reflected on the prevailing forms of struggles. Indeed, while by definition class struggles and class antagonisms are tied to the relations of production, they tend to develop under the “remote control” of the globalized system. In contrast, however, organized political struggles must still take place within the narrower context of the territorial legitimacy of organized States. Never before has the disjunction of political and social realities been both so obvious and so difficult to counteract. The historical evolution of societies appears to be taking place independently from, or even in spite of, the institutionalized forms of its self-conscious collective organization. Before concluding, I will raise three separate but interconnected points. The first point concerns the modes of organization of political struggles. Indeed, by now, most localized and tangible effects of the prevailing system of social relations appear as distant reflections of remote, intangible, mobile, invisible, and untouchable mechanisms. The markets are there to be feared, respected and obeyed. It is therefore increasingly difficult to define or even to conceive of efficient countervailing strategies

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and actions in the domestic field. Class antagonisms are circumscribed by processes, strategies, and decisions that lie far beyond the frontiers of any closed society and the competences of any State. Under the circumstances, therefore, it is natural that most organized political forces and parties, and almost all forces exercising political power, should be “converging” in the acceptance of their inevitable heteronomy. Even if some of the strongest actors like the U.S., China, Russia, and the E.C., to the extent that they decide to act coherently and collectively, are still capable of (partially) negotiating the terms of their servility to the market forces, the effective margins of political decision-making are increasingly limited by exogenous parameters. Henceforward, at least for small countries, there can be no question of effectively protecting a national market, a national material production, a national society, a national bourgeoisie or, in most cases, a national currency. Even if the details of the modes, the scope and the timing of central interventionist policies may differ, all prevalent social and economic options seem tied to the universal principles of a stereotypically competitive instrumental rationality. Much more than the product of a deliberate and autonomous multilateral political decision, the “Washington consensus” reflects a generalized realization that all political subsystems must henceforward comply with the new modes of their structural heteronomy. The second point pertains to the changing modes of perception and internalization of political issues. Under the circumstances, it is also normal that popular participation and interest in standardized political processes should be fading away. The main enemy of political parties and labor unions, the one they have to fight on a daily basis, is not their antagonists and adversaries but the lurking indifference, apathy, disaffection, de-politization, and dismay of their own prospective supporters. Moreover, this tendency is only accentuated by the fact that class divisions in post-Fordist social formations seem to be increasingly dimmed. The stable bonds between the fluid hierarchies of the working population and their political representatives are being displaced and blurred. Political topologies and balances are therefore growingly detached from their traditional foundations. In this sense, the universally ongoing ­crisis in political representation is due both to structural and ideological reasons. Day after day, in almost all countries, political representatives find themselves bereft of their immediate audience, their prestige, and of their persuasive power, all at the same time. Finally, the third point, concerning the semantic content of political discourses, it is characteristic that political issues seem to be increasingly invested in overtly ethical, even moralistic, tones. The growing attention attributed to the issues of political corruption, transparency, and trust;

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the insistence on the political importance of the moral individual called upon to take personal initiatives in order to enact publicly oriented private values; the resurrection of the symbolic importance of civil society; the growing idealization of personal responsibilities vis-à-vis oneself and the world in which, very characteristically, social exclusion is growingly considered in terms of personal inadequacies; issues of tax evasion and voluntary associations are only symptoms of the generalized concern for recuperating whatever imaginary forms of public participation may still be salvaged. The slogan “change yourself before trying to change the world” is obviously most pertinent within worlds that are not supposed to be changed or even changeable. Clearly, within dominantly individualistic cultures, personalized utilitarianism cannot be overcome by rhetorical exhortations. Despite their ubiquitous resonances, such symbolic transmutations cannot be convincing on a massive scale. It is no accident that popular reactions towards growing misery should tend to be invested in unpredictable, unorganized, spontaneous and sometimes explosive or even violent forms. When all hopes for a better future seem to be thwarted, most political alternatives seem unrealistic. On the one hand, provisionally or irretrievably, the appeal of communism seems to have lost its immediate credibility. On the other hand, the total discredit of all versions of trickledown economics provided a lethal blow to all forms of sensible reformist accommodation with developmental rhetoric. Ever since they proved themselves incapable of resisting the technical logic of ultra-competitive neo-liberalism, social democrats were condemned to losing their political credibility. As things stand today, the all-pervading myth of a rationally pursuable, unlimited, balanced, and equitable growth only provides a ubiquitous alibi for the strong and an increasingly implausible accommodation for the meek. The deadlock appears to be complete. The ruses of history, however, seem to be inexhaustible. Even if the global vision of unlimited sustained growth had provided the main ideological and cultural engine leading towards the fulfillment of the long-standing liberal-bourgeois political utopia “for all,” this is not true anymore. Gone are the golden fallacious days of an early globalization, when social relations could still be seen as lying beyond the field of political debates to the effect that their extended reproduction should be ensured quasi-automatically. By now, the lurking demise of political credibility and the waning of class representativity may well be leading towards an explosion. And this precisely is the crucial point: the ongoing crisis probably marks the beginning of a new era of unprecedentedly radical re-adaptations not only of economic and political equilibria,

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but also of meanings, ideas, and social actions and mobilization. The increasing disjunction between a liberated production and an uncontrollable reproduction seems irretrievable. Even if the actual crisis is overcome, the ideological cement enabling a minimum of social cohesion is crumbling. In this respect, the logic of the calendar seems undaunted. We find ourselves literally in the clutches of the “cruelest month of April, mixing memory and desire,” to quote T. S. Eliot. In this “Wasteland” that lies all around us, the “dead still demand to be buried” and eventually to be resurrected. But even if the terms of this resurrection remain unknown and probably unknowable, some May Day must somehow follow. For now, even the notion of revolution is being gradually bereft of its magic content. Things cannot exist otherwise than within the dynamics of their constant change. Even if one accepts on face value the “non-marxist” Marx’s conviction that revolutions are the locomotives of world history, we are most certainly incapable of predicting their when’s, their why’s, their how’s, and their where to’s. Only a few months before his suicide in 1940, Walter Benjamin observed, “perhaps, revolutions are an attempt by the passengers of this train—namely the human race—to activate the emergency brake.” Even if brakes can be applied in various ways, nobody is endowed with complete foresight. If both hand brakes and foot brakes fail, the train may well run off the rails and explode. University of Athens

The Recent Economic Crisis in Greece and the Strategy of Capital Spyros Sakellaropoulos

Abstract The deficit and public debt crisis in Greece, part of the expansion of the global crisis through the countries of the Economic and Monetary Union, raises questions about the existence of a common currency for national formations with different productivity, the specific role of financial capital in the overall conjuncture, and the maintenance of the hegemonic position of Germany within the EU. In Greece the problem of the deficit and the debt is employed as a bridgehead for the deployment of aggressive class policies. The effort is centered on rapid transfer of wealth from labor to capital—reduction in salaries, greater labor flexibility, loosening of restrictions on firing, reduction in pensions—with an intensity unprecedented in modern times. Through this project the Greek bourgeoisie calculates that it will acquire the capacity to deal with the pressures to which it is being subjected by capitalist formations of higher productivity.

The general context The advent of the global economic crisis has brought to the surface the structural contradiction that was present from the outset in the endeavor of the single European currency. Even Paul Krugman acknowledged that it was predictable that at some point the establishment of a single currency by countries with entirely different levels of productivity would bring to light a host of contradictions (Krugman 2010). These are contradictions that have to do with the different structural characteristics of each country—the uneven rates of capital accumulation, the unequal contributions to international competitiveness—which lead not only to differentiations in the rates of inflation, an increase in GNP, and a spiraling of public debt, but also, and above all, to differentiations in international specialization of the national productive systems (de Grauwe 2009). In this context, in conditions of capitalist development, from the moment that it cannot be used as an instrument for devaluation, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 321–348 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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single currency is used as a lever for exerting pressure for modernization of the less competitive capitals. This is not a neutral procedure and, on the basis of the law of uneven development, the tendency will be for the differences between national capitals generally to become greater. For precisely this reason Germany, as the economically most powerful formation of the European Union, chose the solution of the euro. It judged that its superiority in competitiveness, reinforced by the individual member state’s inability to implement devaluations, would result in protracted export growth, as indeed occurred. The worsening financial crisis had the effect of partially, but not totally, modifying the existing economic and political context. Conditions of recession were generated: a fall in consumption expenditure, leading to a cutback in state revenues and an increase in the deficit as a percentage of the smaller GNP. Under such conditions, the competitiveness deficit became even more obvious, resulting in financial indicators being disrupted and the cost of borrowing increasing. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the fall in production triggered an increase in unemployment, so that there was an even greater shortfall in public revenues and a more frequent resort to borrowing to cover basic needs. The situation is exacerbated through the fact that the fall in production generates an increase in unemployment, resulting in an even greater shortfall in public revenue. The absence of elementary redistributive policies, with the potential to offset the uneven development, shows that the EU is not a confederation, much less a federation, but a sui generis institutional conjunction of national formations competing with each other for the largest possible appropriation of produced wealth. Demythologizing myths This new reality will lead the Greek bourgeoisie to a change of model vis à vis its mode of insertion into the international division of labor. To understand the content of this change, certain myths that the ruling class seeks to impose through its political representatives and through the shapers of public opinion need to be demystified. Myth 1: There is a certain deviant quality to the Greek economy necessitating implementation of such extreme austerity measures. If one takes seriously what is said in the mass media, in official governmental circles, and also among a certain section of organic intellectuals—in their endeavor to justify the violence of the measures being taken—one could conclude that what is taking place in the Greek economy is something unprecedented, an extreme case by Western standards. But the available data

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does not support such a conclusion. For a start, the Greek State is not the most wasteful in Europe. Its operating costs correspond to 17.3% of the Greek GNP, as against 19.9% for Germany, 24% for France, and 23.7% for Great Britain, and a European average of 21.8% (Vergopoulos 2010). As far as deficits are concerned, the USA in 2009 ran a 12.5% deficit, Japan a 10.5% deficit, with the average for the countries of the Eurozone 6.6%. As for debt, it may indeed be the case that the Greek debt in 2009 reached the level of 113.4% of GNP, but economically very robust Japan finds that its debt has sky-rocketed to the level of 197.2%.1 This situation appears in a very different light if we take into account the overall debt of every country, that is, the total sum borrowed by the state, businesses, and private individuals. According to official IMF statistics, overall Greek debt amounts to 179% of GNP, at a time when the EU average is 175% and Holland presents an overall debt of 234% of GNP, Ireland 222%, Belgium 219%, Spain 207%, Portugal 197%, Italy 194%. Corresponding findings emerge from an examination of the figures for external debt, that is, the debts of the state, businesses, and private individuals to foreign banks, bearing in mind that part of the debt is to banks in the same country. Among the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain), Ireland owes 414% of GNP, Portugal 130%, Greece 89.5% and Spain 80% (Delastik 2010a). Greece may appear to have a great need to borrow money but the situation for many other Western states is no different. Specifically, the country’s new loan requirements for 2010 are expected to amount to 50 billion euros, at a time when other “small” countries such as Belgium and Holland are each programmed to be borrowing 100 billion euros. If for foreign banks the risk of lending 50 billion euros to Greece is considered high, what can be said of Germany, which admittedly has a GNP nine times higher than that of Greece, but is nevertheless expected to borrow 370 billion euros? France will go as high as 450 billion euros, and Italy 400 billion, so that in terms of a proportion of GNP, their borrowing is of the same magnitude as Greece’s (Delastik 2010b). Clearly, economic problems similar to those of Greece are being faced by other Western countries. When this started to become obvious, a second argument was enlisted: that Greece faces both debt problems and deficit problems and it is the combination of the two that has generated the present crisis situation. This argument, however, has two contradictions to it. The first is that countries much more developed than Greece (such as the USA and Japan) are also deeply in debt and have large deficits. The fact that they do not face problems similar to those of Greece has to do with the fact that, as much stronger economic

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powers, they are in a position in this present phase to manage the global economic crisis in a different way. The second contradiction has to do with the fact that an overall framework of dramatization of the situation began to be generated both in Portugal and in Spain. Spain has a high level of debt. Portugal, by contrast, is not greatly indebted and its deficit is clearly lower than Greece’s. The underlying factors must therefore be sought elsewhere. As I will demonstrate, they mostly relate to Greece’s, but also Portugal’s and Spain’s lack of competitiveness, aggravated by the present global crisis and its links to the crisis of the euro, all inducing the markets to withdraw confidence from the Southern European capitalisms. Myth 2: The problem of Greek competitiveness arose because in recent years Greek working people have adopted a consumption model that does not correspond to the economy’s real capacities. Expressed simply, what this means is that during the preceding period, wage increases were awarded that the Greek economy could not support, resulting in production costs rising excessively and Greek products rendered uncompetitive. The logical corollary of this myth is that, from now on, the income of Greek workers will have to be lowered so that the lost competitiveness can be regained.2 The theory of a rise in real incomes in Greece, and moreover at a rate disproportionate to the average for the EU-15, is contentious for a number of reasons. Available figures from the European Commission do indeed indicate that between 1995 and 2008 there was a 37% cumulative increase in the purchasing power of average wages in Greece. But this figure is overestimated. For a start, it assumes an average rate of inflation and not the inflation corresponding to the consumer goods and services mostly utilized by working class households. After making the relevant calculations, it emerges that this overestimation is in the order of 0.7% annually (Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2009). Moreover, the average wage does not reflect the reality as experienced by the large majority of workers because the very high amounts paid to executives are included in this figure. Finally, the average of the real wage payments is not calculated for a stable number of hours but for total work time, so that overtime pay is included.3 The problem is that the absence of such data for the period as a whole complicates the task of drawing clear conclusions on what has befallen the great majority of wage-earners. It would be safer to use different tools if one wishes to comprehend exactly what has taken place. Starting from the share of wages in GNP, it is clear that there is a long-term trend towards contraction of this share from 56% in 1995 to 54% in 2008. The deterioration in living conditions for Greeks also

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appears from the fact that the proportion of household income saved fell from 14.1% in 1996 to 8.9% in 2004. Meanwhile, the proportion of the population living below the threshold of poverty in 2006 came to 21%. It is interesting to note that half of the poor have an income less than 44.4% of the median income and are very far from being in a position to be able to escape from poverty (Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2008:210–211). The mass resort to private borrowing perhaps becomes comprehensible from this perspective. Not being able to satisfy their consumer needs in the same manner as the preceding generation, a significant proportion of Greeks have turned to the banks.4 As a result, following the deregulation of consumer credit in 2003, household debt has gone through the roof: 28% annually for the period 2002–2007. As a proportion of GNP the overall debt burden for Greek households rose to 50% at the end of 2009, from 34.7% at the end of 2005 (Mitrakos-Symigiannis 2009:7). Another indicator that registers social inequalities is taxation, where indirect taxes account for 66% of tax revenues, tax on salaries 12%, taxes on large companies 10%, on small companies 4%, and on self-employed professionals 3% (Kyprianidis-Milios 2010:10). The situation with the more “proportionate” direct taxes does not appear any fairer: in 2004 wage earners and pensioners accounted for 44% of income tax revenues and in 2006 50.1%. By contrast, while in 2004 companies paid 43% of overall income tax, by 2006 this had fallen to 36.3% (Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2008:22–23). The information above is comprehensible only as the result of a conscious class policy on taxation on the part of the state. Nothing different could be expected given that for large companies the tax burden fell from 29.9% in 2000 to 18.6% in 2006. In the same year the corresponding figures for Spain were 53.3%, for France 31.4%, for Italy 27.1%, for Cyprus 26.8%, for Belgium 21.6%, for Denmark 32.3%, for Portugal 22.6%, for England 27.7%, and for the EU-25 28.7%. By contrast, the real tax burden on labor in Greece in 2000 came to 34.5% and by 2006 had risen to 35.1%. For Spain in the same year, the figure for labor was 30.8%, for France 41.9%, for Italy 42.5%, for Cyprus 24.18%, for Belgium 42.7%, for Denmark 37.1%, for Portugal 28.6%, for England 25.8%, and for the EU-25 36.4%. The numbers above illustrate that the real tax burden on labor in Greece corresponds to the average for the EU-25, while the real tax burden on profits comes to hardly half of the EU-25 average (15.9% in Greece, as against 33% in EU-25 (Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2008:22–23).5 The overall conclusion that this information leads to is that Greece is distinctive for its economic inequalities. This becomes particularly

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evident when one takes into account that the top 20% of Greeks in the scale of wealth earn 40.4% of the overall national income, while the bottom 20% of Greeks earn just 7%. By contrast, in the EU15 countries as a whole, this ratio in the last decade has never been higher than 4.8:1 (Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2008: 213). Over the last 15 years, social inequalities in Greece have increased because the wealth produced was distributed very unevenly. Today’s problems in the Greek economy cannot therefore be regarded as attributable to (putative) increases in workers’ incomes. Myth 3: (Supposed) increase in wages has led to a rapid decline in exports. The first point worth emphasizing is that even if we accept, as a working hypothesis, that there has been a real increase in wages, this does not necessarily lead to a fall in competitiveness. The reason for this is that, without even taking into account the methodological observations in the preceding paragraphs, the average productivity of labor in the EU15 countries has risen more than wages (19% as against 14%). The problem therefore cannot have its origins in salaries. It would also be a mistake to imagine that the problem of competitiveness is one that has emerged now—and even more that it has been caused by a rise in salaries. To conclude that there is now a crisis in competitiveness means that at some quite recent point in time, this problem did not exist and that therefore the Greek economy has seen significant growth. The following table, covering the last fifty years, shows no such recent change. The conclusion that emerges from the figures in Table 1 is that the export-import ratio for the period between 1950 and 1989 presents a few not particularly significant fluctuations (between 1/3 and 1/2.5). The clearly higher figure for imports reflects a lack of competitiveness but it has not resulted in anything like bankruptcy or any comparable economic misfortune. The subsequent period between 1990 and 1999 saw a stabilization of the ratio at 1/2.5. Finally, for the period 2000–2009, we may conclude that a slight slippage in the export/import ratio is to be observed, causing it to fluctuate around 1/3. This development is linked to the power of the Greek social formation’s integration into the international division of labor and, above all, to the pressures exerted on the Greek economy, as a result of its entry into the Eurozone, by national formations with superior productivity, but also through the use in itself of the euro as an expensive currency in transactions with countries outside the Eurozone. This decade, however, does not seem to be have been characterized by any drastic reduction in exports on such a scale as to justify taking measures as drastic as those jointly decided

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Table 1. Time chart of the import/export ratio: 1960–2009

Year 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996

Exports/Imports % 42 33 36 40 37 41 40 41 40 41 38 44 43 41

Year 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Exports/Imports % 42 36 36 34 35 32 33 33 34 31 30 31 33

Sources: a For the years from 1960–1989 see Milios-Ioakeimoglou 1990:117. b For the years 1990–1999 see Economakis-Sakellaropoulos-Xenakis 2006:708. c For the years 2000–2009 see Bank of Greece.

by the Greek Government, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund. The lack of a problem in plummeting Greek competitiveness can be seen from the figures in Table 2, which examines the evolution of Greece’s market share as a proportion of world exports, exports to the Eurozone, and exports to all the other countries of the European Union. Table 2. Market share for Greek exports: 2000–2008 (%) Year

World

Eurozone

EU27

2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

0.0017 0.0016 0.0016 0.0018 0.0017 0.0017 0.0017 0.0017 0.0016

0.058 0.048 0.050 0.054 0.052 0.055 0.059 0.057 0.055

0.045 0.037 0.040 0.043 0.041 0.043 0.046 0.044 0.043

Source: UNCTAD 2010

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These figures provide no evidence of a profound exports crisis. There are fluctuations attributable to conjunctural factors, but they all move within very specific limits. Thus, between 2000 and 2008, the Greek share of global exports fluctuates between 0.016 and 0.018 of the total of exports to the countries of the Economic and Monetary Union between 0.048 and 0.059 and of exports to the countries of the EU between 0.037 and 0.049. It could of course be argued that even given the size of Greece, these contributions are very low. One could argue that although Greek capitalism does not derive its strength from industry, the case still remains that the specific existing data does not indicate any falling off in exports. What is the real problem? The real problem has to do with the model for integration into the international division of labor adopted by the Greek bourgeoisie in the postwar period and reinforced by Community funding with the country’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC). The emphasis was placed primarily on shipping (Greek remains steadily the number one shipping power in the world), on the development of the construction industry above and beyond the rebuilding of the country (it is worth mentioning the very significant presence of Greek construction companies in North Africa and the Middle East), on tourism, and only secondarily and in a subordinate capacity, on industry, and even less on industry for export (for a map of this strategy see Table 1 in the Appendix). Income from tourism, shipping and EEC funding made a decisive contribution to reducing the trade deficit. To put it somewhat differently, the relative weak point of Greek capitalism—the competitiveness of its industry—was offset by its very strong presence in shipping, the development of the tourist industry, and funds from the EEC/EU mostly channeled towards construction. In the 1990s the even greater opening to international markets, brought about by the worldwide victory of neo-liberalism (the phenomenon called by some “globalization”), intensified the pressures on the Greek economy. The chosen solution in addressing these new realities was not any kind of technological transformation or radical reshaping of the mode of organization of labor beyond the adoption of certain forms of labor flexibility. Instead, emphasis was placed on continuing the same model, with simultaneous intensification of the level of exploitation of the popular layers (reduction in labor’s share of the product generated, increases smaller than the rise in productivity), as well as through the utilization of cheap migrant labor. It is characteristic that in a period of

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pronounced internationalization of capital, Greece is a country making very few direct investments abroad.6 Those it makes are almost exclusively in the former “socialist” countries of the Balkans. Entry into the European Monetary Union, the carrying out of large-scale construction works, the organization of the Olympic Games in 2004—none of this introduced any diversification into the strategy but, on the contrary, left it unmodified and stronger. At the same time, there was a perpetuation of various parallel ways of strengthening the power coalition and its underpinnings, such as toleration of the illegal economy (which at the dawn of the twenty-first century reached the level of 28.5% of the GNP, at a conservative estimate), collusion of sections of the monopolies with the state machine, with resultant overpricing of public works projects, etc. The problems began to worsen when there was a reduction in European funding, a fall in income from tourism, and an increase in borrowing to cover the costs generated in public works spending due to favoritism towards certain corporate monopolies (the example of the Siemens scandal is typical). There were chronically high levels of military expenditure, primarily because of broader geopolitical planning and obligations.7 There were also excessively high public expenditures because of overpricing. One indicative example is the functioning of the hospital sector and everything associated with it: drugs, medical equipment, medical examinations conducted in private clinics because of the inability of public hospitals to perform them. Finally, changes to the shipping register for Greek ship-owners, with their diversion to the shipping register of Cyprus, also contributed to the worsening of the economic problems in Greece. At the same time, the entry into the EU of formations with lower labor costs, like the former “socialist” countries, exacerbated the image of falling Greek competitiveness by increasing competition within the same economic integration. This development was most damaging to the traditional Greek labor-intensive industries of textiles, clothing, and footwear, resulting in their bankruptcy or in transferring production to other countries of the Balkans. A significant role was also played by the high level of inflation in Greece compared to the average of the Eurozone countries. A rate of inflation in the order of 3.5% might be considered nothing out of the ordinary. Considering, however, that in the Eurozone countries inflation fluctuated around levels of 2.2%, that is an approximately 70% difference, which over the course of a decade made a substantial contribution to the reduction in Greek competitiveness.8 Bank capital for its part attempted to pressure businesses into moving towards drastic restructuring, but this ran up against the inability of many businesses to incorporate such significant changes within the time period intervening before the international

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crisis broke out. Their attempts often resulted in disintegrative effects. A vicious circle was thus being generated, with the crisis triggering cutbacks in financing for businesses, further aggravating the recession. All this was to make its presence very much felt in terms of enterprise efficiency. The data shows that the marginal efficacy of fixed capital was on a long-term upward trajectory until 2004.9 This was related to a significant increase in investments (at the highest levels of all EU countries for the period 1996–2004) in mechanical equipment (Ioakeimoglou-Milios 2005:590–591).10 From that point on, every additional unit of investment in fixed capital was accompanied by a smaller increase in the product generated. This marked the end of an investment cycle characterized by the deployment of new technologies in the form of mechanical equipment imported from abroad. The cycle in question got under way in 1996 and from the 25% that was the product/capital ratio in 1995 it reached 28.5% in 2005. The rising trend peaked in 2006 and went into a downturn in 2008 (Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2008, 2009). All this indicates that, aided and abetted by the global recession, from 2005 onwards, the Greek economy began to show pronounced symptoms of contraction. GNP, which in real terms had been on an upward trajectory between 1996 and 2004, peaked in 2005, and then went into a sharp decline. According to predictions, GNP will fall by about 2% in real terms in 2010. The annual rate of growth slowed from 4.0% in 2007 to 2.9% in 2008 and –2% in 2009. Last but not least, industrial production fell by 4.0% in 2008 whereas in 2007 it had risen by 2.7%. At the level of state management the crisis translated into a 6.6% rise in the public deficit, which in 2008 was equal to 12.9% of GNP. This was triggered by a significant fall off in revenue, the return of taxation monies (around 4%), and increases in public expenditure (around 2%). It is characteristic that, whereas for the entire period between 2002 and 2008 public revenue increased each year, in 2009 for the first time it recorded a fall of 1.1 billion euros. This is the background against which the data in Table 3 should be read. The existing data is presented from the viewpoint of their correlation with GNP to avoid the latent danger of overdramatizing certain real or presumed developments. In the current account balance column of this table, the first finding has a bearing on the trade deficit. The deficit was falling prior to 2004, when because of the Olympic Games significant economic development was taking place. Subsequently, the deficit increased and, in 2008, was back to the figures for the year 2000, falling again in 2009 on account of the de-internationalization induced by the global recession. We are faced with an exports crisis but it is not of such dimensions as to warrant

5.6

7.7 20.0 13.7 2.6 7.3

2000

6.0

7.5 15.2 13.1 2.7 7.5

2001

19.1 100.8

6.6

6.7 15. 12.7 2.5 6.8

2002

18.1 97.9

6.3

6.8 13.6 11.2 2.3 5.7

2003

Source: Processing of Bank of Greece data and figures from 2010 Budget

Debt-servicing expenditure/GNP 16.4 14.8 General government debt/GNP

C. Public Debt

Deficit on bonds and   interest-bearing securities/GNP

B. Balance of Fiscal Transactions

Current Account Deficit/GNP Trade Deficit/GNP Trade Deficit without fuel/GNP Balance of Current Transfers/GNP Income from Tourism/GNP

A. Current Account Balance



Table 3. Trends in certain public sector statistical indicators

15.4 98.6

6.3

5.9 12.6 11.6 2.0 5.7

2004

15.8 98.8

2.1

7.8 14.5 11.0 1.6 5.6

2005

12.8 95.9

1.8

11.6 17.5 13.0 1.6 5.6

2006

14.5 95.6

4.7

14.8 18.9 14.7 0.7 5.1

2007

16.2 99.2

7.6

15.1 19.1 13.8 1.2 5.0

2008

17.0 113.4

11.7

11.0 12.7 9.5 0.5 4.3

2009

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(even from a bourgeois viewpoint) such drastic measures as those that have been taken. Moreover, if one also takes into account the question of fuel, as an energy-importing country, Greece would be in a much better situation from the viewpoint of the trade balance if it did not also have to deal with this problem. One must take into account the relatively high rate of inflation which, in a situation of fixed nominal exchange rates, led to many Greek products gradually losing competitiveness, as did the increase in imports that was a concomitant of the economic growth and contributed to the rise in demand for imported products and investment in imported mechanical equipment (Milios 2010). The evolution of the current account deficit follows a similar trajectory: falling until 2004, rising until 2008, falling again in 2009. It should be noted that in the period subsequent to 2004, the deficit fluctuates around much higher levels than prior to 2004. This, on the one hand, again confirms that we are not faced by a sudden exports crisis and, on the other, shows that the other indicators are lagging even further behind. The primary factor underlying this downward trend is the fall in tourist revenues, virtually continuous between 2000 and 2009, despite the organization of the Olympic Games which were expected to have given a boost to tourism and justified the inordinate costs involved. The adoption of the (expensive) euro must have played a significant role in this process of falling tourist revenues. The second reason for the falling current account deficit is associated with cutbacks in current transfer payments (i.e. Community subsidies), the termination of the Third Community Support Program having a negative effect on this indicator. The crisis in the current account balance highlights a very significant deviation on the part of the Greek economy when compared both with its own recent past and with the prevailing average in the Eurozone. This is a crisis that affects both Portugal and Spain, bringing to light similar economic phenomena there. Specifically, between 2006 and 2009, the Greek deficit was consistently in two-digit figures, whereas during the same period, the countries of the Eurozone were moving on average at levels between +4% and –0.8%, the Portuguese deficit was steady at 10%, and the Spanish was fluctuating between 7% and 10% (European Economy 2009). The basic question is therefore neither the debt nor unemployment but the current account balance, which brings to light the more general problems of productivity. The current account balance crisis became interwoven with the global crisis, complicating what had hitherto been the role of the Greek banks. Up to the time that the global crisis broke out, Greek lending institutions had been in a position to cover the current accounts deficit by borrowing from abroad so as to cater to the increased demand for

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foreign exchange. This was also the way they replaced the inputs for the purchase of government bonds and shares which in the first years of operation of the euro helped to cover the current accounts deficit. But the lack of liquid funds from foreign banks that was one of the consequences of the crisis meant that Greek banks were unable to acquire low-interest loans, with the increase in the deficit as a natural result (Pelagidis-Mitsopoulos 2010:247). In the balance of fiscal transactions section, the basic problem we detect has to do with the deficit from portfolio investments and particularly bonds and interest-bearing securities. The period between 2000 and 2004 is characterized by relative stability, with the deficit being kept at levels of 5–6%. The subsequent overheating of the economy through increase in the GNP resulted in a drastic reduction of the deficit to 1.8% in 2006, but from 2007 on a rapid rise is observable, with the result that in 2009 the deficit rises to 11.7%. This development is attributable to a number of factors: a reduction in real GNP in 2009 because of the recession, an increasing resort to borrowing owing to the cost of the public works projects carried out during the preceding period, and a reduction in tax revenues both because of the economic contraction brought about by the global recession (which naturally affected Greece), and because of reductions in company taxation. As might be expected, all the above have repercussions on debt. From 2006 onwards, there was an increase in expenditure for the servicing of debt. In 2009, a marked increase is to be observed in indebtedness as such. From 2007 onward, debt increases significantly in absolute terms.11 Two observations can be made on this. The first is that the increase in debt is a serious question, not to be brushed aside. It is a major problem for the Greek bourgeoisie, exposing the crisis in the model of capitalist development that had been implemented in the previous (many) years. The data in Table 2 of the Appendix shows that while the decade between 2000 and 2009 is characterized by high rates of growth, in essence, this does not improve the situation of the economy, because the additional revenue is channeled into meeting interest payments. If we also take into account payment of amortization, a deficit is generated that necessitates a renewed resort to borrowing. The crisis of 2009, which was to be characterized by negative growth, propelled the Greek economy much further into deficit. The overall picture becomes darker when one bears in mind that a large number of expired loans will have to be paid in 2011–2013, with the average time period for repayment of loans falling from 10 years to 7 years. Nevertheless (and this is the second observation), we are not speaking here of something historically unprecedented, nor should

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parallels be drawn with 1898 or 1932, when historical conditions were entirely different (the absence of a common currency, a lesser degree of internationalization of the Greek economy, and so a lesser effect of the aforementioned two bankruptcies on the international economy). Besides that, it is evident from Table 3 that in 2002 and 2003 the situation was clearly bleaker than now, because debt-servicing costs were higher. Moreover, almost all of the debt (97%) is in euros and so is not influenced by the fluctuations of the euro against the dollar, the yen and the pound, and no question arises of there being insufficient reserves of foreign exchange (Vergopoulos 2009). Regarding Greece’s debt, 75% of it is held by European banks, which for obvious reasons do not want to see a collapse of the Greek economy.12 Finally, 75% of the debt is with fixed—and 25% with fluctuating—interest rates, so that the effect of the markets is largely confined to new loans (Stathakis 2010). The three key dimensions of the question The real problem internally in Greece is neither the deficit nor the debt (as I have shown, similar problems are being faced by other countries) but two entirely different issues: the downgrading from the international markets of Greek capitalism, in whose representatives’ ability to forge an alternative bourgeois strategy they had lost confidence, and the more general international dimension of the crisis. In relation to markets, it is clear that Greek capitalism in the coming period will very likely be downgraded within the international division of labor so that investment in it involves certain dangers. For this reason Greece is now borrowing at such high interest rates.13 This has its effect on the banking system: the banks are looking for capital abroad to sustain demand, but Greece’s low credit rating necessitates the imposition of high interest rates on its borrowing (Pelagidis-Mitsopoulos 2010:248). The channeling of capital into the fiscal sector is predicated on predictions that entail a significant element of risk: the markets make an assessment of future production, positing a right to the future income expected to be generated by this production. There is no way of ensuring, however, that these profits will in fact be realized. From the moment that the markets form the impression that the conditions prevailing in a country (both the strategy of the bourgeoisie and the resistance to it that is mounted by the subaltern strata) do not guarantee the initially predicted profitability, they then “downgrade” the country in question through mass outflow of capital and/or a rise in interest rates (Ioakeimoglou 2001b). In its international dimension, the Greek crisis has to do both with the euro and with inter-imperialist antagonisms. The aspiration of

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a number of European countries in establishing the euro was to create a strong currency that would gradually come to function as the global reserve currency. The euro did make extremely satisfactory progress, winning a substantial share of the global markets. In the international bond markets in December 2007, the euro accounted for 32.7% of their overall value, as against the 21.7% of 1999. By contrast, the dollar’s share fell from 46.8% in 1999 to 43.2% in 2007. In 2004, 19% of transactions in specific fiscal products (spots, swaps, outrights) were in euros, with the predominant dollar notching up 44% of the market, the pound 8.5% and the yen 10%. Most significant, however, was the presence of the euro in total global reserves. According to the relevant statistical data, in 2007 63.9% of global currency reserves were in dollars (as against 71% in 1999), with the euro’s share in the vicinity of 26.5% (as against 17.9% in 1999), pound as low as 4.7% (as against 2.9% in 1999), and the yen 2.9% (as against 6.8% in 1995) (Melas 2010:35). The euro therefore succeeded in demonstrating a considerable dynamism, without of course becoming a main reserve currency, though imposing certain limitations (albeit unevenly) on the predominance of other currencies. This development was to encounter a reaction from the rival formations, the more so because from the time of its creation, the revaluation of the euro was primarily against the dollar and the pound. The crisis in Greece has been used not only as a device for extracting speculative profit from lending at exorbitant rates of interest but also as means of converting Greece’s crisis into a crisis of the euro.14 Inside the Eurozone this has taken the form of real conflicts between Germany and France.15 Perceiving the emerging danger, France wished to help Greece, not of course out of the kindness of its heart but out of apprehension that the crisis could then spread to Portugal and Spain, triggering the collapse of the common currency. Germany for its part judged that its particular interests were best served by the existing situation whereby, as the country with the highest productivity, it had achieved domination of the Eurozone as an exporting power. To put it somewhat differently, further export penetration by Germany was based not on the nominal exchange rates of the basic reserve currencies but on technological innovation that would enable it to maintain its leading position in specific branches of industry (automobile manufacturing, chemicals, mechanical equipment) in the broader capital goods sector while imposing a ceiling on wages (Horafas 2010:12–13).16 As a result, between 2000 and 2010, Germany will have accumulated a very large current accounts surplus. In 2007 alone, it was in the order of 8%. This occurred because within this time period there was a very large growth of exports while domestic demand remained stationary, registering an almost imperceptible rise

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of 0.2% annually. The insignificant increase in domestic demand can be explained by the stagnating real incomes of workers, a rise of 0.4%, much smaller than the increase in productivity. The final result was that within the space of a decade, a product would cost 25% more if it had been produced in Greece, Italy, Portugal or Spain, 23% if produced in Ireland, 13% if produced in France, while in Germany its price remained stable (Fleischbeck 2010:57). It was therefore thought in Germany that any assistance towards Greece would have the effect of reducing the profits of German companies because it would tend to offset differences in productivity and generate domestic problems in Germany, its export triumphs being contingent on policies of austerity to an extent unknown in the other countries of the Eurozone. In other words, German capitalism agreed to be part of the euro on the calculation that when other formations surrendered the advantages of being able to devalue, they would be unable to compete with Germany’s high productivity and wage restraint. When the consequences of this policy started to become evident, the assessment was that it was preferable for the Greek economy to be placed under pressure rather than questioning the totality of the arrangements that had brought such great gains to Germany. To put it somewhat differently, with its adoption of the euro, Germany appeared to be making a decision to concentrate its activities inside the Eurozone. It is therefore no surprise that 43% of its exports should be to other countries within the monetary union. There is an additional third dimension, which has not fully crystallized now but in the near future will become a matter of concern for more radical analysts. Starting from Greece, whose profile in the West has always been unorthodox in that it had a more dynamic workers’ movement, strong leftist traditions, and a political system tilted towards the left, a transition is evidently being sought to a new phase in the politics of the developed capitalist formations. Today’s crisis shows that there are no countervailing trends to the falling tendency in the rate of profit—not even through changes in the organization of production (implementation of flexible work relationships) nor through technological innovation (use of informatics in production, new forms of automation, biotechnology). At the same time, the fact that a significant part of expanded accumulation has been associated with the development of services, that is to say, with labor-intensive workplaces, has placed limits on increases in productivity. Moreover, the dynamic emergence in the international division of labor of low labor cost, but highly skilled, working collectivities in national formations such as China and India, has placed pressure on the hegemonic states, generating conditions of

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lower profitability. Finally, the channeling of a section of profits from production into the financial system has retarded the implementation of a broader restructuring of production and labor.17 The crisis that appeared in the USA in 2007–2008 in the form of a housing price bubble represented a distillation of all preceding problems. Precisely because the financial over-extension was functioning as a pre-emptive ratification of the generation of future value and profits, it entailed a risk of sudden rectification and massive devaluation of holdings which, in conjunction with the latent tendency towards overaccumulation, resulted in a global financial crisis.18 The problem with this specific economic crisis is that it is really no more than the reactivation of the crisis of 1973, which was not solved but merely deferred, since all the elements of crisis persisted in a latent condition. As indicated by Brenner, financial investment in the USA, the EU, and Japan, on all indicators (product growth, investment, employment, salaries) has been steadily deteriorating since 1973 (Brenner 2002, 2008 also see the data in tables 3 and 4 in the Appendix). For Brenner, the problem is centered on the intensity of competition between American, Japanese, and European businesses, and given that the figures involved preclude withdrawals of fixed capital, a fall is induced in the average rate of profit in the productive sectors, leading to a slowing down of investment and a squeeze on wages. An increase in the rate of exploitation helped to avert a collapse in profitability but did not restore it to pre-1974 levels. An attempt was therefore made to solve the problem of capital accumulation through an increase in private consumption via an expansion of private lending. This merely ushered in a sequence of fiscal bubbles. The great failure in the bourgeois strategy was one of committing themselves so decisively to “expanding debt,” fuelling the conception that capitalists would be able to extract profits from the loans they issued to working people while at the same time strengthening demand for capitalist commodities (Wolff 2008). Recent developments have shown that such a procedure cannot not provide answers to the structural crisis of capitalism. Clearly, the crisis does not only affect Greece but Greece is affected by it in its own distinctive way. I have traced, dialectically, the sequence “Greek crisis-crisis of the euroglobal crisis” and the inverse of this. But, here too, Greece is playing the role of guinea pig. The desideratum is to find new ways of reversing the falling tendency in the rate of profit. The option that predominates is that of changing the correlation between absolute and relative surplus value. This does not mean that relative surplus value will not continue to predominate, but that there will be a very great fall in labor’s share of the wealth produced and a parallel increase in working time. For this

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reason, in Greece too the measures are not confined to a new period of austerity but are symptomatic of a tendency to abolish the social gains of decades, on the pretext of finding a way out of the crisis. Is there any chance of these specific measures leading to recovery? On the basis of what we have established above, the conclusion can only be that the measures taken not only will not contribute to reducing the deficit, but are very likely to plunge the country into a deep recession. For a start, the measures were not decided upon for the reasons that have been proclaimed, since, as we have seen, the question as a whole is very different from how it has been presented. As a result, a correspondence between means and aims is difficult. Other questions also arise. The basic conception concerning fiscal reform centers on the notion that a cutback in overall demand will bring about a slump in sales resulting in a fall in prices and subsequent recovery of the market. What must not happen, argue the advocates of governmental policies, is a rise in wages, because that will reduce profits, investments, and therefore employment. What does not register, not due to lack of intelligence but because these are clearly class policies, is that an increase in profits and investments becomes feasible only if economic policy focuses on expansion of overall demand. Otherwise the “cheap” goods will remain unsold, businesses will cut back on production, unemployment will increase, and the recession will deepen. The reduction in wages will lead to a corresponding reduction in private consumption, decreasing overall demand and bringing about a fall in fixed capital investments. Perceiving that their productive potential is not being sufficiently utilized, businesses have no reason to proceed with new investments—the more so when, as in the case of Greece, a large proportion of the fixed capital reserve has been recently accumulated. The result will be a reduction in input from all the factors comprising domestic demand, triggering an immediate rise in unemployment, and so a further contraction in internal demand. The bleakest aspect of the outlook is that it will be difficult for the Greek economy to return to its initial condition even when, and if, demand recovers. By then a section of the capital reserve will have been liquidated, many companies will have gone bankrupt, and part of the unemployed workforce will have lost its knowledge and its skills (Ioakeimoglou 2010a). Clearly, reductions in incomes will not solve the problem but on the contrary will raise a host of new problems (Thanassoulas 2010:13). In the banking sector there will be a worsening of the precarious situation of the banks, with resulting new cutbacks in liquidity to the other sections of the economy (Lapatsioras-Milios 2010:12).

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Conclusion As demonstrated by the “school of Althusser,” the peculiarity of the political is that it concentrates the class struggle at every level. In this sense, the recent governmental measures are not simply a response to a crisis economic in character but clearly a political strategy embodying specific class interests. The Greek ruling class finds itself at the centre of a maelstrom which is the product of a variety of different manifestations of class struggle: the inability to continue with a specific mode of incorporation of the Greek social formation in the global division of labor, contradictions generated by the use of the euro in the context of global crisis, the requirement that all national formations should fall in line with the preferences of the powerful European bourgeoisies, the attempts at the international level to devise a new model for accumulation. Within this context, the coming years will be characterized by attempts on the part of the national bourgeoisies to shift the cost of the crisis to the forces of living labor. The representatives of the popular interests, in politics and in the trade unions, will be called upon to forge effective strategies for turning back the offensive of capital. The future, apart from lasting a long time, promises to be extremely interesting. PANTEION UNIVERSITY Appendix Table 1. Timeline for Balance of Current Accounts: 1960–1989 In million $

1960

1965

1970

1975

1980

1985

Non-fuel imports — Trade deficit 289 Fuel deficit — Trade deficit without fuel — Fuel deficit/trade deficit % — Shipping (1) 77 Migration (2) 91 Tourism (3) 49 EEC funds (4) 0 Other (5) 57 Total invisible resources   (1) + (2) + (3)+ (4) + (5) 276 Invisible payments 65 Invisible balance 211 Invisible balance/trade deficit % 73 Current account deficit 78

945 686 71 615 12 164 207 108 – 71

1580 1084 116 968 11 277 345 194 0 134

4221 3036 844 2192 28 845 782 644 0 455

7921 6810 2982 3827 44 1816 1084 1734 0 1526

7373 12983 6268 9086 3188 2092 3080 6994 51 23 1039 1375 801 1386 1428 1977 869 2602 1123 2901

550 137 413 60 273

950 267 683 63 402

2726 765 1961 65 1075

6160 1566 4594 67 2216

5260 10241 2268 3732 2992 6509 48 72 3276 2577

Source: Milios-Ioakeimoglou 1990:116

1989

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Source: Finance Ministry

GNP (millions of euros) 121517 130547 139574 153045 168417 198609 Revised (181088) Annual percentage change GNP (A) 4.5 4.2 3.4 5.6 4.9 2.2 Amortization (1) 10.8 8.9 14.5 13.6 10.9 10.3 Interest (2) 7.8 7.1 6.1 6.0 5.5 4.8 Parallel expenses (3) 0.1 0.0 0.1 0.0 0.1 0.0 Total annual debt repayment   GNP (B): (1) + (2) + (3) 18.7 16.0 20.7 19.6 16.5 15.1 Difference between change in   GNP and debt repayment (A–B) –14.2 –11.8 –17.3 –14.0 –11.6 –13.1

Year

Table 2. Relationship between increase in GNP and debt repayment

228180

4.5 9.7 4.2 0.1 14.0 –9.5

4.5 7.7 4.4 0.0 12.1 –7.6

2007

213985

2006

–13.1

15.7

2.6 11.0 4.7 0.0

239141

2008

–19.6

17.6

–2.0 12.4 5.2 0.0

234358

2009

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Table 3. Evolution of dynamism in the Global Economy: 1960–2007 Percentage change per year GNP

’60–’69

’69–’79

’79–’90

’90–’00

’00–’07

4.2 10.1 4.4 5.3 5.1

3.2 4.4 2.8 3.2 3.6

3.2 3.9 2.3 2.4 2.9

3.3 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.5

2.3 1.4 1.2 1.9 2.0

Productivity of labor

’60–’69

’69–’79

’79–’90

’90–’00

’00–’07

USA Japan Germany Eurozone G7

2.3 1.2 8.6 3.7 4.2 2.5 5.1 2.9 4.8 2.8 (60–73) (’73–’79)

1.3 3.0 1.3 1.8 2.6

1.7 1.1 2.5 1.9 1.9

1.7 1.8 1.5 0.9 1.0

Real Compensation per employee

’60–’69

’69–’79

’79–’90

’90–’00

’00–’07

2.7 7.5 5.7 5.8

1.0 3.9 3.0 3.2

0. 1.7 0.8 0.6

1.9 0.8 2.3 1.1

0.6 0.1 0.2 0.4

USA Japan Germany Eurozone G7

USA Japan Germany Eurozone Source: Brenner 2008

0.364 0.106

Rate of profit Japan

Growth in real compensation   per worker Japan

Source: Brenner 2009 *For Japan 2006 **Until 1990 the figures apply to West Germany

0.022

Growth in real compensation   per worker Germany

0.019 0.189

0.041

0.245

1960–1969

Rate of profit Germany**

0.250

Growth in real compensation   per worker USA

1949–1959

Rate of profit USA



0.085

0.297

–0.001

0.124

0.013

0.134

1970–1979

Table 4. Rate of profit and evolution of real compensation in the private industrial sector

0.027

0.198

0.014

0.104

0.007

0.118

1980–1990

0.026

0.103

0.027

0.052

0.014

0.164

1991–2000

0.036

0.083

0.004

0.122

0.013

0.141

2001–2007*

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NOTES 1  For the case of Japan, certain commentators assert that what is important is not the extent of the debt but the fact that to an overwhelming extent it is domestic debt, in contrast to Greece, where what is involved is external debt. This may help to explain the international pressures to which Greece is being subjected, but from a fiscal viewpoint there is no difference. At some point there has to be payment on the bonds and then Japan will be obliged to take out new loans, entering the same type of vicious circle as Greece. 2  Let me cite characteristically the positions of G. Papantoniou, former Minister of National Economy in the Simitis governments: “Since the middle . . . of this decade there has been an inordinate increase in the deficits of the external trade balance, reflecting delays in adaptation of the economy to the new competitive international environment. Private and public borrowing has been spiraling upwards. The country has begun to live beyond its economic means in accordance with the high expectations generated by the success of the entry procedure. Savings have to a large extent been channeled into covering financial deficits. There has been a weakening in productive investments and a downgrading of competitiveness” (Papantoniou 2010). 3  According to another similar European Commission study, the per unit labor costs for the Greek economy as a whole by comparison with the figure for the 35 other most developed countries of the planet increased by 15% in the period between 2000 and 2009. But the problem is that this fall in competitiveness is calculated in dollars, while each country has its own currency. The methodological error is thus made of factoring into labor costs changes attributable to fluctuations in exchange rates. If we want to ascertain the relative competitiveness of labor costs between Greece and other countries, we must calculate the labor costs in the different countries in their national currencies. Following this methodology, I. Ioakeimoglou came to the conclusion that, during the period between 1995 and 2009, the labor cost per unit of product for the Greek economy as a whole compared, in national currencies, to the corresponding figure for 35 industrial countries, fell by 2% (Ioakeimoglou 2010c). 4  Greek “hyper-consumerism” has recently been the target of much scathing comment. In reality, this “tendency” is nothing more than an attempt to maintain a living standard that had been established between 1960 and 1990 as a by-product of economic development and popular gains. Having said that, given that hardly any family (in contrast to the 1960–1990 situation) could survive respectably solely on the salary of the father, women also entered the work force. And because even then the income was not sufficient to sustain an already acquired mode of consumer behavior, the option was taken of resort to bank loans. For the whole problem to become comprehensible, suffice it to say that, up until 1990, for the family to buy a house the salary of the father was sufficient. From the 1990s onward, it was necessary not only for the mother to work but also for the couple to take out a loan. 5  The comparative data quoted by Pelagidis-Mitsopoulos, which have to do with tax on dividends distributed to physical persons and income tax on physical persons, also highlight the limitations on taxation of businesses in Greece compared to other countries of the EU15 (Pelagidis-Mitsopoulos 2010:231). 6  It is revealing that in 2006, the accumulated volume of Greek direct investments abroad came to only 8.0% of GDP, at a time when the average for the EU27 was 23.2% and with this level of performance, Greece was ahead only of Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, i.e., not even all of the former “socialist” countries.

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7  From this viewpoint we need only mention the purchase by the Greek State of American warplanes, French frigates, and (defective) German submarines. It is clear that an overall reduction in public expenditure cannot be acceptable to the bourgeois power centers because drastic cuts in some kinds of public spending will come up against reaction from powerful imperialist countries. The cuts that “have” to be made cannot therefore be extended beyond certain acceptable domains: reductions in salaries, reductions in staff, reductions in pensions, reductions in expenditures that will not cause tensions with corporate monopolies and the imperialist centers. 8  Some years ago, Costas Vergopoulos showed considerable foresight in predicting what was then the future, sternly criticizing the state policies that were “preparing” the country for entry into the IMF: “Despite the external deficits and the inflation, it continued to be government policy to maintain the exchange parity of the drachma, that is to say essentially its permanent overvaluing for the sake of securing the favor of the European Monetary Union. But this would not only harm the international competitiveness of Greek prices but would raise the cost of foreign investment in Greece and foreign financing of Greece in real terms. Today, with the entry into the euro, this scenario is tending to unfold once again, largely canceling the potential benefits to the country from monetary stability. For as long as the level of inflation in Greece deviates from the corresponding European level, in conditions of currency stability, the country will continue to face the same problems as those of the past: a fall in the international competitiveness of its products, along with a drying up of foreign investment and other funding from abroad, not to mention of course a steady contraction of net inputs from Europe, calculated in real terms” (Vergopoulos 2005:44–45). 9  The marginal efficacy of fixed capital is defined as the change in GNP in the course of the year in stable prices per unit of gross investment of fixed capital for the year (Table 1). 10  To be specific, in the period between 1997 and 2004 the annual rate of formation of fixed capital in Greece was just under 25% of GNP, whereas in the EU it was kept under 20%. For investments in technological inventory there was an 11.15% increase, whereas in the rest of the EU, the increase was just 3.14%. Reserves of fixed capital increased in Greece at an annual rate of 3.5%, compared to a figure of 2% for the EU as a whole (Vergopoulos 2005:93–94). Our assessment is that this significant development is not unrelated to the inflow of funds from the European support frameworks. 11  In absolute figures, the General Government debt increased from 204,018 million euros in 2006 to 216,381 million euros in 2007 (an increase of 12,363 million euros), 237,196 million euros in 2008 (an increase of 20,815 million euros) and 272,300 million euros in 2009 (a change of 35,104 euros). This large increase is a result of the necessity to repay short-term loans (of a duration of up to three months), the government having contracted many of these during the period in question). More specifically, short-term debt increased by 8,091 million euros in 2006 to 24,723 million euros in 2007, 25,674 euros in 2008 and 36,904 million euros in 2009. 12   There are certain aspects of the current situation that should not be overlooked because they show how far the implications of an extension of the crisis in the Greek economy could in fact reach. A significant part, for example, of the banking system of Bulgaria (it is estimated at around 30%) belongs to Greek banks. A collapse of the Greek economy would therefore introduce elements of crisis into the Balkans generally. 13  Of course some contribution was made to this by the concealment of real data by the preceding government with resulting indeterminacy in the money markets as to the real state of the Greek economy. 14  In a very interesting article, Ahmet Incel analyzes the role played by specific American

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financial institutions, above all Goldman Sachs, in generating the pressures to raise the cost of risk insurance in the Eurozone through over-inflation of the financial problems of Greece, Spain and Ireland. Its chosen weapon for this purpose was the so-called Credit Default Swap (CDS), these being insurance contracts against the danger of a company or a state defaulting on its debts. The greater the risk, the higher the interest rate (Incel 2010). Up to the time of the activation of the support mechanism, the risk quotient for Greece in the CDS markets had skyrocketed from 120 to 700, meaning that the financial markets estimated that there was a 60% chance of Greece not being able to meet its loan repayment obligations in the next five years. To appreciate how inflated the risk in question was made to appear, suffice it to mention that the corresponding indicator for Romania, which is in an even worse fiscal situation, was 265. By way of comparison it is estimated that the risk of Morocco not being able to pay off its debt was eight times smaller than the risk with Greece, and that of Lebanon four times smaller! 15  We should make it clear at this point that intra-European disagreements had to do with further support for Greece and not the necessity as such for the recent governmental measures. On the contrary, all the members of the Eurozone were openly in favor of the measures. The reason for this is that a climate inculpation of Greece had been generated for its persistence in deviating from what the imperialist centers and the international markets wanted (a resounding defeat of the workers’ movement, an even greater redistribution of income in favor of capital, an increase in retirement age, greater flexibility in labor relations, and the displacement of the trajectory of politics onto an even more conservative, neo-liberal path.) 16  My assessment is that a significant role in the wage freeze was played by the reunification of Germany for two mutually supportive reasons: on the one hand, in the East there was no tradition of trade union practices, and on the other, the lower standard of living in the East facilitated a squeeze on labor costs in the West. See also Lapavitsas 2010. 17  According to a report by JP Morgan Securities, between 2000 and 2004 the turn towards the fiscal system on the part of businesses in the G6 countries involved sums in excess of 100 billion dollars (Harman 2008). 18  Obviously in the space available in this article it is not possible to make extensive references to the subject of the crisis. The low profit margins and correlations of power that precluded any real increase in salaries contributed to over-inflation of the fiscal sphere. Businesses purchased financial products to increase their profitability; households contracted consumer loans and housing loans because they were not able to purchase houses and other commodities out of their salaries. The result was a huge increase in borrowing and the conversion of loans into special types of securities that were purchased by a succession of depositors (businesses, insurance funds, other banks). Initially this innovation was regarded as particularly promising because, in the event that some enterprises encountered difficulties, this would not be confined to just one lending institution because the risk had been shared between different purchasers. But when house prices began to collapse, it became evident that the system suffered from a twofold problem: on the one hand it was not clear who had possession of the problematic loans, with the result that the banks were unable to assess the reliability of each individual client and finally stopped lending to everyone. On the other hand, this generalized absence of clarity emptied the reserve ratio of any meaning, and likewise the capital ratio, so that banks were unable to monitor the rate of credit expansion (Garganas 2010:40–41).

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Brenner, Robert 2002 The Boom and the Bubble. The US in the World Economy. London: Verso. 2008 Against the Current. “Devastating Crisis Unfolds.” Solidarity. http://www .solidarity-us.org/node/1297. 2009 “What is Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America. The Origins of the Present Crisis.” UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. http://www .sscnet.ucla.edu/issr/cstch/papers/BrennerCrisisTodayOctober2009.pdf. Delastik, Giorgos 2010a Γιώργος Δελαστίκ, «Για να μην τρώμε κουτόχορτο» (“So as Not to be Stupid”). Ethnos, 2 February. 2010b «Καταχρεωμένοι και οι μεγάλοι της ΕΕ» (“The Big EU Countries also Deeply in Debt”). Ethnos, 20 March. Economakis, Giorgos, Spyros Sakellaropoulos, and Athanasia Xenaki 2006 Γιώργος Οικονομάκης, Σπύρος Σακελλαρόπουλος και Αθανασία Ξενάκη, «Άμεσες Ξένες Επενδύσεις: Θεωρητική Διερεύνηση και μια Εμπειρική Ανίχνευση των Τάσεων Επένδυσης Ξένου κεφαλαίου στην Ελλάδα την Περίοδο 1990–2002» («Direct Foreign Investments: Theoretical Investigation and Empirical Reconnaissance of Foreign Capital in Greece in the Period 1990–2002”). In Βασίλης Αγγελής και Λεωνίδας Μαρούδας (επιμ.), Οικονομικά Συστήματα, Αναπτυξιακές Πολιτικές και Στρατηγικές των Επιχειρήσεων στην εποχή της Παγκοσμιοποίησης, Μελέτες προς Τιμήν του Καθηγητή Στέργιου Μπαμπανάση (Economic Systems, Developmental Policies and Business Strategies in the Era of Globalization, Studies in Honor of Professor Stergios Babanassis). Athens: Papazisis. European Economy 2009 “European Economic Forecast.” Autumn 10. Fleischbeck, Heiner 2010 “The Greek Tragedy and the European Crisis: Made in Germany.” Monthly Review 64:56–58. Garganas, Panos 2010 Πάνος Γκαργκάνας, «Κρίση-από τις τράπεζες σε όλη την οικονομία, την ιδεολογία, την πολιτική» (“Crisis—From the Banks to All the Economy, Ideology, Politics”). In Μαρία Στύλλου και άλλοι, Ο Ελληνικός Καπιταλισμός και η Παγκόσμια Οικονομία και η Κρίση (Greek Capitalism and the Global Economy and the Crisis). Athens: Marxist Bookshop. de Grauwe, Paul 2009 “The Euro at Ten: Achievements and Challenges.” Empirica 36:5–20. Harman, Chris 2008 “From the Credit Crunch to the Spectre of Global Crisis.” International Socialism 118. http://www.isj.org.uk. Horafas, Vangelis 2010 “The Global Economic Crisis and the Crisis in the European Union.” Monthly Review 64:2–21.

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Incel, Ahmet 2010 Αχμέτ Ιντσέλ, «Οι ακροβάτες των χρηματοοικονομικών ξανά επί σκηνής» (“The Acrobats of Finance on Stage Again”). Avghi, 14 March. Ioakeimoglou, Ilias 2010a Ηλίας Ιωακείμογλου, «Η Επερχόμενη Καταστροφή» (“The Coming Catastrophe”). http://www.ioakimoglou.net/assets/catastrophe.pdf. 2010b «Ευρώ, το ευάλωτο νόμισμα» (“Euro, the Vulnerable Currency”). Avghi, 9 May. 2010c «Φταίνε οι μισθοί ή το ευρώ;» (“Are Wages to Blame or the Euro”). Avghi, 24 April. Ioakeimoglou, Ilias and Giannis Milios 2010 Ηλίας Ιωακείμογλου και Γιάννης Μηλιός, «Δείκτες αποδοτικότητας της ελληνικής οικονομίας (1996–2004)» (“Indicators of Efficiency in the Greek Economy [1996–2004]”). In Βασίλης Αγγελής και Λεωνίδας Μαρούδας (επιμ.), Οικονομικά Συστήματα, Αναπτυξιακές Πολιτικές και Στρατηγικές των Επιχειρήσεων στην εποχή της Παγκοσμιοποίησης, Μελέτες προς Τιμήν του Καθηγητή Στέργιου Μπαμπανάση (Economic Systems, Developmental Policies and Business Strategies in the Era of Globalization, Studies in Honor of Professor Stergios Babanassis). Athens: Papazisis. Krugman, Paul 2010 Πωλ Κρούγκμαν, «Τι προκάλεσε το ευρω-χάος» (“What Caused the Euro-Chaos”). Vima, 17 February. Kyprianidis, Tassos and Giannis Milios 2010 Τάσος Κυπριανίδης και Γιάννης Μηλιός, «Camera Obscura. Το ανεστραμμένο είδωλο της ‹κοινωνικής οικονομίας της αγοράς›» (“Camera Obscura: The Inverted Image of the ‘Social Market Economy’”). Theseis 111:4–13. Labor Institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labor 2008 Ινστιτούτο Εργασίας (ΙΝΕ) ΓΣΕΕ-ΑΔΕΔΥ, Η ελληνική οικονομία και η απασχόληση. Ετήσια Έκθεση (The Greek Economy and Employment. Annual Report). Athens. 2009 Ινστιτούτο Εργασίας (ΙΝΕ) ΓΣΕΕ-ΑΔΕΔΥ, Η ελληνική οικονομία και η απασχόληση. Ετήσια Έκθεση (The Greek Economy and Employment. Annual Report). Athens. Lapatsioras, Spyros and Giannis Milios 2010 Σπύρος Λαπατσιώρας και Γιάννης Μηλιός, «Είναι αναγκαία τα μέτρα που παίρνει η κυβέρνηση για τη ‘διάσωση της Ελλάδας’;» (“Are They Necessary, These Measures the Government Takes to Save Greece?”). Bloko 0:12. Lapavitsas, Costas et al. 2010 “Eurozone Crisis: Beggar Thyself and Thy Neighbour.” Research Money and Finance. http://www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/media/reports/euro crisis/fullreport.pdf. Melas, Kostas 2010 Κώστας Μελάς, «Μια πρώτη αποτίμηση της Ευρωζώνης και του κοινού νομίσματος» (“A First Assessment of the Eurozone and the Common Currency”). Monthly Review 64:22–39. Milios, Giannis 2010 Γιάννης Μηλιός, «Η Ελληνική οικονομία κατά τον 20ο αιώνα» (“The Greek Economy in the Twentieth Century”). Αντώνης Μωυσίδης και Σπύρος Σακελλαρόπουλος (επιμ.), Η Ελλάδα στον 19ο και 20ο αιώνα: Εισαγωγή στη νεοελληνική κοινωνία (Greece in the 19th and 20th Century: Introduction to Modern Greek society). Athens: Topos.

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Milios, Giannis and Ilias Ioakeimoglou 1990 Γιάννης Μηλιός και Ηλίας Ιωακείμογλου, Η Διεθνοποίηση του Ελληνικού Καπιταλισμού και το Ισοζύγιο Πληρωμών (The Internationalization of Greek Capitalism and the Balance of Payments). Athens: Exantas. Mitrakos, Theodoros and Georgios Symigiannis 2009 Θεόδωρος Μητράκος και Γεώργιος Συμιγιάννης, «Προσδιοριστικοί Παράγοντες του Δανεισμού και της χρηματοοικονομικής πίεσης των νοικοκυριών στην Ελλάδα» (“Determinant Factors in Lending and Financial Pressures on Households in Greece”). Economic Bulletin of the Bank of Greece 32:7–29. Pelagidis, Thodoris and Michalis Mitsopoulos 2010 Θοδωρής Πελαγίδης και Μιχάλης Μητσόπουλος, Η στιγμή της στροφής για την ελληνική οικονομία. Πως ο προοδευτικός πραγματισμός μπορεί να τη θέσει ξανά σε τροχιά ανάπτυξης (The Turning Point for the Greek Economy. How Progressive Pragmatism Can Restore it to a Trajectory of Development). Athens: Papazisis. Papantoniou, Giannos 2010 Γιάννος Παπαντωνίου, «Από την ανάπτυξη στη Στασιμότητα» (“From Development to Stagnation”). Vima, 1 January. Stathakis, Giorgos 2010 Γιώργος Σταθάκης , «Το ελληνικό δημόσιο χρέος, η ‘χρεοκοπία’ και το Ευρώ» (“The Greek Public Debt: ‘Bankruptcy’ and the Euro”). Avghi, 14 March. Thanassoulas, Takis 2010 Τάκης Θανασούλας, «Η Πολιτική είναι συμπυκνωμένη οικονομία» (“Politics is Condensed Economics”). Spartakos 101:10–13. UNCTAD 2010 UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics. http://stats.unctad.org/Handbook/TableViewer/ tableView.aspx Vergopoulos, Costas 2005 Κώστας Βεργόπουλος, Η Αρπαγή του Πλούτου. Χρήμα-Εξουσία-Διαπλοκή στην Ελλάδα (The Seizure of Wealth. Money-Power-Corruption in Greece). Athens: Livanis. 2009 «Δυστυχώς δεν επτωχεύσαμεν» (“Unfortunately We Did Not Go Bankrupt”). Eleftherotypia, 17 December. 2010 «Η Ελλάδα πρέπει να ματώσει» (“Greece Must Bleed”). Eleftherotypia, 26 February. Wolff, Richard 2008 “Capitalist Crisis, Marx’s Shadow,” http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2008/ wolff260908.html

Book Reviews Evangelos Spyropoulos. Two Nations on Wheels: Greeks and Poles at the Crossroads. A Millennial History. New York: East European Monographs. 2008. Pp. 600. Cloth $65.00. This massive monograph weaves together lengthy synopses of two histories— Greek and Polish. Spyropoulos acknowledges that “[no] attempt is made to form any historic laws, to prove or disprove ‘historic laws’ or political ideologies. The book does not claim to provide a model of political analysis or a deeply searching inquiry” (xii). What then is the purpose of the study? Two Nations on Wheels is descriptive and intended to inspire additional work on a virgin topic. A statement on page 549 summarizes Spyropoulos’s findings: In canvassing the stories of the Greeks and Poles in the last thousand years, we witnessed that with few exceptions the two nations chronologically and almost simultaneously followed divergent paths. At the end of the millennium, and despite the seeming tribulations, internal and external developments made the two peoples coverage ideologically-politically and economically.

The histories are, indeed, unsynchronized and the absence of intrinsic parallels or frequent direct contrasts hampers the study. But some important or interesting observations are offered. The Preface argues that Greece and Poland differ in almost every respect beginning with topography and climate, yet, each has acted as a bulwark for Europe. Part I observes that the Greeks had an unrivaled ancient history central to the West while the Poles experienced, and the Greeks did not, the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, essential elements in Western Civilization. As the Byzantine Empire fell, Poland entered its Golden Age. Spyropoulos observes that a few years later, Poland too declined. These “few years” stretched from 1453 (fall of Constantinople) to 1578 (election of King Stefan Batory). Most historians, however, date the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the Khmelnitsky Uprising in 1648. Perhaps in Greek historical time events separated by 125 or 195 years appear almost simultaneous. “The Pathology of Byzantium and Poland” section offers a useful generalization: both the Byzantine Empire and early Modern Poland were weakened by internal rivalries whose actors actively solicited the foreign intervention that ultimately extinguished the state.   Part I traces 800 years in 120 pages; Parts II–V discuss 200 years in 660 pages. The lack of historical synchronicity continues through the nineteenth Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28 (2010) 349–371 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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century; only after World War I does Spyropoulos see some parallels and, eventually, a convergence. Part II offers an imaginative analogy between the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815) and the Empire of Nicaea (1204–1261). The successful Greek independence movement is contrasted with failed Polish efforts (1794, 1830–31, 1863–64). The Greeks succeeded because they exercised strong influence within the Ottoman Empire, were backed by the Great Powers and fought only one occupier. Lacking a nobility, the Greeks were socially more homogeneous and could mobilize the wider population for the liberation movement. The independence achieved, however, did not fulfill irredentist aspirations for a resurrected Byzantine Empire. In one of his more synthetic sections, Spyropoulos finds common traits in Greek and Polish nationalism: religion, language (despite the long Attic versus demotic dispute), a broadening social definition of nation, “support of massive literary works” and internal divisions with the rivalry between monarchists and republicans in Greece and support for Piłsudski or Dmowski in Poland. Crucially, both nations embraced romanticism and “a sort of Quixotic streak” that extend into the twentieth century. “[P]arables, metaphors, allegories, and symbols take on paramount importance” when “poetry, fiction and music . . . become vehicles of political communications.” This brought longterm negative effects (171). Part II traces events through World War I and subsequent state building. Rivalry between the pro-German Royalists and the Venizelists weakened Greece. Consolidated leadership under Piłsudski gave the Poles an advantage. Both states won the war and lost the peace. Spyropoulos extensively discusses the Sèvres Treaty and the Turkish war but his summary of the Polish resurrection omits the Wielkopolska Uprising and pivotal Ukrainian war and overstates direct Western aid in arms, munitions and men. Interestingly, Greeks and Poles alike regarded the Panagia (the Virgin Mother) as their special protector. Entitled “Greek and Polish Parallel Paths, 1923–1939,” Part III actually extends through 1945. Greece began the interwar period diplomatically isolated and with a huge refugee problem. Poland was better off internationally but faced problems of state consolidation. Internal and external factors, including the Westernized urban and isolated rural gap, resulted in both states vacillating between democracy and dictatorship. Spyropoulos does not, however, acknowledge the same, wider European phenomenon. Subsequently, Greece entered World War II militarily more prepared, benefiting from more defensible terrain and a weaker adversary, Italy. Greece’s significant victory in Albania has historically been underappreciated. Poland is remembered as heroic and, unlike Greece, free of significant collaboration. Polish exiled forces remained united and apolitical while their Greek counterparts bickered and mutinied. Nonetheless, each country found itself on Cold War front lines. “Comparing Greek and Polish Performances, 1953–1970” in Part IV draws some conclusions: Greece and Poland went on divergent roads mainly because the former had “more freedom of movement in internal and external policies” even to the point of defying its allies on issues such as Cyprus. The Greek people defeated the Communists and enjoyed political stability until the 1967 Colonels’s Coup. Industrialization and agrarian reforms led to urbaniza-

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tion, substantial emigration and economic integration with Europe. Economic development replaced “managing poverty and dependence” with a prosperous market economy. Dangerously, government largess outstripped economic growth. Poland’s sham multiparty system, in contrast, was imposed from without and the socio-economic system radically remolded by Stalin remained isolated from the world economy until 1970. The Communists took Poland from backwardness but could not match the success of Greek capitalism. However, both Papandreou and Gomułka carved out internal maneuvering room while remaining loyal to their respective superpower sponsors. After 1967, Greece became increasingly isolated from the West and Poland increasing open, leading to the irony of liberalization in Communist Poland and a bogus liberalization in Greece. Economic crisis in 1973 and the Cyprus disaster ended Greek military rule.  Such changes would come later in Poland with Solidarity.  The final part of the monograph examines the convergence of contemporary Greece and Poland. Amidst changing international balances of power, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement and Solidarity pulled their societies in opposite directions. Ultimately, PASOK failed and Greek socialism was dismantled; Solidarity succeeded and communism unraveled. Unfortunately, the final chapter offers only a bewildering, poorly edited discussion. Poland and other East European states are referred to haphazardly as members of the EU and aspiring members. A one page conclusion incorporated unceremoniously at the very end does not provide a strong coda for Spyropoulos’s exceptionally ambitious monograph, though two new thoughts are floated. Greece and Poland became “brotherless” after the loss of statehood as their natural allies, fellow Orthodox in the Balkans and Catholic Czechs and Slovaks respectively, remained alienated. The two “democratic, strong and prosperous” countries can now act as poles for stability and security. These observations, however, do not emerge naturally from previous discussions.  Spyropoulos’s curious methodology is illustrated by a radical question: “How is it that Poland, according to international surveys, is the most corrupt member of the EU and the ranks in the lowest place among a list of some 150 states” (756)? No sources are given. (German-based Transparency International actually lists Poland as 46th least corrupt and Greece as 71st in 2009.) In fact, Nations on Wheels uses no footnotes whatsoever. Also its lengthy bibliography lists only secondary sources and contains no works in Polish. Spyropoulos admits to not having mastered the language. This accounts for instances when Polish history seems somewhat off the mark as with the premature references to the Polish Question. Some terms are curiously misspelled. The Tatra Mountains are referred to as the Tiaras, Cieszyn is repeatedly called the “Chechen region,” and the Communist leader Gierek sometimes appears as Bierek. In a number of places, cardinal directions are reversed and English names such as Davies (given as Davis) are misspelled. The massive scope of the book may partly account for these flaws but they nonetheless detract from the laudable goal of sparking further interest in an unexplored topic. Nations on Wheels can be used as a starting point but only with caution. The absence of intrinsic patterns of similarities or dissimilarities in

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the two histories results in a work that can be critiqued as was Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The two principle voices are simply not sufficiently integrated. Brahms masterfully resolved this problem with his Piano Concerto No. 2. Hopefully, Spyropoulos will do the same in his next ambitious project. Janusz Duzinkiewicz Purdue University North Central

Stavros T. Stavridis. The Greek-Turkish War 1918–1923: An Australian Press Perspective. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. 2008. Pp. xvii + 353. Hardback $105.00. Ryan Gingeras. Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pp. xiii + 256. Hardback $99.00. The Asia Minor War (1918–1923) has always been a contentious topic in Greek and Turkish historiography. Even the names assigned to it, Asia Minor Disaster and War of Liberation respectively, point to the emotional responses these events continue to generate. As a result, the books produced to discuss the conflict, and the circumstances leading up to it, are often colored by the background of the author, and the few that have tried even mildly to take a more detached attitude are often attacked, especially if they are meant as textbooks for young Greeks or Turks. One would think that foreign academia would have been able to provide a more dispassionate approach to these historical events, which are after all fast approaching their centenary anniversary, but that has not been the case. Although recent years have seen the publication (or re-issue) of several books dealing with the circumstances of the Greco-Turkish conflict of that time, few have broken new ground or have been of unquestionable scholarly value. In addition, in response to a renewed fascination with multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious entities, most recent publications have been mostly focused on a single city, the city of Smyrna (Izmir) which is portrayed as a multi-ethnic paradise destroyed by the rising tides of nationalism and intolerance that pitted the various communities against each other (see for example Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922). Thus there is a plethora of books dealing with the final chapter of these events, the destruction of much of the city of Smyrna (Izmir) by the advancing Turkish Nationalist forces after the defeat and evacuation of the Greek forces from Asia Minor (see for example Marjorie Housepian Dobkin’s Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City), a catalytic event in modern Greek consciousness since it marked the end of the Megali Idea (Great Idea), the driving force for nearly a century of Greek foreign policy which had almost been realized with the conclusion of World War I and the ensuing Treaty of Sèrves. It is true that a new generation of scholars has begun to look at this conflict and its aftermath through different lenses, examining for instance the effects of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne, not in isolation as was often the case before, but in a

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the two histories results in a work that can be critiqued as was Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. The two principle voices are simply not sufficiently integrated. Brahms masterfully resolved this problem with his Piano Concerto No. 2. Hopefully, Spyropoulos will do the same in his next ambitious project. Janusz Duzinkiewicz Purdue University North Central

Stavros T. Stavridis. The Greek-Turkish War 1918–1923: An Australian Press Perspective. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press. 2008. Pp. xvii + 353. Hardback $105.00. Ryan Gingeras. Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pp. xiii + 256. Hardback $99.00. The Asia Minor War (1918–1923) has always been a contentious topic in Greek and Turkish historiography. Even the names assigned to it, Asia Minor Disaster and War of Liberation respectively, point to the emotional responses these events continue to generate. As a result, the books produced to discuss the conflict, and the circumstances leading up to it, are often colored by the background of the author, and the few that have tried even mildly to take a more detached attitude are often attacked, especially if they are meant as textbooks for young Greeks or Turks. One would think that foreign academia would have been able to provide a more dispassionate approach to these historical events, which are after all fast approaching their centenary anniversary, but that has not been the case. Although recent years have seen the publication (or re-issue) of several books dealing with the circumstances of the Greco-Turkish conflict of that time, few have broken new ground or have been of unquestionable scholarly value. In addition, in response to a renewed fascination with multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious entities, most recent publications have been mostly focused on a single city, the city of Smyrna (Izmir) which is portrayed as a multi-ethnic paradise destroyed by the rising tides of nationalism and intolerance that pitted the various communities against each other (see for example Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922). Thus there is a plethora of books dealing with the final chapter of these events, the destruction of much of the city of Smyrna (Izmir) by the advancing Turkish Nationalist forces after the defeat and evacuation of the Greek forces from Asia Minor (see for example Marjorie Housepian Dobkin’s Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City), a catalytic event in modern Greek consciousness since it marked the end of the Megali Idea (Great Idea), the driving force for nearly a century of Greek foreign policy which had almost been realized with the conclusion of World War I and the ensuing Treaty of Sèrves. It is true that a new generation of scholars has begun to look at this conflict and its aftermath through different lenses, examining for instance the effects of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey following the Treaty of Lausanne, not in isolation as was often the case before, but in a

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comparative approach. Unfortunately much of this research is often limited to the national historiographies, a notable exception being an edited volume by Renée Hirschon published in 2003 and re-issued in 2008 which bridges precisely this gap by bringing Greek and Turkish accounts in a single volume. Other scholars have begun to address the issues in novel ways, examining for instance the attitudes and effects of the press, as did Georgia Eglezou in a very recent volume that looked at the Greek Media in World War I and the Asia Minor conflict. It is within this new context that two new books are trying to make their mark taking very different approaches and examining issues often ignored by earlier historiography. Both seek to provide a more balanced and detached look at this period and unveil some of the intricacies and intrigues that involved foreign actors as well as local communities and leaders. By stepping away from the two familiar actors, the Greek State and the Turkish Nationalist Movement, both books provide a new and refreshing image of the dramatic events following the conclusion of World War I. Stavros Stavridis’ The Greek-Turkish War 1919–23, by Gorgias Press, is an examination of the conflict seen primarily through the lens of two Australian newspapers, The Age and Argus, though often enriched by detailed accounts of other major newspapers (The New York Times, the London Times, etc.) as well as government documents mostly from the Australian government archives. Stavrides’s account tracks the changes in the editorials of the two newspapers as events unfold, which are particularly interesting following the return of King Constantine I to the throne of Greece. The author’s focus is in essence two-fold, looking at the coverage of the intrigues surrounding the conflict among the Great Powers of the time, and at the same time looking at the impact of this question in a rather remote country like Australia. Unlike most other foreign powers that had political and economic interests in the region, Australia’s involvement was centered to the emotional question of the future of the graves of the ANZAC expeditionary force that had fought and died at the failed campaign of Gallipoli in 1915, and a mild general concern with the interests of the British Empire. In fact, Australia was utterly dependent on the British Foreign Office for her foreign policy since it was yet to have representatives in other nations, and was often ignored when she asked to participate in the deliberations regarding the future of the region, as was the case with the Lausanne Conference (Stavridis, 280). However this is also the period that sees the emergence of an independent Australian identity, still tied to the Empire but with the first seeds of an autonomous foreign policy. For example, the Australian government was not pleased with the British assumption that they would automatically provide troops if necessary for an Anatolian campaign, as they had done only a decade earlier (Stavridis, 290). By discussing such questions, this book becomes of equal interest to the scholar of the Asian Minor War as to the researcher of the evolution of the Australian State and identity. The strength of the book is certainly in discussing the complicated motives and policies of the Great Powers regarding their claims and interests in Anatolia. Remarkably, this is an area where there has been more emotional reaction than solid research. It is of course clear that Italy, France, Great Britain, the

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United States, and of course Greece, had very different policies regarding the future of the still-existing Ottoman Empire and their disagreements are not unknown. What Stavridis achieves, however, is to present these disagreements from a rather detached point of view, that of the Australian Press, allowing the reader to appreciate the intensity of the disagreements as well as the shifting alliances and policies of the Great Powers. The very early opposition of Italy to the Greek presence in the region, for example, is amply demonstrated, as is the general sympathetic attitude of the Australian Press to the Greek case. By contrast, the Australian Press was consistently critical of the Italian government and its policies, and the same was true with Mustafa Kemal’s (Atatürk) Nationalists. This favorable attitude towards Greece endured as long as Venizelos is prime minister of Greece but gets undermined, though not entirely, with the return of Constantine to the Greek throne. It is impossible to discuss the circumstances surrounding the conflict between Constantine and Venizelos in this space, and unfortunately neither does Stavridis, which may be problematic to anyone not familiar with the vitriolic feud between King and Prime Minister. Stavridis, however, makes clear that both Australian newspapers treated the Venizelist Greek government very differently from the ensuing royalist one to the point where in some later editorials the Greek government was portrayed as a threat rather than a valued ally, as had been the case with Venizelos (Stavridis, 180, 194, 200). Stavridis further demonstrates that the early hostility towards Constantine was enhanced by certain acts of the royalist government, in particular its threat to occupy Constantinople (Istanbul). Yet the British, as exemplified by Lloyd George, remained more or less publicly committed to the Greek cause for the duration of the conflict (Stavridis, 222). Stavridis also explores briefly the plan and use of Greek forces by the Great Powers as an instrument to enforce allied policy in the region in the absence of British and French troops (not to mention the public’s calls in those countries for rapid demobilization following the conclusion of hostilities with Germany). Furthermore, the reluctance to pressure the royalist government on the issue of Constantinople by blockading Greek ports or directly confronting the Greek army, as the French suggested (Stavridis, 186) had a lot to do with the fact that the Great Powers were dependant upon the Greek army to enforce the Sèrves Treaty in the region, an army that significantly outnumbered the allied forces in the region (Stavridis, 192). Although the extent to which Australian or other journalists had access to information regarding many of these secret negotiations is questionable, Stavridis does a good job in exposing how these questions reached the wider public and helped shape public opinion in countries that were not as directly involved as Greece or Turkey. The book is exhaustively researched and well documented but there are some flaws that detract from an otherwise interesting and unique approach. The main difficulty involves the format of the book, which is quite clearly the author’s doctoral dissertation. Unfortunately, the manuscript was not significantly edited in the transition from dissertation to book and thus its style can be a bit tiresome (in fact, it often refers to itself as a dissertation). The entire first part, which deals with the theoretical framework of writing history and the appropriate

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use of sources such as newspapers, could easily have been omitted, since no one would seriously contest the idea that newspapers are historical sources (though I did enjoy the brief history of the Australian newspaper industry). The examination of the two Australian newspapers is quite interesting in that it presents a very different approach to a topic that is often emotionally charged but at the same time presents certain difficulties, since Australia’s interest was relatively limited regarding this issue, and their newspapers often relied on other press agencies for access to information (Stavridis, 77). The author attempts to corrects the situation by extensive recourse to the Times, the New York Times, and other sources of information, but that raises the question, why not focus primarily on those sources rather than the Australian ones which often simply duplicated the information issued by other publications and news agencies? Furthermore, the complexity of the negotiations, rivalries, and deliberations, much of which was conducted in secret, raises certain questions regarding the validity of the coverage. As an examination of the representation and shaping of public opinion, this work is effective, but the examination of media has its limitations and the role of media has increasingly come under scrutiny even in our era of greater access to government. Thus the most interesting and valuable part of the book involves the public perceptions regarding the complicated Great Powers’s attitudes towards the unfolding events, and the image of the Greek, Ottoman, and Nationalist governments in the Australian and foreign press in general. The manuscript was probably concluded just short of the publication of Georgia Eglezou’s The Greek Media in World War I and its Aftermath, which is absent in the bibliography, a pity since a look at the Athenian Press would have allowed for interesting comparisons and juxtapositions, as would similar examinations at the French, Turkish and Italian Presses, especially regarding the Great Power politics at the aftermath of the Great War. More significantly, Stavridis does not extend his examination to the Australian Press’s coverage of the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, a significant omission considering the emotional and often traumatic legacy of those population shifts in Greece and Turkey. Furthermore, Stavridis’s account requires some basic knowledge of the people, events, and prior developments to the conflict which may prove an obstacle to those unfamiliar with the history of the region at the time. Nevertheless Stavridis has produced a useful book even if some editing would have made it more approachable and more engaging. Ryan Gingeras’s Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923 by Oxford University Press, on the other hand, manages to be engaging and provocative at the same time. Gingeras has chosen to focus on the local level and the reactions and initiatives of the local leaders in a region that is rarely the focus of study of this period. The author has chosen to examine what he terms as the South Marmara region, the provinces situated to the south of the Sea of Marmara and home of numerous ethnic and religious groups. Gingeras wisely chose to extend his research to the period of the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and to focus on the stories of two of the communities that had settled in the region, the Circassians (North Caucasians) and Albanian immigrants and refugees. Yet he manages not to ignore other ethnic and religious groups, such

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as the Armenians and Greeks whose story is ultimately intertwined with that of their Muslim neighbors. Gingeras confronts some very difficult questions, such as identity and nationalism, and places great emphasis on the “culture of paramilitarism” of the area as a catalyst for much of the violence that engulfed the region, a concept developed by Ussama Makdisi with relation to Ottoman Lebanon, and an approach that brings to mind the arguments raised by Stathis Kalyvas in his examination of the Greek Civil War of 1944–1949 in The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Gingeras skillfully exposes the complicated landscape of the region which experienced a massive influx of North Caucasian refugees fleeing the Russian advance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the earlier and more complicated settlement of Albanians in the area which become a flood during the Balkan Wars when many Muslims were expelled from Macedonia and Thrace. This is one of the most interesting and neglected topics, not only in the standard accounts of the conflict in Greek or Turkish historiography, but also in the examination of conflicts throughout the Balkans in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. There are often assumptions that reduce the conflict to a few involved communities, mostly the ones that came to develop nation states, utterly ignoring the presence of numerous other ethnic groups that existed throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. What Gingeras achieves is to bring to the fore the existence of a number of Muslim groups whose interests, ideas, and identity could have placed them in opposition to the rising nationalist tide among ethnic Muslim Turks in Anatolia. With a starting point of the nationalist policies of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Young Turks, the author examines the effect of the Armenian, to a lesser degree Greek, and surprisingly Muslim Albanian deportations following the eruption of World War I from the region of South Marmara to the interior of Anatolia and to Mesopotamia. Gingeras provides a brief, balanced account of the deportations but does not linger because what he is interested in are the effects of the deportations on the region. Circassians, who were not deported, naturally profited from the properties left behind by the deported Armenians, Greeks, and Albanians, as did ethnic Turks, but the return of some of the deportees following the 1918 conclusion of hostilities between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente Powers brought understandable tensions in the area. Undoubtedly some will take offence to his treatment of the deportations and his avoidance of the question of genocide, but his examination of the context within which they took place is illuminating and exposes the way the Ottoman Government of the time perceived threats. For example, his discussion of the Ottoman Government’s and CUP’s attitudes and policies towards Albanians is particularly interesting and problematizes the idea of Muslim vs. non-Muslim conflict that is so often assumed. The collapse of Ottoman authority following the conclusion of World War I unleashed a wave of what can best be described as banditry, creating a situation that the new Nationalists attempted to exploit to confront and harass the Greek army that landed in Smyrna (Izmir) to the south and which the Nationalist forces were not able to resist directly. Gingeras demonstrates the efforts of the National-

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ists to take over control of the region from a rather impotent Ottoman Government and to organize units to oppose the Greek presence to the south. Equally significant for the author, however, was the emergence of a strong Circassian (as well as Pomak, Çetmi, and Albanian) “Loyalist” opposition to the Nationalists, like that led by Ahmet Anzavur (Gingeras, 99), which clashed violently with the Nationalist forces. Adhering to older allegiances primarily local but also to the Ottoman Government in Constantinople (Istanbul), this opposition to the Nationalists was surprisingly strong, even without the support of any outside forces, and persistent throughout the period. The Nationalists would manage to put down this challenge to their takeover but only after some early reverses, and the movement would resurface with the Ottoman Government’s eventual attempt to re-establish its authority, as well as with the conquest of the region by Greek and British forces in 1922. The examination of the Greek occupation of the area is another strong point of this book. The Greek occupation is generally ignored in Greek historiography but vilified by most Turkish historians who portray it as a murderous regime, responsible for several massacres in the region. Gingeras shows that the presence of the Greek and to a lesser degree British forces reversed some of the power relations that had developed in the immediate post-war period. Christian paramilitaries became increasingly active, and notorious, in the area, and thousands of Christians found positions in the new administration, gendarmerie, or other state posts, replacing a previously Muslim administration (Gingeras, 111). Circassian paramilitaries also re-appeared, often collaborating with the Greek forces, aiming apparently to establish an autonomous nation state in the region, as indicated by a declaration issued as early as 1921. Unfortunately, the author states that sources are particularly scarce regarding this topic in Turkish archives (and absent in Greek ones), as are sources dealing with the reaction of the Albanian community to the Greek and British occupation. One can only hope that future researches may uncover more material pertaining to this topic that complicates both Greek and Turkish nationalist accounts. The Greek occupation did not last long of course, and with the return of the Nationalist forces several thousand Circassians fled to Greek lands and islands. Surprisingly, many would stage incursions against the Nationalists as late as 1923 with the aid of Greek ships (Gingeras, 140–141), events that are not widely known and rarely referred to in other examinations of the Asia Minor War. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of a book full of surprises is the extension of the author’s examination well into the 1920s and his look into such questions as the treatment of Albanians and Circassians in the 1926 Immigration Law, which often present paradoxical results (Circassian citizens often being treated more harshly than Circassian immigrants, and Albanians continued to be discriminated against). Gingeras has produced a very interesting book that is bound to be controversial. I am sure that many Greek, Armenian and Turkish historians will take issue with several points the author makes but on balance, he has produced a valuable, well-researched, provocative work that will be interesting to specialist and student alike. His focus on minority populations is an approach that

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­ opefully other scholars will follow with respect to Christian and Muslim popuh lations in Anatolia and the Balkans that will allow a clearer understanding of the complex circumstances of the region that are often ignored by historians. I was left wondering about the role of Circassians and Albanians in the emerging nation state of the Turkish Republic, especially in later generations, but clearly that was a topic beyond the scope of the current research. Gingeras manages not only to shed light to a little-known part of the dramatic events that unfolded in Anatolia in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, but also to spark the interest of his audience regarding the earlier history and future fate of the groups he describes in his book. Although Gingeras’s book addresses a seemingly more esoteric topic than Stavridis’s account of the press coverage of the conflict, his writing style is much more engaging and he is able to present very complicated circumstances in a clear manner that allows this work to be accessible by all. I would have liked the inclusion of some classic texts in the bibliography, such as Michael Llewellyn Smith’s Ionian Vision, but overall I think that Gingeras’s book will prove more provocative and influential to a wider audience than Stavridis’s whose value would be to more specialized groups. Both works, however, try to bring a more balanced approach to a topic that is still rousing strong feelings in both countries. One can only hope that future scholars will follow in their paths and challenge the standard histories produced regarding this conflict, exposing the multiplicity of actors involved, their aims, policies, and histories. Evdoxios Doxiadis International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies REFERENCES CITED Dobkin, Marjorie Housepian 1998 [1971]  Smyrna 1922, The Destruction of a City. New York: Newmark Press. Eglezou, Georgia 2009 The Greek Media in World War I and Its Aftermath—The Athenian Press and the Asia Minor Crisis. New York: Tauris Academic Studies. Gingeras, Ryan 2009 Sorrowful Shores, Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirschon, Renee, editor 2008 [2003]  Crossing the Aegean. New York: Berghahn Books. Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006 The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makdisi, Ussama 2000 The Culture of Sectarianism: Community History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley: University of California Press. Milton, Giles 2008 Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922. New York: Basic Books.

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Smith, Michael Llewellyn 1998 [1973]  Ionian Vision, Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922. London: Hurst & Company. Stavridis, Stavros T. 2008 The Greek-Turkish War 1918–1923, An Australian Press Perspective. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.

Dimitrios A. Stamatopoulos. Δημήτριος Α. Σταματόπουλος, Το Βυζάντιο μετά το Έθνος: Το Πρόβλημα της Συνέχειας στις Βαλκανικές Ιστοριογραφίες. Athens: Alexandreia. 2009. Pp. 429. €30. In Το Βυζάντιο μετά το Έθνος: Το Πρόβλημα της Συνέχειας στις Βαλκανικές Ιστοριογραφίες (Byzantium after the Nation: the Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies), Dimitrios Stamatopoulos examines the ideological uses of the Byzantine past by the Balkan national historiographies of the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It is hard to say whether this is a book of traditional comparative history or one that examines its subject through a cross-national perspective (histoire croisée). Traditional comparisons are made between two (or more) distinct historical realities—usually the nation-states—and aim to mark similarities and differences, whereas cross-national history follows a given topic beyond national boundaries, evoking an alternative spatial framework to the nation (e.g. the Balkan region, the Ottoman Empire). Stamatopoulos’s approach stands between the two: it offers both a comparative view of the various national historiographical contexts of the newly established Balkan states and a transnational examination of the behavior towards a common Byzantine past and an equally common Ottoman present. In other words, Stamatopoulos does not treat the elements of the comparison (the Balkan nation-states and their historiographies) as clearly separate units, but as parts of a whole, of the same regional and cross-national reality. Most scholars agree that the emergence of the historiographical interest in Byzantium dates to the second half of the nineteenth century and owes much to the rediscovery and veneration of the Middle Ages by the European Romantic movement. Stamatopoulos’s analysis goes far beyond this common assumption. Byzantium came out from the darkness, yes. But which Byzantium—he asks—and, especially, whose Byzantium was that? Was there only one Byzantium or as many “Byzantiums” as there were proponents? Which were the political/ideological connotations behind the confronting views on the Byzantine past? These questions are first examined in the case of Greek historiography. The author develops his argument based on a bipolar scheme: the positive pole is located in Athens and particularly in the diptych of national historiographers Spyridon Zambelios/Constantine Paparrigopoulos. The negative pole is located in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, namely in its “official” historiographer Manuel Gedeon. If Zambelios’s and Paparrigopoulos’s roles in revaluating and legitimizing the Byzantine past are widely known, the Patriarchate’s reaction to this revaluation remains still unexplored. Stamatopoulos’s detailed

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Smith, Michael Llewellyn 1998 [1973]  Ionian Vision, Greece in Asia Minor 1919–1922. London: Hurst & Company. Stavridis, Stavros T. 2008 The Greek-Turkish War 1918–1923, An Australian Press Perspective. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.

Dimitrios A. Stamatopoulos. Δημήτριος Α. Σταματόπουλος, Το Βυζάντιο μετά το Έθνος: Το Πρόβλημα της Συνέχειας στις Βαλκανικές Ιστοριογραφίες. Athens: Alexandreia. 2009. Pp. 429. €30. In Το Βυζάντιο μετά το Έθνος: Το Πρόβλημα της Συνέχειας στις Βαλκανικές Ιστοριογραφίες (Byzantium after the Nation: the Problem of Continuity in Balkan Historiographies), Dimitrios Stamatopoulos examines the ideological uses of the Byzantine past by the Balkan national historiographies of the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It is hard to say whether this is a book of traditional comparative history or one that examines its subject through a cross-national perspective (histoire croisée). Traditional comparisons are made between two (or more) distinct historical realities—usually the nation-states—and aim to mark similarities and differences, whereas cross-national history follows a given topic beyond national boundaries, evoking an alternative spatial framework to the nation (e.g. the Balkan region, the Ottoman Empire). Stamatopoulos’s approach stands between the two: it offers both a comparative view of the various national historiographical contexts of the newly established Balkan states and a transnational examination of the behavior towards a common Byzantine past and an equally common Ottoman present. In other words, Stamatopoulos does not treat the elements of the comparison (the Balkan nation-states and their historiographies) as clearly separate units, but as parts of a whole, of the same regional and cross-national reality. Most scholars agree that the emergence of the historiographical interest in Byzantium dates to the second half of the nineteenth century and owes much to the rediscovery and veneration of the Middle Ages by the European Romantic movement. Stamatopoulos’s analysis goes far beyond this common assumption. Byzantium came out from the darkness, yes. But which Byzantium—he asks—and, especially, whose Byzantium was that? Was there only one Byzantium or as many “Byzantiums” as there were proponents? Which were the political/ideological connotations behind the confronting views on the Byzantine past? These questions are first examined in the case of Greek historiography. The author develops his argument based on a bipolar scheme: the positive pole is located in Athens and particularly in the diptych of national historiographers Spyridon Zambelios/Constantine Paparrigopoulos. The negative pole is located in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, namely in its “official” historiographer Manuel Gedeon. If Zambelios’s and Paparrigopoulos’s roles in revaluating and legitimizing the Byzantine past are widely known, the Patriarchate’s reaction to this revaluation remains still unexplored. Stamatopoulos’s detailed

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examination of both intellectual environments shows that the kind of Byzantium which emerged through the works of the two “national” historiographers was poles apart from the kind of Byzantium imagined by the elite of the Patriarchate. As he argues, Zambelios and Paparrigopoulos (the former by focusing on the “spiritual” aspect of Byzantine Christianity, the latter by politicizing the Byzantine Empire) nationalized/Hellenized the Byzantine past. For them, Byzantium was nothing else than the intermediary link between ancient and modern Greece. In short, in their work, the Byzantine past was put in the service of “national narration.” The instrumental use of the Byzantine period (and of religion in general), as practiced by the builders of the Greek “national canon,” was viewed with particular suspicion by those intellectuals who were attached to the ­ecumenical/ imperial ambience of the Patriarchate. Gedeon, being the most representative figure of this ambience, opposed the ethnoracial approach of “national” historians, proposing instead a view of history that would focus on the “genos” (something between nation and millet) and on the central role assumed by the Patriarchate during not only the Byzantine period, but also the period of the Ottoman Empire. Stamatopoulos is particularly insightful in explaining the political motives behind this attitude: what preoccupied Gedeon, he argues, was the collapsing unity of Ecumenical Orthodoxy, a world that was falling apart under the pressure of the newly established national identities. So, according to the author, if it is true that the second half of the nineteenth century saw in the Balkans the establishment of a series of “national canons,” it is also true that these “canons” produced a series of “deviations.” The author adopts the bipolar antithetical scheme between “canon” and “deviation” in order to discuss also the cases of Bulgarian, Albanian, Turkish and Romanian historiographical attitudes towards Byzantium. Thus, Bulgarian historiography is examined through the confronting models proposed by historians Marin Drinov (“canon”) and Gavril Krâstovic; (“deviation”); the Albanian case is viewed through a comparison of the early and late works of the same person: S*emseddin Sami (“deviation”) vs. Sami Frashëri (“canon”); while the Turkish and Romanian historiographies are examined, respectively, through the pairs of Fuad Köprülü vs. Ays*e Afet IÆnan and Nikolae Iorga vs. A. D. Xénopol. A special section is dedicated also to Slavic historiography, especially to the works of Konstantin Leont’ev and Marko Balabanov. What emerges from Stamatopoulos’s comparative analysis is that, in most of the above cases—at least in the early ones (Greek, Bulgarian and Albanian)—the contrast over the Medieval/Byzantine past concerns actually the same political/ cultural dilemma: nation or empire? Religious ecumenism (Pan-Orthodoxy, PanIslamism) or nationalism? The “deviations” which appear mainly in Constantinople call upon an ecumenical ideology (be it Orthodox Christianity or Islamic Ummah) which aspires to reconstruct the broken pieces of religious consciousness by transcending the nation and overcoming the national center. This kind of “imperial/ecumenical discourse”—which, in political terms, strives to create a perspective for the survival of the empire (be it the Ottoman or the Russian)— does not necessarily exclude the nation. It consists usually of a desperate effort

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to combine the old world of the empire with the new reality of nations. In other words, it constitutes a nostalgic answer to the rapid ascendancy of nationalism which, in the eyes of these historians (Gedeon, Krâstovic;, S*emseddin Sami and Leont’ev), threatens to destroy not only the empire but also their own intellectual role and existence within it. In brief, Stamatopoulos manages to deepen our knowledge on the Balkan historiographical production regarding the Byzantine period. He succeeds in producing a thoughtful and exhaustive analysis of the ideological and political uses of the Byzantine past. Last but not least, he proves effective in reconstructing the historical alternative of “imperial nationalism,” reminding the reader that the struggle over Byzantium produced its own series of winners and losers. He produces an exemplary book of comparative analysis and transnational history, whose translation into English seems to be imperative. Konstantina Zanou University of Nicosia, Cyprus

Margaret Poulos. Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. 2009. Pp. xxvi + 222. 38 illustrations in www.gutenberg-e.org/poulos/. Cloth $60.00. Margaret Poulos, in her book Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity, explores the intersection of the female warrior, nationalism, and feminism during two centuries: from the “national invention” of 1821 to the “second wave of feminism,” almost at the end of twentieth century. It is an ambitious and potentially worthwhile project to write the history of women warriors in Greece, as women not only hold up half of heaven (according to Mao Zedong), but also “half of Greece.” In the first chapter, Poulos reviews Anglo-American feminist theories concerning the relationship among women, war, peace and the nation, and tries to situate the discourses of Greek feminism in relation to these theoretical approaches. The second chapter refers mostly to the emergence of proto-feminist women, led by “the charismatic figure” of Kallirhoe Parren, who aimed to create a “national feminism” grounded in the Greek War of Independence of 1821. This was achieved in part through the images of Bouboulina and other female heroines, in articles published in the feminist weekly The Ladies’ Newspaper (Efimeris ton Kyrion), which Parren founded in 1887. But feminism and the national narrative were “unstable alliances” (37–46). Parren was actively sympathetic with the Balkan Wars (1912–13), but when Eleftherios Venizelos prepared for WWI alongside the Allies, Parren, along with her personal and political friend the Queen of Greece, adopted a pacifist stance, until she was finally exiled in 1917. It is important to take into account (as Poulos fails explicitly to do) politics and particularly the diversity on national issues policy. When Parren stopped promoting the fighter Bouboulina and declared that women were the “Peace

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to combine the old world of the empire with the new reality of nations. In other words, it constitutes a nostalgic answer to the rapid ascendancy of nationalism which, in the eyes of these historians (Gedeon, Krâstovic;, S*emseddin Sami and Leont’ev), threatens to destroy not only the empire but also their own intellectual role and existence within it. In brief, Stamatopoulos manages to deepen our knowledge on the Balkan historiographical production regarding the Byzantine period. He succeeds in producing a thoughtful and exhaustive analysis of the ideological and political uses of the Byzantine past. Last but not least, he proves effective in reconstructing the historical alternative of “imperial nationalism,” reminding the reader that the struggle over Byzantium produced its own series of winners and losers. He produces an exemplary book of comparative analysis and transnational history, whose translation into English seems to be imperative. Konstantina Zanou University of Nicosia, Cyprus

Margaret Poulos. Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. 2009. Pp. xxvi + 222. 38 illustrations in www.gutenberg-e.org/poulos/. Cloth $60.00. Margaret Poulos, in her book Arms and the Woman: Just Warriors and Greek Feminist Identity, explores the intersection of the female warrior, nationalism, and feminism during two centuries: from the “national invention” of 1821 to the “second wave of feminism,” almost at the end of twentieth century. It is an ambitious and potentially worthwhile project to write the history of women warriors in Greece, as women not only hold up half of heaven (according to Mao Zedong), but also “half of Greece.” In the first chapter, Poulos reviews Anglo-American feminist theories concerning the relationship among women, war, peace and the nation, and tries to situate the discourses of Greek feminism in relation to these theoretical approaches. The second chapter refers mostly to the emergence of proto-feminist women, led by “the charismatic figure” of Kallirhoe Parren, who aimed to create a “national feminism” grounded in the Greek War of Independence of 1821. This was achieved in part through the images of Bouboulina and other female heroines, in articles published in the feminist weekly The Ladies’ Newspaper (Efimeris ton Kyrion), which Parren founded in 1887. But feminism and the national narrative were “unstable alliances” (37–46). Parren was actively sympathetic with the Balkan Wars (1912–13), but when Eleftherios Venizelos prepared for WWI alongside the Allies, Parren, along with her personal and political friend the Queen of Greece, adopted a pacifist stance, until she was finally exiled in 1917. It is important to take into account (as Poulos fails explicitly to do) politics and particularly the diversity on national issues policy. When Parren stopped promoting the fighter Bouboulina and declared that women were the “Peace

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Corps of Humanity,” there was a conflict raging in Greece between Venizelos and the King, known as ethnikos dichasmos or National Schism. Venizelos, following a pro–Great Britain policy, wanted Greece to enter the Great War, while the King, following pro-German policy, preferred Greece’s “neutrality,” or, in other words “peace.” And Parren had close connections with the Palace and its policies. After the Great War (1914–1919), Greece had doubled its territory in the north. The Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922) led to the end of the politics of the Great Idea (Megali Idea), the irredentist campaign to expand the Greek State into Asia Minor and other areas of historical Greek presence. Before the Second World War, in the interwar period, there was a “first wave” of Greek feminism, firmly located within the liberal Venizelist tradition (50). Poulos’s third chapter discusses the establishing of women’s unions. While Parren worked for the Lyceio of Ellinidon on custom and tradition, the League for the Rights of Women targeted legal and constitutional reforms aimed at women’s economic independence, education and suffrage. It also participated in the international pacifist women’s movement, established after the horrors of the Great War. In 1936, as war clouds covered Europe, the Metaxas dictatorship made all social movements illegal and brought women into the center stage of political life and national discourse by creating a cult of Mother Worship (65). Chapter Four takes up the question of women’s participation, during the Axis Occupation (1941–1944), in the National Resistance Movement (mainly in the National Liberation Front (EAM) and its military wing ELAS), in which a great number of Greek women fought for national liberation and for a “better” world. The Resistance was constructed as the reincarnation of the spirit of 1821: the focus was on national liberation and as the author concludes “the history of the 1940s serves as a poignant example of both the emancipatory and inherent limitations of national movement” (101). Moreover, as the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) played a major role in EAM, feminism was considered a bourgeois theoretical preoccupation. According to the KKE, women were partners equal to men and had the right and the duty to fight alongside them. According to the author, the figure of the adartissa, the female partisan, was, for many women, the greatest expression of political empowerment (94). Chapter Five reviews the Greek Civil War (1946–1949) and is the longest chapter. It is divided into two parts, given the “special richness” of the period as regards the relationship between gender and national identity. The first part focuses on the shifting conception of Greek national identity as expressed through the symbol of the adartissa, as the number of women fighters in the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG), dominated by the KKE, rose to almost 30 percent of its fighters and 70 percent of its auxiliary services. The second part examines the transformation of women fighters from “heroines” to wild, bloodthirsty animals, to “hyenas.” I believe that the KKE’s “pragmatism”—to use Poulos’s term—used the symbol of adartissa, the heroine, only during the armed conflict, for external consumption. At the same time, the DAG fighters, young girls recruited from the villages, were not treated well by the KKE’s female leadership, when they were arrested and were sent to jail or to exile. Only in 1996, many years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we learned, through written testimonies, that

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there were adartisses in the women’s prison of Averof. Moreover, the first memoirs of adartisses were published only in the 1990s, while the publication of exiled women’s testimonies started in the 1970s, and those of the women prisoners in the 1980s. In addition, most of the adrtisses-writers had not lived in the Socialist Democracies, where the fighters of the DAG went after their defeat and the KKE was governing. Margaret Poulos passes by the decades of 1950 and 1960 and the final chapter concentrates on the period after the collapse of the Colonels’ Junta in 1974, the Metapolitefsi. It describes the various autonomous women’s groups, their activism and their magazines as well as the women’s unions linked to the political parties. Poulos investigates the link between the internal conflicts of “second wave” feminism and the history of the 1940s in shaping feminist discourses and identities. In the 1970s, while Greek society “discovered” and glorified the adartissa, all women unions (autonomous or linked to the parties) argued strongly against the government’s proposal for women’s voluntary enlistment in the military (167–171). I would like to add that their knowledge was limited to a few number of volunteer adartisses during the National Resistance. They knew almost nothing about the many recruited heroines/hyenas of the DAG (1946–1949). The truth is that gender and nation are indubitably linked. As Eric Hobs­ bawm has observed, during the anti-fascist struggles in Europe, the Left gained control of national identity from the Right. At exactly this time, Greek women entered into the political arena en masse, not in the name of feminism but of national liberation, and they did so from the ranks of EAM/KKE. Feminism (whether in the form of Parren, or “first” or “second wave” ) never mobilized a large number of women in Greece. Therefore, it is worth noticing that politics— especially in Greece—is closely connected with the history of the nation and plays a major role in the construction of gender/women’s identity. Thus, we can state that in periods of political upheaval, political identity overrides common gender identity and even gender interests; such was the case for Parren during the ethnikos dichasmos. And during the Greek Civil War, in 1946, women’s unions adopted the view of right-wing politicians that women should not yet be given suffrage, even if Greece had signed the UN Charter making gender equality, theoretically, Greek law. Tasoula Vervenioti Hellenic Open University

Peter Loizos. Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus. Studies in Forced Migration, Volume 23. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2008. Pp. xii + 210. 22 illustrations, 2 maps. Paperback $29.95/Cloth $90.00. A substantial and growing body of international literature addresses the consequences of involuntary migration, including the adoption of refugee identities, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and somatization of the distress that

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there were adartisses in the women’s prison of Averof. Moreover, the first memoirs of adartisses were published only in the 1990s, while the publication of exiled women’s testimonies started in the 1970s, and those of the women prisoners in the 1980s. In addition, most of the adrtisses-writers had not lived in the Socialist Democracies, where the fighters of the DAG went after their defeat and the KKE was governing. Margaret Poulos passes by the decades of 1950 and 1960 and the final chapter concentrates on the period after the collapse of the Colonels’ Junta in 1974, the Metapolitefsi. It describes the various autonomous women’s groups, their activism and their magazines as well as the women’s unions linked to the political parties. Poulos investigates the link between the internal conflicts of “second wave” feminism and the history of the 1940s in shaping feminist discourses and identities. In the 1970s, while Greek society “discovered” and glorified the adartissa, all women unions (autonomous or linked to the parties) argued strongly against the government’s proposal for women’s voluntary enlistment in the military (167–171). I would like to add that their knowledge was limited to a few number of volunteer adartisses during the National Resistance. They knew almost nothing about the many recruited heroines/hyenas of the DAG (1946–1949). The truth is that gender and nation are indubitably linked. As Eric Hobs­ bawm has observed, during the anti-fascist struggles in Europe, the Left gained control of national identity from the Right. At exactly this time, Greek women entered into the political arena en masse, not in the name of feminism but of national liberation, and they did so from the ranks of EAM/KKE. Feminism (whether in the form of Parren, or “first” or “second wave” ) never mobilized a large number of women in Greece. Therefore, it is worth noticing that politics— especially in Greece—is closely connected with the history of the nation and plays a major role in the construction of gender/women’s identity. Thus, we can state that in periods of political upheaval, political identity overrides common gender identity and even gender interests; such was the case for Parren during the ethnikos dichasmos. And during the Greek Civil War, in 1946, women’s unions adopted the view of right-wing politicians that women should not yet be given suffrage, even if Greece had signed the UN Charter making gender equality, theoretically, Greek law. Tasoula Vervenioti Hellenic Open University

Peter Loizos. Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus. Studies in Forced Migration, Volume 23. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2008. Pp. xii + 210. 22 illustrations, 2 maps. Paperback $29.95/Cloth $90.00. A substantial and growing body of international literature addresses the consequences of involuntary migration, including the adoption of refugee identities, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and somatization of the distress that

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typically accompanies the wrenching aftermath of displacement. As one of the latest in a series of studies of forced migration published by Berghahn Books, Iron in the Soul: Displacement, Livelihood and Health in Cyprus attempts to test the hypothesis raised by earlier refugee researchers (including Elizabeth Colson, to whom the volume is dedicated) that premature death and a constellation of health problems are associated with the stresses of forced migration. Ostensibly, Iron in the Soul is a book about the long-term physical and mental health repercussions of Greek Cypriot villagers’ displacement due to expulsion from their community, Argaki, in the Turkish occupied lands of Cyprus. However, Peter Loizos’s answer to that fundamental research question takes the form of an ethnographically grounded analysis that draws from numerous disciplines, including political science, public health, demography and history. The thematically organized chapters reflect his holistic approach, including a portrait of increasingly tense ethnic relations in the years preceding the crisis that evicted the villagers from their home, diachronic economic analyses, recountings of global, island and community politics and how they influenced the events before, during, and after the villagers’s flight from Argaki. Particularly poignant are villagers’s narrations of their comparatively recent visits to their natal homes after the barriers to visitation were suddenly lifted in 2003. The result of this interdisciplinary tour is a wide-ranging and engaging depiction of experiencing and responding to the pain of exile. Loizos makes the case that the severity of the blow was ameliorated to a great extent through the villagers’s ability to achieve key goals, including ensuring children’s marriages and other family-oriented pursuits. To do so required creativity and resilience and reliance upon support from kin. Echoing a number of anthropological studies on ritual healing in Greece, Loizos identified engagement with the Orthodox church as an additional way in which some but by no means all of the villagers made sense of their sacrifices and suffering. With respect to dealing with illness, some of which was exacerbated by the stresses of exile, refugees’s priority access to quality healthcare services also appeared to play an important role. Nevertheless, Loizos neither sugarcoats the agonies experienced along the way, nor glorifies the survival and gradual normalization of the refugees’s new transplanted lives. Loizos does not tie his wide-ranging analysis to any one theoretical point of view. However, his assessment of comparatively good health outcomes stemming in part from economic and social successes of the refugees from Argaki once they were resettled is entirely consistent with the increasingly popular social determinants of health approach. The social determinants of health perspective, pioneered by such theoreticians as Engels, include wealth/poverty and social capital as key variables connecting socioeconomic status to health outcomes (Marmot and Wilkinson, 2006). Although he notes that he did not conduct research continuously over the past forty years with the study population, Loizos is uniquely qualified to write about them, because his original ethnographic research dates to 1968, well before the villagers were forced from their land in 1974. Moreover, because his father came from the town, he relied upon ties of close kinship as well as the

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usual relationships built through long-term fieldwork. Perspectives of the Turkish Cypriots from the same village are conveyed through the assistance of a Turkish Cypriot sociologist colleague who shared his interview data with Loizos. A parallel study of Turkish Cypriots uprooted from the Southern part of the island would add yet more texture to the present volume, but Loizos suggests that such a comparative study would be better taken up by another researcher. One of the most compelling contributions of the book lies in the way it details how easily the survival outcome of a number of residents might have differed had they chosen to react violently to the chaotic stimuli of the 1974 conflict. Loizos offers testimonies of pivotal decisions made just before the village residents became refugees. For example, one man recalled entreating his fellow Greek Cypriot villagers to refrain from killing Turkish Cypriots from the same village in the midst of the troubles leading up to the forced partition. It is important to document such peaceful and reasoned choices, rather than focusing on the tragic and undeniable violence that did occur elsewhere. Such choices are contextualized within the larger forces contributing to the tragedy; international involvement is evoked not only by accounts of Turkish, Greek, British, and American interventions in the country, but also by a mocking cartoon of Kissinger wielding a carving knife to cut Cyprus in two. Timelines from the distant as well as recent history of the island, maps, diagrams, first-person accounts, and numerous captivating crisp black-and-white photographs of Argaki’s former residents and their descendents help to make the book’s rich details more accessible to students who are unfamiliar with Cyprus. In fact, the volume would serve well as a reasonable and readable textbook for undergraduate students in Mediterranean Studies or medical anthropology of the region. Selections from his earlier ethnographies of the villagers pre- and immediately post-displacement (Loizos 1975 and 1981, respectively) would also be appropriate for a series of readings to serve as a case study of diachronic research methods. However, the present volume stands on its own merit and has an internal cohesion; thus it does not require knowledge of Loizos’s previous two books on Argaki’s villagers in order to benefit from its conclusions, focusing on the people rather than the place, in the face of such upheaval. Roland S. Moore Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation REFERENCES CITED Loizos, Peter 1975 The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village. Oxford: Blackwell. 1981 The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marmot, Michael and Richard G. Wilkinson, editors 2006 Social Determinants of Health (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Alexandros Kyriakopoulos and Efthymios Gourgouris, editors. Ανησυχία. Μια καταγραφή του αυθόρμητου τον Δεκέμβριο του 2008. Athens: Kastaniotis. 2009. Pp. 289. €19.00. A. G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network, editors. We Are An Image of the Future. The Greek Revolt of December 2008. Oakland: AK Press. 2010. Pp. 386. $17.00. The importance of historical events is often reflected in the extensive and long standing commentary that serves as their recognition, establishment, critical evaluation, analysis, or interrogation by contemporaries, but also reconceptualization, reiteration, and re-imagination by generations following. Most precious, however, especially as events become distant in time and entrenched all the more as a result of such commentary, is any documentation of primary evidence—not merely testimonial accounts by the historical actors, but even more, the presentation of actual materials embroiled in the action: pamphlets, posters, stencils, graffiti, photography, artwork, and media practices in the broadest sense. Even the most avid devotees of theoretical reflection cannot help but be awed by the presence of such raw historical traces. I am especially partial to the extraordinary posters from the Paris Commune, the pamphlets distributed by the rebelling soviets during the Kronstadt Uprising or the unprecedented and startling documents from Barcelona under anarchist governance, and I would give anything to have seen even one of the posters that Vladimir Mayakovsky designed and produced daily (numbered in the tens of thousands and posted anew everyday in the post offices of 34 towns), informing the Russian people how to cope with everyday concerns in revolutionary conditions (from food supply to typhus prevention) or offering advice against the kissing of icons—all poetic texts in perfect quatrains bearing both the mark of the Russian poetic tradition and Mayakovsky’s own inimitable style, which had led Leon Trotsky to reprimand him for everywhere producing Mayakomorphism. Especially precious, it seems to me, is raw historical evidence of spontaneous social action, where no guiding political mechanism holds the reins of a budding archive of decision making. The profoundly heterogeneous, plural, and multi-sited spontaneity of what we have come to identify as the December 2008 insurrection in Greece is arguably the most remarkable—and most difficult to theorize—dimension of what happened. It is what defies subsequent attempts by supporters and detractors alike to codify the historical evidence whether according to standard modes of allegedly “objective” social science or the pronouncements of ideological certainty—to my mind, the same thing. My intellectual response to the events, in all honesty, remains one of puzzlement. I refused, at the time, to rush into the realm of public assessment, as I felt that all the analytical tools I have inherited were indeed ineffective. In retrospect, puzzlement honors the seriousness of the event, which isn’t to say that, as intellectuals, we should not try genuinely to evaluate the significance of what happened. (For the best such efforts in English, see the texts of Neni Panourgia, Marinos Pourgouris, and Kostis Kornetis in this issue and of Andreas Kalyvas in the recent issue of Constellations.) This is not the venue for such an attempt on

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my part. However, I am convinced of one thing: what happened deserves to be called an insurrection and, as all insurrections in history, it was spontaneous and uncontrolled, an eruption of extraordinary rage against all and in demand of nothing—or, just as well (to borrow a bit from the poetic language of the actors), in demand of all and against all established order which amounts to nothing. It was an insurrection conducted initially by students of the lycée, who were eventually joined by a significant number of university students, immigrant undocumented workers, as well as by weathered anarchist groups and youth belonging to autonomist and freethinking circles of all kinds, politically, socially, and sexually. It is utterly misguided, however, to consider that autonomists and anarchists controlled the contours of the action in any way, and it goes without saying that the official parties on the Left were completely uninvolved—decidedly suspicious from the outset and, with few individual exceptions in the ranks, ultimately opposed to the movement in ways so typical to be banal. For this reason, before intellectual assessments weigh in, publications of sheer documentation from the field of action are invaluable. Each of the publications I consider here is precious in its own way. The impetus of the Greek publication Ανησυχία was indeed nothing more than a collection of representations, an impartial staging of some of the key images of the December days. Given the imaginary that animates the December events, it’s elementary to note the imagistic nature of all texts produced by the actors and reproduced in this book—whether declarations of various groups occupying public buildings, posted evaluations of events as they are going on, or ingeniously poetic expressions of all kinds. As an eruption against the society of the spectacle, the December insurrection was conducted with keen awareness of the politics of the spectacular. The metaphysics of logos was stripped of its pretentions and against it was hurled the reflection of its own, inner and hidden, media manipulation. The logic of established discourse was re-performed as the ill-logic it actually is by an overwhelming iconic assault. At an elemental level, this publication succeeds precisely because it confronts the reader imagistically. It does not provide a narrative representation of what happened, but a performative aggregate of a remarkable range of actions, whose dramatic effect, though enacted in a number of weeks, produced in the end a continuum of affect, a sort of permanent simultaneity of experiences, whose meaning cannot be comprehended in any logical, propositional sense. The title Ανησυχία, itself drawn from a widely disseminated poster, mobilizes a variety of meanings. Its literal register—disquiet—captures the core imaginary signification of the insurrection, as the impetus of the actors, reiterated in myriad ways day after day as the events unfolded, was first and foremost to disrupt society’s stupor, its complete self-abrogation of will and robotic subjugation to the desires of consumerism, greed-driven deception, and political clientelism. Surely, contiguous meanings of the word—unrest, worry, trouble and so on— bolster the image of a troubling condition, in which a particular sector of society (rather heterogeneous, except for the common denominator of youth) refuses to conform to enforced standards of social behavior. In many of the texts, the actors confess living through days of continued sleeplessness entwined with a

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continuous ­explosion of dream-like sensations. This becomes a metaphor for a way of being that counters society’s guilty sleep and willful surrender of its dream-making (poie \tic) capacity. The ingenious overturning of language and the startling, oftentimes violent, artistic expression in poster art produced during the events should be understood as an aesthetics of battle specifically directed against the anesthetic way of life in Greek society as a whole, a life of voluntary servitude to convention. The single most targeted word, seen just about everywhere, is κανονικότητα: normalcy, normativity, order, canonicity. The two editors of Ανησυχία, who are photographers and graphic artists, sought simply to capture the fingerprint of the spontaneous, as they put it—by all accounts an impossible task. Aside obviously from a certain sequential ordering, the image-text speaks on its own, remaining in this sense unedited and uneditorialized. I reproduce here (in the order presented in the book) what to my mind are especially indicative (always ingenious and incisive) phrasings, fragments of a politics in the making, a political poiein: “We’re making an insurrection, and we’re enjoying it”; “We ask for nothing because we want everything”; “We have no demands, we have commands”; “If we break shop windows, it isn’t because life is too costly, but because our comfort keeps us from experiencing life’s cost”; “Don’t throw anymore teargas, we cry on our own”; “Death is overcome by living”; “Poetry on the barricades”; “There’s something everyone is afraid to lose—their chains”; “PARADISE has been destroyed, time for some people to go to HELL”; “I don’t want to work, I need time for NOTHING”; “Christmas is over—the Virgin had an abortion”; “December was not an answer, it was a question.”

Ανησυχία was received with praise by virtually every critic in the press or the internet, which is noteworthy considering the skeptical, if not outright oppositional, response to the events by many in Left intellectual ranks. A charge can be made that the book aestheticizes (and thus depoliticizes) the significance of the events. No doubt, it deactivates the transient nature of insurrectionary power. What is gained in turn is a bona fide memory of the elemental imagination of the insurrection, and whether or how this is aestheticized—or by the same token, re-politicized—is not decided by the event of publication but remains in the hands of the inheritors of the December legacy. With such charges in mind, however, certain anarchist circles did stage an expropriation of the book from Kastaniotis’s central bookstore, under the argument that this material cannot, in effect, be published by anyone, since it already and irreversibly belongs to the public domain. As it is authorless and self-authorizing, it cannot be re-produced in the marketplace. The logic of the action cannot be faulted, but it underestimates the immensely valuable act of this publication. One consequence of this action was that the publication was made available on the publisher’s internet site and, of course, it can be downloaded from various freeware sites. It is surely significant that just two years subsequent to the events there is extensive documentation of the actors’ own words published in English. The effort to collect, translate, and publish the material that comprises We Are an Image from the Future testifies to the magnitude of the event’s importance. Though the insurrection registered immediate resonance internationally—we all remember

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the alarmed injunctions of European state leaders lest this fuels similar action in their own countries—the subsequent response from radical circles worldwide (from the explicit reference to December by the writers of The Coming Insurrection to anarchists in Italy, Spain, and the US, to bloggers from Arab societies who saw in Greek youth a beacon of anti-authoritarian action, to eponymous radicals, like Mike Davis, who consider Greece the forefront of anti-capitalist insurgency) corroborates the fact that what happened in December 2008 in Greece has already made an indelible historical mark and will be a reference point for years to come beyond Greek national boundaries. We Are an Image from the Future is a somewhat different kind of publication. Apart from photographs of street clashes and reproductions of certain posted declarations it shares with Ανησυχία, the documentary evidence comes in the form of testimonials, chronicles, interviews, or personal narratives by participants, mostly identified by first name only or by group name. In addition, there is a significant number of texts in the same order that provide accounts of the multiple histories of movements and forces that re-emerged in December, even if the events were conducted by youth engaged in such a way for the first time. There are some brief but extremely concise and informative accounts of the history of anarchism in Greece, of student movements in the last decades, of street violence, of the relation of spontaneous social action to the organized bodies of the Left. What thus emerges in this publication is a retrospective of both close and far view which contextualizes the spontaneity of action and provides access to how it all fits the big picture, not only of why December 2008 was significant in itself but how it opens a new way to connect with a great range of insurrectionary strains past and to come. As far as I know, nothing of this kind exists in Greek activist or historical literature. The collection of texts fashions a much more complex image of what went on than is usually rendered in the press or assumed by casual accounts. Unlike the raw expressionism of the material in Ανησυχία, the reader is confronted with a kaleidoscope of profoundly involved and sophisticated reasoning behind the actions, a documentation of keen sensitivity as to the stakes involved, as well as an evidently seasoned self-consciousness of the magnitude of what occurred. Despite what one hears from detractors of Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking, spontaneous action does not mean naïve, thoughtless, or directionless action—and this collection of more or less unmediated instances of thinking/remembering/ reconsidering is a rare demonstration of this fact. As one reads through, one gets a tangible sense of how decisions were made, from the earliest gatherings in Exarcheia right after the Grigoropoulos assassination, to the heaviest street battles in the deep of the night during the weeks afterwards, to conversations amongst individuals or in assemblies as to how to proceed next, to decisions made on the run on fortuitous occasions, to a detailed description of the action to take over national television broadcasting during the Prime Minister’s speech—this latter being one of the most sophisticated and complex demonstrations of both theatricality and political acumen, with clear and successful measures taken against anyone being hurt and against anyone being arrested. Other accounts of momentary decision making and spontaneous action

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include anarchist groups taking over fire trucks and conducting conversations with central Fire Department control on the truck radio; the famous Christmas tree burning; facing outrageous provocations and taunting chants by police ranks; a story of young shopkeepers of a posh clothing store, which was destroyed, taking part nonetheless in the protests; activities of organized insurgency by groups engaged in sophisticated counter-information; accounts of the relation between squatter groups and autonomous neighborhood assemblies—all this juxtaposed with texts from all kinds of supportive and contiguous actions abroad (London, Barcelona, Sofia, Ankara, even Wellington, New Zealand) and complex theoretical analyses of mass-mediation, the construction of radical subjectivity, prison reform as a domain of struggle, the unique significance of immigrant action (mostly by Albanian and African workers), and the striking presence of new gender and sexuality awareness at the very front of the action. I do want to focus on the last two elements. Much has been made of solidarity participations in the action by various immigrants, whether individually or organized in groups. One of the earliest rumors, while battles were still taking place, was that the night-time looting was solely conducted by immigrants—a questionable assertion about an issue that still requires elucidation. The participation of immigrant laborers or unemployed youth of immigrant parents is indeed documented in both books by the reprinting of distributed declarations of solidarity primarily during acts of occupation of public buildings. The most important event, however, that situates the immigrant labor issue at the core of the December events was the assault on Konstantina Kuneva, a Bulgarian worker and leading trade union activist (actually, the secretary of the Union of Housekeepers and Cleaners of Attica). Kuneva was attacked in front of her home on December 23rd by unknown assailants who threw sulfuric acid in her face and forced her to swallow it. She survived the attack at great cost, the loss of an eye, severe damage to internal organs, and permanent disfigurement. She emerged, however, as a symbolic figure of enormous magnitude, right next to Grigoropoulos, and brought about extensive mobilization, especially by various women’s groups and advocates of the rights of immigrant workers. Her case extended the scope of the insurrection and its movement almost to March, and even today, Kuneva—an extremely powerful and articulate personality—carries a highly revered presence in radical circles but even in certain quarters of the mainstream press. Kuneva’s case—especially by virtue of the action taken in her name and in support during the days and weeks subsequent to her assault—also brought to the forefront the incisive significance of gender in the general constitution of the events and their aftermath. From the first few days, it became plainly evident that a vast number of women, often very young women, were at the frontlines of the battle-clashes with the police. One also saw that a substantial part of the poster and stencil art put up in city streets as the events unfolded demonstrated a women’s perspective of what was at stake. One particularly striking communiqué, released by an anti-sexist group, instructed insurgents to stop using the word “cunt” to describe the police (often routinely reproduced in soccer-style chants of enmity), concluding with the command: “Aside from the cop, kill the sexist

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in your head!” In this collection, there is ample testimony, from interviews and reprints of declarations such as this, that discussions of gender and sexuality issues were very much in focus in the context of all other kinds of insurgent action. Some of the most inventive slogans and poetic configurations of the movement’s aims, whether by means of violence or not, emerged from within the imaginary of free-thinking communities, with the demand to rethink social relations in direct connection with sexuality issues. The deeper historical and political meaning of the Greek December insurrection may still elude us, though there is no doubt that this event will remain a key reference in radical history and in the history of youth movements worldwide. The hermeneutical work in this case is made harder by the fact that the insurgent actors demanded precisely that we dismantle our ways of interpreting and representing the world. Certainly, care should be taken not to arrive at easy conclusions based on classic analyses of power relations (political and economic) or standard social and cultural analyses about Greece specifically. What happened certainly exceeds what caused it to happen. And for this reason, studying the signs, images, and traces of the happening itself, with an open mind as to what might be signified, is the first place to begin, and these two publications are, in this respect, a treasure. Stathis Gourgouris Columbia University