5. Identity Politics in Greece
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Tassos Anastassiadis EHESS, Paris [email protected] “Challenging the modernization – secularization dogma: The identity cards crisis in the 90’s and the Church’s ‘conservative renovation’”. It is reasonable to question oneself where would social studies on the Greek Church have stood today, if the “religion turn” of the nineties had not occurred. Prior to the post-89 paradigmatic (in Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of the notion)1 turmoil, studies about the Greek Orthodox Church were scarce. Quite ironically, we owe to S. Huntington, who in his famous article about “The Clash of civilizations” relegated Greece “on the other side of the wall” - because of its orthodox background - the stimulus given to the field. At the same time the shock of this statement structured the debate. Authors usually challenge Huntington’s claim concerning Greece, or his general argument, but feel obliged (?) to abide to the criteria and the scientific categories used in relation to “culture” and political modernization. Therefore, the dominant use of the “traditional” dualistic models such as “Tradition versus Modernity” or “Orthodoxy versus Europe” have impoverished the debate, the main reason for this being the aforementioned lack of substantial socio-historical research concerning the Church of Greece. To paraphrase Nietzsche’s remark, we can say that part of the problem with the development of generalizing scientific literature is that talking about Orthodoxy in general is far more “economical”, although considerably less accurate, than examining what is being orthodox, who is orthodox, and what does this imply if it does, about political action.2 We do definitely have to account that the current interest concerning the Church, measured in terms of articles and books, is inversely proportional to the number of works produced about the functioning of the Church, its history since 1833, its agents and its internal and external power equilibrium.3 Most authors base their analyses on the treatment of the Church’s discourses as information-sources according to a prefabricated schema which has become a “weltanschuung” of greek-relevant social theory: modernization. Even when an author recognizes the limits of these analyses in terms of “identities”, “cultural dualisms”, “traditionalist attitudes”4 etc. it becomes 1 “ they implicitly define problems and legitimate methods of research for future generations of scientists ”. 2 caracteristics : remarkable accomplishments attracting a group of researchers from competing scientific activities ; and sufficiently vast perspectives furnishing to this group all kinds of problems to resolve. ” cf. Thomas Kuhn, La structure des révolutions scientifiques, Paris, Champs, 1983 (1962), introduction. 2 Cf. Michel Dobry’s critic – following Bourdeu’s scheme - of the “ behaviouralist ” school’s fixist and mechanical use of expressions such as “ the political attitudes of the catholic ” or in our case the “ orthodox ”. Sociologie des crises politiques, Paris, Presses de la FNSP, 1986, pp. 241-243. 3 Charles Frazee’s book on the History of the Greek Church 1821-1852 is the only work mentioned in bibliographies more than thirty years after its apparition. This contrasts amazingly with the development of historical and sociological works concerning the churches and their agents in other countries. 4 E. Papataxiarchis’ essay “La valeur du ménage: classes sociales, stratégies matrimoniales et lois ecclésiastiques à Lesbos au XIXe siècle” pp. 109-142, in: S. Woolf (ed.), Espaces et familles dans l’Europe du Sud à l’Âge moderne is a good example of how the Church can have a strategic interest in fighting a tradition cherished by social actors and thus contribute to the appearance of a “ modernity ”, while holding a discourse proclaiming the attachment to tradition and refusing innovation. 1 difficult to furnish a convincing answer regarding the apparent “contradictions” in the Church’s discourse and acts other than reducing everything to complete post modernist subjectivity.5 We would like to suggest a triple methodological shift in dealing with an ecclesiastical institution. In this we are extending E. Troeltsch’s constructive criticism of Weber’s “protestantism” thesis,6 as well as R. Koselleck’s efforts to combine social history with the conceptual history apparatus.7 Therefore, we propose that discourse analysis need not consider them either as automatically informative8 or as performative,9 but rather as responses to specific social demands. Furthermore, in these discourses concepts are constantly used and reused while being resemantized in the longue durée. And finally in order to understand this process, a shift from discourse analysis to that of practice has to be implemented. The identity card “crisis” of the 90’s is a good testing ground for this methodological hypothesis. Admittedly, during the 1993-2000 period Church-State relations in Greece go through their greatest phase of turbulence since the proclamation of the Autocephalous in 1833. This turbulence definitely does crystallize in the question of the mention of confessional status in the identity cards. Nevertheless, it is the latent project of constitutional reform diminishing the role of the Church, which seems, as always, to be the apple of discord. Three methodological “illusions” are usually present –isolated or combined- in numerous analyses: A/ the “etiological illusion” which observes the resurgence of the latent opposition “Orthodoxy- Enlightenment”, not to mention the Byzantium/Occident one. The modernizing history of modernity which mixes up sociological object and social conquest even identifies periods when either the first or second aspect of the antithesis prevails.10 Therefore, for example the orthodox-nationalist dictatorship of Metaxas becomes a disruption in Greek history with the liberal “modernizers” of the 2nd Republic.11 According to the most renowned law historian of the period, religious minorities’ harassing focalizes with the Metaxas legislation on proselytism.12 In fact, a critical approach of the period reveals the development and continuity of religious strife on the aftermath of WWI (i.e. 1922 for Greece) and the progressive legislative implication of the Greek 2nd 5 For example, Stavrakakis’ critical account of the Diamandouros & Mouzelis thesis concerning cultural dualism, stresses the importance of the apparent incapacity of this theoretical apparatus in explaining what may appear as incoherences within the Church’s actions and discourse, but finally gives up explaining them by accepting to just present their existence. He cannot disentangle his analysis from the “ populist discourse ” doxa although he does in numerous occasions sense the veritable sociological importance and context of Christodoulos’ discourse. Religion and populism : Reflections on the “ politicized ” discourse of the Greek Church, LSE paper, 2002, (cf. footnote N° 31). 6 E. Troeltsch, Protestantisme et modernité, Paris, Gallimard, 1991 (1909-1913), pp. 24-27. 7 R. Koselleck, Le futur passé: Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques, Paris, EHESS, 1990 (1979), pp. 19-36 & 99-118. 8 N. Chomsky states that “it would be wrong to believe that the discourse’s primary function is to inform.” 9 E. Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1966. 10 Cf. N. Diamandouros, Cultural dualism and political modernization in post authoritarian Greece, Athens, Alexandria, 2000. 11 Cf. Ibid., p. 63. 12 This has been the nature of Alivizatos argumentation in the “identity card” debate. He puts the emphasis on the Metaxas case. Alivizatos, Uncertain modernization, Athens, Polis 2001, pp. 287-324. Nevertheless, the author’s major work, Political institutions in crisis 1922-1974, Athens, themelio, 1995 (1979), pp. 339-374 gives us a far more interesting, although incompletely problematized insight about the continuity between republic and dictatorship. 2 Republic in favor of the Greek Church in order to ensure national cohesion. For some minorities, (i.e. the Salonica Jews), it is even flagrant that the Metaxas’ dictatorship is seen as a positive development saving them from the “homogenization-modernization” campaign of the Liberal republicans.13 B/ the “heroïc illusion” usually follows not far away since this archetypal opposition is supposedly exacerbated - in what becomes a “crisis” - by the “charismatic” aspects of the leaders of the two poles. On one hand Prime minister C. Simitis, head of the “modernizers” and on the other Archbishop Christodoulos, expressing the voice of the “populists” or of an “underdog culture”. Let us suggest here that the identity card question was latent since the eighties, and the first critical debate took place in 1993, in a period when questions of succession were opened within the Church and the PASOK. The apparent crisis between two charismas couldn’t it also be perceived as the successful resolution of a long lasting social debate while consolidating the authority of new leaders within their respective institutions? C/ finally the “natural history” illusion which is the most treacherous given its inclination towards comparisons. In this version, secularization, which is characterized in the beginning by a decline of religiosity, slowly moves to a second phase when new élites, new institutions, new concepts (which are secularized versions of the preceding period’s ones)14 try to substitute themselves to the old ones. This usually provokes crises and the emergence of counter-secular movements. In the older