Biennial Conference of the Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, La Trobe University, 11-13 December 2008

1 Modern Greece: an old/new nation Roderick Beaton Keynote paper given at the 9th Biennial Conference of the Modern Greek Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, La Trobe University, 11-13 December 2008 The title of this talk points to a paradox. Greece is a very old nation, perhaps the oldest in Europe and one of the oldest surviving in the world today. But no: Greece is a new nation, created in the early 19th century. Both these statements can’t be true. And yet who would deny the antiquity of Greece? The name still, today, refers primarily to one of the great ancient civilisations of the world; indeed this is why we often have to distinguish the modern language, and the modern field of studies that brings us together here, by the addition of the word ‘Modern’. We don’t have to talk about ‘Modern British’ studies, ‘Modern French’, still less ‘Modern Australian’! But in the case of Greece we often have to make that distinction, precisely because in the minds of many people and in a wide variety of contexts, the very word ‘Greek’ implies in itself the idea of ‘ancient’. We can deplore this practice if we wish. But the fact remains: ‘Greece’ is very old as well as, in its modern form, distinctly new. The way out of the paradox must surely be to ask: what do you mean by a ‘nation’? That is the question that I intend to address in this talk. In particular, how does the success-story of Greece as a modern nation map onto current and developing theories of nations and nationalism? What does the unique and specific story of modern Greece have to tell comparatists, theorists, and historians of nationalism as a social and political phenomenon? And how, conversely, can the current theoretical debate help us better to understand the specific case of Greece, both in its particularity and in its wider political and sociological context? Two books published in 2008 tackle these issues head on. The volume of essays edited by Katerina Zacharia, entitled Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and 2 Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate), focuses on the Greek case diachronically, taking in the whole chronological sweep implied by its title. Specialists on the classical and Byzantine worlds, as well as on modern Greece, drawn from a variety of disciplines, offer their insights into the different ways in which Greeks at different historical periods have constructed a communal sense of identity for themselves. The other book is The Cultural Foundations of Nations, by Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: Blackwell). Smith is one of the foremost contemporary theorists of nations and nationalism, and here he proposes a far-reaching typology of nations and the social and political forces that shape them, that goes back as far as the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt and attempts to account for nationalism as a worldwide phenomenon at the present day. I want to say something about each of these books now. Anthony Smith’s book is important to the study of modern Greece for two reasons. Since the mid-1980s, Smith has been developing a theoretical approach to nations and nationalism which has ever more parted company with a dominant orthodoxy associated with his former colleagues at the London School of Economics. According to this orthodoxy, known as ‘modernism’ in the technical terminology of specialists, the idea of the nation is inseparable from modernity. The ideas on which nationalism is based derive from the philosophy of Rousseau and Herder in the second half of the 18th century; the political nation is a product of the revolutions of the United States and France in 1776 ad 1789 respectively, the wars of liberation in South America in the first two decades of the 19th century, and (perhaps) the industrial revolution. Smith, originally an adherent of this view, began to diverge from it, in The Ethnic Origin of Nations (1986). Without quite disowning the ‘modernist’ paradigm, he began to introduce the idea that modern nations, beginning in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, had been built upon much older political, social and cultural foundations. For the study of Greek national identity, this was a promising approach. Whereas thoroughgoing going ‘modernist’ theories of the nation seemed to leave no 3 room for the greater part of Greek history (before 1821), Smith opened a way to investigate how perceptions of the past could play a constructive role in the modern formation of nations. As he expressed it in 2001: Nationalism and nations [...] are part of a wider ethno-cultural ‘family’ of collective identities and aspirations [... T]he process of nation-formation [is] not so much one of construction, let alone deliberate ‘invention’, as of reinterpretation of pre-existing cultural motifs and of reconstruction of earlier ethnic ties and sentiments. [... T]he Greeks afford a good example of this revival and reidentification through continuity of names, language and landscapes. (A.D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History, Cambridge: Polity, 2001, pp. 58, 83, 84, original emphases) This was a powerful answer to theorists such as Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, or even Benedict Anderson, whose influential concept of ‘imagined communities’ was still being hotly contested in the Greek press as recently as 2005. Since then, Smith has been extending his chronological range backwards, and the furthest reach of this process is revealed in his new book, The Cultural Foundations of Nations. The most far-reaching argument – and it remains to be seen how this will fare as the theoretical debate continues – is that the processes that give rise to nations in the modern world can in principle be found anywhere in the world and at any point in historical time. The existence of these processes can only be demonstrated, of course, where evidence exists in the form of a historical record. Allowing for the incompleteness of evidence for pre-modern periods, Smith identifies among the recorded civilisations of the ancient Near East four that he argues can be understood as ‘proto-nations’. The Greek city-state is not among them, even although he does note evidence that the Athenians in the fifth century BC viewed themselves in ways very similar to those that define a modern nation (59 and n.). 4 In Smith’s formulation, the model of the Greek city-state was enormously influential in later developments in nation-building. But he leaves no room for the idea that the Greeks themselves had been a nation before the 1821 revolution. On the other hand, his final chapter does give a welcome prominence to modern Greece – not because of any intrinsic link to antiquity but rather as an ‘exemplary’ case in the author’s developing typology of modern nations. This is the more remarkable because the Greek case has tended to be skated over in general and theoretical studies of modern nationalism. The last chapter of Smith’s most recent book begins with an account of the Greek revolution and a summary of the ideological mix that went into shaping the first hundred years of Greek national identity in the modern world. Of course, like all such theoretical studies by generalists, this one is severely limited by the sources to which Smith has had access. But brief though it is, it is a nuanced account that Smith gives. What interests him about the Greek case is the co-existence and competition of two very differently based ideologies in the formative stage of the modern Greek nation: on the one hand the classically-based model of the ancient city-state that was promoted by philhellenes and the Greek elite, on the other the allegiance to Orthodox Christianity that motivated the great majority of combatants and later citizens of the Greek state. Smith’s purpose is to propose a broad-based typology of nations, and Greece here serves that purpose because, as he reads the evidence, modern Greece is representative of a hybrid between two of his basic types. Smith’s typology, its strengths and possible limitations, need not concern us for now. Suffice it to say that the two fundamental types of nation that he sees coming together in the hybrid Greek case are what he calls ‘covenantal’ nations and ‘republican’ nations. ‘Covenantal’ nations, in Smith’s analysis, are modelled ultimately on ancient Judaea as its history is told in the Old Testament and characterised by a community of religious faith and divinely-inspired mission. ‘Republican’ nations, on the other hand, draw their inspiration from the ancient Greek city-state, and particularly from the democratic institutions of classical Athens and of republican Rome. 5 The dichotomy that Smith has observed about modern Greece is immediately recognisable as the much-discussed ‘double heritage’ of the Greeks, deriving both from classical antiquity and from the legacy of Byzantium and the Orthodox Church. In Greek terms this dichotomy is well known, and the actual or alleged differences between a ‘Hellenic’ and a ‘Romeic’ identity run through the whole of Greek literature from Korais and Solomos to the present day. The Hellenic/Romeic dichotomy has been famously discussed in English by such different commentators as Patrick Leigh Fermor, Arnold Toynbee, and Michael Herzfeld. To that extent Smith is saying nothing new. What is new is: first, the attempt to contextualise that peculiarly Greek experience in a wider theory of nations, and second, the claim that aspects of this experience are ‘exemplary’ for the understanding of other nationalisms elsewhere in the world. I will come back to this idea of modern Greece as an ‘exemplary’ nation at the end of this talk.

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