Money, God and Race

The Politics of Reproduction and the Nation in Modern Greece

Alexandra Halkias PANTEION UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT At the present historical moment, the modernization of the Greek nation is at the forefront of discussion in the Greek public sphere. In the shadow of this discussion, the official public sphere has also been grappling with a very low national birth rate – approximately 100,000 per population of 11 million. This statistical phenomenon is coupled with a high frequency of abortion, between 150,000 and 200,000 in 2001, and is referred to in the media and policy discussions as ‘the demografiko’, Greece’s ‘No. 1 or No. 2 national problem’. This article examines popular Greek perceptions of the problem of the national birth rate and the contestation between meanings of nationhood that the resulting discourses both illuminate and, as the author shows, sometimes incite. The focus is on what women living in Athens say about the demografiko. These are voices not currently being heard in the public sphere. The author argues that the demografiko’s articulation of ‘Greece’ is a window through which one witnesses the racially and religiously inflected politics of late modernity, just as they are also being played out at the site of gender and reproduction elsewhere in Europe and Asia.

KEY WORDS critical demography ◆ modern Greece ◆ national identity ◆ nationalism ◆ reproduction ◆ resistance

At the present historical moment in Greece, there is a heated debate going on concerning modernization. In the shadow of this discussion, the public sphere has also been grappling with another issue, Greece’s low birth rate, reported at approximately 100,000 births annually for a population of 11 million. This low birth rate is coupled with a high abortion rate, estimated between 150,000 and 250,000 abortions in 2001, and they together constitute the focus of the public problem, referred to as the ‘demografiko’. The demografiko is widely represented in the public sphere as ‘Greece’s No. 1 or No. 2 national problem’. As shown below, in a brief overview of the related discussion in the press, the demografiko, far from being a simple statistical issue, is a fairly complex socially constructed public problem

The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 10(2): 211–232 [1350-5068(200305)10:2;211–232;032933] 212 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2) that touches a deep chord in Greece and has preoccupied the Greek national imaginary throughout most of its modern history. Whatever the precise rate of abortion, the mass media often report that Greece has one of the highest rates of abortion in Europe.1 When juxta- posed to the pronounced pro-natalist discourse in circulation in the public sphere’s discussion of the demografiko, the high rate of abortion in Greece presents an interesting paradox. How is it that we simultaneously have the occurrence of a vehement hegemonic discourse articulating strong pro-natalist positions in the public sphere, and an apparently contradictory wide-scale popular practice, the high rate of abortions?2 This article examines contemporary popular Greek perceptions of the problem with the national birth rate. More specifically, the focus is on what women living in Athens themselves have to say about the demografiko. These are voices that are not currently being heard in the public sphere. As these women’s comments demonstrate, the definitions of nationhood underlying official discussion of the demographic problem in Greece are the object of contestation in less visibly public domains. This article demonstrates Greek women’s disagreement with the terms of demografiko discourse and argues that, ironically, women’s disagreements both advance an incisive critique of the nation’s preoccupation with its biological welfare, and, at the same time, reveal the pervasive permeation of civil society with nationalist ideologies. That is, Greek women’s opposition to the mandate of their bearing ‘more’ children reflects both their criticism and, at the same time, an implicit endorsement of key terms in the nationalist discourse animating the demografiko. Thus, the narratives expressed by the Athenian women interviewed have important theoretical implications concerning the intricate operation of power. In this article, I explore how hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ideologies concerning state-building projects are simultaneously refracted and redeployed at the site of the gendered subject of late modernity. As Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and Anderson (1991) have argued, the nation is a historical construct that becomes discursively naturalized and, I would emphasize, at particular historical junctures, discursively denat- uralized or, as in this case, problematized. Women’s responses to the demografiko’s articulation of ‘Greece’ permit a sighting of the simultaneous operation of power and resistance (Foucault, 1990; 1995). In addition, this material constitutes a window through which we can witness the racially and religiously inflected politics of late modernity, especially the political deployment of ‘population’ and ‘demography’, in the same way they are being currently played out elsewhere in Europe as well.3 Halkias: Money, God and Race 213

MODERNIZATION AND NATIONALISM

The larger discursive context of the preoccupation with the Greek birth rate throughout the 1990s is the debate on how best to modernize Greece. An important force fuelling this debate is the ongoing effort to become aligned as an equal member of the European Union. Another issue of primary concern has been the party clientelism seen as underlying both Greek politics and the professional realm, and as being responsible for the difficulties Greece encountered in developing the rationalization and efficiency of a truly European state.4 The debate concerning modernization is multilayered and was importantly intersected by a wave of Greek nationalism that flared up in 1994 with the contentious US-led international recognition of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as an autonomous state.5 Overall, Greek media coverage of the demografiko serves as a reposi- tory for deeply rooted cultural anxieties about race, religion and sexuality that are increasingly being disallowed expression at other discursive sites of the larger project of Greek modernization. The slowly increasing secu- larization of the state, and the effort to achieve both structural and cultural alignment with the European Union, have pushed sentiments concerning an essentialized notion of Greekness underground, so to speak. Meanwhile, the continuing influx of Eastern European and Asian immigrants, along with the ongoing construction of Turkey as a menacing spectre work to exacerbate these anxieties. In this social context, population growth has become a highly politicized arena. In the midst of the larger debate concerning modernization and national identity, and the proliferation of policies concerning both the fiscal welfare of the nation-state (for example, a range of controversial new tax measures have been implemented, and then modified, throughout the tenure of the Panhellenic Socialist Party currently in office) and the full alignment of Greece with the European Union, the persistent concern with abortion and national birth rates can seem incongruous. Moving Greece out of its present straits is clearly not a simple matter of increasing the number of Greek infants being born. Indeed, international concern with demography at the present focuses rather on the population explo- sion and ways to limit population growth. In this larger context, a high national birth rate, the stated objective of Greek official demografiko discourse, is typically seen as a symbol of an underdeveloped and inade- quately modernized country. Yet, in Greece, especially at particular historical junctures, such as 1994 when the issue of Macedonia’s autonomous statehood peaked and while Greece was simultaneously fulfilling its second term as Chair of the European Council, concern over the low birth rate had been pronounced. 214 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2)

THE DEMOGRAFIKO

The different arguments presented for just why the nation needs more babies are implicitly and often explicitly putting forward disparate images of Greece.6 For example, much of the right-wing press focuses on the need for more soldiers, hence implicitly arguing for more male infants and suggesting that the precondition for Greece’s future welfare is the preservation of territorial boundaries from physical incursions coming either from the military-political entity Turkey or from the more nebulous ‘Muslim threat’.7 The moderate-right newspaper coverage also makes the claim that more babies are needed in order to protect Greece’s cultural- moral boundaries.8 The centrist media coverage is characterized by an emphasis on the claim that a higher birth rate is also necessary in order to produce more workers to help bolster the Greek economy and, more specifically, to support the state-run retirement fund that is in crisis.9 Nonetheless, at the same time, the centrist coverage is also, unexpectedly perhaps, characterized by some of the most strident racial and religious essentializing inflections of the demografiko.10 The left-wing newspapers Avgi and Rizospasti had far less coverage of the demografiko and overall their positioning of ‘the problem’ differs in significant ways to that of the right and centre (i.e. an international context is almost always used to frame the report on Greece’s birth rate). Yet, even here the demografiko is taken for granted as a serious national problem in similar terms to those of the right and centre.11 Finally, paradoxically, the high rate of abortion seems to be being read across the political spectrum as both a powerful symbolic marker of Greece’s lack of the much desired modernization and, at the same time, as a symptom of the advance of the desired modernization. That is, truly modern women are portrayed as using appropriate contraception by taking pills instead of having abortions in order to avoid having children,12 and yet the high rate of abortion is also seen as a side-effect of other social changes caused by modern times, such as women’s growing independence and, occasionally, the very availability of abortion services in modern Greece.13 Thus, overall, in much of the Greek press, the low birth rate in itself is often seen as the result of women’s ‘selfishness’ and of their entry into the labour force.14 Meanwhile, the high rate of abortions is attributed to the ‘backwardness’ and ‘ignorance’ of Greek women, seen as embarrassing the country to outsiders.15 Moreover, the public discussion of abortion is rarely accompanied by any comment on the role of other agents involved in the abortion rate such as the women’s partners, gynaecologists, or the state.16 For instance, one of the right-wing New Democracy Party members, Fani Petralia, has made the demografiko a pet issue. Her writings and lectures systematically take the individual woman as the Halkias: Money, God and Race 215 primary unit of analysis while also positioning the low birth rate, and abortion, as serious enemies of the Greek nation.17 At the same time, media coverage of another recent study on Greek national demographic development suggests that the abortion rate may actually reflect the much desired modernization of the Greek nation. The book itself, meanwhile, amply documents that the high rate of abortion in Greece was present before the era of heightened ‘modernization’ debates (Emke- Poulopoulou, 1994: 75–9). The ostensibly gender-neutral cluster of narratives that animates the official Greek public sphere is gendered in multiple and often complex ways.18 For example, ‘the body’, both the physical human body and its manifestation as a metaphor for the ‘body politic’, is a trope that is found at the centre of the anxieties being voiced concerning the demografiko. Examining what the demografiko discourses in particular reveal about the national imaginary at the present historical moment, instead of accepting them at their face value, illuminates the profound politics of the body and reproduction at the geopolitical site of Greece in late modernity, while also complexifying contemporary theorization of power and resistance in late modernity. This effort may also serve as a powerful tool in the project of reassessing and reshaping the terms of an important and ongoing discussion taking place concerning the nation at present. A key part of this project must be to take seriously what Greek women themselves have to say about the demografiko. Analysis of their opinions may operate as a lever by offering an endemic position from which to interrogate the basic terms and claims of demografiko discourses, and the state-building project of which these discourses are a constitutive element.

POPULAR CONCEPTIONS OF NATIONHOOD

My argument with regard to the persistent high rate of abortion in Greece is that the nationalist and religious discourses permeating the public sphere and which work to tentatively establish the boundaries of ‘Greece’ as it is popularly imagined, also work viscerally to produce culturally specific configurations of the boundaries of bodies and to shape perceptions, practices and experiences of sexuality. These discourses themselves yield an understanding of abortion, and, importantly, at the same time, of heterosexuality itself, as natural. Certainly, Greek nationalist discourses articulated in the demografiko debate have not paranoically configured abortion as an antagonistic gesture that is at some sites seen as tantamount to treason. There is a subversive element in the various (physical-semantic) reversals abortion effects – a danger that the media’s representations seem to seek to contain 216 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2) and which the women’s responses to my question concerning the demografiko often activate. In aggregate, the social phenomenon of a high abortion rate and a low birth rate which persists in the face of the demografiko discourses and their various institutional affiliates (such as the booming family planning industry nested in the Ministry of Health domain since the mid-1980s as well as the scores of research centres concerned with the demografiko) can stand as a severe comment against the prevalent matrix of nationhood, the nationalist narratives it is associated with and the ideology of reproductivist heterosexuality (Warner, 1993: xxiv) with which nationalism is intimately connected. At the level of the ‘individual’ subject, women’s comments concerning the demografiko put forward an incisive critique of the terms and premises of current nationalist discourse. Interestingly, this occurs even as they elsewhere in their narratives reinscribe it. The range of opposition expressed by women towards the larger policy concerning births, and the production of knowledge that surrounds it, is fairly extensive. Most of the responses I received to the question concerning women’s own opinion about the demografiko are characterized by an interplay between a firm critique of the state itself and, at the same time, a visible – at times start- lingly so – endorsement of the pronounced nationalism expressed in much of the media’s portrayals of the demografiko.

THE WOMEN

This article analyses the findings of fieldwork done in Athens during 1994. During this time, were conducted in-depth interviews with 120 women who had been living in Athens for five years or more and reported having had two or more abortions. All the interviews were transcribed and their contents organized into thematic categories. The majority of the women interviewed were visitors to the family planning centre of a state- run clinic in Athens that is considered to have the best family planning centre in Greece. Thirty of these women were found through a snowball sampling procedure. The findings analysed here concern the response to the last question of the semi-structured in-depth interview, the direct question, ‘Have you heard of the so-called demografiko? If so, what have you heard, and what is your opinion?’

THE COST OF CHILDREN

The tension between a critique of the state and many women’s nonetheless tenacious adherence to the terms of contemporary Greek nationalist discourse is articulated in several different registers. All, Halkias: Money, God and Race 217 however, are embedded in a larger narrative expressing concern with the financial cost of having and raising a child in Greece in the present day. Most of the women I interviewed, when asked their opinion on the demografiko, focused on the apparent contradiction between the state’s fascination with an increase in births and its simultaneous failure to produce and implement financial measures that would adequately support this aim. To illustrate this backdrop to all the women’s responses, and also to portray how the financial aspect of raising children in Greece is perceived locally, I quote at some length from the graphic description offered by Maria, 30 years old, born on the island of Kalymnos. At the time of the interview she had been living in the Athens area of Platia Amerikis for the last five-and-a-half years and was working as a civil servant at OTE, the national phone company. Maria is single, has graduated from high school and pursued advanced training in English and typing. She goes to church only on the ‘big’ holidays, as she said, of Christmas and Easter. Her response when I asked for her opinion on the demografiko focuses on elements that surfaced in most of the women’s responses.

Yes . . . what everyone says is that Greece will end up as . . . the country of the aged [h hora ton gerondon] and of the third age. Because people, they don’t decide to have children easily . . . First of all, even to have one child today, even only one child, you have to be sufﬁciently well off, there are very many expenses. In other words, no matter how simply [litodiaita] you live, the child is costly [asimforo]. It requires much expense. Don’t look back at the old days when – my mother’s time – when things were simple, all they needed then was a little milk. Now the child goes to the doctor, it always needs milk, and the . . . the caring, the great care [i frondida], for diapers alone you need a lot of money. And when you can’t meet all this expense and also it is just the one person working, only the man, for example, is working. . . . With the salary he gets now, even on 150,000, or even 200,000 drachmas [587 Euros] what can be done? And it’s not . . . in other words, one reason that plays a role is the ﬁnancial problem. Putting aside the psychological and moral matters and I don’t know what else.

The financial burden of having a child in Greece was in all cases represented as the main reason women do not have more children. As we see in Maria’s response, the very notion of ‘caring’ for children is above all given an economic dimension. It is against this backdrop that all other objections are voiced. At the same time, it is possible that the financial cost is being seen as the only legitimate reason to object to the mandate of childrearing. In this sense, real financial difficulty may also operate as a cultural code to foreclose a deeper discussion of the desire and/or the decision to have children.19 If it is simply ‘too expensive’ 218 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2) then the subject need not address the thorny issue of whether or not she actually wants to have (more) children. Certainly, there are real and steep expenses associated with having and raising a child in Athens today. The women I spoke to were, like Maria, very clear about this. Yet, the anger expressed along with the often very detailed accounts of the financial difficulty of raising children in modern Athens seems to have more behind it. Some of these women may not simply be objecting to a clearly impossible economic expectation, though this is an important aspect of their objection. Regardless of the issue of their desire to have children, or ‘more’ children as the demografiko discourse puts it, the responses reveal that many women living in Athens are also deeply troubled by the implication that what is riding on their childbearing performance is the degree to which they are behaving as good Greeks. Many of the responses received to the question concerning the demografiko were openly sarcastic. These more scathing critiques of the state’s position put into sharp relief important contradictions inherent in the social construction of the demografiko as a social problem. Often making powerful use of irony, these critiques redeploy the very elements that are central to the nationalist narratives animating the public sphere and the discussion of the demografiko therein.20 As I show here, these are (1) a religious narrative concerning inherent Greekness and its superiority in contrast to other nationalities and (2) an equivalent narrative in which being Greek is, in addition, implicitly equated to being a member of the Greek race.21 In both cases, an essence of Greekness is being deployed in order to speak of, and against, the modern Greek nation-state.

GREECE AS RELIGIOUS GROUND

The charged juncture of a severe critique of the state, on the one hand, with an apparently uncritical endorsement of the fundamentally religious terms of the nationalism animating the demograﬁko, on the other, is concisely illustrated by the following comments made by a woman called Elena. She was 37 years old at the time of the interview, married with two children.

Why don’t women give birth [to more children]? The state gives out subsidies – but it takes from all of us giving just a little to those who have a lot of children [polyteknoi]. Now do you know who are considered polyteknoi? Those who have three children. With the third child the state gives you money. Which is inconceivable. What a point we’ve reached! How is this going to happen? With what? You cannot take from those who have nothing. [Ouk an lavis ek tou mi ehondos]. If you have two children, you’re ﬁnished, private lessons, Halkias: Money, God and Race 219

schools, doctors, and clothes. In a little while they’ll be giving to those who have a second child . . .

Elena’s objections are clear. She feels that the expenses related to raising a child are formidable and she is very firm in her belief that the state’s provisions are inadequate for what is required. Yet, in voicing her feelings, Elena makes an interesting rhetorical move. She refers to a biblical phrase in Ancient Greek, which states that nothing can be offered by those who have nothing. In so doing, she, like many of the women I spoke with, is strategically drawing upon the pool of meanings of Greekness that emphasize the superiority of Greeks qua Greek Orthodox Christians. This notion animates much of the public discourse surrounding the demografiko. In other words, as Elena’s retort implicitly reveals, one of the reasons having more babies is seen as being so important for Greek women is to thus preserve the Greek nation that is assumed to be uniquely and essentially Greek Orthodox and, for this reason, superior. But the state is called to task in terms of the Greek nation-state with a popular phrase of a blatantly religious register. Elena suggests that it is the Greek state itself which, with its insistence on more births, may be betray- ing Greek Orthodoxy, at a substantive level, rather than those who don’t have more children. Another woman, Christiana, aged 42 at the time of our conversation, makes a similar move, again vividly demonstrating how the very narratives in circulation in the public sphere, and that enable the preoccupation with the demografiko, are also those that could instead be acting as a brake to the escalating concern with the birth rate. Born on the island of Xios, Christiana has been living in Peristeri, Athens for the last 20 years. She works now as a homemaker raising her four children and taking care of her husband of 21 years. She graduated from high school and attended secretarial school before spending several years working as a secretary. Christiana told me that she goes to church ‘very, very often’. Here is her response to my question concerning the demografiko.

Look, very well, the demographic problem exists but they will have to give incentives if they want to resolve it, if they want people to have children. For me it happened, let’s say, that it was easier for me because of my husband’s job. Otherwise how would I raise these children? Eh, we shouldn’t have children just like that, by chance, and leave them to the mercy of God.

Here Christiana also interestingly deploys a religious register to strengthen an argument against the mandate to bear more children. In noting that ‘we’ should not have children without caring about the financial consequences in the particular way that she does, the implication is clearly made that the formal discourse in favour of an increase in births as it stands now may not only be an instance of hubris (by expecting too 220 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2) much understanding from God) but also a case of double-talk. In other words, Christiana’s comment implies, one of the linchpins of formal demografiko discourse is that Greek women need to reproduce more in order to be proper Greek Orthodox Christians and in order to preserve the Greek (Orthodox) ethnos. Yet, she indicates, the source of this discourse does not seem to consider the religious implications of its own position. Defending ‘better’ Greek Orthodox Christianity, Christiana may be seen as implicitly asking whether the state itself is sinning if, in the very process of claiming that Greece needs more Greek Orthodox Christians to defend its territorial and cultural integrity from external (Muslim) threats seen as looming at the borders, it requires the birth of children whose physical well-being cannot be financially supported. More brief in her response concerning the demografiko, another woman, aged 34, married with one child, also makes a comment that powerfully illustrates the common use of irony to highlight the contradictions involved in the official mandate for more children and the role of religion in the demografiko discourse. Again, this is done through the endorsement of the same religious terms that are relied on by the nationalist argument in favour of increasing births. Irini says,

Yes, I’ve heard of the demograﬁko. But I’m not the one who will solve it! Take that glass away from me! [Apeltheto ap’emou to potirion touto!]

Irini is also quoting from the Bible as a way of emphasizing her argument. In this case, the quote used is Christ’s words from the cross. This is taken as an example of how even Christ expressed a human limi- tation, expressing his suffering at the crucifixion. The parallel Irini makes implicitly here is that being asked to have more children is similar to being on a cross. This underlines the degree of her objection to the mandate to have more children. At the same time, we again see in this response a distinct reliance on the same religious discourse animating current Greek nationalism. And yet simultaneously the use of this phrase also works to emphasize the limitations of demografiko discourse – to ask people to have more children in the current context is, in Irini’s words, somehow tantamount to the crucifixion of the central figure of one of the foundational narratives of the Greek nation-state, of Greek Orthodox Christianity. What could be more anti-Christian, she suggests, like many of the women I spoke with, thus recasting the mandate for more births in an entirely different light, even as its very principal terms are underlined. Halkias: Money, God and Race 221

GREEKS AS MEMBERS OF A RACE

The second theme recurring in women’s critiques of the demografiko concerns the idea of Greek nationality, via a presumed superior and homogeneously Greek Orthodox populace, as a marker of membership in a common race. This is a race that is portrayed as being sharply distinct from, and superior to, that which Turks qua Muslims, and hence Muslims more generally, are seen as being a part of. In this case, where a religiously inflected racial component of Greekness is both endorsed and strategically rearticulated to contest aspects of the demografiko in women’s rede- ployments, the dynamic is more subtle. In this section, I present two excerpts from the interviews that concisely portray the affiliation of Greek religious nationalism with a racialized representation of Greekness at the site of the women whose bodies are the explicit target of demografiko discourses. Where necessary the local cultural subtext to particular phrases or images is referred to. One of the women I spoke with, Teti aged 35, made a comment that illustrates this more subtle domain of the negotiations taking place around demografiko discourse. With a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and having been widowed two years before, Teti tells me she goes to church occasionally. She is the mother of a four-year-old. Here is our exchange concerning the demografiko; note the pronounced edge to her response.

Teti: Yes, about the low birth rate [ypogennitikotita]. AH: Yes, and what is your opinion about that? Teti: My opinion is that my husband has recently died and I have to raise a child and that child has to have a home, and food, and all this of a certain standard. Meanwhile, I pay a lot to the Inland Revenue [se efories] and all that. On the one hand, we have a demographic problem and, on the other, I can’t raise a child because the state provides me with nothing. And when we say nothing, we mean nothing. How is it possible that I would have a second one too? Shall I take them out to stand by the trafﬁc lights and have them sell packets of tissues?

Teti is also quite graphic in her statement concerning the ﬁnancial difﬁ- culties of raising a child in contemporary Athens. At the same time, she also uses a different metaphor to call the state to task for its insistence on increasing the birth rate. Like most of the women I interviewed, she does not hesitate to ‘hit where it hurts’ as a way of cementing her argument. In this case, instead of calling the state ‘a bad Greek Orthodox’, Teti implies, as I explain below, that the state is hypocritically supporting the superiority of Greeks as a race, in the usual elision of Greek Orthodoxy with Greek nationality, here as a race especially vis-a-vis the race Muslims are seen as being in this strain of fundamentalist nationalism. 222 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2)

Teti’s main tool in this critique is the image of Albanian children selling tissues at traffic lights. This image is often referred to both in casual everyday conversations and in the media. Rather than being used simply as an indisputable sign of another failure by a state all too often the target of criticism in Greece, this image is often also referenced as an indication of the inferiority and irresponsibility of Albanians and secondarily gypsies (in most instances both seen as being members of a vaguely bounded but clearly distinct and inferior race). The implicit question underlying popular deployments of this image is: what kind of a people (ti pasta anthropon) would send their children out to stand in the traffic in order to beg for money? Thus, I suggest, Teti’s comment can be read as a statement that when the state insists that Greek women have more children it is actually undermining its argument about the superiority of Greeks as a type of people. Using irony, she both critiques the nationalist construction of the demografiko and endorses the racial terms which have helped to produce it. Amalia, married for 11 years and the mother of two children, also implies the same thing in her response to me. Here we see that the dominant image being redeployed, in a clearly derogatory way, is that of a people as a race of lesser value, closer to animals. Indeed, Amalia states, as is seen in the following, the ‘quality’ of ‘the Third World [people]’ is suspect precisely because they reproduce at a very high rate. Meanwhile, at the same time that we see in this excerpt a redeployment of racial terms anchoring contemporary Greek nationalist discourse, we also see a yet more penetrating interrogation of the terms of the demografiko. The extent of the critique here helps illuminate facets latent in many of the other interviews. Thus, before concluding, I quote from Amalia’s response at some length.

For people to be able to have more children, they will have to have more resources [parohes]. In other words, there has to be some provision [pronoia] from the state, in all regards, from the ﬁnancial to the social, and more education of the people about how to raise children, because it is not a simple thing. To have children like that, so that the population grows, and then you’ll see their future. We don’t want to end up like the countries of the Third World where there are masses on the one hand, but the quality goes down.

First of all, there need to be more daycare centres so that one can work, since now both [parents] have to work, and leave the child somewhere, to have some social care/welfare [merimna], and to have jobs for both. There is also the problem of unemployment! There are many things that have to be improved so people can have children.

Amalia, aged 37, was born in the city-port of Pireus and had been living in an upper-class northern suburb of Athens for the last ﬁve years. She designs jewellery, as she says, ‘not as a job really, put down Halkias: Money, God and Race 223

“self-employed” and we’ll be covered’. She graduated from high school and says she goes to church on the important holidays. Amalia’s response is paradoxical in that it contains both a facile representation of ‘the Third World’ and a very sophisticated understanding of the social concomitants of human reproduction. The ‘Third World’ as a populace is distinctly marked in her response as somehow being of inferior quality and she seems clear that she is talking about a distinctly different people. Yet, as she notes, the act so frequently represented as simply biological and, at most, a function of women’s desire, having children, in fact involves a whole range of social and economic factors. At the same time, the depth of her analysis of the pivotal social context of human reproduction sheds light on one of the main mechanisms by which the demografiko has come to operate as a policing discourse patrolling the boundaries of appropriate Greek femininity: all the social and economic factors central to reproduction, which Amalia, as so many of the women, lists in detail, are typically swept underground and the figure of women’s (not men’s, or the couple’s) alleged lack of a desire to have babies emerges as a scapegoat for all the national problems that, in turn, are themselves conflated with the perceived problem of an overly low national birth rate.

CONCLUSION

Almost all of the women interviewed used a double voice to express disdain with the demografiko discourse while simultaneously both endorsing and casting doubt on the dominant matrix of nationhood and the essentialist discourses (religious and racial) that it relies on. Though there is significant disagreement with aspects of the ‘Greece’ underlying demografiko concerns, there is also ample evidence that the matrix of Greek nationhood as somehow being essentially Greek Orthodox, and based on a racial commonality and superiority, is unquestioned. In addition, the primary objection that is posed is typically aimed at the request that women have ‘more’ babies, while the implicit claim that women need to have at least one child in order to be ‘good Greek citizens’ was never questioned in any of the interviews. Moreover, the objection that is articulated, towards having ‘more’ children, is almost always embedded in a claim concerning the ‘concrete reality’ of the financial cost of having children in Athens. It is through their comments concerning finances that the women interviewed expressed their objections towards having ‘more’ babies. It needs to be emphasized that none of the 120 women interviewed openly expressed any disagreement with the clear, if tacit, cultural mandate to have at least one child in order to be a ‘good Greek woman’. 224 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2)

This assumption concerning the mandatory birth of at least one child to a woman (not a couple, or a man, as it could alternatively be posed) directly links reproduction to citizenship and configures the adult female Greek subject as primarily ‘mother’ (mana) rather than either ‘soul’ as the Greek Orthodox inflected discourse might have it, or ‘person’ (atomo) as modernizing Greece’s deployment of Enlightenment concepts might more ‘naturally’ express it. The need to have at least one child in order to be considered a good Greek woman, which is implicitly underscored in the official public sphere’s articulations of the demografiko, is never chal- lenged by the women interviewed. These findings demonstrate that reproduction and national identity are intimately connected, while the depth to which nationalism penetrates the body politic is put in sharp relief. These interviews with Athenian women concerning the demografiko also illustrate the complexity of the relation- ship between nationalism and women’s bodies. Compulsory motherhood of one child emerges as an uncontested victory of the nationalist discourses animating the demografiko. What stands as contested territory is women’s increased reproduction. It is at the discursive site of this struggle that we become witnesses both to the pervasiveness of an essentializing religious-racial nationalism in the Athens of late modernity, and to the inherent contradictions that emerge at the junction of this nationalism with women’s bodies and reproduction. These Greek women’s narratives reveal both that reproduction and national identity are intimately affiliated and, at the same time, that this process is not seamless. We need to continue to interrogate the semantic and radically political processes through which ‘Greece’ and ‘Greek women’, as well as ‘nation’ and ‘women’ elsewhere in Europe at the present time, are born(e) and joined together at the hip – to unravel their ‘conditions of intelligibility’ (Butler, 1997a: 134) – in order to unscramble the everyday discursive practices through which these categories are made to appear in various geopolitical contexts as firmly fixed and ‘natural’, as well as distinctly separate (indeed, often, at odds), rather than viscerally linked through narratives and potentially negotiable, as I am suggesting they both indeed are. Both these subject positions and the affiliated states of subjectivity are highly intricate and at times contradictory productions which are further complicated by the exigencies of transnationalism. That such historically contingent and vexed ‘social facts,’ to borrow from Durkheim, as are ‘the nation’ and ‘women’, come to appear so firmly natural biological or territorial and political entities is but one sign of the intricacy of this operation. This article has sought to illuminate some of the always partial ways that discourses – especially discourses of the body politic and the population – are refracted at particular sites of congealment, thus producing particular effects of truth. Indeed, power and resistance occur together. As Foucault (1980: 98) states, ‘[Individuals] are not only inert or Halkias: Money, God and Race 225 consenting targets of power; they are always also the elements of its articulation.’ I would add that nations, respectively, are not always the inert or dictating ‘source’ of power, but also always a product of its operation, even when spoken ‘against’, at the same moment, by its subjects.

NOTES

I would like to thank all the women who participated in this research. Their anonymity is protected as promised. I am grateful for the close readings and comments of Chandra Mukerji, Page duBois and Jonathan Markovitz, the University of California, San Diego, and of Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, Boston, on earlier portions of this work. Aspects of the argument presented here have also beneﬁted from the questions and comments of the audience and fellow panel members at the Invited Session AAA Executive Program Committee ‘Toward a Critical Anthropology of Population: Where We Have Come From and Where We Are Going.’ of the American Anthropological Association’s Annual Conference, Philadelphia, 2–5 December 1998, and from the participants of the Greek Study Group of Harvard at the Minda De Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University on 17 March 1999. I would also like to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for The European Journal of Women’s Studies for their helpful suggestions. Part of the material in this article is drawn from a book on the junction of national identity, sexuality and gender in modern Greece upon which I am currently working.

1. This figure reflects the estimates reported in the news media by doctors and other experts during 2001. The formal statistics on abortion in Greece are inaccurate as they report only those operations performed as a result of a miscarriage. A recent obstetrics/gynaecology conference held at the Aris- totelean University of Thessaloniki offers additional insight into the reality of abortion in Greece at the present. According to a statement made on Star channel on 10 May 2002, Dr Pontis of Aristotle University reported that the majority of married couples have had at least one abortion and that during the past year there were approximately 240,000 abortions performed nation- ally. In a special edition of the Greek feminist journal Dini, published in 1993, the estimate made was that there are 300,000 abortions performed in Greece each year. 2. In an analysis of the Chinese case, where the state’s position is the opposite of that of the Greek official public sphere, as it is against ‘superfluous’ reproduction, Ann Anagnost (1995: 25) notes a pervasive reluctance on the part of the populace to criticize the state position. Yet, she asks, ‘Must we assume that this reluctance to criticize the population policy openly is a measure of how much the power of the state is internalized within the speaking object?’ The response she gives is instructive for the case of Greece as well. Anagnost comments ‘To suggest so would obscure the complex ways in which the subject of population provides the means to articulate concerns about the nation that are not entirely contained within the state.’ In Greece, as this article shows, we see that population policy is being criticized verbally by women, though certainly in more complex ways than initially apparent. 3. For an excellent discussion of how reproduction and nationhood are inter- twined in debates concerning population in disparate geopolitical contexts, 226 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2)

see the collection of articles in Ginsburg and Rapp’s (1995) Conceiving the New World Order: for cases with direct links to the case of Greece, see especially Soheir A. Morsy,’s ‘Deadly Reproduction among Egyptian Women: Maternal Mortality and the Medicalization of Population Control’ (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995: 162–76), Tola Olu Pearce,’s chapter, ‘Women’s Reproductive Practices and Biomedicine: Cultural Conflicts and Transformations in Nigeria’ (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995: 195–208) and Gail Kligman’s contri- bution, ‘Political Demography: The Banning of Abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania’ (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995: 234–55). See also Kligman (1992). 4. See Constas and Stavrou (1995) for a discussion of the challenges facing Greece in the future. For the historical development of party clientelistic relations, see Demertzis (1990) and for an account of the changes in party clientelism since the end of the Papadopoulos junta in 1974, see Lyrintzis (1987). For an overview of the particular elements of traditional political culture that are seen as impediments to Greece’s current project of modernization, see Charalambis and Demertzis (1993). 5. Addressing the categories that seem to be shaping this debate, a recent exchange in one of the main national newspapers, To Vima (17 May 1999) was centred on the very category of the nation. A professor in sociology at the University of Athens, Anna Frangoudaki, argued that it is important to use the words meaning ‘motherland’ and ‘nation’ (patrida and ethnos) with greater care. In her article, Frangoudaki laments the charged ways in which these terms are being used in Greek political and popular culture. This commentary was met with a scathing response by the well-known social critic Georgousopoulos who tried to make the argument that if we do away with such words, in effect, we lose ‘our country’ itself. Drawing from historical and educational texts (high school history books for example) Georgousopoulos claims that the absence of the word patrida would leave children without a foundation for seeing themselves as ‘Greeks’. 6. The results summarily presented in this section come from a qualitative content analysis of all Greek mainstream daily and weekly newspaper articles published from 1 January 1994 through 31 December 1994 with either the word ‘demografiko’ or ‘abortion’ appearing in their text. Reflecting the political economy of the press in Greece (where newspapers have been historically either owned or at least partially funded by different political parties), the articles were clustered according to the political affiliation of the newspaper they appeared in. For a detailed analysis of the public sphere’s portrayal of Greece in coverage concerning the demografiko see Halkias (1997, 1998). 7. In ‘The High Cost of Solving the Demografiko’ (Kathimerini, 27 January 1995), the then representative of the right-wing New Democracy Party, Fani Petralia, is quoted as saying that ‘if immediate measures are not taken, in the year 2003 there won’t be enough numbers of enlisted [soldiers] in the military in order to guard the borders of the country’. A similar claim is made in the article ‘A Sad First in the Low Birth Rate’ (Kathimerini, 5 April 1994), where the reader is told that because of the low birth rate ‘in the immediate future [Greece] will face a serious problem from her neighbours’. Examples of editorials graphically portraying the same type of argument include ‘Well- Placed Anxiety’, by Dimitris Tzoumas (letter to the editor, Kathimerini, 12 February 1994) and ‘No to Abortions’, by Father Dionysos (Kathimerini, 17 September 1994). For a news article that focuses specifically on the claim of a direct link between the birth rate and military prowess, see ‘Important Halkias: Money, God and Race 227

Changes in Military Service’, by Dionisis Makris (Kathimerini, 13 December 1994). 8. For example, a letter to the editor of Kathimerini, ‘Abortions. . .’ (18 March 1994), by a retired air force general, Takis Karathanasis, refers to abortion as ‘a disgusting way of removing a life’, which, in addition to creating ‘huge problems for the woman, not only psychologically, but also gynecologically’, also creates ‘spiritual problems that concern our entire nation’. 9. Vivid examples of centrist coverage of the demografiko with an emphasis on the claim that an increase in the birth rate will bolster the Greek economy by producing more workers (without, it must be noted, addressing the current unemployment rate and the impact of the influx of illegal alien workers on the economy) are the letter ‘Greece Today’, by Nikos Athanasopoulos (Elef- therotypia, 5 June 1994), where the author comments that, ‘Our youth, in their vast majority, are lazy and they try to survive opportunistically, either through gambling or by . . . withdrawing [money] from the bank by the method of armed robbery!’, as well as the news article ‘The Drop in Income Led to the Drop in Births’, by Manolis G. Drettakis (Eleftherotypia, 21 September 1994). In the latter, the claim is made that the demografiko is both created by the financial crisis of the country and also has a serious impact on it. For a pronounced emphasis specifically on the retirement fund as a reason more births are needed, see also ‘The Low Birth Rate’, by Nikolaos Tritsarolis (Ta Nea, 7 June 1994) and ‘Make Room for Old Age’ in the Sunday magazine E of Eleftherotypia (5 June 1994). Here the writer notes ‘How can it be that a “country of old people” which, it should be noted, is run by “dinosaurs”, is not taking any care for [its] old age?’ 10. A more alarmist religio-racial essentializing nationalist definition of the demografiko emerges clearly in this sector of the press. Interestingly, this can occur even within the context of articles such as those cited previously wherein the economic context of Greek society is also contended with. For example in the aforementioned article ‘The Low Birth Rate’ by Nikolaos Tritsarolis (Ta Nea, 7 June 1994), we see that the sentence ‘The average of 1.3 children that each family gives birth to, in a few years time won’t be enough to guard our borders’ immediately precedes the sentence ‘Also, retirees will face a problem since there won’t be enough working people to pay the pension funds.’ Further examples of centrist demografiko coverage are comments such as ‘If this trend continues, the ethnos will very soon have to face a crisis of tremendous proportions. It will be, literally, a crisis of existence’ (‘Why Greeks Don’t Want Children’, by Manolis G. Drettakis, Eleftherotypia, 23 September 1994); ‘Shortly the Albanians will pass us in size . . . Greeks seem to be very indifferent to the directive “multiply and grow” of the Bible’ (‘And Three, and Four Children . . .’, Ta Nea, 5 April 1994); and ‘It seems that when God directed towards his chosen the command to “increase and prosper” Greeks were holding . . . an umbrella!’ (‘Last in the Birth Rate’, To Vema, 10 April 1994). Perhaps most clearly emblematic of the intersection of religious and nationalist discourses at the site of the centrist demografiko coverage is a letter to the editor of Eleftherotypia (15 June 1994), titled ‘Aging Population’ by Arisitidis K. Soumakis. Consider the following passage: ‘This serious statement [the demografiko] and prognosis for the future existence of Hellenism and the Greco-Christian traditions . . . with the dangerously escalating population increase of Islamicism taking on the shape of a dangerous 228 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2)

“giant”, creates a very large national obligation for the Church and the polity to take on their responsibilities in the face of this national danger.’ 11. The left-wing coverage typically has a more systematic approach to the economic context of the demografiko, while also, importantly, decentring ‘the woman’ as the scapegoat for the low birth rate and identifying ‘the family’ or ‘the couple’ as agents that also play an important part in the creation of ‘the problem’ along with ‘the woman’. For example, in an article titled ‘A Woman’s View on the Demografiko’ (Rizospastis, 8 May 1994), the writer Emke-Poulopoulou is quoted as stating that ‘Contraceptives and abortions constitute means. The causes are social, economic, psychological, demographic. This distinction is important so we can help the women and the couples who want children to have them and not oblige those who don’t want children to become parents.’ Nonetheless, this coverage also reiterates the pronounced religious component of Greek nationhood found in other sites of demografiko coverage. Consider how, in the context of a detailed account of the social and economic factors contributing to the low birth rate, including the state’s failure to support families that have many children (politeknous), another article in Rizospastis states that the state should be ‘ashamed’ since, because of ‘the financial crisis, the limited resources available for the larger segments of the population, the Orthodox brothers of Northern Ipiros and Pontos are piled up in squares asking for a day’s wages’ (‘If Women Had the Right to Choose . . .’, Rizospastis, 21 August 1994; my emphasis). Yet another article in the same paper, ‘Individualism Leads to the Low Birth Rate’, by Berry Tsougrani (Rizospastis, 3 December 1994), actually seems to lament an inad- equately formed ‘collective consciousness’, along with ‘fragmentation’, as another factor contributing to the low birth rate. In effect, the argument here is that if there was more of a collective concern for the nation, there would also be more births. 12. A radio advertisement for the contraceptive pill, in June 2002, promotes the pill by stating that ‘it guards against cancer, does not contribute to weight gain, keeps the skin clear of acne and pimples and gets rid of unwanted preg- nancies and abortions [diohni tis ektrosis] and, should you want to have a child, just stop it, and get pregnant!’ 13. This reflects another interesting contradiction. Although abortion was legalized in 1983, fairly safe and inexpensive abortion services were easily available in Athens even before its legalization and the subsequent provision of free abortion services by all state-run obstetrics/gynaecology clinics for insured women. 14. A columnist for the centrist To Vema, Giannis Marinos, has frequently written editorials on the demografiko. In ‘Murder Is Permitted, Pity No’ (31 July 1994), Marino defines the demografiko as ‘the low birth rate of Greeks, who prefer to be without children instead of taking the responsibility of creating them and furthering the perpetuation of the species [genos]’. Implicitly refer- encing the selfishness of Greek women who fail to have the desired number of children, he argues ‘with the prosecution of the so-called baby trade, I discern the institutionalization of the low birth-rate and the prosecution of women who still accept to have many children’ (my emphasis). In another editorial, written by the same author, ‘A Demographic Crime’ (To Vema, 28 August 1994), Marinos concludes, ‘[with the demografiko] what has been cultivated, next to the social, national and moral suicide, is the tolerance of racial degradation [filetikos ekfilismos]. Why has all this happened? Very Halkias: Money, God and Race 229

simply: the low birth rate has spread for financial reasons using as its alibi a plethora of arguments for freedom, self determination of the individual, equality of the two sexes, and other values appropriately modified to justify the phenomenon.’ In the same editorial, the reader is told that the current financial measures are not effective means of increasing the birth rate since ‘when two subsidies are given to both the working spouses (instead of just one of them) then the woman’s work is encouraged and having children is discouraged’. The implication throughout this and other similar articles is that women’s desire to work in the labour market (which is connected to a lower birth rate) is an example of selfishness. Coverage that tries to problematize this representation of women occurs in the left-wing press. For example, in ‘Best to be Quiet?’, by Melina Volioti (Avgi, 8 September 1994), the reader is told that ‘if family planning had been developed . . . there would not be a “demographic” problem . . . since people would more or less have the size family that they wanted, they would bring children into the world not by chance but when they would be psychologically, financially and socially ready, under the best conditions’. 15. In ‘Abortion, the Cheapest Contraception’ (Kathimerini, 5 November 1994), the writer states that ‘for the Greek woman, abortion constitutes a method of “contraception”. Gynaecologists claim that they “brainwash” their clients to apply some contraceptive method and not to consider contraception a secondary matter.’ In ‘The Bourgeoisie Goes to . . . the Obstetrics Hospital’, by Sophia Neta (Eleftherotypia, 1 November 1994), it is reported that ‘Un- fortunately . . . Greece remains the first country of the European Union with regard to the number of abortions, while only 3–4 percent of Greek women of reproductive age use the contraceptive pill.’ Putting in sharp relief the implicit claim that Greek women are to blame, the article ‘Abortions are Double the Births’ (Kathimerini, 23 August 1995) comments that ‘The percent- age of Greek women [sic] who use contraception (the pill or the diaphragm) is around 10 percent whereas the absence of information on the methods of contraception is the main reason for the tragic picture our country presents to Europe: it comes first in abortions which are double the number of births.’ Focusing more on the age distribution of contraception usage, the article states that ‘All the facts relating to abortion at a young age continue to be disappoint- ing despite the observations of scientists that Greek women have begun at last to “mature” and to learn how to avoid an unwanted pregnancy’ (my emphasis). 16. The claim made by the press that Greece presents an embarrassing image internationally because of women’s ‘insistence’ on having so many abortions reflects a familiar pattern. As Herzfeld (1987) has shown in great detail, the poetics of submission characterizing Greek femininity involve women in a tenacious performance of loyalty and support towards male members of the family when outsiders are present. However, the very same display of loyalty may contain an ‘edge’ that is discernible only by the ‘insiders’ present and understood as a criticism directed at them. The press’s claim regarding women’s contraceptive choices reflects a sense that the aggregate rate of abortion is violating this cultural dynamic by exposing the ‘insider’ group to potentially dangerous public scrutiny. 17. Petralia also wrote and published a book titled The Childless Country: Demo- graphic Development and Prospects. This book presents her opinion on the demografiko and the various proposals she has submitted to parliament over the past 10 years for measures ‘to encourage the Greek woman to have more children’ (Petralia, 1997). 230 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(2)

18. For a concise and insightful overview of the international literature on how citizenship is gendered, and the concomitant of this in the public sphere, see Yuval-Davis (1997). Also see Pandelidou-Malouta (2002: esp. 103–41). Addressing Greek reality specifically, with an informative discussion on the participation of women, or lack thereof, in political decision-making struc- tures of Greece, see Pandelidou-Malouta (2002: 65–91). 19. I thank Vicente L. Rafael for his insight on this matter. 20. In his work on contemporary political culture in Greece, Diamandouros (1993) has proposed two large categories of political culture: the Balkan/Ottoman/Greek Orthodox or ‘underdog’ culture that is opposed to modernity and Enlightenment ideals, and the Enlightenment/liberal/ democratic ‘reformist’ one that looks to the West as a model. Mouzelis (1995: 20) has argued that the ‘underdog’ culture can be separated into two subtypes, the clientelistic and the populist, and that it is the latter of these, with its emphasis on romyiosini, that is dominant. In a similar vein, Danforth (1995) argues that Greece exhibits two forms of nationalism, ‘primordial’ and ‘modernist-constructivist’. However, Herzfeld (1987) contends that all Greek nationalism fits into the ‘primordial’ category. As I have argued elsewhere (Halkias, 1998), discussion of the demografiko evinces two sides of nationalism, a ‘fundamentalist’ one, and a ‘modernist’ one, which are, however, and this is important, related. Using this analytic schema, I find that the women’s responses to the question concerning the demografiko primarily express the former type of nationalism. Their particular responses show that a further distinction can be made within this category between a fundamentalist-religious oriented nationalist register and a fundamentalist-racial oriented one. The rhetoric of the former rests on the perception of Greek Orthodoxy as essentially constitut- ing Greekness as a superior quality. The rhetoric of the latter goes one step further, to emphasize a racial basis to this notion of Greekness. 21. For an excellent exploration of this, with an emphasis on religious nationalism and its cross-cultural preoccupation with women’s bodies, see Friedland (2002).

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Alexandra Halkias is a lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Panteion University, Athens, Greece. She received a PhD in communication from the University of California, San Diego in 1997 and is the author of several articles on the politics of representation, the nation–gender nexus, and other current issues in social theory, in Greek and international academic journals. She is currently working on a book on the politics of national identity, gender and sexuality in contemporary Greece. Address: Department of Sociology, Panteion University, Syggrou Ave, Athens 176- 71, Greece. [email: [email protected]]

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