Charalampos Minasidis Serving Under the Greek Banner: Minority Citizen Soldiers’ Experiences and Attitudes during the Long Great War (1914-23) The rapid changes the Long Great War (1914-23) brought either confirmed or challenged the state authority and its nation-building policies. The war emerged as a new structure and introduced a new, but still contingent, definition of national consciousness and belonging. It also raised the dilemma to those about to be drafted, between accepting or refusing to serve and fight and offered the opportunity to the dominant group to include or exclude individuals and even whole communities and groups from the imagined community. In this respect, the war evolved into a test of unity and legitimacy for the state and targeted disproportionately the minority citizen soldiers, questioning their allegiances. Based on understudied collections from Greece and Turkey and on published and unpublished memoirs, diaries, interviews and private documents the paper examines minority citizen soldiers’ attitudes towards the war and their service and argues that they did not defer from the majority citizen soldiers’ ones. Of course, many of them had not developed a Greek national consciousness and did not want to serve under the Greek banner, but several others were enthusiastic supporters of the Great Idea, while a third group prioritized their families and their needs and stood against the war either by deserting or trying to find ways to evade the draft. However, contrary to the majority citizen soldiers, most of the minority ones were unable to negotiate a military service under better terms, as they did not know Greek or they could not offer an antagonistic skill. The paper also argues that the Greek state followed a contradictory policy over its minority citizen soldiers. Although it was willing to socialize as many minority conscripts as possible with the Greek Army, it also accepted the initial exemption of certain minority communities from the military service. However, the National Schism and the need of the Provisional Government of National Defence to mobilize as many men as possible negated the previous policies. Even so, the decision to include minority conscripts into the Greek Army’s ranks, did not mean the democratization of war and the socialization of violence for all minority conscripts. As Carl Schmitt’s sovereign, the provisional government decided who is or could be a loyal citizen soldier and who is or could be disloyal, and therefore undesirable to obtain weapons training. Thus, certain minority soldiers’ groups were labelled as untrustworthy and reliable only for unarmed service and were sent to sapper battalions, while a security mechanism was established for those evading the draft or deserting. After the reunification of Greece under the pro-war liberal government and the mobilization of conscripts from Southern Greece, the Greek state offered the opportunity to conscripts from certain minority groups the opportunity to pay and be exempted from service. Still, tens of thousands of minority conscripts continue serving the Greek banner, even under arms. However, for many of them their service, not even an armed one, did not prove enough to protect their citizen status, and after the end of the war they were deported. They were necessary for the war effort, but not for the postwar peace and nation-building process. Charalampos Minasidis is a PhD candidate in the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation entitled War is the Father of All: Citizen Soldiers, Mobilizations and Democratization in the Kingdom of Greece and the Ottoman Empire during the Early 20th Century examines the human landscape of total mobilization via the social category of citizen soldiers as a way to study Greek and Ottoman society at war during the early 20th century. His research and studies have been funded by the French School at Athens, the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Foundation, the A.G. Leventis Foundation and UT. He holds an MA in The History of Warfare (2008) from King’s College London and an MA in Balkan and Turkish History (2013), a BA in Political Sciences (2014) and a BA in History (2007) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is currently a research fellow of the Research Centre for the Humanities working on a group project on “Greek Soldiers, War and Trauma: The Asia Minor Campaign and the Consequences of a Painful Experience.” He also collaborates with projects, such as the 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War et al., while, in the past, he has conducted several research projects for the Society for Macedonian Studies. He has authored journal articles, book chapters and the book Η Πολιτική των Ηνωμένων Πολιτειών στο Μακεδονικό Ζήτημα τη Δεκαετία του 1940 [United States Policy on the Macedonian Question during the 1940s] (Thessaloniki: Epikentro Publishers, 2016.) 4 .