Greek Identity and Europe: Entanglements and Tensions

Abstract

The financial crisis riveting Europe at the time of writing translates into a particularly intense — and conspicuous — crisis of European identity for Greece. The current situation, however, overshadows the earlier, also-intense series of contestations of the Europeanness of Greek identity that have marked Greek and European reality in the last 20 years. Two facts make the contestations of Europeanness of Greek identity unique. First, these contestations take place after a long history of debate on Europeanness of Greek identity which, by the late 1980s, seemed to have been positively resolved, with Greece’s European identity an accepted fact. In other words, the contestations that we observe from the 1990s onwards are within the context of a hard-won certainty of Greece’s Europeanness, both within Greece and externally. Second, this contestation takes place while Greece was already part of the European integration project, and had been so for nearly a decade. This is particularly striking considering that there was less external questioning of the Europeanness of certain countries still aspiring towards membership in that period.