History of Global Arms Transfer, 3 (2017), pp. 41-50

From Collective Memory to Frontline
Reality: The Greek State and Society
Confronted with Migrant and Refugee
Question(s), 1980-2016
By TASOS KOSTOPOULOS
Why the arrival of more than 1 million of Middle Eastern refugees in Greece
during 2015 and 2016 did not provoke an open racist backlash, just as it happened
in other European countries during the same period? A number of factors, both
circumstantial and/or historical, may explain this development. The transitional
nature of the refugee border crossing, judicial suppression of local Nazis but also
the recent discredit of private TV Channels and the availability of volunteer
activists generated by the recent capitulation of the SYRIZA government to thetroika, are the main circumstantial reasons that have contributed to the massive
show of solidarity that did not allow xenophobic reactions to take the upper hand.
As for the historical reasons, they can be traced back to the fact that up to one
fifth of today’s Greek population is itself of refugee descent –and the subsequent
collective memories arising from that.

I
If during the last decade, the political and social evolution of Greece has been full ofcontradictions, one of its most contradictory aspects was the lack of any significant racist
upsurge during the mass influx of Middle Eastern refugees to the Aegean Islands
throughout 2015 and the first months of 2016.
Four years after the entry of an openly Nazi party (Golden Dawn) in the Greek Parliament,
which had been preceded and followed by a number of violent attacks against Third World
immigrants, the arrival of 856,723 refugees in 2015 and another 157,988 during the firstsix months of 20161 was not greeted by massive xenophobic reactions, like in other nations
in Eastern and Central Europe. On the contrary, there was a wave of solidarity mobilization
by segments of civil society who rushed to compensate for the deficiencies of a state
apparatus not only totally unprepared for such an event, but also decimated by five years ofcatastrophic bailout memoranda. It was this mobilization of a protective civil society thatprevented the emergence of a racist counter-current against the refugee “invasion”,
denounced as such not only by the Far Right (Golden Dawn continues to holdapproximately 7 percent of the electorate, at least), but also by the conservative mainstream
opposition (New Democracy party), whose propaganda tried initially to speculate on theissue and arouse xenophobic sentiments against immigrants and the left-wing government
1 Numbers provided by the UNHCR webpage. According to the Greek MFA, there have been 851.319 refugee
and immigrant arrivals in 2015, compared to only 41.074 in 2014 – an increase of 1972 percent within a single
year; ρα είο απλ ρ τ, ογ κ , p.3.

－ 41 －TASOS KOSTOPOULOS
that allegedly “protected” (or even “brought”) them into the country. Even in the biggest
islands of the East Aegean, where the number of incoming refugees was two, three or evensix times their total population2, such racist reactions during the fall of 2015 proved to behalf-hearted and short-lived.
There is no doubt that this initial absence of mass displays of anti-refugee racism by the
Greek public must be first and foremost attributed to the fact that many of the Middle
Eastern refugees who landed in Greece during 2015 were passers-by, whose goal was not
to install themselves in a country suffering from a severe social crisis (with an official
unemployment rate of 26.5 percent), 3 but to continue their way northward, within the
Schengen zone, to integrate into an economically more accommodating environment.
Active solidarity toward the incoming refugees was therefore tantamount to an act ofhuman care for people in urgent need, not necessarily amounting to unequivocal support
for their more or less permanent settlement in Greece. Its anti-fascist component, i.e., theopen rejection of the Islamophobic rhetoric forwarded by the Far Right, was neverthelessequally present on the field.
To fully understand this development, we also must take into consideration a number ofcomplementary factors that either facilitated this solidarity activism or inhibited thedevelopment of an opposing mobilization against the refugee “invasion”. Some of thesefactors can be described as circumstantial, while others came out of a historical backgroundthat needs to be thoroughly explained.

II
The circumstantial factors, arising from recent developments in the previous years ormonths, include:(a) The legal prosecution of Golden Dawn since the fall of 2013, with many of its
members and leaders still on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from criminal
conspiracy to moral instigation of (or physical implication in) several racist and/or
politically motivated murders or attempted murders. The end of the New Democracy
government’s blind eye toward the criminal activities of the Nazis (or even the conscious
harboring of them by the ND right wing) not only destroyed once and for all the myth of anautonomous semi-military organization dedicated to fighting to the finish “against all”,
according to their own slogans, but also exposed -- albeit only partially -- Golden Dawn’s
nature as a tool of the Greek “deep state” within the military and police forces 4. The passive
stance adopted ever since by its leadership and rank and file, itself a form of indirect
declaration of loyalty to the authorities and the established order, did not leave them withany breathing room to organise anti-immigrant actions, at least for the time being.
(b) The prosecution of racist hate speech through Law 2485, adopted by the Parliament in

2 85 percent in the case of Lesvos (500.018 refugees, compared witha local population of 85.412), 411 percent in Leros (31.929 to 7.755), 245 percent in Samos (73.732 to 30.102),235 percent in Chios (120.804 to 51.339) and 231 percent in Kos (58.420 to 25.280). On the small island of
Agathonissi, inhabited by 316 Greeks, but with 31.089 refugee arrivals during 2015, this analogy reached 9.838
percent; ρα είο απλ ρ τ, ογ κ , p.3.
3 Hellenic Statistical Authority, The Greek, p.7 (data for the end of 2014). The level of unemployment remained
more or less stable during 2015 and early 2016.
4 For a very good detailed account of Golden Dawn activities and their prosecution, the reader may refer to thebilingual (Greek-English) website www.goldendawnwatch.org. Unfortunately, the English version of its day-today monitoring of the main trial stops at the end of 2015. See also: Psarras, Golden Dawn.

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FROM COLLECTIVE MEMORY TO FRONTLINE REALITY
September 2014. Although it has never been applied up to this day5, its existence not only
hindered anti-refugee activism, but it also prevented several private TV channels fromplaying the xenophobic card to attract broader audiences. We must stress here that,
according to the founding rules of Greek Private Radio and TV stations, set by their West
European and U.S. counterparts during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the conscious
cultivation of a climate of tension and urgency, even about nonsense issues that arecompletely forgotten the next day, is inherently perceived as a conditio sine qua non for a
successful electronic media business6.
(c) The total loss of credibility in the private TV channels during the referendum
campaign of July 2015, when most of them threw away any pretense of objectivity or evenprofessionalism, engaging themselves in an overt black propaganda campaign in favor of
the “yes” vote, a breach of respectability that alienated most spectators, at least
temporarily7. These private channels have played a crucial role in promoting racist agendas
among the population in the past. In the 1990s, they constantly overplayed incidents ofcriminality by young male Albanian immigrants, eliciting a societal demand for tough lawand-order policies and de-legitimising the democratic imperatives that had dominatedGreek public discourse since the military junta’s downfall two decades earlier8. In 2009,
they created a wave of Islamophobia against incoming Afghan and Pakistani immigrants,
elevating the far-right LAOS Party -- until then a more or less marginalised entity -- into a“respectable” political force that was incorporated into the short-lived neo-liberal“Government of National Salvation” created by banker Lukas Papadimos in 20119. During
the spring of 2012, they finally contributed to an openly racist campaign by this same
government, consciously promoting Golden Dawn as a “lesser evil” against the ascending
Left and contributing to its electoral success10. When some of these TV channels tried to
instigate anti-refugee feelings in September 2015, it was too soon for them to recover theirlost credibility and repeat their earlier exploits as incubators of Greek racism.
(d) Last but not least, the SYRIZA government’s recent capitulation to the troika and themass disengagement produced in the party’s ranks by this development, together with thegeneral feeling of an onerous defeat suffered by most of the Greek Left forces, diverted theenergies of those still active into the field of solidarity toward the destitute refugees -- asboth a form of political engagement with an immediate practical outcome and an active
anti-fascist mobilization that allowed no space for xenophobic feelings to develop. It must
be pointed out that even before SYRIZA’s inception as an umbrella of various left-winggroups in 2003, most of its components had been more or less deeply engaged in the local
anti-fascist movement. The annual “Anti-Racist Festivals” organised each summer since1996 by a network of immigrant and solidarity associations provided the first meeting
5 With the notable exception of the law’s most problematic aspect -- the penalization of genocide and war
crimes denial. This clause has been used against the German revisionist historian Heinz Richter for his
characterization of Wehrmacht war crimes in Crete as lawful reprisals against the “brutal” and “illegal” armed
resistance that some of the island’s inhabitants launched against the 1941 Nazi invaders. After a mobilization of
professional Greek historians, who were seriously concerned about the law’s long-term impact on scientificresearch in Greece, a Rethymnon Court declared last February that this specific clause was unconstitutional andtherefore invalid, clearing Heinz Richter of any charges.
6 For such a directive: ρακ .
7ό , Η ειρα τ σ .17-9.
8ό ,ι ο οί. 45- .
9 On this spectacular transformation of LAOS from a marginal group to a “respectable” partner of themainstream pro-bailout parties, see Dimitris Psarras, The Rise.10-4.
10 αρρά ,αύ , p.377- 2;
στόπο λο ,
ι α ί , p.42-57.

－ 43 －TASOS KOSTOPOULOS
ground for the later party’s founders11. Most of the local solidarity networks that emerged
last autumn to provide relief and protection to the refugees were thus staffed either by
SYRIZA rank-and-file or by fellow travelers from the anarchist movement. In the firstcase, the matrix of mobilization was provided by pre-existing social solidarity networks set
up in recent years to counter the worst side effects from bailout policies, while theanarchists were inspired mostly by direct-action schemes.

III
All of these circumstantial factors could not possibly amalgamate into a positive (or at least
neutral) attitude toward the new refugees had there not been a historical background that
played into the hearts and minds of the mainstream Greek population. Solidarity activists
managed to repel racist propaganda by recalling the collective memories of the sufferings
by numerous Greeks of earlier generations, who also had experienced forced expatriation
due to national or political persecution – just like today’s Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan
refugees. At least one-fourth of the current Greek population is related partly or totallyfrom people who either immigrated to or left Greece during the 20th century as war orpolitical refugees. Although the construction of their collective memory has followedvarious trajectories and was often imbued with contradictory ideological content, thecommon denominator of that refugee experience continues to function as a very strong
identity marker for all subgroups.
From the point of view of their origin and the political context of their (permanent or
temporary) expatriation, these earlier Greek refugee currents can be classified according tofour main categories:
1. The biggest group consists of the Greek-Orthodox refugees who left Turkey during or
immediately after the catastrophic outcome of the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, either
fleeing slaughter at the hands of victorious Kemalist forces or as a result of the compulsory
exchange of populations agreed upon between the two countries in 1923 at Lauzanne12.
According to the 1928 census, 1,104,216 out of a total of 6,204,684 Greek citizens, or 17,8
percent of the country’s population at that time, were refugees of Asia Minor, Pontus, or
Eastern Thrace origin13. A meticulous study of the official numbers reveals, however, that
this number is clearly an underestimation, as many villages exclusively inhabited byrefugees are not registered as such 14. Even today, the offspring of those people aredescribed (and self-described) in everyday talk as people “of refugee origins (προσ γικκαταγ γ ) or even “refugees” (πρόσ γε ); their clubs often bear a “refugee” designation.
The term “refugee” has acquired a rather positive connotation, defining a group that
suffered because of its national identity and managed to survive (and sometimes prosper) in
spite of the difficulties it confronted since its expatriation. This was not at all the case in
the days just after their ancestors’ arrival in Greece, when both their Greekness and thecompatibility of their manners with those of the indigenous population were fiercely
contested by local nativists15. Although rejected from the sanitised official discourse about
11 For a self-presentation of those activities by the group that has been at their core: λ.
12 For the 1919-1922 Greek-Turkish War, known in Greece as “the Asia Minor Campaign” and in Turkey as“the War of Independence”: Smith, Ionian Vision. For the compulsory Population Exchange ordered by the
Lauzanne Treaty: Pentzopoulos, The Balkan, p.64-71.
13 Ministère de l’Economie Nationale, Résultats, Vol.I.
14στόπο λο ,λ ο , 264-5.
15 Pentzopoulos, The Balkan, p.209-12; Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republi, p.191-8.

－ 44 －

FROM COLLECTIVE MEMORY TO FRONTLINE REALITY
the “reception” of the 1922 refugees by the Greek motherland, this memory of alienation(or even humiliation) has nevertheless survived at the level of informal family history,
producing an ambivalent stance toward nativist policies but also eliciting feelings ofsolidarity toward any segment of the population who is expatriated for its identity or
beliefs. The final outcomes of these contradictory tendencies are at stake amid the ongoing
political confrontations inside these communities.
What must be taken into account are the different paths through which the first twogenerations of those Greek refugees have been fully integrated into Greek society (andaccepted by it) during the 1940s. A considerable number of former refugees from Turkey
actively participated in the Communist-led resistance movement, while others collaborated
with the Quisling governments and fought in paramilitary Nazi units under the leadershipof high-rank SS officers, only to transform themselves into “nationalist” anti-Communist
fighters during the subsequent Civil War of the late 1940s16. Individual descent from people
or communities distinguished for their participation in WWII Resistance does not, ofcourse, automatically pre-ordain an equally anti-fascist stance today. Nevertheless, astoday’s crisis in the relations between Greece and the German-led European Union has led
to a resurrection of collective memories from the Nazi Occupation of Greece and imbued itwith new meanings, it is increasingly difficult for people to overcome those earlier schismsthat defined social life in Greece for decades. One of the main problems met by Golden
Dawn in its efforts to extend its influence beyond the traditional far-right audience has been
the open identification of its leaders with German Nazis, who perpetrated the harshest
foreign occupation ever suffered by the country’s inhabitants.
2. Smaller groups of ethnic Greek refugees, fleeing national oppression by other Balkan
nationalisms, had been immigrating to Greece since 1906 and continued to do so. The firstsuch wave came from Bulgaria, whose Greek minority also was subjected during the 1920s
to a population-exchange scheme, formally voluntary, but more or less enforced17. Most of
the earlier arrivals had been absorbed into the social fabric of metropolitan Athens, while
the later wave more or less kept its collective identity. Less visible as a compact social
body, the Greeks of Istanbul who left their homes after the anti-Christian pogrom of 1955
and a wave of expulsions in the mid-1960s, estimated at between 40,000 and 100,00018,
also keep a strong form of collective identity through a multitude of “Constantinople”
clubs19. The modalities surrounding their ethnic cleansing, together with their rather quick(though often equally traumatic) absorption into the rest of Greek society, make it less easy
for them to identify with the current Middle East refugees. Nevertheless, certain aspects ofa repressed “Oriental” collective identity, for the first time publicly expressed in 2003 by
the tremendously popular film “A Touch of Spice”, expose enough open questions for asocial anthropologist to explore in this direction. The same can be said about the former
Greek colony of Egypt, the bulk of which (more than 10,000 people) expatriated between
1960 and 1964, after the passing of nationalist legislation affecting foreign workers there20.
16 Refugee participation in the Resistance is amply documented in most of the historical literature on the
1940s. For this participation as a marker of total integration into Greek society: εοτοκά , λολογ ο 7,
p.509-11 & 545-6. For the delicate question of armed collaboration with the occupiers by Turkish-speaking
Pontic communities in Macedonia: αρα τ ί , α α
λ , p.109-207.
17 Wurfbain, L’échange. The 1928 census registered a total of 49.027 refugees from Bulgaria (op.cit., fn.13).
18 Alexandris, The Greek, 291 & 294..
19αστασιά ο ,ο , 76-84.
20 ταλα ά, κ, p.334-5 & 344. Some of these “repatriates” were immediately hired by foreign
firms operating in Greece; they comprised, for example, an impressive 11 percent of all personnel employedduring the 1960s in the aluminum industry run by Pechiney Co. (ib.id, p.342).

－ 45 －TASOS KOSTOPOULOS
Without any effective social representation, these “Egyptiots” ( ιγ πτι τε ) more or lesswere quickly integrated into the rest of Greek citizenry and are even less visible as such inthe public life of modern Greece. Therefore, any estimation about their collective stancetoward actual Middle Eastern refugees is a risky venture. Even less discernible is the stanceof the former Greek minority population from Albania, self-designated as “North Epirotes( ορειο πειρ τε )”, numbering between 40,000 and 100,000 people, most of whom cameto Greece after 1990 as economic immigrants rather than political refugees. The strong
links between their associations and the “deep state” irredentist networks surviving fromthe Cold War years have functioned more or less as an impediment toward any progressive
tendencies21.
3. A third wave of Greek refugees moved in the opposite direction during the late 1940s:
some 75.000 left-wing guerillas, members of their families, or local supporters who left
Greece in 1949 after their defeat in the Civil War, taking shelter in the East European“Popular Democracies” and distant Soviet Uzbekistan22. Their repatriation became an open
issue during subsequent decades, claimed by families and fellow travelers as proof (or evena precondition) of national reconciliation, but steadily rejected by the post-Civil War
conservative governments. Some of them were in fact repatriated little by little on an
individual basis during the 1950s or immediately after the 1974 downfall of the military
junta23, while most of the rest followed after the 1982 decision of Andreas Papandreou foran “unconditional repatriation” of all “ethnic Greek” refugees (exempting all of thoseamong them who belonged to the Slav-Macedonian ethnic minority)24. Their experiences
may have been radically different from that of ethnic Greeks persecuted by foreign
nationalisms and sheltered by their “national centre”. Nevertheless, it produced an evenmore clear background of positive feelings toward persecuted people who look for shelterin foreign lands, far away from their homelands.
4. The last wave has been composed of political emigrants who fled to the West during themilitary junta that ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. Some of them left the country
after the military coup of 1967, while others already had been abroad as emigrants orstudents, engaging themselves in dissident activities, and did not take the risk of returning
during the military regime. A total of 2,800 people, the most famous among them being thewell-known actress Melina Merkouri, had their Greek citizenship revoked by the country’s
military rulers, then reinstated immediately after the junta’s downfall25. Although few innumber, enduring this form of exile only for a relatively brief time, this collective
experience proved to be the most influential of all on an institutional level, leading to thecategorical prohibition of any extradition “of foreigners persecuted for their activities infavor of liberty” incorporated in the new democratic Greek Constitution enacted in 197526.

21 α λο ,ι λλ ε . The writer estimates the former members of Albania’s Greek minority living in
Greece at around 75,000 (p.286).
22 For their number: Constantine Karamanlis Archive (Athens), f.2A, p.303,/
πα απατρισ ό τειρα το σο ιετικο σ ασπισ ο ε ρισκο, Athens .6.1956, 2.
23 A total of 15,957 political refugees were repatriated between 1951 and 1970, while another 20,500 were
estimated by Greek security services to have died in exile: ρε π λα , ο λλ κ , 466. After the junta
downfall, 22,273 more were repatriated on a selective basis before the 19 2 final decision: σ κο , λλ, 201).
24
19 3/ /1, . . . 106 41/29.12.19 2. Slav-Macedonian refugees were estimated in 1956 by the Greek
CIA to be at least 45,203 (fn.21, p.3).
25στόπο λο ,αιρ σει , 65.
26 Constitution of the Hellenic Republic, article 5.2§2. Although not always respected in practice, thisparagraph remained intact during the constitutional revisions of 1986, 2001 and 2008.

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FROM COLLECTIVE MEMORY TO FRONTLINE REALITYIV
Due to this turbulent past, and the subsequent self-perception of the Greeks in those years
as a “proletarian nation” allegedly closer to the Third World “periphery” than to thedeveloped capitalist West27, the first decade of democratic rule after 1974 (better known asα ολ, i.e., “change of regime”) witnessed a widespread attitude of solidarity
toward foreign liberation movements and/or political refugees. In this context, thousands ofTurkish political refugees from various left-wing organizations were received withwholeheartedly friendly feelings by the mainstream Greek population after the military
coup of 1980, while the sporadic extraditions of such fugitives by local security forceswere harshly denounced as serious breaches of the democratic Constitution28. Only during
the mid-1990s, after the reestablishment of parliamentary rule in Turkey and the emergenceof a conservative nationalist mobilization in Greece, did this widespread moral support forthe struggles of Turkish people who wanted democracy (and maybe socialism) give way to
the nationalist fantasy of a Greek-Kurdish “cooperation against the common enemy” (i.e.,
Turkey) -- a development linked to the secret cooperation between certain factions of the
Greek “deep state” and PKK, publicly revealed in 1999 during the infamous “AbdullahÖcalan affair”29.
Even more clear is the traditional solidarity shown by Greeks toward Palestinians. As avery popular (but highly inaccurate) left-wing slogan of those days declared, “no American
will stay in Greece, Cyprus, or Palestine!”30. To a lesser degree, similar positive feelings
were, for a shorter period of time, manifested toward other Arabs, with the numerous
Lebanese Christians constituting a very special case, obliged as they were by the prevailing
atmosphere to express their anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim feelings in a rather low voiceor otherwise circumspect way.
Less sanguine in those days was the popular feeling toward East European fugitives.
Although they were provided with political asylum, and with personal sympathy on an
individual basis, they were at the same time mostly viewed as either “American stooges” ornaive victims of imperialist propaganda -- a propaganda that they were often themselves
eagerly reproducing anyway. A noticeable exception was made after 1981 for Polishpolitical refugees due to the sympathies produced by the resistance provided by Solidarnosc
against the martial-law regime and the widespread appraisal of the personal risks inherent
in such a mobilization. It also must be pointed out that, in contrast to other East European
dissident movements who were restricted to an anti-communist intellectual milieu, theworking-class-based Solidarnosc enjoyed the support not only of conservative and liberal
Greek circles, but also of radical-left groups, as well as the local “Eurocommunist” party.
The last instance of old solidarity habits appeared in the summer of 1990, when a shiploadof 182 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka landed at Pireus, eliciting widespread sympathy fromthe Athenian public, although the conservative government of Konstantinos Mitsotakis was
not at all predisposed to being friendly toward them. In a short span of time, any political
27 See, for example, Andreas Papandreou’s emblematic declaration, in his foreword of Cambodia’s Norodom
Sihanouk memoirs: “The peoples of Indochina have born the main burden in the struggle for independence andself-determination. The showed the way. We Greeks shall follow”: ι α ο κ, α ύ α, 10.
28ό ,ι ο ρκοι , 15-17.
29 As far as I know, there is not a comprehensive work on the Öcalan affair in Greek or any Western language.
The account of the Greek CIA agent who accompanied him from Athens to Nairobi, where the PKK leader was“abducted” by the Turkish MIT, is naturally full of crucial gaps: αλε τερί , α
ο . For the Öcalanversion of his ordeal: τ αλά ,ο α.
30 The slogan was inaccurate since, among the three countries mentioned above, only in Greece was there, infact, a U.S. military presence.

－ 47 －TASOS KOSTOPOULOS
tradition of hospitality subsided under the influence of more conservative trends thatallowed for the emergence of openly racist preachings by a reinvigorated nativist rightwing. The point of departure for such a restructuring of the public space was the mass
influx of Eastern European economic immigrants, mostly but not exclusively Albanians,
during the early 1990s. The 2001 population census registered 438,036 Albanian citizens
and 114,101 other Eastern Europeans living in Greece, compared with a mere 20,556 and29,275 10 years earlier 31. This development coincided with the reappearance of an
offensive version of Greek nationalism that had been dormant since 1974, with thecultivation of a nationalist hysteria around the Macedonian “name” question and, on aminor scale, the development of irredentist tendencies toward Southern Albania thatsurvived until 1997. The main change inflicted by this sudden transformation of Greece,
from a country of traditional emigration to one of mass immigration, was a radical changeof self-perception. The widespread earlier “false conscience” of a supposedly “proletariannation” gave way to the (politically much more problematic) self-portrait of a “petit
bourgeois”-imagined community, envious of the authentic Big Power imperialists, but at
the same time arrogant toward anyone considered to be holding an “inferior” position in
the imperialist chain32.
Twenty years later, the sudden -- and totally unexpected -- downgrading of Greek society
within the European Union, its painful (for the working class and a big part of the middle
social strata) displacement from the middle core to the semi-colonial periphery of theformer privileged nations’ club, produced a gradual (and equally painful) self-reappraisalthat led to a decisive rearrangement of the notions of friend and foe in the collective
national imagination. This rearrangement is best reflected in some popular afternoon TV
soap operas, in which the earlier negative stereotype of a cunning, self-interested, andtreacherous (but also ridiculous) Eastern European female immigrant has now been
substituted by a German female figure with the same qualities33.
Of course, this general tendency was not the only rearrangement of collective identity thattook place during the last decade. The crisis in political representation, provoked by thebailout memoranda that enforced a rapid dismantling of the post-war welfare state and an
abrupt degradation in the living standards of the Greek population’s vast majority, led tocentrifugal tendencies that not only destroyed the local Social Democracy (PASOK), butalso “emancipated” the long-discredited extreme right-wing forces that for three decades
had been either marginalised or had taken refuge in mainstream conservative parties. On
the grass-roots level, the re-emergence of a militant right-wing radicalism, mobilised
mostly (but not exclusively) against what it denounced as an “invasion” of Greece byMoslem immigrants34, was met by an equally radical response by the social forces -- mostly
youths -- who mobilised on the Left. As the popular mobilization against the bailout
agreements gained momentum, so did mass antifascist and antiracist activism as well.
In this context, there is much more than sheer coincidence between the emancipating
grass-roots mobilization that accompanied last summer’s referendum against the troika
31 Office National de Statistique de Grèce, Résultat, 261; National Statistical Service of Greece, Population &Housing, 306. In the case of Albanian citizens, it must be taken into account that tens of thousands among thembelonged to the Greek minority of Southern Albania, whose members had difficulties naturalising themselves as
Greek citizens, even after many years of permanent residency in Greek territories.
32 For an early description of this transformation:ό ,α τι περιαλισ ό , 37-42.
33 The most striking example of such a rearrangement was provided by the serialίσ στο σπίτι ( ack toHome), projected by MEGA TV during 2011-2013.
34 Or even the country’s “settlement” with a foreign population, planned in advance by obscure forces behind“Globalization” –a recurrent theme of modern anti-Semitism worldwide.

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FROM COLLECTIVE MEMORY TO FRONTLINE REALITY
diktat, and the comparatively positive reception of 1 million Middle Eastern refugees
during the following months. Of course, nobody can predict the final outcome of theongoing internal struggle between rival social projects, as well as between the competingsocial forces behind them. As the SYRIZA government is gradually worn down by popular
disapproval of its enforcement of the policies imposed by the country’s creditors, and at thesame time the opposition attempts to overthrow it through a neo-liberal remake of theearlier anti-bailout revolt are not attracting any considerable mass following, there is an
obvious tendency of the mainstream opposition parties to either instigate or at least favour
local reactions toward the permanent installation of refugees (or even to the introduction of
their kids into local schools). The fact that New Democracy, the main conservative party, is
now led by an alliance of its neo-liberal president Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the scion of anestablished (and very wealthy) political family, with a bunch of former leaders of far-rightgroups whose political profile has been built on an anti-immigration agenda, is also a factor
that plays into that trend35. Although recent experience indicates that playing with such
racist fire in the end tends to favour the real extremists to the detriment of the “moderate”
ones, the temptation of populist mobilization is not an instrument to be easily dismissed.
Footnote References
Alexandris, A. The Greek minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish relations, (Athens, 1992).
Mavrogordatos, G. Stillborn Republic. Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922-1936,(Berkeley, 1983)
Smith, M. Ionian Vision. Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922, (London, 1973).
Pentzopoulos, D. The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact on Greece, (Paris, 1962).
Psarras, D. Golden Dawn On Trial, (Athens, 2015), www.goo.gl/AmlhL6.
Psarras, D. The Rise of the NeoNazi Party “Golden Dawn” in Greece, (Brussels, 2014).
Wurfbain, A. L’échange gréco-bulgare des minoritiés ethniques, (Paris, 1930).
αστασιά ο , .
τ ό , .
ολ , (Athens, 2007).
ρα. ., n ir
κ
α ο
κ
κο
α , (Pallini, 1988)
ρε π λα , . ο λλ κ αο κ
λ α, (Athens, 1977).
λ
κα λ
α
ο κ ο
κ ύο γ α α ολ κ κα οκκαα α, (Athens, 2008).
αλε τερί , . α
ο
αλ
α
αλ
α , (Athens, 2007).
στόπο λο , .
ι α ί από τ α πολ ία στ κε τρικ πολιτικ σκ
: π “ θ κε”πόθεσ ,in ορ τικό ρ α Η ,κα ο αο οο αού, (Athens, 2013), 42-57.
στόπο λο , .
λ ο καοκ α, (Athens, 2007)στόπο λο , .
αιρ σει ιθαγ εια . Η σκοτει πλε ρά τεοελλ ικ ιστορία (1926-2003) ,ύγ ο αα α, 83 (2003).
εοτοκά , . λολογ ο
, (Athens ,1987).
αρα τ ί, . α αλο κ αα κα ολ κκ
ο
ο
ο κ
ο
ο ο
ο
κού
ο , (Herakleio, 2001).
ταλα ά , . κ
α ο κ α, (Herakleio, 2015).
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ό ,ι ο οί τ αλ α ικ
α ία ,λο , 13 June 1993.
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ό ,α τι περιαλισ ό τε ιά . ο ιά ε τλαα ρ ια α ,
λο
λ
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α, 7
35 One of the two party’s vice-presidents, Adonis Georgiadis, as well as its shadow minister of Law and Public
Order, Makis Voridis, were first elected in 2007 as MPs of the far-right (and openly racist) Greek Popular
Orthodox Rally (LAOS). As a book publisher who pushed his products by the medium of a personnal TV show,
the first systematically advertised an openly anti-Semitic literature. The second had been the Youth Leader of the
far-right National Political Union (EPEN), a marginal party created in the 1980s by the imprisoned military junta
leader Papadopoulos. In 1994 he created his own group (Greek Front), under the auspices of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
National Front; after an even more marginal existence, the Greek Front was in 2005 absorbed into LAOS.

－ 49 －TASOS KOSTOPOULOS
Feb.1993.
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ο α
ο α ο , (Athens n.d. 2003 ).
α λο , .
ι λλ ε τλ α ία στλλά α in . σιτσελίκ - .
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