land and livelihood lowered the standard of living for everyone”.<sup>5</sup> The refugees’ distinct identity was further cemented by clear allegiances to opposing political parties during the interwar period, with refugees actively supporting the liberals and natives standing behind the conservatives.

Has the refugees’ initial economic hardship upon arrival turned into persistent social marginalization? Has the historical strife between refugees and natives cemented into deep-seated mistrust and oppositional identities? Has social cohesion – understood as “a sense of shared purpose and trust [...] and willingness to engage and cooperate” among members of a same society (Kim, Sheely and Schmidt, 2020) – been eroded by major inter-group cleavages? Or, to the contrary, have the League of Nations’ resettlement efforts proved sufficient to prevent refugee’s exclusion and foster their integration into the Greek society ?

To address these questions, I use Murard and Sakalli (2018)’s geocoded dataset of refugee settlements in 1928, which I combine with several indicators of social cohesion at the local level in the 2000s and 2010s. I also use various Greek population censuses from 1928 to 2001 to examine refugees’ social integration, and the European Social Survey to look at the second-generation refugees’ political values, trust, and civic engagement.

The first important result is that refugees experienced a successful social integration in the host society. By 2001 refugees display a high rate of intermarriage, with close to 50 percent of refugee women being married with a Greek native. Second generation refugees also report levels of trust in others and in institutions similar to natives, do not perceive to be discriminated against, and are more likely than natives to engage in political activism and to participate in voluntary associations. I also find no persistent inter-group inequalities between refugees and natives in terms of educational attainment or occupation. Furthermore, the civic engagement of refugees appears to have contributed to higher involvement in voluntary associations at the community level. I find that, among small communities (bellow 1,100 inhabitants), places with a higher share of refugees in 1928 are more likely to have at least one sport association in the early 2000s. I find no evidence that refugees increased political fragmentation – which is consistent with the fact that voting patterns of refugees and natives are very similar – nor that refugees increased crime in places of resettlement.

These results have important policy implications. They suggest that early investments in resettlement efforts (e.g., provision of farmland) and inclusion policy (e.g., citizenship) can have significant returns in the long-run by fostering refugees’s assimilation and sustaining social cohesion. Under the threat of profound social disruption caused by the influx of 1.2 millions destitute refugees, the Greek state sought to promote national unity by including refugees in the national community. This was accomplished not only by providing refugees with the economic tools for their

> 5Kontogiorgi (2006), p. 166, and Kritikos (2005)

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