The various ethnographies presented in the previous chapters give a sense of the diversity within these situations. All those involved, whether economic migrants, networks based on memories of the diaspora, neo-residents of the borderlands or those involved in the re-evaluation of cross-border heritage, have their own distinct characteristics that give rise to these different situations. Nonetheless, these scenarios have elements in common that shed light on the larger dynamics of social transformation in contemporary Greek society, as well as trends that have a wider effect on Europe and the Mediterranean. These approaches have all the hallmarks of specific emerging identification discourses with a different emphasis to the more classical discourse of those nation-states from where the authors originate. Whether it is Jews from Rhodes, a minority who have vanished from the heart of the island where they have their roots, Albanian-speakers in Greece, confused with Albanian migrants who have been arriving since the beginning of 1990, or groups of Aromanians in the various regions of Macedonia or in Epirus, these affiliations all appear to be faced with new forces which, instead of creating a kind of global melting pot, stemming from the standardisation of lifestyles and identification, are instead leading them to affirm or re-affirm their particularity through the new channels of expression open to them.

In the same way, beyond the classic mechanisms of power, the different kinds of geographical mobility presented throughout this volume paradoxically seem themselves to foster a certain kind of social fragmentation. Cross-border relationships, suspended for nearly half a century in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, have now been reactivated and networks uniting people with different citizenships have been (re)formed from fields as diverse as trade, migrant networks and marriage. This reactivation has led to the promotion of an alternative or minority memory, along with a re-evaluation of traditional terms of legitimacy, thus linking the future of contemporary Greek society to that of its neighbours engaged in post-socialist rationales. More widely in the country, the oldest minority groups have been joined by more recent flows of migrants, leading to a marked revival of the minority claim and a significant shift in the prevailing social and political frameworks of coexistence. According to some commentators, this movement, connected to European politics on the protection of minority rights, could affect the stability of the country concerned (Riedel 2002).