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‘That's the way they do it in Europe’: Redefining Culture in a Greek Border Region

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2012

Dimitris Gintidis
Dimitris Gintidis*
Affiliation:
Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Spartis 49, 546 40 Thessaloniki, Greece. E-mail: dgintidis@uom.gr
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Abstract

This article aims at portraying the symbolic and material impact of cross-border and entrepreneurial EU-funded projects on the local public sphere of Evros, a Greek region bordering with Turkey. Often construed as ‘European policies’ at the local level, such projects reflect a complex interaction between the ‘European’, the ‘national’ and the ‘local’. In order to unravel the dynamics of such interaction, I focus on the case of local cultural associations. These associations stood as typical bearers of a romantic nationalist discourse; this local enactment of Greek nationalism was also related with specific forms of symbolic capital, through ostensibly ‘disinterested patriotic action’. The introduction of EU-funded projects in the local public sphere challenged such historically constructed practices. At the same time, these projects were mediated by the representatives of the Greek State and were locally appropriated as a reformulation of older national policies and funding channels. The article argues that the implementation of those projects brought about two significant changes in the local public sphere: the dissemination of cross-border policies throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and the growing importance of a new, market-oriented perception of public action, in local cultural associations.

Type
Focus: Complexities of ‘Europe’
Information
European Review , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , 04 January 2012 , pp. 43 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Academia Europaea 2012

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References

References and Notes

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22. More recently, tensions between Greece and other members of the EU on the subject of national economic policy led to a certain repositioning, as short termed as this may be, of the discourse of ‘national interest’, including the partial use of the rhetoric of ‘patriotic honour’ as a response to various ‘insults’ from other European counterparts. The Greek State provides examples of various reorientations and combined uses of such ‘conflicting’ representations. Being the legitimate bearer of the nationalist rationale, the State seems, in the long term, more apt than anyone else in legitimising and naturalising such alternations in the dominant nationalist narrative. On the issue of the State's symbolic violence, see Bourdieu, P. (1997) Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Seuil), p. 179 and 248–268. At the same time, I should emphasise the pertaining Eurocentric foundations and aspirations of the Greek State and Greek elites, which seem to be embedded in their perception of social reality, their subsequent action and this action's hegemonic limits. See M. Herzfeld (1995) Hellenism and occidentalism: the permutations of performance in Greek bourgeois identity. In: J. Carrier (ed.) Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford: Oxford University Press); M. Herzfeld (1998) I Anthropologia Mesa apo ton Kathrefti (Athens: Alexandreia); N. Panayotopoulos (2001) La Conversion de l’État Grec à l’Économisme Dominant. Regards Sociologiques, 21, 41–49.Google Scholar