Suchergebnisse

This article analyses Greek orientalism towards the Arabs from the end of the eighteenth to the late twentieth century. It examines an extensive body of texts, beginning with Adamantios Korais' rallying call for Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt and ending with the post-Suez attacks on Nasser's anti-colonial policies by leading post-war Greek writers. The analysis approaches the representations of the Arabs as a branch of a wider Greek orientalist discourse that, for the most part, has focused historically on the Turks. In so doing, it conceptualizes Greek orientalism as partly a 'borrowed construction', internalized in Greek discourse from European colonial ideology, and partly as an articulation of what Edward Said has called an imperial 'structure of feeling', which in the case of Greece emanates from the irredentist/neo-Byzantine expansionist vision of Megali Idea. The analysis deploys the concepts of 'internalized' and 'transposed orientalism' to denote a process whereby a particular culture, like that of modern Greece, which is itself the object of western orientalist depiction, first embraces this demeaning image of itself and then, in an attempt to mitigate it, projects it in upon other neighbouring cultures that are perceived to be inferior to or less 'westernized' than its own. Finally, the article examines the role of Egyptian-Greek writers in the construction of this discourse as cultural mediators who, in contrast to other Greek thinkers and artists, had a direct experience of interacting with modern Arab culture.

From the mid-1940s to the fall of the Colonels' Dictatorship in 1974, Greek society was defined by an official anti-communist discourse that divided it into 'nationally-minded' Ethnikofron citizens and left-wing 'enemies of the nation'. The article shows how this power discourse deployed visual media to construct an emotional regime of fear around communism during and after the Greek Civil War. It uncovers a large volume of propaganda imagery, including posters, illustrations, book covers, photographs, newsreels and feature films, which was used alongside texts and corporeal practices to vilify the Greek left. The article argues that the visual language of Ethnikofrosyni patterned itself on older scripts of negative othering embedded in Greek popular culture, such as lycanthropy, teratology, witchcraft, Islamophobia and Orientalism to discredit communism without engaging with its twentieth-century ideas and policies. Communists were therefore portrayed as monsters, beasts, barbarians, Muslims, Turks, Jews and unfeminine women to arouse primordial fears that threatened the deepest symbols of Greek national identity. The article stresses the centrality and relative autonomy of images in the discourse of Ethnikofrosyni and uses comparisons to unveil the processes of circulation and domestication operating across different national strands of anti-communism in the Cold War.

Discusses the endeavour by Prime Minister Kostas Simitis, a member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), to shift the focus of foreign policy from nationalism to internationalism; since Jan. 1996. Some focus on relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the US, the European Union, Cyprus, Turkey, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.