TEMES
Encounters with Modernity: Greek Historiography Since 1974
Antonis Liakos
UNIVERSITAT D’ATENES
f we were to discuss only one theme in mainstream historiography
since 1974, this would be the way in which “modernity” has been
conceptualized and, at the same time, criticized and contested. If
mainstream historiography has to do with modernity, modern Greek
historiography has to do with modernization. This encounter with
modernity, in one form or another, is a common feature of Postcolonial
theories. However, in contrast to these theories, where the principal aim is
the critique of the concept of modernization, in Greek scholarship modernity,
modernization (and Westernization) have far more positive meanings.
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In the last quarter of the 20 century, Greek society has entered a
new phase. With the fall of the dictatorship in 1974 ended a long period of
political turmoil, cleavage, and serious restriction to intellectual life. Thus,
the past twenty-five years have not simply been a new phase of
development for Greek historical studies. In this period the community of
historians and the framework of historiographical research were formed.
Like other national historiographies that take shape at the intersection
between international developments in the discipline and the political and
I
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109
social realities of the particular society, the course of Greek historical
studies has shown both convergences and divergences from mainstream
historiographical trends.
1. Landmarks and generations
Since 1974 there has been a great proliferation of publications
dealing with modern Greek history. The output of historical books reached
its greatest volume in the middle of the 1980s and has been maintained
since then. In this period, we can point to a number of landmarks in the
development of historiography. In 1971, the publication of the History of
the Greek Nation (Athens, 15 vols) started. The volumes which deal with
the modern period were published between 1974 and 1978. The whole work
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was intended as a substitute for Paparrigopoulos’ 19 -century History of the
Greek Nation as the standard historical narrative. In 1971 the historical review
Mnimon appeared as a forum for a young generation of historians, and the journal Ta Istorika appeared in 1983, as the proliferation in the publishing of history
books was beginning. During the 80s, historical research was supported by the
large state banks as well as by research programs maintained by the Greek
government. Finally, in 1990 the journal Istor, and then in 1999 the journal
Historein (with English as its working language) appeared.
If we were to classify modern Greek history by generations, we
could talk of four generations in the historical output of this period. First,
the generation of the “Fathers” (Dimaras and Svoronos) created trends and
schools of thought. Second was the generation of their students, known as
the “generation of the 60s”, (represented by Ta Istorika), then the
generation immediately after the junta (associated with the journals
Mnimon and Sinchrona Themata), and most recently the generation of the
90s (Istor and Historein). These four generations are interesting for the
themes they have addressed, particularly regarding their approaches to the
pattern of modernization, as well as for their methodology. The first and
second generations were engaged chiefly with the history of the Ottoman
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history. That is, the history of the modern Greek state has been the concern of
the generations which began to publish after the end of the dictatorship in 1974.
Of course, the theory, methodology and style of writing do not always
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correspond to generational divisions. The historiographical traditions, the trends,
and the schools of thought straddle two or sometimes three generations.
The studies which relate to modern Greek history do not themselves
have a long history. The first chair in Modern History at the University of
Athens was established only in 1937. Modern Greek history was regarded
largely as a continuation of Byzantine studies and did not extend beyond
the years of the Greek Revolution. The first serious works which dealt with
modern history appeared just on the eve of or in the aftermath of World
War II. However, the postwar period was not favorable for the development
of research. Even the suspicion that a certain historical work might dispute
the official version of history was enough to incur legal consequences for
the author. Thus, in 1955, when Nicolas Svoronos published his Histoire de
la Grece Moderne in Paris, he was deprived of citizenship. It took more
than 20 years after the end of the War for modern Greek history to be
incorporated into the national narrative. What have been the most important
historiographical schools in this period?
2. The School of the Greek Enlightenment
The school of historical thought with the greatest influence is connected
with Dimaras and deals with the history of the Greek Enlightenment. Dimaras
belonged to the literary generation of the 1930s which introduced modernist
poetry to Greece and renewed the literary canon and aesthetics. He invented
the term “Modern Greek Enlightenment” in the midst of the Civil War in 1945
with the aim of revising older interpretative frameworks for “Turkokratia”.
Even more, this concept and the schema of history it implied overrode the
interpretative framework established by Demoticism for cultural history, as the
opposition between the demotic and the learned tradition. The concept of the
Enlightenment also confronted the warring ideological frameworks of the Right
and the Left. It resisted the ethnocentric and romantic view of the National
Revival, supported by the Right, but also, the idea that the national revolution
remained incomplete as a result of the defeat of bourgeois and popular social
forces, maintained by the Left. This concept constituted an interpretative break
which created a paradigm shift across a widespread area of modern Greek
history and created a corresponding community of scholars. With the invention
of Enlightenment, Europeanized Greek society acquired noble ancestors and
Encounters with Modernity: Greek Historiography Since 1974
111
was connected with a framework of modernist values. At the same time Greek
history began to breathe to the rhythm of European society. It was incorporated,
even if on the periphery, within one of Europe’s great moments.
The Enlightenment School was not only concerned with themes
related to the period of Enlightment, but also with a specific method; not
History of ideas but History of Consciousness, or the history of intellectual
evidence of change. The students of Dimaras turned in many directions: to
the history of the book and of mentalités, to the history of literature, to the
history of Logioi, but also of popular literature, and of the introduction of
scientific ideas to Greek society. In parallel, the topos of the Enlightenment
was examined by researchers who had followed other courses, far from the
influence and the method of Dimaras. Adherents of this school turned their
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attention to Greek romanticism and national ideology of the 19 century.
Dimaras’s conceptualisation of history both presupposes and reinforces the
notion of a dichotomy between the inertia of the masses and the intellectual
vibrancy of the elites. This framework alluded to that of the Annales
School, which characterized social change as the clash of a modernist elite
and the inactive masses, as renewal and tradition. It also created an
underlying schema of continuity for the ideological conflicts of Greek
society. This framework was consumed, enriched and expanded over time by a
series of interrelated concepts: renewal, Europeanisation, Westernization,
rationalization, modernization on one side; inertia, conservatism, antiwesternism on the other. This dichotomy has in various ways penetrated
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intellectual, political and economic history from the 18 to the 20 century.
3. The Marxist View
Besides Dimaras, another strong influence on modern Greek studies
comes from the work and presence of Nikos Svoronos. He moved the
discussion from the nation to the society, and with his work emphasized the
economic and social forces, particularly in modern economic activities,
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which were evident in the 18 century. This thematic shift was already
important and it reoriented historical studies from the political events of the
Greek Revolution to the social realities in the period which preceded it.
However, his influence on the wider public is chiefly due to his Histoire de
la Grece Moderne. If in the Enlightenment School the schema of history
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was the modernist elite versus the inert masses, the schema of Marxist
history, inspired by Svoronos, was “society and people” versus “State” and
the “mechanisms of local and foreign power”.
4. The New History
In the late 70s and early 80s, a process of exchange began between
the Enlightenment School and the Marxist current, despite their appreciable
differences both in historical framework and in method. This process was
expressed in the demand for the “renewal” of historical studies, and it
created what was called “New History”. Asdrachas, Iliou, Panagiotopoulos,
Dertilis and Kremmidas, i.e. the second generation, constituted the leading
figures of the “New History”. There is no clear definition for what the term
“New History” specifically meant or what it included. Usually it is defined
in opposition to “traditional history”. If “traditional history” was considered
part of the Humanities, the “New History” was placed within the Social
Sciences. If the former was characterized in practice as only interested in
documents and susceptible to historical myths, the latter was interested in
the “Histoire-probleme”, the history of the average person and society as a
whole. In short, for many who took their first steps at this time, i.e., the
generation of Mnimon, “New History” meant Dimaras plus Svoronos, the
Annales school plus Marxism.
New History set up a particular historiographical tradition, inscribed
in the wider current of social history, which dominated the international
field of historical studies in the period from 1960 to 1980. In the Greek
case, a specific feature of New History was its preoccupation with “the
ideological use of history”. So, the historians of this generation understood
their historiographical task to be a discharge of “ideological myths” from
history. However, with this conception the slide to positivism was easy. It
also served as an obstacle in the reception of historiographical currents
connected with the “linguistic turn” and the postmodernism of the 1980s
and 1990s. As long as the task of historians was to rescue reality from
ideology, it was difficult for them to accept different versions of reality and
even its disappearance into the linguistic games or regimes of discourses.
Two generations shared the New History: the generation of the 60s
(with its journal Ta Istorika) and the generation of the seventies
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113
(represented by the journal Mnimon). From the end of the 70s and
throughout the 80s there was widespread enthusiasm for the New History.
The term “Renewal of History”, which the new historians used, was not
restricted to historiography, but in a period of political optimism it meant
that the New History constituted a cultural challenge that had the power to
renew society. Interest and activity in history began to hold broader appeal.
While traditionally, graduates of Philosophical Schools had turned to
history, at this time the history profession drew graduates not only from the
social but also from other sciences.
5. The modernization debate
The central modernization debate developed on the ground of
political and economic history. During and in the aftermath of the
Dictatorship, intellectuals, particularly those outside Greece, turned to the
study of the development of the political system; they sought to determine
what had impeded the democratic development of the country. The
watershed study for this period was John Petropoulos’ Politics and
Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece. The author belonged to the group of
Greek-American scholars (together with L.Stavrianos and G.B.Leontaritis)
who had absorbed the political and social theories circulating in the postwar American academy. However, this tradition of modern Greek
historiography in America was not sustained, and interest in Greek affairs
has tended more to social anthropology.
In Greece, Petropoulos’ book created a whole tradition of political
history, which employed basic categories originating from social anthropology
and modernization theory. The concept of clientelism became the fundamental
component in the interpretation of political behavior and of the relations of
society and state, with several variations: class vagueness and ambiguity,
absence of social conflict, autonomy of politics, clash of westernized and
underdog culture, the transition of the clientelist system from oligarchic
parliamentarism to mass democracy combined with populism .This debate
created a field in which history intersected with political science and
sociology on the ground of modernization theory. Underlying this discussion,
however, was a subtext. Greek society was described as “what it is not” and its
analysis presupposed comparison with an ideal (Western) type, as implied
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by universalist modernization theory. Consequently, the analysis concerned
the divergences and the differences; the negativity. This framework
overturned the Marxist schema of Svoronos in which the fundamental
conflict was between state and society. In the new schema, the causes of
backwardness were shifted into the society. The result of this analysis was
the discourse on populism by the modernist intellectuals of the 1980s and
its dissemination from historiography to political discourse.
During the 80s, economic history was popular in Greece. The
questions of economic history were common to those of political history
and linked with the problem of the modernization in Greece: why was there
no industry in Greece? What are the causes of Greek backwardness? The
explanations were pursued through issues such as the monetarisation of the
economy, usury, the quality and allocation of investments, the availability
of a labour force, the obstructive role of small agriculture, the formation of
the domestic market, the proportion of foreign loans, the role of domestic
and diaspora capital, and the time and pace of incorporation into the
international economy. The blueprint of the questions and framework of the
debate was offered by George Dertilis, who presented a cohesive interpretative
framework of Modern Greek History. Emphasis was given to a system of
adjustments and equilibrium created by a society of small landholders, with
easy mobility and without differentiation of roles, which ultimately
impeded the great changes demanded by industrialization.
The central question which economic history poses is akin to the
question asked by the School of the Greek Enlightenment and by political
historians about the modernization of Greece: Why Greek backwardness?
The question can only lead to a history of absences, to the comparison of a
model and its shadow, and certainly with the terms, the methods and the
underlying value system of the model. From this view, the three great
currents of historiography of this period kept pace in the formulation of a
negative question and in the localization of the basic dilemma of Greek
society with the terms tradition or modernity. Clearly, the view was dictated
by the second part of the dilemma.
Even if these studies exercised a great influence on historical studies
as well as on social and political scientists, the principal problem was how
to deal with the sixty-year period of ruptures and intense political and social
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cleavage in Greek society, from the National Schism (Dichasmos) through the
civil war and to the Junta. This period could not be adequately explained within
a theoretical framework of modernization which reduced problems to
clientelism and the transplantation of institutions. So, political historiography
developed from two different perspectives and methods. For the first
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period, that of the long 19 c., the studies revolved around issues of the
function of institutions, the establishment of the state, and clientelist links.
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For the second period of ruptures, the 20 century, a separate problematic
emerged. From an analysis of political parties we passed to the problematic
of several levels of social--cultural cleavages and partisanship (parataxeis).
In the same way the focus changed to the functions of the state. For the first
period, social analysis of the state and the elites was given primacy; for the
second, the changes of institutions and to the processes of political
identification were made central.
6. The Trauma of modernity
It is perhaps ironic that the moment Greek history entered world history
and became part of an international problem, ( the period of WWII and the Civil
War), was also one of the most traumatic moments for Greek history and
memory. In academic historiography the apropriation of this period sprang
mainly from the generation of the 1970s, in the form of PhD theses outside
Greece. It was a political historiography which broke the ice from the Cold War,
and from this viewpoint it was part of a more general, international revisionist
climate of the end of the Cold War. Here the role of MGSA was crucial,
organising the first conference in 1978 in Washington. This conference dealt
with the conflict during the German occupation as the culmination of a crisis
which had been smoldering since the establishment of the Greek state. But in
Greece there was a hesitation to incorporate the period of resistance and the civil
war as a whole. This problem of periodization had mainly to do with the
psychology of the Left. At a time when it was incorporating itself into the
political and academic system, it sought to place the history of the Resistance
within national history. In this process, the Civil War constituted an “anomaly”.
Still, the first conference on the Civil War took place in Copenhagen in 1984,
with the programmatic statement that historical analysis of the Civil War could
contribute to the reconciliation which was underway at that time in Greece.
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During 70s and 80s, most studies were based on the Anglo-American
archives and concerned foreign intervention. The first complete study of the occupation period, which laid the foundation of the historiography of the period,
was written by Hagen Fleischer, and the second by Mark Mazower. In this
second study we have a turning away from the history of organizations and
events to the everyday experience of occupation. This turn from political to
social history , was more pronounced in the 90s, with the books by Margaritis on the social origins of the Resistance, by Van Boeschoten on oral
history, and others.
The study of everyday experience and memory has shown how fluid the
line was between the Resistance and the Civil War, and has provoked a revision
of earlier interpretations, although we do not yet have a complete study and a
social history of the second part of this period, that is of the Civil War.
To sum up, in the historiography of the 40s, the basic pattern of
Modern Greek Historiography was repeated. It was developed from outside
Greece to inside, from political and diplomatic to social history. But the
History of the 40s was less incorporated within the main explanatory
frameworks of Greek Historiography. The historiographical patterns of the
school of Enlightenment and the modernization debate remain without
connections to this period.
7. Historiography in the 90s
During the 1990s the main trend of historical studies has been to
move away from debates on modernization, as well as to abandon
explanatory schemas for the whole course of Greek society. The turn to
social history is more obvious, and even to cultural history. If in the 80s
social and political theory were the interlocutors of history, in this decade
social anthropology has been more influential.
During the 80s, discussions about modernization pointed out the
ambiguity and the irrelevance of class terms in describing Greek society
and considered the lack of labour force availability as one of the obstructive
constants of industrialization. Consequently it discouraged studies and
marginalised interest in the old social history on the labour movement or
the formation and behavior of the Greek working class. Emphasis was
given more to socialist ideas and the relationship between socialist
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intellectuals and Demoticism. Only in the 1990s did works appear dealing
with the relationship between the working class and the state, and the
origins of the welfare state in Greece.
Neither popular culture nor the everyday life of the popular classes
has attracted the interest of Greek historians. Popular masses have been
considered anti-modern and in opposition to modernity. The best works in
early modern Greek social history were produced as part of the Annales
school and dealt with demography, famines and plagues, and diet. The
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social history of the 19 and 20 centuries has been occupied extensively
with youth and education, and urban history. Gender history has also
appeared, as a dimension of contemporary social history, and feminism in
Greece has likewise been influenced by a historical approach.
A new field in the 1990s is the study of nationalism, national
ideology and identity. Already in the 1980s, a keen interest in the construction of national ideology and in the comparison of Greek nationalism with
other national movements, such as those in Italy and Serbia, had developed
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as an extension of the study of Enlightenment and 19 -century history. In
the 1990s this interest became more systematic. New historians, under the
influence of theories of nationalism (Hobsbawm, Anderson, etc.) began to
study Greek nationalism. If in the previous decade the main object of these
studies was Modern Greece, in the 1990s the object is the Greek Orthodox
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population in the Ottoman Empire in the long 19 century. The three main
studies in this field refer to the structure of communal organization of the
Greeks of Asia Minor, to the way in which the national identity of the
Greek Orthodox in Constantinople was formed connecting it with
community stratification and cultural strategies, and finally to the transformation of the millet system and the nationalization of the Greek-Orthodox
population in Asia Minor.
The turn to the study of national identity and ideology was a
reaction to the strong nationalism within Greek society, especially from the
beginning of the 1990s, due to the Macedonian issue and Greek-Turkish
differences. Within this framework, the study of the minorities that live in
Greece has also begun. A group of studies dealing with the Jewish presence
in Greece and particularly the Holocaust has appeared, while a second
concerning the stereotypes held by Greeks of the others, especially of the
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Slavo-macedonian minorities within Greece has come out. In this field the
contribution of social anthropology has been profound. Finally, new approaches to the Greek Diaspora have appeared. Post-war emigration to
Western Europe and Australia is just now beginning to be an object of
historical analysis, as is the Greek Diaspora in the former Soviet Union. Finally, there has been a shift in the study of the USA Greek Diaspora towards diasporic identity.
8. Institutionalization
The works discussed here constitute scholarly historiography,
although in Greece the boundaries of the community of historians are not
clear cut. At the same time, scholarly historiography does not coincide with
academic historiography. Only since the 1980s has the historical community
become fully included in the university campus. A discussion of the reception of
this historiography and the public use of History in Greece would require a
separate and very different analysis, in which the term modernity would have a
more ambiguous meaning, and the interest in history would have more to
do with imagined compensation to an identity suffering from modernity.