Understanding Modern Greece's Political Mentality through the Perspective of its Orthodox and Byzantine Roots

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In recent years, the European economic crisis--and Greece as one major epicenter thereof since 2009--stimulated Greek public debate on identity, and particularly on the relationship between Greek and European identity. Greece's Byzantine past and heritage, as well as today's predominance of an Eastern Orthodox religious affiliation, emerge as aspects of exceptional importance in this debate, which both directly and indirectly affect society, politics, and the actual relationship of Greece with the European Union and its member-states. In this project, I will enquire into the deeper assumptions within the Greek public sphere as these are to be traced in the discourse produced by Greek public intellectuals and academics who share the following two common traits: (a) a claim that Greece possesses a cultural otherness in comparison to the "West", which (b) is to be traced in its Orthodox Christian and Byzantine roots, from a religious and historical perspective respectively. These intellectual currents will be analysed through the perspective of cultural and religious studies concerning their religious basis and through the perspective of critical geopolitics concerning their implicit understanding of spatiality as demonstrated by the use of concepts such as "the West", "our own East" ("e kath' emas Anatole"), the Byzantine "Oikoumene", and so on. Apart from analysing these ideological currents, the demonstration and analysis of their impact on Greek society and politics is also to be thoroughly studied, i.e. the way these currents partially form public opinion and policy. I expect that through this research project, the deeper roots of Greek public opinion's implicit ambivalence concerning Europe and the European Union will become more articulate, lucid and better understood in their proper dimensions. Not only should this project decisively contribute to the understanding of the Orthodox and Byzantine roots of modern Greek identity per se and of Greece's contemporary ambivalence, but is should also provide the European scholar with an inner perspective on the causes and mechanisms of contemporary Greek political mentality.