European Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts by Justine Lacroix & Kalypso Nicolaïdis

Author:Justine Lacroix & Kalypso Nicolaïdis [9780199594627]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

(p.201) Conclusion

Thinking on Europe has been interwoven with the Greek nation‐building process. The idea of Europe has been inextricable from the Greek project of national self‐consciousness, the kind of Europe that was viewed by West European classicists and humanists as having originated in classical Athens. Acceding to this Europe, which ancient Greece had helped create, was viewed by Greek public intellectuals and political elites as a natural return to origins, or a long‐postponed European family reunion. Europe is ‘possessed’ in the public pronouncements of many Western‐oriented Greek public intellectuals, but this is so largely as a result of awareness of the distance created by successive historical layers of Byzantine and especially Ottoman rule between Greece and Western Europe. It is a Europe officially ‘possessed’ in national fear of being ‘othered’, politically revered for fear of being culturally relinquished.

The prevalent European story among Greek public intellectuals has equated Europe with progress, identifying the country's modernization challenge with catching up with Europe. Pro‐European reformist political and intellectual elites, of the centre‐right and the centre‐left or even the non‐communist left, have thus repeatedly enlisted the EU in the service of promoting Greece's modernization. This ‘enlisted’ Europe can only operate as an effective external constraint and driving force for national progress if it is integrated enough to generate rules and norms that can be internalized by the national socio‐economic and political order. Hence this pro‐European school of thought has naturally gravitated towards an (occasionally even simplistic) ‘supranational’ idea of Europe. Pro‐European supranationalism has been the most vocal opposition pole of the debate, struggling against a long tradition of cultural gravitation towards Eastern Orthodoxy, ethnocentrism, a nostalgic communitarian vision of an unadulterated past, a ‘culture of the underdog’, or – to follow a more systematic typology – the statist/national school of thought. The independence versus integration, nationalism versus supranationalism divide has been the most salient one in the Greek public intellectual debate. Such ideological polarization, however, has been mitigated by the emergence of a ‘third pole’, a middle of the road ‘transnational’ school of thought, which was given impetus by the increasing complexity and mishaps of the European integration project, and especially the disenchantment following the rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty. This transnational school of thought is gathering pace among Greek intellectuals who are principally European scholars.

Public intellectuals have had a significant influence in the Greek debate on Europe, but most crucial has been the impact of political leaders. Some of these (from Panagiotis Kanellopoulos and Constantine Tsatsos to Costas Simitis) have been public intellectuals in their own right. The gradual development of the socialist PASOK to pro‐EU orthodoxy in the course of the 1980s and 1990s has (p.202) sealed a bipartisan majority of Greek public opinion solidly in support of the EU – though not without the occasional wavering and setback. The mainstream pro‐European story of Europe, which has become dominant with public opinion, has emphasized the crucially stabilizing role of the EU in underwriting the Hellenic Republic in the late 1970s and

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