cspdf, Job 181 - University of Kent

Greek self-narration with a ‘kernel’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1995), a reference
point. The way that modern Greeks internalised Western discourse is still
preserved in their persistence in calling themselves Neohellenes or modern
Hellenes, unconsciously designating their ‘crypto-colonial’ identity (Herzfeld,
2002b). Unfortunately, the other, actual colonial past, the subjection of the
Greek peninsula to the Ottomans for centuries, induced scorn and contempt
for the modern Greeks. The verdict was that Ottoman rule had ‘orientalised’
them to such an extent, that they had lost their centrality in European identity
(Herzfeld, 1987). This discourse, replete with derogative terms such as ‘filthy’,
‘disorderly’, ‘barbarous’, or simply, ‘Oriental/Turkish’, all of them popular in
the nineteenth-century Western literature on Greece, makes philhellenism (as
the love for things Hellenic, but not Neohellenic) a strange version of
Orientalism (the interest in things Oriental, coupled with a contempt for the
actual, living, ‘Orients’ of the colonial nations). The schizophrenic Western
discourse, in which Greece simultaneously played the role of the birthplace of
Europe and its internal ‘other’, was expressed by Greeks also in their attempts
to repress or resist their Ottoman past in every possible way.
Post-liberation Western political involvement in Greece complemented
the symbolic colonisation of Greek culture. We find such crypto-colonialisms in
different periods; the actors and agents involved are also different, but the
consequences were always catastrophic. In the 1850s Western involvement in
Greece involved a temporary occupation of the Greek capital by the British
fleet. In 1919 it contributed to the outbreak of a Greek-Turkish war that was
initially supported (‘instigated’, according to some Greek historians) by Britain