GreeSE Papers GreeSE Papers Hellenic Observatory Discussion Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe

Sociology Study, 2022

Arguably, globalisation has caused an identity crisis in Europe. As national borders became more integrated in the last few decades, the volume of migrants into the EU and the value of ethnicity held by Europeans have also been on the rise. Particularly, the bloc has been facing an influx of immigrants from the African and Middle East continents. As for the EU leaders, their stance on a common migration policy is entrenched in the wider social, cultural, and political processes that depict an endangered European identity. This would explain the current debate on immigration in many of the European countries appears to have been securitised. This paper takes a wider look into how immigration has reshaped the EU, as well as, how EU immigrants have had to shift their identities as they struggle to fit into their new society.

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 2006

During the last two decades Greece has become a multicultural society due to the influx of immigrants mainly from the Balkans and East Europe. At the same time Greece became fully integrated to the European Community. Within this context the relation of Greek national identity to Europe and to the immigrant 'Οther' becomes a topic of everyday conversations and a focal point of social scientific research. This study following a discourse analytic perspective (Edwards, 1997; Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter, 1996; Potter and Wetherell, 1987) attempts to explore the way Greek people construct Greek national identity in relation to immigration and European integration within an interview context. It is argued that participants strategically managed stereotypes about immigrants in order to avoid accusations of prejudice, while stereotypes about the Europeans seemed to be informed by the ambivalent positioning of Greece between East and West (Bozatzis, 1998; Herzfeld, 1987).

Lay and Social Science Discourses on identity, migration and citizenship (LSSDMIC) The LSSDMIC project aimed to examine the ways in which the principles used in the social sciences to explain the social world might interact with the interpretative resources that are used by lay social actors to make sense of this world. The project aimed to examine this by focusing on the underlying processes of interaction between social scientific and everyday lay discourses: the different ways in which social-scientific discourses are synthesized, how these discourses are filtered back to lay discourses, and how these discourses are taken up by lay social actors. The topics selected to probe into these issues are identity, citizenship and migration as there have been global developments in these areas since the 1990s and there has been a proliferation of both social scientific and lay discussions concerning them. The interaction between social scientific and lay discourses has been studied by conducting a systematic review of social science texts on identity, citizenship and migration and by interviewing immigrants and locals in Central Macedonia, Greece. The ways in which these social science texts and interview data correspond in terms of the themes they emphasise and the arguments that are developed, has been the object of scrutiny of the project. The role of policy has also been considered for how it is manifested in those discourses. The project emphasised the role of discourse in constructing social reality and the notion that discourse is distributed across different settings. As the project draws onto a close, the conference on Identity, Otherness and Citizenship in Contemporary Europe is held to address these issues beyond the disciplinary, epistemological, methodological and spatial confines of the project. The conference brings together contributions from social psychology, social anthropology, sociolinguistics, history and law to discuss identities and intergroup relations in educational contexts, the relationship between citizenship, multiculturalism and integration, the implications of representations of extremism and of racist discourse on identities, intergroup relations and citizenship, social accounting for new identities, migration and citizenship, dilemmas of national identity and citizenship, the functions of deprivation of citizenship, lay theories of citizenship for the study of residential mixing, and the relationship between otherness and hospitality. The contributions are based on studies in Greece, the UK, Northern Ireland and Australia and draw on accounts of Greeks and immigrants in Greece, Greek emigrants in Melbourne, long-term residents and recent incomers in Belfast, parents, school governors, teachers and politicians in the UK. The conference aims to promote a dialogue and produce insights on identity, otherness and citizenship in contemporary Europe from these different settings and approaches in relation to identities, inclusion/exclusion, intergroup relations and integration regimes.

2019

Whilst most of the research on intra-EU mobility has mainly focused on the reasons behind young Southern Europeans leaving their home countries, and secondly on their experiences within the new context, little is known about their sense of belonging and identities. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring Italian and Spanish migrants' social identity reposi-tioning and the cultural change characterising their existential trajectories. Drawing on 69 semi-structured interviews with Italians and Spaniards living in London and Berlin, this article shows that the sense of belonging to one or more political communities and boundary work are related to individual experiences and can change due to structural eventualities such as the Brexit referendum. While identification with the host society is rare, attachment to the home country is quite common as a result of people's everyday experiences. Cultural changes and European/cosmopolitan identification are linked to exposure to new environments and interaction with new cultures, mostly concerning those with previous mobility experience , as well as to a sentiment of non-acceptance in the UK. However, such categories are not rigid, but many times self-identification and attachments are rather blurred also due to the uncertainty around the duration of the mobility project. This makes individual factors (gender, age, family status, employment, education) that are often considered as determinants of identification patterns all but relevant.

Sociológia-Slovak Sociological Review, 2002

2015

The geopolitical changes of 1989 saw the development of multiple forces, of which migration is one. Greece experienced a shift from a traditionally sender country to a main destination country for immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Employing a discursive social constructionist approach, this paper presents the ways in which immigrants are 'nationalized' in talking about Greekness and migrant integration in Greece. Firstly, it focuses on the construction of migration as inevitable. Secondly, the criteria and conditions of inclusion in the wider national group are presented. Finally, the discursive resources used in the extension of Greekness and the functions of this extension are explored as regards the banal aspects of national identity construction and its dilemmatic nature vis a vis the dilemma of prejudice. This dilemma seems to be managed by the participants of this study by extending Greekness, in order for various ethnic and national groups to be seemingly included in the wider national group, as a 'contract' of assimilation and morality.

A journalistic research on various communities in Athens, Greece. (To Vima newspaper, 2005).

Naturalization criteria play an important role in who can be accepted as a member of a national polity. In the political and social sciences often a distinction is drawn between the right of blood-jus sanguinis-and the right of soil-jus soli-as guiding principles for naturalization. This distinction corresponds to the two different types of nationalism and national belonging identified by Kohn (1945, 1955) namely " ethnic " nationalism and " civic " nationalism. In social psychology this distinction has been used to examine which type of national belonging is more often associated to prejudice against immigrants and their exclusion. Recently approaches informed by social constructionism and discourse analysis examine how citizenship and the exclusion of immigrants are articulated in talk and what interactional goals seem to serve in each occasion. In this paper we examine how immigrants in Greece construct naturalization criteria in talk and how these may relate to the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants. Participants were 25 immigrants who participated in an interview on the current situation in Greece and the new naturalization law. Analyzing the interviews using Rhetorical Psychology, Ideological Dilemmas and Discursive Psychology we argue that participants by ridiculing citizenship criteria they legitimated their own presence within Greece. At the same time, they seemed to exclude other immigrant groups using discourses of legality/illegality. A possible reason for this dilemma, we maintain, is the diverse ideological background of the notion of citizenship, which allows its mobilization towards different ends.

2017

The principal originality of this article lies in the analysis on ethnicity and identity in an under-explored geographical/ethnic context, that is the Greek second generation in Italy. Through a field research, the article analyses second generation Greek migrants' process of identity construction, highlighting the emergence of a network of multiple and hybrid belongings as well as a combination of identities and dialectical positions. The field research findings show that hybrid belongings contradict the idea of cultural purity by revealing that all cultures are hybrid all along. In fact, self-representation and self-identification of the Greek second generation challenge traditional paradigms of ethnicity entailing a reworking of pre-existing hybridity rather than any simple combination of Italian and Greek identities. Another key argument that emerged from this fieldwork is the importance of the specific context, positions and conditions in which hybridity operates.

In this article we advance a qualitative approach to study the interconnection between representations of history and representations of citizenship. We argue that representations of the national past are important resources on which different constructions of citizenship are based. Our empirical context is the heated debate that emerged as a result of the announcement of new citizenship legislation in Greece. We used the online comments posted in the forum of the Ministry of Internal Affairs following the announcement of the legislation to study how national history was represented by Greek citizens and how these representations functioned to form different arguments regarding migrants' citizenship rights. Our analysis identified 4 themes in representations of national history: continuity of the nation, idealization of the past, moral obligation toward the past, and homogeneity or heterogeneity of the nation. We show that these ideas largely sustain an exclusive, essentialist, ethnic conception of the nation as a distinct, homogeneous, and continuous entity of people sharing a common genetic heritage. More inclusive arguments were based on seemingly pluralistic ideas that implicitly entailed banal nationalist assumptions or assimilatory ideas toward migrant inclusion. We conclude that commentators' historical representations inhibit critical understanding of the past and consequently of a more open and plural understanding of the future. Future research should focus on examining how formal and informal education may promote such representations and on the political implications of these for intergroup relations in multicultural contexts.