Inventing Greece

Nationalism acts as a bulwark against death, fate, and contingency. It replaces religion, claiming qualities for the state that clearly are not true. Indeed, nationalism is an invented fiction. In this, Greece does not differ from other European nations in which nationalism developed in the void left by the breakdown of the Christian world-view. The Neohellenic eighteenth-century Enlightenment invented a glorious past for Greece as well as a glorious future. But the distortions were so gross that they could not continue without revision during the nineteenth century. Then nationalism was reinvented still again in the twentieth century, Greece becoming a metaphor: a subjective value of infinite importance, as expressed for example in Seferis's "The King of Asine." What we need to realize in the twenty-first century is that the world has had quite enough of these inventions. Let us redevelop an all-embracing system of value that goes beyond the nation-state.