Attitudes toward the Xeno: Greece in Comparative Perspective
Rent from DeepDyve"We did not sell any tickets to Albanians, only to Greeks." These were the words of a Greek Ministry of Public Order spokeswoman on 31 March 2005, when asked why there were no Albanian fans in the stands to support their national team in a critical World Cup qualifying match in Athens. In the name of stadium security, Greek authorities had decided to control ticket sales. Only those who possessed a Greek national identity card, the exclusive preserve of Greek citizens, could purchase a ticket. Thus, despite the fact that more than 800,000 Albanian migrants live in Greece today, not a single Albanian fan was seen to enter the stadium. Human rights activists protested the Albanians' exclusion, but the Greek government defended its actions as a necessary step to prevent violence between Greek and Albanian fans.1
This dispute over football tickets mirrors a larger controversy in Greek society—one over the presence of foreigners in the midst of a people who have traditionally perceived their society as largely homogenous and who today show a great deal of ambivalence regarding how that society should [End Page 113] cope with a newfound set of social dilemmas. Most significantly, by focusing on Albanian migrants as the cause of intercommunal violence at sporting events—and by accepting their blanket exclusion as an entirely legitimate "solution"—the authorities' actions revealed the xenophobic attitudes that are commonplace in contemporary Greece.
In order to more fully explain these attitudes, in this essay we utilize recently released survey data to compare Greek views toward migrants to those of other Europeans. The survey data reveal that Greeks are markedly more xenophobic than the average citizen in other European states. Given this, the Greek state's decision to close the World Cup qualifying match to Albanians is perhaps not surprising. Instead, its decision was intricately linked—albeit perhaps unconsciously—to the Greek public's overall hostility toward migrants and immigration and to its strong preference for homogeneity and segregation. However, as we will argue, Greek attitudes toward migrants do vary. Greeks who are younger, better educated, and have interpersonal contact with migrants tend also to have markedly more positive attitudes toward migrants.
From a Net Emigration to a Net Immigration Society
Long known as a country that sent its people abroad in search of economic opportunity, Greece has since 1975 become a country of significant in-migration.2 Particularly since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, large numbers of migrants—especially from Albania but also from the Russian Federation, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Poland—have come to Greece to join migrants from Egypt, the Philippines, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere.3 Contributing to this phenomenon are a variety of factors—the geographical proximity of Greece, a European Union member state, to the former communist-bloc countries [End Page 114] and to the Middle East, as well as the customary "push" factors that make migration a largely economic phenomenon.4 Apart from religious, ethnic, and political conflicts, which often press migrants to flee their homes in search of safe havens elsewhere, most emigrants also tend to be motivated by a desire to escape poverty and unemployment in their own home countries. Today, the majority of immigrants to Greece likely fall into this category, having left their homes in search of economic opportunity in Europe. The extent of poverty and unemployment in those countries from which Greece receives its largest share of migrants is illustrated in table 1. Per capita incomes in the sending countries are generally only one-fifth to one-half of the Greek average. However, some migrants make less than the average per capita income in their home countries and are likely living in deeper poverty, paradoxically making Greece, one of the less wealthy of the original fifteen EU states, appear as an attractive land of potential economic opportunity and advancement.
Of course...
