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Diaspora 1:2 1991 Greek Americans and the Diaspora Gregory Jusdanis The Ohio State University Greek Americans: Struggle and Success. Charles C. Moskos. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989. Greece as a nation-state is to a large extent a creation of the Hellenic diaspora. Though internal problems within the Ottoman Empire and external intervention by the great powers, particularly Russia, made the situation ripe for rebellion between the 1770s and 1820s, the intellectuals and merchants of the diaspora actually translated the dissatisfaction among peasants into a nationalist project. Members of the Greek intellectual and mercantile elite, scattered throughout many European cities, launched one of the first projects of modernization outside western Europe (see Jusdanis). Having understood from their experience in the West, first, that the nation-state, and not the empire, was becoming the dominant mode of social and political organization and, second, that their interests lay in neither the Ottoman nor the Russian Empire but in the capitalist states of western Europe, many intellectuals and merchants sought to free the Greek territories from Ottoman control and to create a new administrative unit, independent yet attached to the West. Their chief aim was the invention of a national culture, an imaginary field of shared sentiments, beliefs, and symbols , to replace the ethno-religious identities of the Ottoman Empire . With this collective national consciousness the Greek-speaking Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire came gradually to regard themselves primarily as fellow citizens of a nation-state rather than as coreligionists of the Orthodox millet.1 Though they remained Orthodox Christians, their religious belief constituted not their entire identity but one dimension of their national consciousness. In the differentiated order of modernity, religion simply served one function—meeting the spiritual needs of the citizens. The modernization project of diaspora Greeks, intended to achieve ethnic, linguistic, administrative, and territorial integration , did not result in an inexorable process ofchange culminating in the abandonment of traditional elements and the creation of func209 Diaspora 1:2 1991 tionally autonomous institutions. Like all examples of belated modernity since, it remained "incomplete," in that it did not lead to a faithful duplication of western models. These imports were often resisted by strong indigenous forces, such as the church, oligarchic elements, and clientelistic patterns of social relationships. The Greek elites of the diaspora expected Greeks to become modern; for them modernity and the West were synonymous. Like modernization theorists of the twentieth century, they generalized from the European experience in the beliefthat the history ofwestern Europe would be repeated in the development of Greek society. The Greek case illustrates that the dichotomous thinking which more recently has informed arguments of modernization in the Third World existed from the beginning. In this sense, Greece may be seen as the earliest Third World country (Kaklamanis 15). To be sure, the experiment with modernity pushed Greek culture upon a series of binary oppositions. East-West, modernity-tradition, purism-demoticism , ethnicity-state. Geopolitically, the Greeks ended up replacing Ottoman domination with cultural, economic, and political dependency on the West. The Greek state, once integrated into the capitalist system, actually became peripheral to western European states, a pattern repeated by former colonies of the Third World after independence. The opposition to purposeful modernization impeded but did not derail the movement toward the West. Indeed, the modernizers introduced many western structures, ranging from parliamentary government and a bureaucracy to a university and an academy. Theirgrand succès was a national culture which served as a binding agent for the state and a means of instituting a new pattern oforder. Literature, as in other cases of national unification then and now, was conscripted into this enterprise because of its capacity to instill national ideology into daily practice. Literary narratives, the stories ofthe nation, both promoted collective identification with this entity and facilitated the internalization of the new protocols of social behavior . In their effort to invent national myths, the cultural figures of the diaspora advantageously appropriated elements of Hellenism (the discourse on ancient Greece) and also exploited the connection, established by European philhellenism, between classical and modern Greece. Since Hellenism had already posited Greece as the foundation of European secular culture, the philhellenes...

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