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Reviewed by:
  • Cypriot Nationalisms in Context: History, Identity and Politics ed. by Thekla Kyritsi and Nikos Christofis
  • Nikolaos Papadogiannis (bio)
Thekla Kyritsi and Nikos Christofis, editors, Cypriot Nationalisms in Context: History, Identity and Politics. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2018. Pp. xvii + 340. Cloth €93.08.

The volume under review is a very welcome development in the study of Cypriot nationalisms. Its editors are Thekla Kyritsi, a PhD candidate in political science and history who specializes in women and the early Cypriot press, and Nikos Christofis, an assistant professor of Turkish studies who has produced ground-breaking work on the Greek, Turkish, and Cypriot left. The book is commendable for engaging with broad conceptual approaches to nationalism and national identities, including those of Anthony Smith (1991) and Eric Hobsbawm (1990). At the same time, it considers a wide range of case studies from the late nineteenth century to the present. It contains, along with an introduction, fourteen chapters grouped into four parts: “Early Agents of Nationalism,” “Moments of a Mass Movement,” “Nationalist Identity and Prejudice,” and “The Local and the Global.” The book comprehensively addresses both Greek and Turkish Cypriot subjects, as well as other groups, such as Armenian Cypriots, who fall outside these two categories.

A vital contribution of this volume is that it situates the analysis of Cypriot nationalisms within broader contexts—Mediterranean, European, and even global. It thus complements a few other recent works that take a similar approach (e.g., Rappas 2014; Karakatsanis and Papadogiannis 2017). In this vein, Dimitris Kalantzopoulos convincingly shows in his chapter the impact of the Greek Civil War on the discourse of the AKEL (Anorthotiko Komma Ergazomenou Laou, Progressive Party of the Working People). Another example can be found in Yiannos Katsourides’s chapter, which demonstrates an “unequal Graeco-British co-operation” (36) during the period when Britain administered Cyprus. In [End Page 256] the context of such cooperation, the demand of Greek Cypriot middle-class individuals for enosis (ένωσις, union) with Greece was not necessarily incompatible with their support for the British administration, since those Greek Cypriots imagined that enosis would only become possible in the context of British-Greek friendship. Crucially, the book also considers various contexts for the analysis of Cypriot nationalisms, which have so far generally been neglected in scholarship. The Mediterranean context is a case in point: Iliya Marovich-Old offers a fascinating comparison between the desire for enosis in Cyprus during the interwar years and the contemporary Maltese notion of italianità—an identity that embraced Italian language and culture but did not necessarily presuppose the union of Malta with Italy. By showing that such peripheral nationalisms in Malta and Cyprus posed a threat to British imperial hegemony in the Mediterranean, Marovich-Old helps revise the perspective of works (such as Darwin 1991) which downplay the significance of nationalism in the decline of the British Empire.

This volume also situates Cypriot nationalisms within another hitherto underexamined but important context: that of Latin American politics. Eugenia Palieraki focuses on EDEK (Eniaia Dimokratiki Enosi Kentrou, United Democratic Union of the Center) to demonstrate how it helped to familiarize participants in Greek and Cypriot politics with political developments in Latin America. EDEK in general, and its leader Vassos Lyssarides in particular, helped to create interfaces between Greek and Greek Cypriot nationalism and the anti-imperialism inspired by the Latin American left. Lyssarides influenced both the foreign policy of Makarios and the ideological endeavours of the PAK (Panel-linio Apeleftherotiko Kinima, Panhellenic Liberation Movement), which opposed the 1967–1974 dictatorship in Greece and whose chief founder was Andreas Papandreou. Obviously, Cypriot nationalisms have other transnational linkages that are worth examining. These include the potential influence of the Turkish Cypriot diaspora in the UK on the national identities of Turkish Cypriots living in Cyprus. Similarly, the ways in which the discourse of the Democratic Rally (Dimokratikos Synagermos) has combined Greek Cypriot nationalism with pro-European Union sentiment, and the transnational contacts that underpin this combination, also merit comprehensive analysis. However, an edited volume, even one as fine as this, cannot reckon with all the cross-border links that have helped to shape Cypriot nationalisms.

A second key contribution of this volume is its multifaceted...

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