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Nationalism as a Claim to a State
Historical Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
volume 278
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface.
issn 1570-1522
isbn 978-90-04-53351-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-53352-3 (e-book)
Copyright 2023 by John Milios. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink,
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Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
part 1
The Nation and the Revolution
part 2
The Revolution and Its State
6 The Ebb of the Revolution, the Intervention of the ‘Great Powers’ and
the End of Constitutional Republicanism (1825–1833) 123
1 The Unfavourable Turn in the War 123
2 International-Political Relations and Diplomatic Recognition of the
Greek state 124
3 Internal Conflicts, Dead-Ends, and the End of Constitutional
Republicanism 133
part 3
The Revolution as the ‘Grand Idea’ and as the ‘Present’
9 1821 ‘in the Present’: On the Ideological Uses of the Revolution 202
1 Introduction: on the Ideological Uses of History 202
2 The Tradition of the ‘Continuity of Hellenism’ and Its Transformations
in the Nineteenth Century 203
3 The Ideology of ‘National Continuity’ as a Devaluation of the Revolution
and as a Self-Contradiction 207
4 ‘National Continuity’ and Racism 211
5 Historical Approaches in the Context of the Left (1907–1946): From
Attempts at Scientific Analysis for the Documentation of a Socialist
Strategy to Ideological Uses of History 214
6 Does History Unite a Nation? 225
References 231
Index 254
Acknowledgements
A first version of this book was published in Greek on 15 December 2020 under
the title 1821: Tracing the Nation, the State and the Grand Idea (1821. Ihnilatontas
to Ethnos, to Kratos kai ti Megali Idea, Alexandreia Publications).
I would like to thank Marios Emmanouilidis and Dimitris C. Sotiropoulos
for reading the chapters of the book while they were being written, and for
helping me to improve their quality with well-founded comments. I also thank
Panagiotis Sotiris for his suggestions regarding the adaptation of the text for an
English-literate audience.
I owe thanks to the participants of the seminar ‘Theory and History of Cap-
italism and the National Phenomenon: The Greek Case’ (October 2018–March
2019), whose questions, comments and interventions helped me to shape the
arguments developed in this book.
A special mention is, of course, owed to Barbara Santos for translating the
greater part of the book, for her valuable suggestions and for having improved
the overall style of the manuscript.
About Nationalism as a Claim to a State
Who were the Greeks whom the Revolution of 1821 sought to liberate into
a national-constitutional state? In this fascinating book, distinguished polit-
ical economist John Milios investigates the processes of economic, social, and
political-ideological unification through which, from the second half of the
eighteenth century, Greek-speaking and other Orthodox capitalists promoted
a broad national politicisation of large Orthodox Christian populations in the
Ottoman Empire and turned them into Greek freedom fighters. He shows how
the revolution of the masses demanding representative institutions led to the
formation of a constitutional bourgeois state and a national capitalist social
formation (1821–27) before taking a Bonapartist and, later, monarchist turn.
This is the first book to consider the role of capitalism, nationalism, republic-
anism, racism, and imperialism in the formation of modern Greece.
– Vassilios Lambropoulos, C.P. Cavafy Professor Emeritus, University of Michi-
gan
book not only helps us understand the emergence and the fates of Greece as
a national and political phenomenon, and its continuing role as a buffer state
in global geopolitics, but it also constitutes a valuable contribution to the con-
temporary discussions on (and struggles towards) ideological, economic, and
political decolonisation.
– Yannis Hamilakis, Brown University, co-author of Archaeology, Nation,
and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future
Introduction
©
2 introduction
Only the ‘[d]efeat of the Sacred Battalion under Alexandros Ypsilantis’ in Wal-
lachia on 7 June 1821 is mentioned (p. 729).
This chasm in the national narrative (and in the lapse of memory) is a symp-
tom of an aporia vis-à-vis the vague boundaries of the ‘nation’ at the time of
the Revolution. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the expo-
nents of Greek Enlightenment, who were concomitantly forefathers of Greek
nationalism, believed Greekness to be identified with Orthodoxy, as the nas-
cent Greek nation was, at the time, the first to emerge in the broader Balkan
and Asia Minor region.
The belief that all Christians in the Ottoman Empire were Greeks began
with the Greek Enlightenment. It can be traced in the revolutionary writings of
the early Greek revolutionary Rigas Pheraios (1757–1798) and the revolutionary
pamphlet Hellenic Nomarchy (1806), and was maintained with minor modi-
fications until the middle of the nineteenth century. It is also the ideological
ground for the ‘Grand Idea’, the expansionist strategy of the Greek state in the
first century of its existence. A constituent part of this belief was, of course, the
conviction that the ‘Greek nation’ had existed since antiquity.
The dominant nationalist narrative concerning the continuity of the Greek
nation since antiquity in a paradoxical way nullifies itself. In other words, it
denigrates and largely conceals the political and institutional rupture with
which the 1821 Revolution was connected: the historically unprecedented insti-
tutional and state changes related to the spread of nationalism in the regions
where the Revolution had established itself, i.e. the national politicisation of
the masses and their demand for institutions of representation (and therefore
for a national-constitutional bourgeois state of ‘citizens’), which formed a his-
torically new way of integrating the populations into the state, subsuming them
under the already prevailing capitalist relations of domination and exploita-
tion.
The basis for the broad national politicisation of the masses – the devel-
opment of nationalism – mainly in the regions of southern Greece and the
islands, was the processes of economic, ideological and political unification,
from the second half of the eighteenth century, of the Christian populations
and regions linked to the rapid development of capitalist relations and their
associated commercial networks. These processes economically and politic-
ally unified rural areas with urban centres (centres of long-distance trade with
the interior of the Ottoman Empire and abroad). I refer here to unpreceden-
ted social developments of enormous importance which lie at the very heart
of the Revolution. The ideas of republicanism and constitutionalism, as well
as the national politicisation of the masses, were developed within these pro-
cesses as an aspect of them.
4 introduction
A core facet of nationalism is political, affiliated with the demand for and a
claim to a state. National consciousness, in other words, is not primarily related
to the mother tongue, traditions and place of origin of the nationally mobil-
ised population, but to the demand for ‘national freedom’ and ‘illumination’;
and, in the case at hand, it was related to the demand for an independent
constitutional-democratic state which was supposedly destined to reconstit-
ute the heritage of ancient Greece in the new era, as all the official texts of the
Revolution proclaimed:
3 Resolution of the first National Assembly of the Hellenes in Epidaurus, on the first day of Janu-
ary of year 1 of Independence [15 January 1822], in Mamoukas 1839, Vol. ii, p. 43.
introduction 5
to resolve the ‘Greek question’ (in 1826: the ‘Protocol of St. Petersburg’; in 1827:
the naval Battle of Navarino between the ‘Great Powers’ – Britain, France and
Russia – and the Ottoman forces; in 1830: the ‘London Protocol’).
Throughout the revolutionary struggle, the social, political and ideological
antagonisms between the leading political factions within the Greek state
became clear. These rivalries, which resulted in two civil wars, as well as the
formation of the first three political parties that shaped the central polit-
ical scene of the country for more than three decades, arose out of contro-
versies over specific political and state issues: the form of the constitution
and the state, its federal or centralised character, the role of politicians and
the military, the voting system and the political role of the masses and the
armed forces and their representative institutions, the preservation or dissol-
ution of local parliaments, the extent of political and individual rights, etc.
The outcome of the internal conflicts, i.e. the predominance of constitution-
alism in the international environment of a predominantly authoritarian and
absolutist Europe, illustrates the diffusion and hegemony in the population
of the revolutionary regions of the radical-enlightenment (bourgeois) ideolo-
gies.
In factual terms, it is of course perfectly comprehensible that, on the one
hand, the Greek Revolution shared similarities with the corresponding revolu-
tions of the time (the American, the French …); on the other hand, again
speaking factually, the Greek Revolution evolved its own particular charac-
teristics, such as the initial absence of the institution of a head of state. A
bourgeois revolution, by its very nature, shares certain basic principles and
strategic goals wherever it erupts – principles and goals around which its aleat-
ory dynamics have developed. Attempts by journalists and historians alike to
discredit the revolutionary constitutions and institutions of the first Greek
state, and to demonise the parties that emerged from the internal conflicts,
all the while arguing that all of the above were mainly an expression either
of ‘anarchy’ or of foreign influence and dependency, essentially reveal a fear
of and disregard for mass movements: the fear of any potential for revolu-
tion.
However, bourgeois parties do not split or divide a nation, despite the fact
that party rivalries appear, on the surface, to be the causes of social antagon-
isms: what is a cause may appear as an effect, and vice versa. Bourgeois parties
unite a society divided by opposing class interests: they mediate, mitigate and
incorporate class antagonisms between the exploiters and the exploited, the
governing and the governed, the rulers and the ruled into the parliamentary
apparatus, i.e. within the state in the form of ‘national interest’. In Greece, this
‘national interest’, the ‘national strategy’ into which all parties ultimately con-
6 introduction
verged, was nothing but the expansion of state borders, the ‘Grand Idea’ as it
was later named, the pre-eminently common imperial political goal and ‘desire
of the nation’ and its representatives.
After the Revolution, the modern Greek state became a point of reference
for Greek capitalists and Greek communities that continued to flourish in the
main centres of the Ottoman Empire, thus providing an economic ‘argument’
for the imperial vision of the ‘Grand Idea’. These capitalist enterprises owned by
Greeks, as well as the Greek communities surrounding them, continued to rap-
idly ‘grow’ in the Ottoman Empire, namely outside the Greek state and national
territory, alongside those within Greece; yet those abroad were overwhelmed
by the ‘desire’ to become part of the new state which, in turn, conceived them
as part of a ‘second’ (wannabe) ‘Greece’.
My analysis substantiates the position that none of the uprisings prior to
1821 in what later became Greek territory had the characteristics of a national
revolution. This means that the 1821 Revolution was a turning point in the
history of the European geographical area. Nevertheless, according to official
nationalist historiography, the Revolution of 1821 was nothing but the final,
decisive moment of a continuous resistance and an ongoing rebellion of the
‘Greeks’ against the ‘four-century Turkish national yoke’ since the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453.
Even more, two hundred years after its outbreak, the Greek Revolution of
1821 continues to be a temporal locus for ideological debates and political inter-
ventions related to the present. In most of these discussions, an ‘ideological use’
of the Revolution has been reproduced as an arbitrary portrait of the event and
its protagonists, with at times even non-existent ‘facts’ being constructed in
an effort to defend a particular ideological and political stance in the present.
Such glorification of the Revolution, which has accompanied the history of the
Greek capitalist state from the first decades of its existence until today, has not
left leftist historians and intellectuals untouched.
The book is divided into three parts.
In Part 1: The Nation and the Revolution, the subject of investigation is
the Greek nation and its geographical and social boundaries. It includes four
chapters.
In Chapter 1, ‘The Revolution in Moldavia and Wallachia: Questions on the
Borders of the Greek Nation’, the failure of the Revolution in the Danubian Prin-
cipalities is examined, and a series of questions as regards the ‘meaning’ and
boundaries of the Greek nation are posited.
Chapter 2, ‘The “Hellas” of 1821: Initial Thoughts on the Dissemination of
Greek National Politicisation’, examines the perceptions of what constituted
‘Greece’ in the era of the Greek Enlightenment, from the texts of the early
introduction 7
Part 3: The Revolution as the ‘Grand Idea’ and as the ‘Present’ refers to the
legacies of the Revolution, but also to its ideological uses throughout the two
centuries of existence of the Greek state.
Chapter 8, ‘“Hellenisation of the East”: The Vision and the Reality’, exam-
ines the relevance of the ideological and political framework established by the
Revolution with the ‘Grand Idea’, the expansionist strategy of the Greek state
during the first century of its existence, a strategy that drew support from the
leading position of Greek capital in the Ottoman Empire and was promulgated
as ‘national liberation’ and the ‘civilisation of the East’.
Finally, Chapter 9, ‘1821 “in the Present”: On the Ideological Uses of the
Revolution’, offers a critique of a series of interpretations regarding the Greek
nation and the character of the Revolution that have persistently dominated
Greek and international historiography and public discourse.
I consider this book a continuation of my previous book, entitled The Ori-
gins of Capitalism as a Social System: The Prevalence of an Aleatory Encounter
(London and New York: Routledge, 2018 and 2019).
The aforementioned book explores the first historical period of the domin-
ation of capitalism in Europe with the formation in Venice, from the end of
the fourteenth century, of a capitalist social formation and a capitalist state
without national characteristics – a (colonialist) state in which, despite all the
processes of an early construction of ‘patriotism’ (obedience to the state associ-
ated with the integration of subjects within state apparatuses, the ideological
inculcation of ‘Venetian values’ and the invention of an ‘official history’, reli-
gious and state ceremonies, forms of education, etc.), was not a nation state:
the state’s subjects were not transformed into citizens, the consciousness of
‘belonging’ of the population did not entail claims on the future of the state
and its borders, as later took place, after the French Revolution, in many parts
of Europe when and where nationalism prevailed.
If that book, as I was writing it then, seemed like a ‘return to the future’,
the present book comprises a probe into the past of the present: it examines
one of the most characteristic examples of the shaping of a national capitalist
state and a national capitalist social formation on the European continent: the
Revolution within a non-national Empire, which established one of the first,
stricto sensu, national capitalist states in Europe.
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