Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity by Dimitris Tziovas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity by Dimitris Tziovas Vangelis Calotychos (bio) Dimitris Tziovas, Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2021. Pp. vii + 309. Hardback $108.00, Cloth $35.95, and E-book (PDF) $28.76. Literary critics no longer content themselves with completing literary histories. Instead, they pursue not the diachrony of primarily literary texts but the synchrony of an entire cultural system. Such a shift is arguably discernible in the long and prodigious output of Dimitris Tziovas, professor emeritus of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. His numerous monographs and edited volumes in English and in Greek fit schematically into just such a first and second phase. In his first phase, his primarily textual lens progressively widens from “the nationism of the demoticists” (Tziovas 1986) to a long-due evaluation of Greek modernism (Tziovas 1997), and thence to the conditions of the self and society as revealed through an appraisal of Greek fiction (Tziovas 2003b). His second phase draws from a series of topical conferences, presciently organized at the University of Birmingham by Tziovas himself, that highlighted contexts: the Balkans (Tziovas 2003a), the Greek diaspora (Tziovas 2009), antiquity (Tziovas 2014), and austerity and crisis (Tziovas 2017). These in turn spawned collected volumes under his editorship, many of them reviewed in this journal. Tziovas’s reorientation toward contexts also coincided with his stint as a regular columnist in the culture sections of the Greek press, when he occasionally found himself a reluctant combatant in the culture wars. Meanwhile, in the field of Modern Greek Studies, Tziovas often gamely defended critical theory to his colleagues in Greece or was caught in the crossfire of Anglo-American critical disputes. In various ways, these tributary streams all flow into the present rich volume on Greece “from junta to crisis,” a volume that marks the synthesis of so much important earlier work and is a fitting monument to a long and illustrious career. Greece from Junta to Crisis positions culture at the center of the period in question, the metapolitefsi. This decision should not be understood solely as the natural disciplinary inclination of a cultural critic weary of structural political [End Page 287] analysis, even if Tziovas does write that “we do not need yet another book about [the metapolitefsi’s] politics” (1). Instead, it springs from his contention that the collapse of the dictatorship’s centralized and authoritarian rule released diverse constituencies within Greek society from a longstanding chokehold. In a society marked by the weakness of intermediary and associational forms of power that might have nurtured better forms of social differentiation (Tsoukalas 1981, 295)—beyond party politics and top down hierarchies—the new openness produced fragmentary cultural understandings that appeared neither all at once nor in a simple linear fashion, but rather continued to take shape throughout the period from 1974 to the crisis of the 2010s. Top-down directives for preserving pre-1974 homogenization and assimilation were interrupted by bottom-up glimmerings of difference, Otherness, hybridity and, ever more so, popular culture. Consequently, the processes of modernization, transition, and diversity touted in the book’s subtitle ebbed and flowed as a succession of groups, interests, and identities embraced them at various points in time. The initial swell came with grand ambitions for democratic consolidation, modernization, and Europeanization. On all these fronts, the debilitating under-tow of Greece’s perceived dependency or belatedness in relation to the West was nevertheless felt, and was discursively expressed through a set of persistent cultural dualisms: Hellenic-Romaic; West-East; modernity- traditionalism; modernization-populism. These structuring metaphors through which Greeks have understood themselves have been unpacked in the quite diverse writings by Leigh Fermor, Mouzelis, Diamandouros, Herzfeld, and others. Tziovas devotes his first two chapters to how they frame the terms of modernization and Europeanization; his third chapter also reflects, in a similar manner, on Greece’s relation to an idealized antiquity. As we shall see, Tziovas even saves for the book’s conclusion a recent reboot of the same typology. This is not to suggest that Tziovas is unaware of the paradigm’s exhaustion or even its internal contradictions. Diamandouros...