1 - Understanding Greece in the World

Summary

Before looking in more detail at a number of research projects I have carried out in Greece in recent years, I first summarise in this chapter the environment in which they were undertaken, examining the political and social transformations that occurred in this area as well as the academic work that enabled their realisation. In this way, non-Francophones will be introduced to the state of the art concerning study of these issues in France, and the focus will be shifted for those Balkan Anglophone specialists for whom French publications remain a distant province and are often difficult to access. For this reason, I begin by presenting the main themes and bibliography that were instrumental in my understanding of the transformations that have taken place in Greek society and the theoretical tools and themes provided by the social sciences in order to address them. My starting point was the study of international migration in Greece, but the presentation of this earlier work will reveal the positioning of my research which, based on more general reflections with regard to the effects of globalisation on territories, aims at capturing both Greek and South-East European society in their specific forms, while observing the broader transformations taking place. Without necessarily wishing to diverge on every point, this approach will lead to discussion of the proposals that were put forward in Maria Todorova's work, Imagining the Balkans (2009), and which have become hegemonic in the field of studies on South-East European societies. If Todorova's work rested on the construction of a dominant Western-European perception of the Balkans, which drew on the literary and political discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was greatly inspired by Edward Saïd's (1978) analysis of Orientalism, the implications that such vision has had for contemporary social sciences can, today, disregard the internal power relationships within societies in the region, as well as the economic and political imperatives that govern their position in Europe, and only privilege a theory of periphery and dependence.