This round of Article Spotlights focuses on Greece, in light of the recent elections that brought Syriza to power, and the new government’s attempts to renegotiate the country’s status with the rest of the EU, bringing you studies on nationalism in Greece from the SEN Archives.

Dimitris Dalakoglou’s piece focuses on the tension within Greek nationalism between ‘a supposedly Western-European version of collective self and a non-Western idiom of selfhood.’ Greece has long been affected by a national identity crisis among its elites, Dalakoglou argues, who wish to emphasise both the country’s ‘Europeanness’ and its externality to ‘Europe’. At the same time, a discourse of Greek ‘Westernness’ is used to justify xenophobic treatment of the non-Western ethno-cultural ‘Other’ within Greece, principally non-white immigrants and Muslims.

Dimitris Dalakoglou, ‘From the Bottom of the Aegean Sea’ to Golden Dawn: Security, Xenophobia, and the Politics of Hate in Greece, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2013, pp. 514-522.

Gazmend Kapllani’s essay deals also with the ‘special relationship’ between Greece and Europe, the contrast between Greece’s ‘historical centrality’ and its contemporary ‘political marginality’.

Gazmend Kapllani, The Greek-European Malaise, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2013, pp. 508-513.

Douglas Holme’s piece deals with how the Euro currency has been constructed since the onset of the continental financial-economic crisis by European policy-makers into a symbol of social cohesion and stability across Europe.

Douglas R. Holmes, Cultural Intimacy and the Vicissitudes of the Euro, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2013, pp. 498-503.

Article spotlights compiled by Dr Shane Nagle.